Proof of Work

Coders call one another liars, when all they really mean is that they disagree about how software should work. During the time I was working with Wright in secret, I would text my colleague John Lanchester, who I knew I could trust to keep the secret but also to understand what was at stake in the story. ‘Imagine a situation,’ I wrote to John, ‘where novelists were strangely invested in denying the plausibility of each other’s books. There’s no “proof” as such that one is right and the other is wrong, but they could argue fiercely and accuse each other of all sorts of things while not really settling the problem.’

‘Edmund Wilson says somewhere that the reason poets dislike each other’s books is because they seem wrong, false – a kind of lie,’ John replied. ‘If you were telling the truth you would be writing the same poems as me.’

— Andrew O’Hagan in The Satoshi Affair

Trying to track down the source of that Edmund Wilson paraphrasing.