Earnest is my favourite word for describing that beautiful part during a child's development where they haven't yet had a negative experience from expressing themselves earnestly. That window of time where if you ask if they know something they would proudly reply "no!" because they have no idea that there might be shame in not knowing something.
I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of fear of retribution/shame but I'm always a bit sad when I get in trouble because I was straight forward but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes.
I think you have too much optimism regarding the value of people's earnest expressions. Children are children and so their earnestness is cute and endearing (in most instances)--adults are far less charming and far more petty, self-indulgent, spineless, fickle, fearful.
Social media is a cesspool largely due to all this earnestness. Fear of retribution and shame is helpful in mitigating the self-absorption embedded in most people. We'd all like to think there's something special in all of us and that the world will benefit from the light of our creativity if it was set free. Truth be told, very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists.
People should appreciate the template of conformity that allows them to find a place in the world and not let advertising, that often leverages the idea of uniqueness to sell things, diminish the value of their mediocrity. No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs. We know because if that's who you were, that's who you'd be. Some people seem to find success in art and innovation operating in the same repressive environment, so maybe the environment is not the problem. Maybe earnestness just isn't your thing and fear/conformity is the better strategy.
> We'd all like to think there's something special in all of us and that the world will benefit from the light of our creativity if it was set free. Truth be told, very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists. ...
> No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs.
There's a premise here that unless you are Picasso or Steve Jobs, you have nothing to contribute - and that if you aren't changing the world in a significant way, you are mediocre. People change themselves, their families, their communities, their friends and neighbors lives - most of what we get from the world is in those micro, personal interactions. Friends have done infinitely more for me than Jobs or Picasso.
There's also an assumption that "very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists", which doesn't at all match my experience of people.
I find that almost everyone has much to offer, but you need to give them space and confidence to be earnest. You need to listen, and each one has so much to tell - perspectives that open up new worlds. If your attitude is the one you describe, it's self-fulfilling.
So this should be good news to you. Why is it important to you to advocate for bad news?
> People should appreciate the template of conformity that allows them to find a place in the world and not let advertising, that often leverages the idea of uniqueness to sell things, diminish the value of their mediocrity.
Being mediocre is such a scary prospect given the requirement of differentiation for professional and personal attainment, that people seem to ignore its existence entirely. Any minor differentiator is magnified to represent a "uniqueness" which frees the person from the burden of the mediocre. I agree, everyone has something to contribute and the large swaths of mediocre people drive our civilization forward--but why can't they just be mediocre? Why is it bad news?
No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs. We know because if that's who you were, that's who you'd be.
This statement cannot be allowed to stand uncontested. It suggests that everyone is exactly where they ought to be, that all bullying and harassment and isolation that keeps people from reaching their potential is right and just.
The only thing I'm suggesting is that freedom doesn't spare you from mediocrity.
Real oppression, an experience the US professional middle class is largely spared of, the type experienced by the citizens of Venezuela or the people currently being held in Xinjiang re-education camps, is truly insurmountable and requires large macro shifts to institute change. To suggest individual bullying, harassment and isolation are counted as so insurmountable to a person's theoretical "potential" that the environment must change first to prompt it, is an illustration of the deep self-absorption very few people have the privilege to experience.
I thought it was about becoming the next Steve Jobs, as in billionaire founder. They tend to grow up with great privilege. Evidently there are great obstacles for the middle class, such as favoritism for the already affluent. As in any country, it has little to with actual capability.
Surely Venezuela could have less social mobility, but it isn't actually that great in the west.
It isn't so much that people are incapable of doing anything but mimicking what already exists, as most people only notice and appreciate things that conform to what they already know. There's a large amount of art and music just waiting for blessing to get super popular, not because it's good, but because people need to be told what "good" is.
> I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of fear of retribution/shame but I'm always a bit sad when I get in trouble because I was straight forward but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes.
You might enjoy reading these two posts and discussions:
I've also written about this effect, called Lampshading: https://www.swyx.io/lampshading/ asking the "stupid question" is a strength when done in taste.
One of the most powerful things you can do as a senior engineer for juniors is to show by example that it's OK to ask questions and to not know all the answers. Especially if you can see that someone else isn't sure but dares not ask that question.
Thanks for introducing me to that term! Right up there with 'bikeshedding' as my top new word this year.
I lampshade frequently. My typical use-case: senior dev says something I think is mistaken, but nobody else questions it. How do I know whether they're just humoring him, or if they are all mentally translating between what he said & what he meant? (Btw, people do this translation often -- nobody wants to be a pedant.) Lampshading is a great way of getting people to "pop the 'why' stack" as well. https://mikebroberts.com/2003/07/29/popping-the-why-stack/
Once in my 20s I hung out with some young teenagers at a summer camp for reasons. One night we were talking and one girl started asking questions and the rest of the group sneered at her "not knowing". She ignored them and kept asking because I was earnest and knowledgeable. Five minutes turned to an hour and I think everyone in that group learned (or at least heard) more about the origins of the universe, stellar evolution, evolution, chemistry, physics, etc, than they had learned in school up to that point.
I sometimes wonder what happened to those people. I suspect the girl who asked questions ended up way more knowledgeable than the other 10 combined.
maybe GP was baiting for this to get a response from you, have you considered contacting them? something like "consider not making posts that make it look like you're doing something bad with children"
c'mon catch people a break.
Maybe they were a former alchy giving AA advice to troubled kids, maybe they don't like talking about their religion online
> Earnest is my favourite word for describing that beautiful part during a child's development where they haven't yet had a negative experience from expressing themselves earnestly. ... but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes.
And we’re narrowing that window by exposing children to social politics earlier on through likes and upvotes and whatnot.
This is a different definition of "earnest" from the one pg is using in the article, although there probably is a relationship between them: children at the age you describe are interested in things for the sake of the things themselves and not for what the child can get out of them, and "expressing yourself" is one of those things they're interested in for the sake of the thing itself. It's much easier for young children to be like this because all of the stuff that older people think about that basically boils down to "how is this going to affect what other people think of me?" isn't even visible to the children, so it doesn't clutter up their mental processes.
My perception is that one drawback of earnestness is that it often comes off as just being boring. The most earnest people I know are not popular. The most popular people I know are more like twinkle-in-the-eye-kind-of-BS-but-not-pathological-liars.
I don't mean to say "grr, why aren't nerds more popular!". I mean more that this specific kind of earnestness seems to preclude the playing of certain conversational games that most people seem to enjoy. Earnestness, for example, is pretty far away from my conception of "playful" or "flirty" or even "fun".
Can you expand on the boringness? That conflicts with what I think because I believe that engaging hobbies are that vitality which manifests as “playful” and “fun”. Are you willing to try something new, and if you do, are you willing to learn to do it well enough to enjoy it.
Engaging with a hobby tends to involve making it part of me - the hobbies I haven’t committed to actually liking and just performed have always been the ones that get lost in the shuffle of things. Even more so, being so committed to a hobby pushes me to do more heavy lifting when it comes to doing it socially.
(Edit) After a bit more thought I decided an example would be good:
I love Jorge Luis Borges, so when my book club finally decided to read him I took the time to rate many of the stories, trying to collect an essence of his magical, gaucho, and mystical stories to help focus our discussion. That is what I mean —- to love something so much that effort becomes effortless because you’re bursting at the seems hoping to share. In this way we didn’t just read “Library of Babel”, but some of the little mysteries that show a different touch of his craft.
It seems to me that the perception of boringness can come as a result of earnestness being very niche/focused. Your example is a great one! But if anybody who is not a fan or doesn't know Borges, they would probably find a person earnestly passionately about his writing quite boring -- as one can only have the time and mental energy to be truly earnest about so many things.
In contrast, GP's example of popular people are likely those who are good at faking that kind of deep interest in many things, tailored to their present company, so that they attract a few people from many different crowds. Of course, this is based on my own experience only; in certain circles I can feel quite loquacious and come off as extroverted -- usually because of an earnestly shared interest -- but in most cases I think I come across as boring or even introverted!
The founders I have worked with (who became billionaires) are quite boring.
In pretty much every social gathering with them, they were silent (brooding) and didn't have interesting things to say about things and didn't seem interested to hold a conversation on their own. They seemed to be content listening to others talk.
But in work related meetings, when it came to making crazy bets they were extremely passionate about their belief and commitment and made those decisions like a boss. (They had personality flaws (they could be perceived as rude, unpolished etc in those situations) and they made mistakes when they became insecure while making high-stakes decisions as stakes became bigger.)
In most other cases (in not so crazy decisions that needed to be made everyday), they showed great amount of trust in others. They also showed genuine humility - they didn't assume expertise they didn't have and didn't try to assert that they are the boss.
I have come to believe that the founders mindset and behavior is crucial in attracting and retaining the right kind of talented next 10 employees. After that crucial bit, it is those 10 employees who determine the success probability of the company to a great extent. That founding/forming team is a bigger determinant of success rather than just the founders or just those initial employees by themselves.
We might be getting at different parts of "earnest", which an internet search defines as "resulting from or showing intense and sincere conviction". Your post is about intensity, and I guess mine is about sincerity.
I think jtanderson’s comment clarified the difference for me. Mustering intensity for me means being sincerely interested, so I actually wasn’t seeing the difference.
Personal favorite, I actually think it links well to this discussion of earnestness.
- Man on Pink Corner
A bar story, the characters are a bit rough on the edges. Action packed.
- The Lottery of Babylon
Mystical world where a
lottery runs everything.
- Three Versions of Judas
This is a good example of Borges combining non-fictional and fictional elements, he is doing a critical analysis on a fictional author be made up regarding the “real” role of Judas.
- Deutsches Requiem
Part of his explorations on fascism and nazism, written contemporarily (1946) so it has a bit more rawness.
- On Exactitude in Science
The title well describes this short piece.
- In Memoriam, JFK
Also short and incredibly well-written.
- The Zahir
The Zahir creates obsession, to the point of driving the obsessed insane.
Earnestness is what happens when people "let the guard down" and just be themselves. That's a rare state for a lot of people, who have spent a lifetime trying to be anyone but who they really are.
Exactly, there’s nothing inherently boring about being earnest. You can be earnest and boring but you could also be earnest with a good sense of humor and an interest in film history or software engineering. I’m not going to go all in on pg’s earnestness essay but it’s a positive trait and if you have genuine interests, there’s a good chance being earnest makes you more interesting when discussing interests because you are less likely to be invested in impressing other people with your interest. If you’re earnest your interests tend to scratch your itches of curiosity. But if you are earnest and uncurious then yes you may be boring.
This made me think that there are two type of not-earnestness: "what's in in it for me?" and "what's in it for others?" The first type is what [office] politics is about. The second type is rare and an example of it is when a doctor could tell a patient point-blank that he has 2 months left, but instead strongly recommends to go on a 2 months round-the-world trip and even invents a plausible cause [such trips help so much that savings on meds are multiples of the trip's cost].
> That's a rare state for a lot of people, who have spent a lifetime trying to be anyone but who they really are.
If you do it enough, who you "really are" is someone who doesn't enjoy letting their guard down. Who's to say that's not your "authentic" self at that point?
I think you have a non-standard personal definition of “earnest”. As I understand the words, earnestness and playfulness are completely orthogonal/unrelated attributes.
As mentioned in another comment here, I Googled the definition of "earnest", and it mentions "sincere and intense conviction". My post focuses on sincerity which (perhaps in an extreme form) seems to require honesty and an aversion to misrepresentation. This kind of aversion would seem to make play and humor harder.
Still, the above chain of reasoning is longer and less convincing than I thought it would be.
As someone who is most likely on the more boring end of the spectrum, I agree with many parts of your comment :)
Still, I have learned that being earnest and being fun are not opposites. Sometimes earnest people are spending most of their time focused on work (and if they are good natured, its fun to work with them!). But one can get better at being fun if you value and prioritize having fun with other people for its own sake.
I have also found that folks (including me) particularly enjoy friends who are earnest about their work / side projects. I especially enjoy spending time with friends who are earnestly interested in areas I know little about. Their energy and enthusiasm are infectious and talking to them about their area opens these clear windows into new worlds that are otherwise hard to find.
Earnest but interesting is sometimes a recipe for drama. Nothing worse than being well-meaning, right about something and saying something no one really wants to hear.
If you have any sense whatsoever, you intentionally shoot for "boring" while being publicly earnest.
Remember: "May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse. There's a downside to being interesting.
I initially wrote it without the word Chinese and felt like the sentence didn't convey "This is intended to wish you ill." I felt it sounded more like "This is a swear word."
No. Narcissists are the popular ones because they can't stop hoarding attention, including yours.
Someone earnest can have an incredible sense of humor and a sharp intellectual mind. They can be kind, well-meaning, and respectful. And, they'll leave you alone. So you might have to poke them with a stick a couple of times.
Social media is populated with narcissists competing for virality on every platform. Highly entertaining, yes. A waste of all of our time including theirs? Probably.
I've met some people like that. But only because they are earnest and also have a boring interest or just one or two interests. Not very common in my experience.
> Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery.
To be fair a lot of startup origin stories are so ridiculously fake that they seem like they could have only been created as a mockery of earnestness. Like the founders know they're lying, they know everyone else knows they're lying, and they're just doing it anyway as a weird flex or whatever.
Say what you will about Bezos, but at least he was honest that he just put every CPG product into a spreadsheet and discovered that books had by far the best unit economics and flywheel potential, rather than making up some bullshit backstory story about childhood literacy or whatever.
I watch that video and I see an internet and logistics nerd who proudly explains he found the best way to build a company around it.
Although it's clear that profitability is important to him, the video also shows he's deeply passionate about building this "virtual store". This gives him the incredible drive the article was talking about.
I don't see how you expect to sell that particular story to a group of people who have likely sat in the meetings where those BS stories were crafted.
And most of whom have had more than one "oh damn, i thought we were ironically riffing but now I can't tell if they are very funny and very dry or if this person is very new and drank the kool aid and is completely earnest" moments.
Odd to see a stress on interest in a problem for its own sake from pg, who has elsewhere written that the startup economy would be crippled by raising taxes on people who had already gotten fabulously rich. If being in it for the money is "the wrong motive" to do a startup, downgrading the potential financial gains from set-for-dynasty to merely set-for-life would seem to be a way of ditching the poseurs...
It seems to me the subtle miscommunication between billionaires and the rest of us is the rest of us are asking “what ever will you do with a dynasty” and many billionaires, I think, have a mental model of “I have proven I can employ this wealth more effectively than bureaucrats, and I like to solve big problems, and wealth makes it easier to solve big problems.”
This is a huge generalization we could easily find counter-examples and counter-arguments for, but we could also probably find fair arguments FOR this view, like Bill Gates.
Anyway, I think it’s probably a fair summary of how someone like PG could simultaneously hold the two ideas “don’t start a startup for money” and “higher taxes are a bad idea” at the same time. Which is not to say that he’s right, but I don’t think he’s incongruent.
> It seems to me the subtle miscommunication between billionaires and the rest of us is the rest of us are asking “what ever will you do with a dynasty” and many billionaires, I think, have a mental model of “I have proven I can employ this wealth more effectively than bureaucrats, and I like to solve big problems, and wealth makes it easier to solve big problems.”
> This is a huge generalization we could easily find counter-examples and counter-arguments for, but we could also probably find fair arguments FOR this view, like Bill Gates.
You're correct in identifying the mental model in operation, but you're missing the fact that the people in question are profoundly deluded.
Staggering piles of money (including Bill Gates') were, almost without exception, a result of the ability to capture value, not the ability to create it. And this is worth noting: many of the most significant decisions that led to increasing the value being captured were value destroying, such as "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run".
That isn't to say that value wasn't created at all (quite a lot was), but only that it isn't quite what is measured by, and rewarded with, wealth.
In the most benign cases of extreme wealth, much (even most) of the value captured IS also created by the person or organization doing the capturing, but invariably, more value is being captured than created (or at least, the market believes that will eventually be the case).
I didn’t miss any facts. I was deliberately cagey because this line of debate your comment enters is irrelevant to my larger point: the arguments may be wrong, or right, or any number of other conclusions, but they aren’t incongruent with each other.
I don't disbelieve you, but do you have evidence to back this up? That is, do you have evidence that suggests value capture at the price of value creation is more important than value creation itself?
If you don't capture the value you create, you don't become staggeringly wealthy.
If you capture value you don't create, you become staggeringly wealthy.
Note that I am not claiming that value isn't being created at all in that second scenario, just that the entity capturing the value isn't creating it.
If you capture value while destroying some, the picture gets more complicated, as it depends on the nature of the feedback loops involved. It isn't too hard to see examples in the wild of organizations pursuing strategies aimed at getting a larger slice of the pie, or at getting slices of more pies, rather than strategies that are aimed at getting the size or number of pies to grow overall.
"People's motives are as mixed in Silicon Valley as anywhere else. Even the founders motivated mostly by money tend to be at least somewhat interested in the problem they're solving, and even the founders most interested in the problem they're solving also like the idea of getting rich."
Yeah, but the parent talks about 'raising taxes on people who had already gotten fabulously rich', not some kind of radical egalitarianism. You'd have to be very strongly money-motivated to be deterred by the prospect of merely having hundreds of millions rather than a billion, or a couple billion rather than several billion, or whatever.
I feel this... I don't want billions for myself, I want billions so I can fund moonshot projects. If starting my business in a foreign country with no wealth tax is the difference between being a millionaire and a billionaire, I will strongly consider relocating.
It seems like it'd be easy to create a charity funded with your wealth that provides grants to innovators. You can do this even in a country with a large wealth tax.
The world also has an awful lot of yachts and private jets for me to really buy the argument that billionaires really want the money to give it away. So maybe democratic control over that wealth ends up being better on average, even if you truly are committed to giving away all of your wealth in the way that maximally benefits humanity.
Sure, interested in how the problem they're solving may get them a pot of gold.
Founders aren't motivated by the problem no more than athletes are motivated by the love of the game. Children are motivated in that manner. But not adults.
Startups, like sports, are a business. The only concern is money. That is the ends. The startup, problem, etc are just the means to that end.
Every founder is motivated by money. It just sounds tacky and cheap to say you did it for money, so everyone builds up some silly story - "to help people", "to solve a problem", "cause it was a passion", "to create jobs for the community", "create value for others", etc. Nope. It was all for money. No need to be embarrassed about it.
> downgrading the potential financial gains from set-for-dynasty to merely set-for-life would seem to be a way of ditching the poseurs
I've really started to think that inheritance is one of the biggest problem we have. Each one has the right to their own worth and riches acquired through their own effort, but if you pass those on afterwards then you create a dynasty that defeats the point of meritocracy and equality of opportunity. The incentives then become tribal, to your family, to your friends, and not simply a realization of your earnest passion.
1. The elite will still hand down a superior education and social connections to their progeny, so their children will still be privileged, just not ridiculously so like they are today
2. This will incentivize parents to invest more in their children's soft development, rather than just handing down their wealth and calling it a day
That's because this essay doesn't exist in isolation, it's a defense against the (entirely accurate) claim that his interest in Lisp for its own sake hasn't changed the world, only his business skills have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400184
If you don't have that context, then the essay is in fact very confusing: the beginning of it says that caring about money is the wrong motivation, and the end of it says how good it is that you now get money from earnestly working on things. What it's actually doing is trying to convince people that there's a connection between his financial success and his earnest work on Lisp, and more generally that successful startups (who apparently still need VC investment) tend to be successful because they deserve it, not because they happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right access to capital.
I think this essay would be more effective if the author defined what they mean by “earnest”. I think based on the essay, they mean seriousness + sincerity. But there is also a sense that the author considers “correct” as part of the definition:
>“when you call someone earnest, you’re making a statement about their motives. It means both that they’re doing something for the right reasons [my emphasis] and they’re trying as hard as I can”
So why assume that “interest in the problem” is intrinsically good? Do we really believe it’s not possible for a politician to be addressing the problem of “improving people’s lives” via the intermediate aim of “gaining political power”? So why wouldn’t that also be classified as “earnest”? If a gang leader is addressing the problem of “keeping our guys safe”, and therefore murders members of a rival gang who pose a threat to them, wouldn’t that also be “earnest”? Is it just because the author holds people working individually on a certain class of problems to be admirable, while having a much more negative view or politicians and criminals?
[Edit: I forgot to mention that I think there are some good points in this essay, and I agree with many of them, but I think it leaves some important areas unexplored]
> why assume that “interest in the problem” is intrinsically good?
I agree. I also think there's another aspect that the article leaves out: what is the definition of "solving the problem"?
For example, another recent pg article that was on the HN front page was the one about the founders of AirBnB. Although pg didn't use them as a specific example of "earnestness", I suspect he would describe them that way. But AirBnB, at scale, has created a lot of negative externalities (and much of the HN discussion of the article was focused on that). It doesn't seem to me like dealing with those negative externalities was part of the problem the AirBnB founders were earnest about solving.
And that, to me, is what we computer nerds call a security hole. If it's better to have earnest people trying to solve hard problems, then startup founders are not the only people that need to be selected for earnestness; the people that are going to run the company at scale and deal with the negative externalities it creates at scale also need to be. But those people are not being selected for earnestness at all; in fact earnestness in those positions, I would argue, is selected strongly against.
> Do we really believe it’s not possible for a politician to be addressing the problem of “improving people’s lives” via the intermediate aim of “gaining political power”?
In my limited understanding the writers of the US Constitution held exactly this belief: that the government would be run by imperfect and self-interested actors. They introduced mechanisms like separation of powers to play them off against each other to the benefit of the governed. It seems as we've moved from that focus on outcomes to judging people based on the purity of their motives.
“I am never so happy as when I am really engaged in good earnest, & it makes me most wonderfully cheerful & merry at other times, which is curious & very satisfactory.”
> Interestingly, just as the word "nerd" implies earnestness even when used as a metaphor, the word "politics" implies the opposite. It's not only in actual politics that earnestness seems to be a handicap, but also in office politics and academic politics.
I don't think this is always the case. I've found that no matter the size of the business, they are made up of people, and people have bullshit detectors. When you are able to speak truth and find meaning in an earnest way, people will follow you, peers will respect you, and executives will listen.
PG seems to have a cynical conception of what "politics" is, since he seems to be saying that practising it is anathema to earnestness.
I understand what he means if by "politics" he means self-interest and hoodwinking voters. And that may be his experience of politicians, but it doesn't define the field any more than Mulligans define golf. Champion golfers don't take Mulligans, don't kick their ball closer to the hole, and don't miscount strokes. They are all far too earnest, and have been since they started in the sport.
Likewise with politics. MLK did what he did because he cared for the rights of people. So did Thomas Jefferson, They're not the only ones, though it is difficult to come up with examples that are universally admired because when it comes to politics, we all have different opinions, because we all have different interests.
But what is politics? When I studied it at university, we learned on the first day that politics is just who gets what, where, when, and how, in a society.
Anyone who fights for the rights of other people in society, whether for left or right, for rich or for poor, may be earnest, and virtuous in the eyes of their peers.
But I kinda feel like your example proves the point, because I've never seen MLK described as a "politician" or "political figure". Politics as most people understand it is the process of deciding who ought to run the government, and King specifically avoided discussing this (https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/sta...) because he felt that doing so would undercut his mission of social change.
> Politics as most people understand it is the process of deciding who ought to run the government
That's a narrow definition, sometimes known as "party politics". And that well might be what PG was referring to. The limitation of party politics in America, and other places, is that to become an elected representative you need money for advertising, which you have to get from somewhere, e.g. donations. These usually come with the expectation of a quid pro quo; oil companies want pipelines across the commons and lax pollution laws. They get these by buying politicians.
And so there is a contradiction in a "democracy" like the USA whereby votes are in the hands of the people, but the ability to stand for office is in the hands of the financiers. It leads to a duplicity, which is possibly why PG describes "politics" as anathema to earnestness.
But politics is more than that. Politics is who gets what, when where and how. It exists in classrooms and workplaces, and cars full of screaming kids on a hot day.
It most certainly exists in the competition to have ideas funded by VC. So, in fact, PG is a skilful politician. He just practises his craft outside of party politics.
Ultimately, I guess, "politics" is just a word which can be defined however we want. So I can't tell you that you're wrong or the definition you're using is untrue.
It's not obvious to me that a definition of "politics" which groups together party politics, funding startups, and screaming kids coming home from soccer practice provides much useful insight into the world. At best, it's an imprecise statement of the same sentiment as "everything is physics", that party politics has a large influence on how the world looks. At worst, and I've seen it used quite frequently in this way, it's a sleight of hand maneuver used to slip party politics into contexts where it'd otherwise be excluded.
"Everything is physics" might be true, but as you say, it isn't very useful because it is too broad a brush. That's why we talk about atomic physics, astrophysics, dynamics, optics, nuclear physics, quantum physics, and for that matter, chemistry, and inorganic chemistry. Each of these is a discipline with its own nomenclature and epistemology that enable practitioners to home in on the elements they study in sufficient detail, with an efficiency of language.
Similarly, politics.
To answer the question, what is your hourly rate of pay and why is it so, we have to turn to politics. Physics won't help us, nor will chemistry. Politics is the appropriate discipline, because in politics humans are the atoms, and their interactions are described by the laws of politics.
Your hourly rate of pay is a function only partially of the legislation enacted by your elected representatives. Your state legislature may set a minimum hourly rate of pay. Whether that rate applies to your job, and to you personally, depends on a number of other human interactions, both in the present and throughout history, which occurred independently to the legislature.
And whether you have your job, which pays $X per hour, or another job, which pays $Y per hour, is a function of... that's right, politics. Or more precisely, labor relations, market forces, race relations, immigration, what school you went to, how much funding your school received, what companies your local layers of government attracted to your area. These factors are in turn influenced by taxation, investment law, transport infrastructure, natural resources, environmental regulations... everywhere you look for the answer to the question What is your hourly rate of pay, you encounter a different sub-discipline of... politics.
Sure! I don't mean to deny the importance of the insight; a lot of people do have seriously mistaken beliefs about how social and economic facts come to be, and learning a bit of political science is a critical part of correcting those mistakes.
The problem is that electoral politics, at least as practiced recently in the US, rarely has much to do with this. I'm on a few donor lists, so I got a lot of political fundraising emails over the past year, and out of the candidates I can remember only one was focused on society and how we can make it better. The other candidates talked primarily, if not exclusively, about how terrible their Congressional opponents are and how useful my help would be to defeat their villainous ways. Whatever term you use to refer to this category of activity, I don't think someone with an earnest interest in improving the world would choose to regularly participate in it.
Not making things worse is another expression of making things better. I also dislike where politics has gone in terms of how it's being exercised these days, but I would agree that the building blocks of politics are still, how do we make decisions as a group. Some people have managed to pretend the most important decision is that "person X most not enact their agenda", but it comes from the same root.
> out of the candidates I can remember only one was focused on society and how we can make it better.
Sounds like you encountered one earnest type?
I tried to think of contemporary examples but I couldn’t think of any that would be universally admired. That got me thinking about the meaning of “earnestness” and then I wondered whether I might have conflated it with “virtuous” too much in my own conception.
I suppose it’s just as possible to be earnestly libertarian as it is to be earnestly egalitarian.
There might be as many earnest members of the NRA as there are earnest members of the NAACP and the ACLU.
Fact checking aside, who do you think is more earnest, 45 or 44?
My understanding of 'politics' is: when power is transacted via social influence instead of money. This is why you get corporate politics. The financial incentives within the company (such as bonuses & raises) aren't strong enough to transmit the required forces. Soft power steps in to fill the vacuum.
Pretty good definition. I don't know if it deserves the hate it gets. I've heard politics described as, relationships. And the more I think of it that way, the more acceptable, and even positive, it seems.
Would you rather do things because your boss exercises role power (I'm your boss and you must do what I say), or because you like, respect, and trust your boss (relationship power)?
In politics, the word "technocrat" is used to try to carve out a divide between specific intellectual talent and political leadership talent, with a heavy implication that these are mutually exclusive.
I think that's how PG is using "earnest" here. He presents it first as a compliment but goes on to suggest that it is exclusive from understanding other people's motivations, and by extension, exclusive from business leadership.
> In politics, the word "technocrat" is used to try to carve out a divide between specific intellectual talent and political leadership talent, implication being that these are exclusive.
No, in politics, “technocrat” describes an advocate of rule by an elite of technical experts. When applied to a candidate for office, it often more specifically designates someone who sees their own self-evaluated membership in such an elite as their primary qualification for office. It does not designate actual talent, nor does it imply anything about the separation between different types of talent.
And on the other side, “politics” is anathema to “nerds” and technocrats because good technocrats typically have a nice mix of the old school sociopathic qualities required to succeed in business along with technical chops. They don’t like politics because they typically lack emotional intelligence, don’t comprehend the need for empathy, and think their experience is the only experience that matters. They likewise usually have a regressive ultra-utilitarian philosophy.
This doesn’t apply to everyone or any actual human beings of course, but since we’re talking about abstract made up nonsense character types, might as well go along with it.
Future sadly needs more morality and honesty, the concept of monetary hyper-success created by SV has ruined the idea of balance between passionate craftsmanship and modest business enterprise. Today everyone wants to be big and powerful and we feel the impact of business size as users everyday. Success in life cannot be limited to "be a billionaire" just because. At this point in time I consider this trend as a dark religion and an evil cult.
If you're interested in X for its own sake, you are very unlikely to want to turn that into a business. Unless you're also interested in business and money for their own sakes - both of which should trigger very justified cynicism, because there are far more effective ways to make the world a better place than by getting extremely rich after an IPO.
I disagree. There are many problems that can only be solved by a self-funding organization which sells its solutions to consumers - aka a business.
Suppose I would like to build entertaining, educational toys for children. Should I do it as a hobbyist? No. If I seriously want many children to benefit, I will have to get the toys to them, and producing them will take money. Should I get a grant from a charity? No: only children can judge whether a toy is fun, and if I ask charities to be the judge I will end up optimizing the toys to appeal to the charities, not the children. (The same applies to becoming a charity myself, or to asking for a government grant.) Instead, I should sell toys to children and their parents. That way, I may be able to tell whether I have succeeded in my goal.
The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback. Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism.
The list of businesspeople who are genuinely interested in what they do is long. It ranges from Steve Wozniak down to your local bookshop owner. Paul Graham claims that the best businesspeople are always interested.
> The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback. Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism.
True, but many of the markets we have are neither free nor fair. And even if they were, we should exercise caution before concluding that what is discovered is a need. Markets are equally capable of exploiting wants, socially conditioned propensities, addictions, manifestations of the subconscious, etc.
Even developments which appear unambiguously good can lead to unexpected side effects and easily overlooked externalities.
I want to sell the world on the idea of Capabilities Based Security... which means no product, nothing to profit from, which means no help from Silicon Valley at all. 8(
No matter how earnest, or driven... if there's no profit in it, nobody there cares.
I dunno, do you have any friends with deep pockets and chaotic energy?
In seriousness, no clue. Forking the financial system, which crypto is arguably intended to do, seems hard enough. Forking the kernel (as I understand you propose) seems even harder; you can't rely on traction from anyone with spare hardware, you'd need voluntary opt-in from established players, right?
I'd never heard of capabilities until I followed your comment to your blog, though, so thanks.
Forking the kernel won't help. There needs to be a new security model... Genode is a step in that direction... I've been waiting for them to get something to the point where I can get it working well enough to be a daily driver.
It's possible someone could get the drivers going on a Raspberry Pi 4, which would be close enough. I think it'll happen next year some time.
Would you mind helping me understand your idea better, then? I gleaned my (mistaken) assumption from your Capabilities Digest:
> The principle of least privilege is the solution to this whole mess, but it has to be applied from the kernel all the way up the stack. This is a lot of forking work to do.[0]
Forking the Linux kernel would just result in another monolithic Linux kernel, with all the drivers all tied in.
There are microkernels, which is the specific thing Linus Torvalds didn't want to do when he started Linux. In capability based systems, not even the drivers have access to everything. Any given process is giving a list of capabilities, like file handles to resources, and those are the ONLY things that process can access.
Consider a word processor... under Windows, Linux, etc the application calls a system dialog box to select the directory/file name, the uses that name to open a handle to the files, because the assumption is that any program you run should have full access to all of your stuff.
The fork of that word processor in a capabilities based OS would call the OS, and the OS would show you a similar dialog box, but the OS would then return the file capability to the word processor... it wouldn't be able to access anything else.
Consider the Linux model as handing over your wallet at a checkout, and the Capabilities model as handing over exact change. People are used to handling actual money and thinking in terms of risk like that... thus they would do well in a capabilities based system, and from their perspective not a lot has changed.
From the application programmer perspective, opening/saving files is a bit different, but everything else stays the same. The big plus is that no matter how bad any application crashes, due to bug or deliberate fuzzing, etc... it can't be used to take over the system, like it could in Linux.
We could stop having to worry about security when writing applications, and only worry about it in systems programming, where it belongs.
Genode runs on a variety of microkernels, the nice thing about them is they only do a very few things, so adapting to a new one shouldn't be hard, nor dangerous.
I do a lot of things simply to do the thing for its own sake and I've gotten a lot of feedback that people "value" the wonderful things I do out of the goodness of my heart. And I was homeless for years and hearing that shit about how much everyone "appreciated" how much I "cared" and all this shit while mostly not giving me money for it.
The assumption that people should do things for free is an assumption that they have vast resources to spend on benefiting others with no expectation of getting any of that back. Or that they should serve as slave labor out of "virtue."
Having done the latter, let me tell you it sucks. In the extreme.
If you want the world to be healthy, you need to find ways to do good works that pay your bills and you need to find ways to engage in symbiotic relationships where benefiting others comes back to you. The word for that is generally business.
I would like to keep working on the same things I've worked on for years but turn it into an actual business that pays my bills. There is nothing I want more desperately than to do X for its own sake and somehow also live in comfort because I do good things in this shitty world full of shitty people who all want something for free and are happy to take freebies literally from a homeless woman if they can get away with it.
If you're interested in X for its own sake, you're quite likely to want to do it for a living. This is true even of things like music and art. Not saying you _will_ be able to do it for a living, but it is normal that if you're interested in X for its own sake, you would at least investigate whether you could make that your full time job.
Now, in regards to things like an IPO specifically, I think it would depend on whether or not you need a lot of other people to help you get X done. If you need to hire a lot of other people, then you might need an investment in order to do that if you cannot rely on getting that many volunteers. And in that case, to get the investment, there probably has to be the prospect of an IPO.
My observed experience is that trying to get grants for something, is not materially easier or less political than trying to get investments to fund it.
Fully disagree. Making a living doing what I find truly interesting is perhaps one of the greatest blessings to me in life. One of the better ways to do that is to turn it into a business, or at least a nice self-employment gig.
I believe it's possible to be very interested in business and money and still end up with an ethically credible result.
The problem is that we(in the broader sense of the working world) don't treat those concepts as an "artistic medium" to which additional principles and ideas are needed to structure and shape the outcomes, rather, we just use them as scorekeeping for a nebulous measure of life success, which results in founders laboring hard over the business equivalent of a fart joke, because they're only aiming to min-max response for effort.
The measure of what's an "impactful" business is socially constructed within the arbitrage of what we could potentially strive for against what societal conditions currently allow. Entrepreneurs, as a group, are always testing the boundaries of that arbitrage. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but it's hard to find balance in the arrangement because they aren't able to do their study in private: part of the deal is that they demand access to significant resources to make it happen, and that occasional violations get overlooked in the name of progress. In a time like now when the population is mostly asking for relief measures, it looks indulgent, and sometimes it is.
At this point pg’s articles have a huge survival bias, it’s really hard to know.
The only way to know is YC valuing each company on demo day 1, 5 and 10 years in the future, publicly keeping a record of predicted valuations and their hypothesis for their model Waiting 10 years and regressing to see if their model made the correct predictions.
It could very well be that YC could just shoot money in dark and by the mere fact of being where talent and VCs are, companies turn into unicorns out of sheer luck and timing. We don’t know.
The YC process isn’t scientific, or at-least not open to scientific scrutiny.
Great. Now my company's engineering recruiting email "honest and earnest" turn of phrase about culture is less likely to make candidates pause and consider why I focused on that, but instead probably gets classified as regurgitating whatever everyone read on HN. :)
Goodheart's law at work. This is why you have to change metrics every six months. Just when I figured out "engagement," now "earnestness." Now a potential issue that you're probably already aware of is that many of these traits can serve as culture / age filters.
I think diversity of ideas and influences is inherently valuable in an organization, and to find it, we have to be thoughtful and not jump to conclusions.
For example, even if we announce that speaking up is safe and encouraged, that's going to be more familiar to some, and others will take a while to integrate it and adapt it.
I can definitely imagine, say, 2 engineers founding a company, and the company thus far was built on caffeinated whiteboard sessions, where they were comfortable shouting out their ideas, grabbing the marker from the other, etc. It worked for them so far, so it would be understandable if they think that's their culture and would be a key to ongoing success of the company. But if, for their next hire, they're passing over every introverted thinker, person raised being told not to interrupt, etc.-- then I'd suspect they'd probably be missing out on a ton of skills that their org will probably need, and also personally missing out on traits/practices/behaviors/etc. from which they'd grow by being influenced and meeting halfway. (I think this is tricky example, since the whiteboard jam session is a very appealing idea to a lot of us, and we might ascribe mythical power to it. But I think it's also easy to imagine some big design insight coming in a pause in the excitement, from someone who was standing slightly back from the flailing markers, and who hadn't said much in the first hour of battle. Or even from someone who went off to work something out on the computer, that was being missed in the endorphin rush of whiteboard eureka.)
Yep, although I'm thinking "honest and earnest" is further from a typical metric, and closer to the end goal.
One of my concerns, when I decided to be very forthright in the intro email, was that it would simply be taken as a cheat-sheet by a poor-match candidate for what culture to fake.
But I figured there would be a greater risk that we'd miss recognizing or resonating with some of the best candidates, because they were trying to stick to the rules that the interview prep books told them.
(Funny: were my company to become a FAANG, then the interview prep industry would coach everyone on the exact 5 notes to hit, at what formulaic points in the process. And to practice expressions of curiosity, to have ready in reaction to standard prompts by interviewer. Dictionaries eventually would be updated to redefine "genuine" to mean projecting a particular kind of professional persona mandated by my company. :)
I'm sorry, but would you care to explain the inside baseball to the uninitiated? Who is Zach Tellman, what's a Renaissance man and how does it relate to a paragraph that doesn't mention time periods, how is this calling out Zach Tellman specifically or rather, what's the backstory there, and what does any or all of that have to do with previous criticism of Paul Graham? I'm completely lost here.
The footnote, in particular, which Tellman highlights, seems to be a swipe at Tellman. It reads as Graham accusing Tellman of not being earnest.
A "Renaissance man" is an old phrase, referring to someone who is good at many things (since Renaissance people like DaVinci were good at art, engineering, architecture and more). Tellman was making a joke about the laundry list of vices that Graham seemed to be imputing to Tellman.
Not that the whole essay is in response to Tellman, but, the idea that Tellman's essay was on Graham's mind seems likely, especially when Graham makes the crack about Twitter.
"You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction."
Possibly the most famous verse (2-47) from the Bhagavad Gita.
It doesn't translate very well to English. The word for "duty" has way more weight attached to it. It's things you ought to do from a sense of righteousness, not things prescribed to you by some random corporation.
> Can you imagine a more important change than one in the relationship between intellectual curiosity and money?
Semantics and edge conditions aside, no. I can't imagine a more important change; this is truly a concise and meaningful question. The world will be a little bit better if you ask your 3 closest peers this question.
Including semantics, I believe our language must provide a thought framework to guide intellectual curiosity towards sustainability; ie, named classes of intellectual curiosity that create more opportunity for intellectual curiosity. Further, our language must meaningfully relate the concepts of intellectual curiosity, economic productivity and capital. For example, discussing the relationship between global economic productivity and the potential of a viral pandemic could frame problems in a way that promote intellectual inquiry, incentivized by capital, to preserve future economic productivity.
Including edge conditions, I believe we at least need to constrain intellectual curiosity that would harm. Part of this goes back to semantics; ie, what is harm? But another component exists around cultural norms of transparency, regulation and authority.
> It's a bigger social error to seem naive in most European countries than it is in America, and this may be one of subtler reasons startups are less commmon there. Founder culture is completely at odds with sophisticated cynicism.
I have a high opinion of pg, but mocking an entire continent for non-earnestness because it doesn't make as much money as the US (because they have more startups because, supposedly, the Americans are less cynical than the Europeans) is borderline cynic (and I say that as a cynic myself).
Money, and judging almost everything through the prism of money, is one of the most cynical things we do have right now in our society, and as such I appreciate more a "Greed is good discourse" because it shows its cynicism in plain view and does not try to hide it behind a veil of good intentions, like texts as this one do.
Comparing the US to Sweden it seems to other way around to me. Americans assume that all of government and all companies are evil. If that isn't absolute cynicism I don't know what is. (Plus it enables evil since it is expected so there is little anger.)
Plus the whole thing with Americans being hopelessly naive against religion, the one area they should absolutely be cynical and/or uninterested like Swedes.
>non-earnestness because it doesn't make as much money as the US (because they have more startups [...] , and judging almost everything through the prism of money,
You're interpreting the blog essay unfairly. PG isn't looking at everything (such as "earnestness") only through the prism of money. It's a blog post with deliberately limited scope.
His first sentence sets the context for the rest of the essay: "Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about _startups_."
Yes, we all know there can be other activities to also express earnestness such as creating art paintings, music, parenting, volunteering, teaching, etc. but he omits those and discusses it in relation to startups because... startups is what he often specializes in writing about. It doesn't look like mocking Europe to me.
I understand you want a more universal essay (measures of earnestness beyond startups) but that's not necessary for PG's blog audience.
Yes, you’re seeing two very different value systems run up against each other. Paul Graham obviously has a bias toward thinking the “founder culture” value system is better...but this stance ignores the fact that the European, more traditional culture leads to greater balance —stricter/better regulations around tech and privacy, ownership, and in most places labor.
In America you can make pretty much anything happen but at the cost of living in a society which is lax in terms of regulation, the consequences of which we’re seeing quite palpably this year (workplace discrimination, horrible environmental damage, etc.). While I won’t knock anyone for admitting they don’t know something, not every ignorant person looks for answers once those answers directly go against their agenda. This is what snobbishness, to a certain extent, helps regulate.
It’s seems weird because the UK and Europe had the original founders! I guess the Vikings might have been the first but they typically plundered as an enterprise. Focusing on character traits as a societal descriptor kind of comes off like saying that the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur!
So I imagine reality is different than these tropes.
But it is interesting to ask why does Scandinavia have more startups per capita than other countries?
Like structural racism are there structural components that drive startups?
I hear what you're saying and there might be some truth to it. I didn't read that "sophisticated cynicism" as very mocking. You could even say he's calling them cooler than us, in a very earnest kind of a way.
Well, except that it flies in the face of American culture being considered "the coolest" in the world. Heck, the modern meaning even comes from (African) Americans !
Not only that , in many parts of the world (LATAM for example) American institutions are not considered earnest at all, you know they all have underhanded motives.
Here's an easy way to figure out where earnestness matters vs where it's just bullshitting all the way down. Are there any prodigies? Mathematics: yes. Music: yes. Real estate: no.
You'll find earnestness in fields where the "system" is known, transparent, learnable, and verifiable. Musicians and mathematicians can't bullshit because other practitioners will catch on easily.
In real estates and startups, the "system" is usually esoteric, highly network dependent, and non-verifiable. You can't tell if a startup founder is truly a genius, or just lucked out (or had access to his dad's millions as seed funding).
Any field where knowledge remains locked away in closed networks essentially becomes the domain of bullshit.
Open knowledge breeds earnestness.
If everyone knew exactly how every real estate deal in the world was structured, there would be no bullshit real estate investors.
There are no child prodigy realtors because very few people are willing to take a child seriously enough to buy a house off them. The learnable part of realty (as measured on the realtors exam) is far outweighed by the bullshit part of looking the part.
Astronauts per se no. But there are pilots as young as 16.
he poses the idea of being earnest about something in a way that is disingenuous.
> Why can't there be people interested in self-driving cars or social networks for their own sake?
If you are interested in self-driving cars, but you are not interested in the effects that self-driving cars have on society, you are not actually interested in self-driving cars: you are interested in yourself. To be interested only in the problem-solving aspect of a domain is, first and foremost, to be interested in your own mastery. I am not saying that it is bad to be motivated by mastery: I am personally very motivated by mastery. It's what has kept my interest after a decade of programming professionally. I relate to being interested in a problem because it's an interesting puzzle.
But we should not pretend that being interested in the aspect of solving a problem is the most genuine manner of interacting with that problem (or the opposite: that caring about the side-effects of your work more than you care about the work itself is somehow lacking in earnesty). It is not. What you are building does not stop at the problem-solving phase. How the things you build affect the world is what you have done. If we set our ethical standard at "so long as I am interested in doing the building, I am being earnest", our efforts will forever be deployed by others, perhaps with effects that do not align with our values.
> If you are interested in self-driving cars, but you are not interested in the effects that self-driving cars have on society, you are not actually interested in self-driving cars: you are interested in yourself. To be interested only in the problem-solving aspect of a domain is, first and foremost, to be interested in your own mastery.
This distinction seems completely semantic and vacuous. What do you call it if I'm interested in my own mastery, but only for some subset of all things I can have mastery in? Then we're right back where we started.
> What do you call it if I'm interested in my own mastery, but only for some subset of all things I can have mastery in?
specialization. I don't know why you thought this question was some sort of gotcha. I'm not rejecting the idea that someone can specialize or be a domain expert. I'm rejecting PG's argument that "being earnest" means "ignoring externalities".
If I'm interested in A but not how A affects B, then I'm actually just interested in C rather than A? That makes even less sense than saying that altruism doesn't really exist because altruists enjoy being altruistic.
> If we set our ethical standard at "so long as I am interested in doing the building, I am being earnest", our efforts will forever be deployed by others, perhaps with effects that do not align with our values.
Firstly, "earnest" here seems to be about "less likely to get distracted (and so fail to make money)" and has nothing whatsoever to do with what's ultimately to the most social good.
Secondly, demanding control of everything downstream of you is a great way to get nothing done.
You seem to be advocating that innovation should follow an ethic of "do not call up what you cannot put down", when "fail forward" has a history of working rather better.
hmm, I think the way I worded that sentence is getting in the way of what I'm trying to say. Perhaps this is more clear:
If you're interested in how something works (e.g. self-driving cars), but not what it does, you're not interested in the thing itself: what you are actually interested in is your own sense of mastery.
> You seem to be advocating that innovation should follow an ethic of "do not call up what you cannot put down"
Um, I've never heard this quote before but it looks like it's a Lovecraft quote? Was that ... said by one character to another character after they had summoned some sort of monster or other infernal being? Is ... is your argument that the monster is good if the monster pays you money?
> "fail forward" has a history of working rather better.
uh, define "working better". Better for whom? Along what dimension? Again, this really seems to be arguing that if your idea makes you rich, it is good.
It's only in Silicon Valley that earnestness, or the appearance or earnestness, is important. Here, you need to say "we're transforming patient outcomes and helping people achieve their best health." It's just not a requirement anywhere else I've worked. There are more billionaires outside of Silicon Valley than inside it, and very few of them have had to put up such pretense. They just say "we're starting a health insurance company to outcompete incumbents through better operational efficiency, delivering best-in-industry margins and double digit revenue growth."
> The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly this is also the region with the highest number of successful startups per capita.
I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” or “The British are terrible cooks.” Absent any evidence to back them up, many such statements in PG’s essays seem to be an expression of his prejudices. The very least he could do is to provide some criterion the reader can use to test “earnestness” at the population scale.
In this case, I imagine that he started from “Scandinavia is the region with the highest number of startups per capita” and inferred that this must mean that they are more earnest, rather than going the other way around.
His posts aren’t fact based, they’re mostly an expression of his feelings.
A great example are his 5-6 posts talking about how the most important facet of a programming language is its brevity (https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sex...). At no point does he cite any facts backing that up. Even when the brevity chasing language he created failed to gain traction, he didn’t see that as an indication to recheck his assumptions.
In other words, “feelings don’t care about your facts”. But hey, there’s a market for that sort of article. So who are we to judge?
I think you folks are holding PG to a standard that the vast majority of essays which hit the HN frontpage would not meet.
Even this critical essay looks like it fails to meet its own standard.
A "profoundly unserious" writer which is "mired in intuition and incuriosity"? Nowhere in the post are these terms rigorously defined!
And look! The author accuses Graham of "tantalizing the reader by reducing complex problems down to singular, nebulous concepts" without mentioning principal component analysis! "Profoundly unserious", I say.
The vast majority of essays submitted to HN don’t reach the front page because the author isn’t famous. Whereas PG rockets to the top of the front page within an hour of submission.
Even then, the average HN comments section is highly sceptical of any claims in any post. The top comment is usually critiquing the link for one reason or another. For some reason, that wasn’t the case with PG articles. You’re only remarking about this now because HN is finally holding PG to the same standard that others are.
I value PG's opinion more than a rando blogger because he's very successful, has observed a lot of data about what makes startups successful, seems unusually serious about being correct, and has written a lot of things I consider insightful in the past. He's a name I know and I click it when I see it on HN. There are a lot of other people with similar HN clout, patio11 for instance.
I haven't noticed a trend for comments on PG articles to be less critical. If anything I think I've noticed users feeling a need to be more critical (as I feel your comment illustrates).
It's OK to hold pg to a higher standard than others in terms of factually supporting his claims. Fine. Just be clear that you are doing so. It's fine to remind others not to take his word as gospel as well.
I mean it's at least technically quite possible that someone like PG would have a very good intuitive understanding for what works and what doesn't, without this meaning that he is able to systematise this implicit knowledge in such a way that it is empirically solid and/or can be usefully taught to others.
This is similar to the fact that experts are not always the best teachers, or that a rhetorically skilled speaker/writer is not necessarily a competent linguist or literary scientist, or how many great musicians know little about music theory.
Of course, you are correct that many, many other tech bloggers don't back up their claims either (most notoriously the "I did this thing once at company X, it worked ok, and now I'm preaching it as a new gospel (but it hasn't even been a year that we did this and we don't understand the long-term implications of it yet)" blog posts). I think this is in general a real shame because it leads to all the cargo culting madness that's so prevalent in the industry.
In PG's case, I find that most of his blog posts read like post hoc rationalisations based on sweeping generalisations (e.g. that you can be either "earnest" or jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a particularly false dichotomy). Which wouldn't nearly bother me as much if they weren't also often full of thinly veiled contempt for different kinds of people (e.g. people who are actually good at bringing people together). It sometimes reads to me as a sort of "I was bullied/excluded as a nerdy teenager and now I'm gonna show them how much better nerds are and why they will (or at least should) rule the world". In a world where we increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies making decisions that impact all of us, including people completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't think this is a very good position to take.
>I mean it's at least technically quite possible that someone like PG would have a very good intuitive understanding for what works and what doesn't
Fair point
>you can be either "earnest" or jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a particularly false dichotomy
I'm looking at the essay and I'm not seeing where it says this? Maybe I just forgot.
>people who are actually good at bringing people together
From the essay (in a footnote):
>It's interesting how many different ways there are not to be earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant, to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to be orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make. This pattern suggests that earnestness is not one end of a continuum, but a target one can fall short of in multiple dimensions.
The closest thing on the list to "bringing people together" in my mind would be being cool, which isn't very close IMO.
>In a world where we increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies making decisions that impact all of us, including people completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't think this is a very good position to take.
I don't trust the general population to make decisions either--see our current president for an example of what they can sometimes go for.
You make a good point: while PG may be able to intuitively pick out "winners," this does not mean he will be successful at making those intuitions explicit, as he attempts to do in his blog posts.
The typical reaction to PG essays on HN has been the exact same flavor of negative for many, many years now. Go back and read the comments on his previous submissions. PG himself even wrote an essay about uncharitable criticism and basically exited the site in 2015.
It's very surprising to me that anyone could think that, in 2020, it's new and original to bash PG articles on HN.
I can't speak for Sweden or Denmark but here in Norway great store is set on straightforwardness, plain speaking, and trust. Generally you are assumed to be telling the truth and if you say that you will do something then people will assume that you mean it and possess the necessary skill. This sort of atmosphere means that there is less bureaucracy involved in getting things done, paperwork is on the whole simpler than elsewhere. Doing your duty and pulling together are important features of life in Norway.
Whether any of this is really the cause of there being more startups in Scandinavia than elsewhere is something I'm not able to answer, but the earnestness is certainly present.
The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge of it.
My personal experience is that life is simpler here than in my country of origin (UK); mostly things 'Just Work (tm)' and that might be why startups are more common.
> The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge of it.
Is this a downside, or has the rest of the word devalued its academic qualifications by lowering its standards, failing to seriously tackle cheating, and (relevant to postgraduate degrees and academic titles) prioritising novelty and sensation at the expense of rigour?
I've never seen the inside of a top UK or US university, so I can't be sure that they're churning out meaningless undergrad degrees, but they certainly seem to be complicit in these trends at the level of publishing and hiring/promotion/tenure.
The specific example I had in mind was an acquaintance who held a doctorate from Trinity, Dublin. and it was quite a while ago. So no, I don't think devalued qualifications was the issue.
Scandinavian countries have very high trust societies, based on any survey that looked into this. Why that is is a difficult question and leads us very far. Is it money? Where did the money come from? Oil (but that's not there in all Nordic countries)? Lack of war? Did the lack of war come from their high trust? Or the geographic distance to warring nations and empires of Europe? Is it related to the cold environment, perhaps harder to conquer and less valuable for empires? Do social temperaments have to do with climate? Is it about their genetic homogeneity? Which one is the cause of which? If they go in cycles what influences what in the strongest way? It's a very complicated issue!
It's too reductionist to take only the part "earnest, therefore startup". Sort of implying that if only other nations were also more earnest they'd also have startups and wealth, disregarding all the possibly good reasons that those other nations have not to be trusting/earnest.
But it's also too dismissive to say to this that it's "national stereotyping" therefore it immediately must be false and there can be no connection at all between earnestness/trust and startups in the case of Scandinavia.
Scandinavian countries are not really countries. More like a family club. (This is starting to change though)
When everybody is just like you, it leads to high trust, no us vs them mentality. Same is true in eg. South Korea and Japan.
Contrast this with their
similarily northern neighbour Russia, which is basically the America of eastern europe. A nation resulting from a melting pot
of ethnicitiess, languages, cultures (most current Russians are really assimilated from smaller native cultures, their great grandparents didn't identify as Russian). And the end result? Corruption. Everybody just tries to milk public funds as much as they can, and so forth.
While I'm not disagreeing with your proposed cause to high trust within a culture, I disagree with 'high diversity causing corruption'. I think the corruption issues in eastern europe are a whole different conversation and I'm not sure how diversity in ethnicity would necessarily cause that.
Poland (and most of Eastern Europe) has been steamrolled repeatedly by neighboring empires which have imposed what amounted to foreign governments. These governments ruled despite, not due to, the local populations. Ergo secret police, network of informants, etc, just to control the population.
It's hard to have very high trust levels when your own government and state are working against you and when your coworkers and neighbors can at any time rat you out for unpatriotic activities.
Denmark and Sweden have been at war with each other so many times you can't give an exact number as it becomes difficult to say when it's a prolonged war and when it's 2 seperate wars.
The lack of feudalism as a contrast to other nations and the excess of Lutheranism were mostly a long time ago as was the Hanseatic league. And while Scandinavia looks homogeneous to outsiders, especially to those from far away, the three countries have distinct characters and distinct histories. Part of how each behaves has to do with the climate and topology of each country as well as the accidents of history in recent centuries. At least one Danish king was famous for picking fights with his neighbours which is one reason why Denmark is so small, Sweden had a French king for a while which left its mark on the language and the structures of society. Norway for a long time was simply far away and difficult to travel in which means that decentralisation worked as there was almost no choice. Towns only 10 km apart on the map might have very distinct dialects because there is a mountain in the way meaning that it is a 100 km trip from one to the other.
The glib answers, as I suspect you were saying, are usually wrong or very partial (in both senses of the word).
I meant they escaped the world wars and the rest of the turmoils of the 20th century. Largely because they didn't have deep historic conflicts with the rest of the big empires.
I mean, sure, not completely, they definitely had some of their population deported by Nazis, but it wasn't such a major impact as elsewhere in Europe.
Well, Norway collaborated with the nazis and sympathised for some of their ideas at the time, for example Norway had been experimenting with eugenics programs since the 20s when they started to sterilise mentally hill patients and made it legal in 1934.
But the king of Norway and members of the army escaped to London and directed the resistance from there.
Ask the Jews that owned the houses and nursing homes that were confiscated for the Lebensborn project and the kids that survived it (not many), what they think about it.
Others had it worse doesn't mean they escaped the war and its consequences.
If the eastern block is where you draw the line, you could argue that many parts of Europe escaped the war.
They had a head start after WW 2 for sure. Earlier they were not affected by Ottoman wars like the Balkans and other Eastern Europe (the extent of destruction and de population that brought was beyond imagination), nor a Moorish occupation like in Iberia. Scandinavia was not razed to the ground and drastically depopulated in recent centuries.
Finland is somewhat exceptional among the Nordics as they were quite poor and had some shit to deal with from Russia (and Sweden) but managed to become rich and high trust.
They have been at war for 2 centuries like much of Europe.
Depending on who you ask, Ottomans were their allied or their enemies in Scandinavia, at times they have been both like Denmark allied of Ottomans against Russia that then switched side and sided with Russia that gave them land from Sweden.
There were big differences between Scandinavian countries and they have been at war for a long time.
Denmark for example owned Ghana, like Belgium owned Congo.
They were richer than say Finland.
France has been involved in less wars during the same time span.
Another example: Spain and Portugal weren't bombed during WW2, they were not occupied, they stayed mostly neutral, but didn't develop an high trust society.
Trust is something that is defined and measurable. And yes you’re right, it is complicated. But the complexity isn’t helped by introducing a random thing called “earnestness” without a way to measure that.
> What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France?
Experience, perhaps?
As a French who lived a number of years in Scandinavia, it is day and night. It doesn't mean that people in those countries never cheat, but in France, the default attitude is cheating. Always. About everything and anything. Even when there is nothing to win and being straight or earnest would be much easier. It is exhausting.
> This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,”
Why do you assume bad faith? Having worked closely with folks from many parts of Europe as an early stage founder, folks from Scandinavia certainly seem to take “naive” or “earnest” efforts of founders more seriously than other parts of Europe (or even Asia for that matter).
PG says “the most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia [and therefore it has more successful startups]”. Afaict GP is saying PG doesn’t believe what he is saying and is disingenuously suggesting causality just to support his main thesis.
Well, there is a well known cliché of people in Northern Europe being more cool-headed than in Southern Europe. You can see how it would translate to earnestness being more or less punished in social situations...
(Yet it would also come with being more or less "cool", which is opposite to what pg suggests, so I guess I have no idea ! XD)
I think it’s a cultural thing. Take France. My anecdotal experience is that the bourgeoisie seem to place a certain social capital on having a degree from the right school. Entrepreneurialism is something to be studied, not attempted. Hard to take a risk with that kind of social expectation.
This is what you see if you look at the Perceptions of Corruption Index. That only looks at the public sector (not private companies), but one could reasonably assume the two correlate:
It’s also absolutely the opposite of my experience. I’ve met a bunch of Swedes, Norwegians, Finns and Danes and they are some of the most sophisticated and cynical folks I’ve had the pleasure of working with.
Perhaps the particularly dry brand of Scandinavian pragmatic irony is lost on pg because pg is too earnest to notice that they’re on the other side of a zetetic event horizon.
> I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously.
They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest, it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises.
Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers have Portuguese nationality.
I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia.
I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the facts are definitely not there.
If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with a very different idea of what being earnest means.
> When the problems get harder than the fake ones you're given in high school, caring about them starts to matter.
I wonder how much damage we're doing by forcing kids to work fake useless problems? Granted, it's tough to come up with problems that have never been solved before (nobody's expecting a PhD-level solution from a grade-school kid). However, what if we at least asked kids questions where the answer wasn't literally a list of letters for a multiple choice exam?
> Starting a successful startup makes you rich and famous. So a lot of the people trying to start them are doing it for those reasons. Instead of what? Instead of interest in the problem for its own sake. That is the root of earnestness. [2]
I think he got the definition of "earnest" wrong. It is not about genuine interest. "Earnest" simply means something like "honestly revealing your motivations", no? What if you earnestly want to become rich and famous? What's wrong with that?
It's funny how a team develops their own common vocab not only for the stuff they work on (Ubiquitous Language as in DDD) but also to describe people.
When a few teammates and I interview folks, other than the usual official evaluations, the best we understand each other's feedback is through this common language. A language that got unconsciously developed while interviewing and working together for years and our experiences with other folks in the organization.
We are no YC, but what PG is referring to as earnest would be in our language simply "good energy". The opposite of it would be "looks tired" i.e. for someone showing completer lack of interest in what they do. Another ones would be "fighter" (one who doesn't gives up on hard problems) and "pacifier" (one who stays calm and composed that's good for handling production incidents and help team through with difficult people).
To further muddy the waters, I think if the job descriptions came up with more details about the personality traits required for the job, that could help people have better job matches and satisfaction. I know it becomes too subjective if you overdo it but perhaps things like StrengthsFinder can help. On the other hand there's a risk of going too further on altogether a wrong path as it happened with Myers-Briggs.
> When a few teammates and I interview folks ... simply "good energy". The opposite of it would be "looks tired".
At our office, we have the more normal term of "easy to communicate" and "good culture fit" and so on.
"Culture fit" seems like a slightly more convenient term for applying ingrained racist and sexist biases, but I guess saying any applicants who don't match your racial or socioeconomic background seem "tired" works well too!
I think "looks tired" is also even more convenient for ageism than the usual "that old person didn't seem like a good culture fit".
I know this is a really negative interpretation of what you're saying, but in my experience those sorts of things really are used to filter out people who aren't like you. People of different races, people who have young kids and are thus naturally tired, people who have lazy eyes, people with minor speech impediments. All of those people coincidentally have higher rates of being bad culture fits and looking tired.
I wonder if pg would think those people are earnest or not.
>I think "looks tired" is also even more convenient for ageism than the usual "that old person didn't seem like a good culture fit".
See, this is why I don't think AI will catch on for making hiring decisions... not because it's going to be biased, but because it can be audited for bias & then corrected for it.
> Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery. How can these founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible they sound?
I can't speak for someone like Kara Swisher, but attempting to channel her, I don't think she would think it is beyond belief that some hacker teenager who dropped out of a good college to work on X was earnest that they were trying to make the world better.
The mockery over naivete and implausibility comes from that those teenagers will walk into a VC office on Sand Hill Road, where they will sign over various rights for the future. They will then form a Delaware corporation. With plans to raise more VC, after that an IPO, and finally dividends. Which means what? What came from those who did this in the past?
- The Steve Jobs orchestrated formerly secret cabal, that included Eric Schmidt and others, to drive down engineer salaries in the Bay.
- Social networks amplifying traffic saying Covid is a hoax, and here we are with 3000 dying of Covid in the US on Wednesday.
- The widespread spying and surveillance of people that almost all these companies have a hand in - even Adobe has become a surveillance company.
It's the thinking that the corporations that will be the IBMs, Oracles and Microsofts of the future are there to "make the world better". It is risible.
>“When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software,” recalls Gates. “We had dreams about the impact it could have. We talked about a computer on every desk and in every home. It’s been amazing to see so much of that dream become a reality and touch so many lives. I never imagined what an incredible and important company would spring from those original ideas.”
Which is kind of world better if you like computers. Of course companies change as they grow.
I have never bothered to classify the personality traits of the people I enjoy spending time with, but there is nothing more exciting and interesting than being around a group of nerds who are trying to solve a problem or whatever. people who never get a chance to experience that process really just cannot understand the mindset. It is nice to get paid, but I would probably want to be involved in that sort of thing anyway. I simply thought that is how nerdy and eccentric people behave.
It would be interesting to see YC to move to funding with less regard to business plan. I know they already do this but what if you totally threw out the market research and gut feeling about the usefulness of the product and gave people 500k based on their interest and ability only.
I'm pretty sure that's how it works already. They are looking mostly for teams of people, not a perfect plan. It's just that, building a business plan successfully is a decent project for assessing the effectiveness of a team.
I earnestly think his writing has an overindulgent fandom here. Every single blog post rockets to the top and, in my opinion, they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or persuasion. He may write snappily, but is every single post worthy of Han's top slot?
Part of what I once said about why Def Leppard songs were meaningful to me:
A group of young men singing about love who also stood by their talented but now severely handicapped band member after he lost an arm is something that spoke to my soul. To me, these people had to know something more than pretty words. There had to be something deeper in their songs than just "sex, drugs and rock and roll."
Words never stand completely on their own. What they mean to people is shaped by context, history and reputation.
Hacker News wasn't always a space with 5 million unique visitors per month who mostly barely know each other. When I originally joined in 2009, it had a sense of community.
I never got to be one of the "insiders" in that community. I was a visitor looking in from the outside.
But it did exist and many of those people still come here, though their presence isn't obvious. I don't think you can tell who pg's friends are by who says what on Hacker News.
I've always respected the man, though he and I were never friends. I respected him because of how he comported himself here when he was in my mind just a moderator for a forum that I participated on, before he was big time famous and big time wealthy, when his wealth was measured in words starting with M, not B.
I don't read every single thing he writes and I never have. But I certainly take his words seriously when I do sometimes read them.
He has a PhD and he suggested to his girlfriend that the two of them should start a company together. That company is, of course, YC.
I feel like it gets little press as a "pro diversity" company, but it's a big company with a woman founder and that's true because of Paul Graham. It was not Jessica Livingston who came up with the idea.
It's sort of a stealth diversity thing and I generally don't say too much about that because I think that's the best way to do diversity and I don't want to ruin it by calling a lot of attention to it.
But we've had a pandemic all year and the entire world is cranky as all hell -- me included -- and it's just rubbing me the wrong way that people are so desperate to find a dog to kick these days. So I feel a need to give a bit of pushback here lately.
I mean, you're using a site which self-selects for his target demographic. He's the founder of a VC company which created the site your visiting and apparently his blog gets 15 million page views per year. I think it's just a numbers game, not fandom.
I'm not defending what he writes, but this posts are generally fun to read and think about. Sometimes I don't agree with him or find holes in his arguments, but there's usually a nugget of truth you can take away. They're just blog posts, he doesn't need to be infallible.
The occasional self-promotion from the people running the site is a price I'm willing to pay to use the site.
Yes. It’s because of who he is. If I wrote this post, it would not have the same meaning as if he wrote it.
I know that sounds counterintuitive, but the reason is that we know that PG has huge experience of and access to startup founders and seen their outcomes and has had a great deal of opportunity to formulate thoughts like like this on the basis of what he has seen.
I have experience of startups too. I could have written something like this, but it genuinely wouldn’t have been as meaningful coming from me, because I don’t have the same perspective as he does.
But what you are describing is just an appeal to authority.
It's quite possible that putting the assertions of the text in the context of this particular authority does give it more credibility, but I've also heard that same authority make some very poor assertions.
Just look at the objective criticism that some of the posts gather. Sometimes, there are really major, easily contradicted flaws in these texts.
You’re going to need to explain how you conclude that I am making an appeal to authority.
I didn’t say anything about the validity of his argument. Only that it means something different and more interesting given his experience, than it would coming from someone else.
Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us than when a random blogger is wrong.
> You’re going to need to explain how you conclude that I am making an appeal to authority.
Because of your phrasing: "Yes. It’s because of who he is."
> Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us than when a random blogger is wrong.
Relative to each other, perhaps.
However, is something wrong by PG more interesting than literally every other topic being discussed on HN, so that it "rockets to the top", to quote the comment you initially replied to.
In that phrase, “Yes. It’s because of who he is.”, I am not referring to the validity of his argument. I am explaining the fact that his posts receive a lot of attention.
There is simply no appeal to authority being made.
The rest of your comment isn’t clear, are you saying there is something wrong with people finding PG’s pieces interesting?
I think if your perspective has enabled you to know things you wouldn't have otherwise, _most_ of that should just come through from the writing. It should be possible for you to write in a way that's convincing independently of who you are.
A different person might not have been able to produce the same essay, but if the essay is the same, who the author is shouldn't matter too much (for a good essay).
Nope, I came to the same conclusion as your parent, when I wondered why every one of these threads for the last several years has been full of dismissal and criticism, and why the phrase "out of touch" gets flogged like a dead horse. I've been reading pg for 17 years, so I know who he is, what he's done, where he's coming from, his writing style... I can take his essays for what they are with all that context. Of course his opinions and perspective are what they are, because it's literally his life's work to identify potentially successful founders before they're successful.
Also, I don't suffer from that HN thing where nobody can simply consider an article, or do follow-up research themselves, without measurability, studies and citations, as if they're petrified they might become epistemically infected and be wrong about something that probably doesn't even impact their life in the slightest.
I have read PG essays for the last 4-5 something years. YC was never under my radar before that. The first time I saw ‘PG essays’, I was excited because I thought they meant PG Wodehouse who is my favourite author ever and I was excited that YC reads Wodehouse together.
Alas..that wasn’t the case. But I don’t regret the PG essays and have come to appreciate them over the years. I think it’s because I didn’t have any expectation about this person’s writing or prior knowledge about PG. But not knowing who Paul Graham was and reading them for the first time, I couldn’t figure out the enthusiasm around it. Maybe it was my disappointment that they weren’t by my PG. But over time, I have come to appreciate it.
These are what I call ‘through my lens’ writings. The words derive weight from the cult of personality. And the lens they see the world through..
What we know about PG’s experience is a huge prior that shapes how we interpret what he writes.
I think this probably explains some of the polarization we see in the comments - people who don’t know who he is see this as just a dumb blog post that seems to be getting too much karma. People who do, see it as insight from someone who is in a position to actually know something.
I'm not saying PG asserting some insight is the same as some random person asserting it: certainly PG has some prior we should take into account.
But I think good essays are ones where you don't need to really rely on that prior. A good essay is one that convinces you that what it's saying is true, instead of just asserting it and relying on the reputation of the author.
If an essay doesn't convince you directly, then:
a) the author just didn't take the time to provide an explanation
b) the explanation is too complex, or too difficult to materialize, it's something you just develop an intuition about
c) it can't convince you directly because it's not actually true
If you trust the author on the subject matter enough such that you're in a/b territory, then while I think an essay that explained more would be a better one, an essay that doesn't is still valuable.
But I think at least one concern is that we're actually in c territory. Especially with stuff like "picking winning companies", I'm hesitant to take things at face-value. It's such a complicated thing to predict, it's easy to succumb to survivorship bias. I'm not convinced that PG is just so good at it that things should be taken at face-value.
I think this is a very obvious no-true Scotsman fallacy around the notion of a ‘good’ essay, plus a straw man of what PG wrote: “just asserting something and relying on the reputation of the author”, and one of what I wrote: “that things should be take at face-value.”
It is fairly obvious that persuasive writing often convinces people of things which we are either not true, or meaningless.
It’s also fairly obvious that all authors perspectives are formed by experience, and that knowing about that experience is informative of how we interpret what they say. This is simply true of all human communications.
I can’t really see what you are trying to accomplish by insisting there is something called a ‘good’ essay, whose hallmark is it’s persuasiveness in the absence of knowledge about the author.
Certainly there are some sincere essays that do fulfill this criteria, but it’s what also exactly what a cult leader or marketing agency would be aiming to achieve with their writing.
I would make the case that being persuaded by an essay is an epistemically salient signal which can be thought of as a red flag that we may be being manipulated by someone we wouldn’t choose to be manipulated by.
When we experience it, the responsible thing to do is to inform ourselves more about the author and their experience rather than to lionize the piece of writing.
Re. strawman: maybe this is a good essay, but I was referencing Dumblydorr's assertion that if someone else had written this essay it would be considered mediocre/not make it to the top of HN, and your response that this is irrelevant, since the author _is_ in fact PG.
I'm not sure where the no-true Scottsman is?
> I can’t really see what you are trying to accomplish by insisting there is something called a ‘good’ essay, whose hallmark is it’s persuasiveness in the absence of knowledge about the author.
Really? This seems entirely non-controversial to me. It's more-or-less "don't judge a book by its cover". Maybe I was over-emphasizing _how_ important this is ("hallmark" is probably too strong), but all-else-equal, a text being able to rely on the arguments made within as opposed to who the author is seems positive. And I think there's _obviously_ metrics by which you can judge an essay's good-ness beyond its author.
[SSC][0] is a good example. I think he writes very interesting essays that captivate and convince people on their own. The only "reputation" he had when he started was that he was psychiatrist. Recently he's gotten a bit more popular, but still, his reputation is just "someone who writes good essays".
Are you suggesting it's dangerous that SSC writes good, convincing essays, despite the fact that he's not some well-known figure?
If you have no previous knowledge of a cult, getting convinced by their writing seems to be more about getting convinced by bad arguments than it is about attempting to consider arguments directly. And once you're already in a cult, I think it's a very common feature to have members rely only on the reputation of the cult leader without trying to think critically about the actual things they're saying.
Like, let's say someone gets indoctrinated into a cult. You could say "Yeah, see, if they had just discounted the cult leader due to their reputation instead of trying to actually read what they had to say, they wouldn't have gotten indoctrinated." I guess? But they could have also used more scrutiny in examining the arguments? And if the reader isn't using scrutiny to examine the arguments, why do we think they're going to make good decisions about whose reputation to trust?
> Are you suggesting it's dangerous that SSC writes good, convincing essays, despite the fact that he's not some well-known figure?
Of course not. What did I write that would suggest that?
> cult, getting convinced by their writing seems to be more about getting convinced by bad arguments than it is about attempting to consider arguments directly.
Your criterion for a ‘good’ essay was that it is convincing in the absence of knowledge of who the author is.
For someone who is persuaded, both SSC and the cult leader’s writings both meet this criterion.
How would you modify your criterion to distinguish the two?
> Of course not. What did I write that would suggest that?
> being persuaded by an essay is ... a red flag that we may be being manipulated by someone we wouldn’t choose to be manipulated by
I was persuaded by SSC essays, despite not knowing much about the author. Was that a red flag? Was it bad that I remained convinced by them despite not finding out much about what experiences in his background have shaped his perspective?
> How would you modify your criterion to distinguish the two?
The distinguishing factor is in what you should be persuaded by.
If a "cult leader" is able to convince you of something by presenting you with good arguments, maybe they aren't a cult leader/it's not crazy to believe whatever they're selling.
If someone's convinced of cultish notions because they were persuaded by bad arguments, I'd say the primary remediation is "don't be persuaded by bad arguments", not "don't listen to people unless you know who they are". I wouldn't say the second statement is terrible advice, but it's not the primary problem.
I beg someone out there, please run an experiment that reposts PG’s articles on Medium.com with a different author’s name. All things equal, I wouldn’t doubt that HN would start giving these posts a proper vote count.
But then again, some people are more equal than others. shrug
>they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or persuasion
He’s not writing research papers. He’s just a thoughtful guy with a lot of experience sharing his ideas as concisely as possible. Part of the reason the posts are so interesting is because of the discussions they prompt - I wouldn’t mistake the level of interest on HN for everybody treating these as gospel.
On average, his writings are definitely more worthy of discussion than the newest JS framework or somebody doing something with old or underpowered hardware. Perhaps most of the once-top posts aren't as exciting as one would believe?
What Graham is attempting to prescribe here is an unmediated engagement with a problem. In truth, "making the world better" is no less ulterior a motive in engaging with that problem than "making piles of money."
> Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery. How can these founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible they sound?
I can't speak for someone like Kara Swisher, but attempting to channel her, I don't think she would think it is beyond belief that some hacker teenager who dropped out of a good college to work on X was earnest that they were trying to make the world better.
The mockery over naivete and implausibility comes from that those teenagers will walk into a VC office on Sand Hill Road, where they will sign over various rights for the future. They will then form a Delaware corporation. With plans to raise more VC, after that an IPO, and finally dividends. Which means what? What came from those who did this in the past?
- The Steve Jobs orchestrated formerly secret cabal, that included Eric Schmidt and others, to drive down engineer salaries in the Bay.
- Social networks amplifying traffic saying Covid is a hoax, and here we are with 3000 dying of Covid in the US on Wednesday.
- The widespread spying and surveillance of people that almost all these companies have a hand in - even Adobe has become a surveillance company.
It's the thinking that the corporations that will be the IBMs, Oracles and Microsofts of the future are there to "make the world better". It is risible.
Do you remember life before iPhones? Before Google and universal knowledge, YouTube guides on every subject under the sun, Microsoft Excel, personal computers, international video calls, remote work? (Plus the indirect benefits to you economically from every industry adopting the above)
The world has added 3.4 billion people since 1980. We're in a life-or-death struggle for carrying capacity, so daily life naturally gets worse over time. It's easy to pin that on the whipping boy of the day.
There's no question that the next generation of technology has come with deep, systemic issues. But on balance the existence of these companies has clearly made the entire world better and brighter.
One case study - the Spanish Flu killed 50 million people. A pessimistic estimate for total deaths from COVID-19 after the vaccine(s) are fully rolled out might be 10 million. There are 4.3x more people in the world today. Disinformation is absolutely killing people. But how many more lives might our industry be credited with saving?
Totes agree with the “yeah but actually tech companies have done amazing things” argument but do you ever wonder why so many examples are now quite old? I mean I was raving about Google in 2001 and here we are near 20 years later saying how great their impact on search is...
Looking at release dates might not be the best way to frame this. It took decades before the full impact of the automobile was felt, and there were huge leaps in tech during that period too. We're in a different world today from when the first iPhone came out.
But also, I have a feeling like we're in the process of building up the activation energy for the next major wave of tangibly world-changing tech (AI, robotics, quantum computing?). I suspect the change in pace is related to the slowing of Moore's Law.
Your argument jumps around. By the time Steve Jobs returned to Apple he had near total control: yet a central point of your argument was that idealistic founders have trouble when they sign away rights.
And Job, though he did many wonderful things, had sociopathic tendencies from even before he founded Apple.
As for Facebook, Zuckerberg has maintained a very large amount of control. How does this square with your thesis that the trouble comes from VC’s?
My thesis is that for the earnest young founders mentioned in the essay who want to make the world a better place and to work on X, the trouble starts when they sign a deal with VCs, super seeds etc.
If they are not earnest, but sociopathic, then the thesis does not apply to them. The essay was about earnestness.
Tangentially - if you read the emails, texts etc. found in discovery for Brin, Schmidt etc., they are secretly entering a cartel the DOJ would break up to forbid direct recruitment of their own workers. Even the people who are doing all of the work to supposedly "make the world a better place" are being screwed by the effort, never mind people outside the company and the externalities on the way to that greater profit.
Earnestness is some mix of ethics and disclosure. Perhaps truth coupled with reasonable expectations (honesty meets humility) would be a better characterization, but most people don’t really know what truth, or rather alignment, really entail in a purely communication capacity.
The challenge with earnestness is not everybody can either attain or receive it. It is a gift that takes a certain level of intellectual capability and personality to appreciate otherwise it’s written off as unintelligible or an insult.
As someone who has been accused of earnestness I have
long maintained that Earnestness-ness-ness is the enemy.
Earnestness minus humor is the enemy of building a scalable community.
Churchill once defined a fanatic as someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject.
To move beyond the early adopters and get through to the late majority we need to work out not how to keep the conversation on track, but how to let our audience develop it and still be able to deliver our punchline.
Though I agree with much of this article off earnestness can also be terrible in some circumistances. When people earnestly pursue something abhorrent or deluded.
> When people earnestly pursue something abhorrent or deluded.
Which is exactly what happens all the time. People like the "airbnbs" thinking they can make the world a better place and pursuing their delusion with earnestness, only to cause bigger problems in the end.
I wish capitalists could at least be honest and admit they found an inefficiency in the market to exploit and they just want to profit from it. At least there's no hypocrisy in that.
If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as "academic bogus," you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness."
First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus."
I think this is pretty dumb, for multiple reasons.
First of all, all of those terms have long historical uses in academia.
-hermeneutics. Meaning close text interpretation. Probably the oldest forms of literary criticism.
-dialetics. Broadly meaning "an conversation between two opposing points." Term dates back to Aristotle.
-Hegemony. Meaning "a dominating power." Critical term in International relations.
-Whiteness. The quality of having the color white. Also relates to the concept of race, which is an important topic in the history of America. Melville wrote about both color and race at the same time in his bogus book Moby Dick.
So maybe these all have long histories, but as soon as you chain these terms together, we all know what happens: PoMo madness! Bad Faithery.
I myself used to think that the "post-modern" philosophers like Derrida and Focault were all a bunch of drivel. Then I read them and I found out a lot interesting things to say.
PG seems to think that all "useless" research in this is done for some non-earnest intention. This is not a new; he said in "How to Do what you love" that no one would seriously look for symbol in Conrad for fun (interesting, Genius.com seems to have tons of amateur criticism). Now it seems like he's getting a little fiestier, specifically singling out "whiteness."
His site, he's free to single out whatever he wants. But the fact is that humanities research absolutely does expand human knowledge of the world, in a way that SaaS startups cannot. It's also done, if one can believe, in earnest.
Feel free to tell me I'm not being fair to the article. However you respond, I'll be sure to take a few key words, stick them in google scholar search, and come back at you with a nice big BOGUS.
> he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus."
Yep. That rubs me the wrong way too.
One characteristic of truly earnest people is that they're non-judgemental and open to new ideas and experiences. If one can get past the boilerplate, there's some really cool ideas in postmodernism. I think PG is being the opposite of earnest in that pithy, incurious takedown.
There is a weird expectation among some professions (Silicon Valley tech, especially, but I think it's probably endemic to any well-paid, well-respected class) that all other fields should be immediately understandable to the layman, and if they aren't, there's clearly charlatanry afoot.
As you pointed out correctly, these are all fairly standard terms in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider. Subnet Masks, Hyper-Text Markup Language, BIOS, JavaScript ("What do you mean it has nothing to do with Java?") and so on.
> The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider.
In other fields the obscurity is a side effect. In the humanities it’s the point, to try to make the sky-castle ideas sound more Important and Scientific than they actually are. A big part of postmodern theory is the notion that there basically is no truth, just texts with varying degrees of authority. The field unironically describes itself.
no that's ... really not true. Those terms all have precise meanings and express new concepts more succinctly. In programming, we call this abstraction.
Yes, there are obviously people in academia that are full of crap: other people in academia -also- think they are full of crap. The problem for outsiders is that they're largely incapable of discerning between the earnest deep thinkers and the self-promoting charlatans. Charlatans are always louder, so without stopping to understand the topic at hand, you're almost certainly giving the most of your attention to those who least deserve it.
If you want to try to read something from the humanities that doesn’t use any specialised words, you could try Plato. But note that it will be very hard to understand and talk about and Plato himself was likely limited by the lack of suitable language to express his ideas.
It seems pretty contemptuous to suggest that people in the fields you don’t really know about are trying to obscure some secret bad opinion so that it can become accepted. Maybe these people are actually trying to express something complex and nuanced?
I think there are a lot of issues with academic writing being obscure but I don’t think these are unique to the humanities. Indeed I think you’ll probably find many people in humanities fields are better writers than those in the academic areas you may be more familiar with.
Does that mean they don’t have respect for say quantum computing research? Because I’m pretty confident most people in SV won’t understand, say, a paper on quantum error correction.
I'm upvoting you because I think you make a fair and well-thought-out argument. With that said, there's certainly a hand-waviness to "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology (I took classes in both, just out of curiosity).
And no matter how much you think Derrida or Focault contributed to philosophy, I would argue it pales in comparison to their Analytic contemporaries (Godel, Lewis, Anscombe, Moore, etc.). I was extremely skeptical of philosophers like Nietzsche and after a couple of semesters, I definitely appreciated the Continentals a bit more -- but not enough to take him (and his ilk) as seriously as I take the aforementioned. The problem lies with falsifiability: it's too easy to claim one just doesn't "get" whiteness, or critical theory, or what-have-you.
PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in humanities is -- apologies -- bogus.
Thanks for responding politely. I'll respond to both points.
1.
I don't want to say there's not a lot of hand-waviness in "soft" fields. Actually, I don't really know much about that, I've never participated in any "professional" humanities research. I do read papers from the humanities, though, but only about things that interest me. So I'm a true amateur.
I have, however, participated in academic research in what I think you call a "hard" field, in computer vision and image processing. I promise you, there's a great deal of obfuscation in that field too :-).
I think PG would say that whereas what I'm describing are instances of bad faith in fields that do have earnestness, people who publish papers that contain the words "whiteness" and "dialectics" are just standard actors in fields where earnestness is not even possible. I think he doesn't know what he's talking about.
2.
I don't want to argue about who has or hasn't contributed more(whatever that means) to philosophy. But fortunately I live in a world where I can read both Godel and Foucault, and I'm happy for that. I don't even have to pick a side, because the two wrote about wildly different domains.
But I don't think having falsifiability encompasses the end all be all of what we can explore in writing. Isn't that more the goal of proper experimental set-up? Even Wittgenstein, who I believe apprehended better than anyone the world in its logical constituency and relation, recognized the limitation of the logical method[1].
> "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology
I don't know anything about gender studies, but regarding ethnomusicology, you can be assured that it is a bona-fide, hard subject, even involving and motivating non-elementary math. The study of timbre and harmony in western music is rather dry, since it is overwhelmingly dominated by wind and string instruments that have one-dimensional, harmonic spectra. Even western percussion instruments are painstakingly tuned to have integer partials. The study of ethnomusicology opens an incredibly wide field of different types of instruments and their harmonies that is a godsend for modern musical theory (and, in turn, it helps to understand western harmony as a concrete particular case among an infinite ensemble of possibilities). See, e.g.
I can’t tell if you are being serious or sarcastic.
FWIW I think all of those things sound interesting and cool.
Here’s the abstract from the ‘Saga’s Sorrow’ paper:
“This article examines the construction of gender roles in contemporary white nationalist music. Grounded in extensive and ethnographic fieldwork, the article traces the rise of leading Swedish singer Saga and argues that her music frames women as besieged embodiments of racial and national essence dependent on men for deliverance. The discussion of Saga’s music draws from a review of recent social and ideological shifts in radical white nationalism, insider interviews, performance observations, and structural and textual analyses.”
For some reason I’m reminded of the Zack Snyder film ‘300’.
> I can’t tell if you are being serious or sarcastic.
Of course they were trolling. I don't claim that there isn't a lot of bogus stuff in ethomusicology (as the OP sarcastically proves), just that it is a perfectly legitimate field. You can also find a lot of pompous bullshit in machine learning publications, but that does not mean that ML is bogus.
Not trolling and absolutely serious. I've spent a lifetime exploring the world through the lens of music and I'm an admirer of the field of ethnology. Such studies have been highly useful to how I view the importance of music in society, aside from being entertainment it bonds communities and the study of it sheds fascinating light as to our cultures and ways.
Cool : ). Yeah I honestly wasn't sure and appreciate your response : ). And I agree.
Just for fun I'll throw out Ursula le Guin as one of my favorite science fiction authors because she explores issues of human nature via anthropology and such.
Well, ok, sorry about that then. I'm much more into the "musical" part of ethnomusicology than into the philosophical/ cultural/political aspects, which I find completely uninteresting. But good for you if you find interest in it. I thought you were trolling due to the 3rd book, whose title sounds like a joke to me. As in "is dog barking literature?"; of course it isn't, literature and music are, pretty much by definition, things that humans do.
There is, but I've moved away from characterizing it as hand-waviness. In something concrete like math, I think using hand-waviness is appropriate to describe someone skipping over something they could explain in detail.
In other fields, the frameworks present don't allow for the same degree of analysis, and that's just the way it is. It's kind of like comparing logic programming to an ML model. The model can be very accurate, but we likely cannot dissect it and understand what it does in the way that we can with logic programming.
To put it another way, a math professor whose blog I followed said something along the lines of math is hard because it's easy, and other fields are easy because they're hard.
To be fair there's a ton of hand-waviness on HN about the hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing. It's not that different, IMHO : ).
> PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in humanities is -- apologies -- bogus.
True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think that anything not quantifiable in the way that they are used to is bunk.
Also I'll just throw out, in terms of impact, Baudrillard's work kinda hits the nail on the head when it comes to the internet. You can't quantify the impact of literature or more qualitative philosophy as easily, and, one can only know as time goes on.
I'm not the first to say this, obviously. Baudrillard's quote seems scary-accurate of today:
“Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory.”
> True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think that anything not quantifiable in the way that they are used to is bunk.
I am glad you pointed that out. Anecdotally, I have found that "philosophy" to many in the tech industry when used perjoratively means Continental vs Analytic philosophy. Plus, even with analytic philosophy, when people recognize it as the sort of thing that Russell and his lineage worked on, they don't really get what these philosophers "cared about" - that it mattered to them if mathematical symbolism expressed truths about the Universe in a metaphysical sense. They weren't just manipulating symbols to prove consistency etc.
To me, Wittgenstein's concerns portray the bridge between the two major schools (well, naturally, he was a European who chose to go study under Russell, the Englishman) very well. He cared about the formalism, but he also cared that it made sense in terms of finding meaning in the world.
Somehow, it's the latter struggle that seems to pass by unnoticed when "techie people" (to generalize) think of the work of philosophers.
Baudrillard was definitely onto something with his analysis of the Gulf War. For Americans it was advertised as a war, but it wasn't much more than a one-sided slaughter.
Have you ever read a codebase that accomplishes very little, yet has a million layers of abstraction? With classes like `MainApplicationBeanInjectionFactoryBuilder`?
I think the scathing point was that much can be written about nothing, and one way to obscure your content is to use language such as "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness".
Parent's point was that while those phrases sound like word jumble to some, they actually have very specific and well-understood meanings.
Imagine a non-techie person listen to two software engineers talking. Closures, event bubbling, monads, abstract classes - they'd say the same thing.
Can someone without CS / programming knowledge really judge a good abstraction versus a bad one? Similarly, it's arrogant of us to assume we can do the same in the humanities, because it means we assume the humanities are easy / trivial and so on, which they are not.
It's like the "my kid could paint that" cliche of Modernist painting - maybe your kid could, but, you saying that just indicates that you aren't educated about what the artist is doing, why they choose to do it, and the previous works of art the artist is responding to or in dialogue with.
Kind of like, "why can't everything be HTML/CSS, with maybe a little JQuery?" Sure, you have a point, but there are clearly more sophisticated use-cases where that approach is not the most effective, and, your saying that kinda indicates you may not have encountered or had to deal with those use-cases.
Truth be told I think computer science, at least the parts of it where you get to create abstractions which then define the bounds of what is possible within that programming paradigm (see - word jumble!) is closer to the "soft" humanities than many are aware of or would care to see.
Tech folks tend to love/desire "certainty" in one form another, and, the easiest way to achieve that is to rule out everything which is "uncertain", and, constrain your domain until "certainty" can be achieved. Which can be a great approach for certain technical problems, but also IMHO results in ignorant behavior towards anything which threatens said certainty.
I enjoyed this comment - as someone that is occasionally skeptical of these lofty ideas in the humanities, the analogy to abstractions/concepts in programming never occurred to me.
On the certainty thing, though - I see what you're saying about tech folks desiring certainty, but I've also found that quantitative or hard-science thinkers are often very good at dealing with uncertainty. One reason being that they have the strongest sense of what true certainty is, and the ability to measure uncertainty relative to that. For example, proving the efficacy of a vaccine: we really can be extremely certain that a vaccine is effective. Other areas of study (that I believe are still entirely valid and important), just can't achieve that level of rigor.
I should note my views may be skewed as the entirety of my career has been as a software engineer at an options trading firm, where we are buying and selling uncertainty in a sense, so we have to be comfortable with it.
After writing that all out.. maybe I'm just confirming you example of constraining uncertainty until there can be certainty, or at least a well-quantified form of uncertainty.
> I've also found that quantitative or hard-science thinkers are often very good at dealing with uncertainty. One reason being that they have the strongest sense of what true certainty is, and the ability to measure uncertainty relative to that.
That's an excellent point and I agree with you. My statement about tech folks and certainty was a bit too broad, tbh, and maybe expresses some personal frustration as much as anything.
At the end of the day we're all human and vulnerable to the same tricks of psychology and human foibles.
[EDIT: I want to share in a quote another poster shared that's relevant to our discussion: 'Math is hard because it is easy. The humanities are easy because they are hard.'
It's not just about math being quantifiable, but that there's a much lower barrier of entry to discuss "the humanities" - justice, ethics, the meaning of life, etc. Maybe a good analogy would be we can all discuss the weather, but that means sometimes we think meteorologists are just quacks? : )].
[EDIT EDIT: If interested in learning more about the humanities I highly recommend the Socratic dialogues as starting point. They're still the foundation of all Western Philosophy, including the postmodern stuff people love to hate on. They're pretty approachable and interesting and readable and short and don't have any jargon, really. A course of some kind is ideal but you could read them on your own.]
Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda calculus"
---
The company wasn't called Y Combinator yet. At first we called it Cambridge Seed. But that name never saw the light of day, because by the time we announced it a few days later, we'd changed the name to Y Combinator. We realized early on that what we were doing could be national in scope and we didn't want a name that tied us to one place.
The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.
I want to say that I read somewhere -- maybe in comments on HN -- that the Lamda part of that is also a reference to the starting letter for Lisp which stuck in my mind due to the mostly forgotten two quarters of Greek I had eons ago. But I'm super short of sleep and can't be arsed to go digging for more explanations/citations for why it got the name it got as random crap to do on a Saturday afternoon while failing to be productive due to the aforementioned lack of sleep.
Also want to add to the parent post that "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness" is actually just a bunch of keywords and I doubt a competent academic would use that particular phrase.
It's easier for me to imagine, "The hermeneutics of hegemonic whiteness", "The dialectic of whiteness and hegemony", etc.
I have a hard time imagining "hermeneutic" and "dialectic" together because of what those words actually mean. I feel like you'd see one or the other in the kind of phrase / term / sentence we are discussing.
"Hermeneutics" is defined as: "the branch of knowledge that deals with interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts." Back in the day people did close reading/analysis of the Bible so they could understand what God meant and called it hermeneutics. Today it can encompass close reading and analysis of literature (since techniques of analyzing one book - the Bible - also work when analyzing other books) or be used in a more general way to talk about a sort of abstracted, looking-at-the-symbols-within approach to analyzing something.
"Dialectic" is literally a dialogue between two people, the term originating with Ancient Greece and Socrate's approach to philosophy. Hegel retconned it to also include a sort of evolution-through-competition where two things (for lack of a better word) logically opposite to each other butt heads and produce a "synthesis" - not unlike the "marketplace of ideas".
"This “textbook” Being-Nothing-Becoming example is closely connected to the traditional idea that Hegel’s dialectics follows a thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern, which, when applied to the logic, means that one concept is introduced as a “thesis” or positive concept, which then develops into a second concept that negates or is opposed to the first or is its “antithesis”, which in turn leads to a third concept, the “synthesis”, that unifies the first two "
No doubt postmodernists have something interesting to say. But as the question is one of earnestness rather than importance or interestingness, consider some examples:
> Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to the √–1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (–1).
This is from Lacan who elsewhere refers to point-set topology and uses terms from it (bounded, compactness, etc) with no connection to their mathematical meaning, and here he invokes √-1. I got this reference from “Postmodernism and its problems with science” by Jean Bricmont (the original link has been excluded from the Wayback Machine, but PDF here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jean_Bricmont/publicati...).
Bricmont co-wrote the book Impostures intellectuelles (French) / Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (English) with Alan Sokal (after the Sokal affair). Not repeating the criticism in the above PDF or in their book, but consider a couple of responses to the book:
* Luce Irigaray, who argued that E=mc² is a “sexed equation” because it “privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us […] privileged what goes the fastest”, and that the science of fluid mechanics is under-developed because it is a quintessentially feminine topic, has, in her entry on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/), an actual section titled “Opaque Writing Style”, which, if I'm reading correctly, says that it is intentional. The London Review of Books carried a review (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n14/john-sturrock/le-pau... , reference via https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/tallis.html ; see also the many links on Sokal's page: https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/) of Sokal and Bricmont's book that defends her by saying:
> Irigaray’s invocations of the sciences concerned may be worse than dodgy, but in that libertarian province of the intellectual world in which she functions, far better wild and contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so inappropriately demanded by Sokal and Bricmont.
My point is: in all fields you can find better and worse writers, you can find people “playing the game” or being unnecessarily obscure. Of course I don't know all the jargon of all fields, and my first instinct when something doesn't make sense will always be that it's me who has failed to understand, to trust that the authors are in fact saying something meaningful that a trained person in the field could understand with enough effort. But IMO a failure to be clear must at least be seen as a failure; when a field as a whole rejects clarity or correctness itself (even as at least an aspirational ideal), and considers it perfectly acceptable and defensible to abuse terminology from another field simply for prestige and effect (really, see the examples from Bricmont and Sokal, and responses thereto), then it seems a betrayal of this trust (the authors aren't failing to be clear; they aren't even trying! and everyone thinks this is fine!); it seems reasonable to suggest non-earnestness.
(This is orthogonal to whether it is interesting and important—it may very well be—the point is only whether earnestness is considered a value.)
--------
Edit: The short version of this post is that no physicist or mathematician or engineer accused of being unclear will ever have a section in their biographical entry justifying their “opaque writing style”, nor have it said that in their world it's better to be “wild” than correct. This IMO is a genuine value difference between the fields.
I'm going to say bogus is too kind a word many times. There was a famous academic troll[1] that revealed some of these humanities for the make believe they are. These people basically made up garbage papers that sounded like these feminist, gender studies, and critical race disciplines and published them in peer reviewed journals. Even the people in these disciplines can't tell satire from seriousness - and that's damning. They even published a rewrite of mein kampf. Why should my tax dollars go towards that? These people should get a real job and contribute to society. Bogus is being too charitable.
It made for one of my all time favorite episodes of Joe Rogan though. Worth a listen.
Why should your tax dollars go towards CS research, when nearly half of all sampled papers (circa 2015) can't be reproduced [1]?
As a society, we delegate funding based on perceptions of expertise: someone who knows more than you or I about these specific fields decided that they deserved some amount of funding (probably significantly less than you think). Sometimes that means that junk and fraud[2] gets through; that's the cost of doing business in every field.
These kinds of embarrassing mistakes should be read as an indictment of academic culture and the failures of the peer review system as a whole, not a "gotcha" against a field that you or I aren't qualified to evaluate. Which, again, is why nobody asked for my opinion or yours about which things to fund.
I have no problem with funding CS research. It's at least somewhat productive to society. Not hugely, but that's academia for you. Even batting 50% is great compared to 0%.
These kinds of woke gender studies, socialist, racist, fields etc are a joke. I don't accept your implication that only someone inside the nut house are credentialed to evaluate it - if anything those seem like the people least likely to be able to make a clear judgment. These kinds of people are dangerous - they advocate for tearing down the system we have that works pretty well - with no coherent idea of what to replace it with. If they ever got into power we'd all be screwed.
It's my opinion that these fields are a net negative to society as a whole, having nothing to do with science or any kind of semi-scientific discipline, and should not receive public funding. They are merely thinly disguised political ideologies. It's sad what academia has come to.
> having nothing to do with science or any kind of semi-scientific discipline, and should not receive public funding.
It's the humanities. It's not supposed to be "scientific," with whatever weight you decide to place on that adjective.
Our government (and every government) funds thousands of things, academic and not, that aren't themselves scientific: parks, libraries, public arts, aesthetic programs intended to motivate the public towards some policy goal[1]. Most people think these things should receive some amount of funding, and recognize that they themselves are not immediately qualified to distinguish worthy endeavours from un-worthy ones.
Let's not compare gender studies to a park. That's a bit apples and oranges.
Humanities are meant to have some redeeming value and some rigorousness even when you can't apply the scientific method.
History, literature, philosophy, and anthropology are all good examples of valuable humanities where there is some grounding in logic and facts. Gender studies on the other hand is just an ideology with very little basis in reality, and little grounding of any kind in facts and logic. You could call it a religion of sorts, but it would be insulting to religions which at least have a richness of tradition and culture and philosophy behind them.
> History, literature, philosophy, and anthropology are all good examples of valuable humanities where there is some grounding in logic and facts.
I'm sorry, but this is a profound misapprehension of the humanities: one of the first things you do in the study of history is learn that history is a human project, subject to human flaws. We don't take Thucydides and Herodotus at their words; we expect the "facts" of history to be distorted.
Philosophy predates what you think of as "logic," and does not use the phrase to refer solely to systems that map roughly to the constrained proof structures that programmers are taught. More profoundly, many philosophers will outright reject the idea that logic is some kind of a priori substrate: not because they think it's wrong or not, but because they think that it's the responsibility of philosophy to consider what would have to be for it to be otherwise.
I know that it's difficult, but please consider whether your own positions have become dogmatic. You don't have to agree with prevailing views in gender studies (I don't even know what they are!); you merely have to ask yourself whether you're qualified to dismiss it as "an ideology with very little basis in reality."
> I'm sorry, but this is a profound misapprehension of the humanities: one of the first things you do in the study of history is learn that history is a human project, subject to human flaws. We don't take Thucydides and Herodotus at their words; we expect the "facts" of history to be distorted.
Sure, but there's still a basis in facts where can corroborate accounts from different authors, even different sides in a war. yes it's subject to interpretation, and there's no one right answer. But you also can't just make stuff up and get people to take you seriously. There's some rigour to making and presenting your arguments. Very different to gender studies.
> I know that it's difficult, but please consider whether your own positions have become dogmatic. You don't have to agree with prevailing views in gender studies (I don't even know what they are!); you merely have to ask yourself whether you're qualified to dismiss it as "an ideology with very little basis in reality."
Maybe. I've seen a lot of terrible examples of things from gender studies. I'm sure there have to be some redeeming ideas right? The whole field can't be 100% worthless. But by and large there's not much value in it and a lot of nonsense, incorrect, and even dangerous thinking to be found there.
> Sure, but there's still a basis in facts where can corroborate accounts from different authors, even different sides in a war. yes it's subject to interpretation, and there's no one right answer. But you also can't just make stuff up and get people to take you seriously. There's some rigour to making and presenting your arguments. Very different to gender studies.
Except that a lot of it is just made up! Both the Greeks and Romans were happy to make up foundational and battle stories to support their cultural lodestones; we don't really know much about how Rome was founded other than that it certainly wasn't Romulus and Remus. Even our best period sources (Dionysus of Halicarnassus and Livy) were (1) 800 years too late, and (2) under immense political pressure to "prove" (there's that word again) that the myths were real.
And note: the greatness of Rome is conditioned on the greatness of their founding myth, which goes from Romulus and Remus to the great Aeneas of Troy[1]. The greatness of the Western neoclassicial period (democracy, free speech, property, capitalism!), in turn, is conditioned on the greatness and intellectual rightness of Greece and Rome. There's a reason why George Washington is apotheosized on the Capitol Rotunda, and it's not just because Brumidi thought it would look cool.
If you can see why these kinds of observations and analysis might be interesting, you can get an inkling of why people find gender and other critical studies interesting: they don't exist to destroy Western culture, only to reconcile its lionizations with what we actually know. And, as it turns out, we don't know a whole lot other than what our progenitors want us to know.
[1]: This, among many other reasons, is why Rome had its own reactionary anti-Hellenic scholars. Modern conservative groups frequently borrow their names. Parallels abound.
You seem to have a post factual philosophy. Just because some things are made up in history does not mean the whole field is without rigor, nor does it make it equivalent to the counter factual nonsense coming out of gender studies.
That you can find examples to the contrary does not prove the rule or make everything somehow equal.
I'm sorry if it wasn't clear, but those weren't supposed to be examples to the contrary (it's a matter of historical fact that people believed those myths, and acted based on those beliefs), nor do I have a "post factual" personal philosophy (I'm actually a Rawlsian and a moral realist, which is about as stodgy and non-postmodern as you can get by moral philosophy standards).
The point with that whole digression was to provide a little window into the kinds of analyses that a critical philosopher might do: they're not interested in dismantling history as a whole; they're interested in carving at the joints between phenomena that are taken for granted as conjoined. I think that's important, even if it isn't the kind of research that I personally excel at (or even understand especially well).
Sorry, I didn't mean to go at you. It's just one of my buttons when people cherry pick something bad about Y and try to use that establish that X is therefore somehow equal or not worse. There are some people out there who even like to believe all humans are equal. As if they live in some alternate reality. I'm not implying anything about you by the way, just venting.
Someone else in the comments here had the gall to say there are bad physics papers therefore gender studies is no less legitimate. Which is totally nonsensical as an argument.
> they're interested in carving at the joints between phenomena that are taken for granted as conjoined
On the surface I have no issue with that. I just think the field of gender studies in general is so toxic and full of garbage that anyone doing actual serious work in that field would do well to distance themselves from it.
> Why should any tax dollars go towards academic research?
Research is a process through which we unlock various technological orchards to harvest for the betterment of all mankind. The problem we have today is we're running low on new orchards. It's a crying shame how little we spend on research - compared to e.g. weapons.
> Careful with this reasoning. Commies said the same thing when they sent people they didn't like to uranium mine labor camps.
Do I dignify that with a reply? That's got nothing to do with what I said.
I bet me liking humor puts me in a sizable minority, if not even silent majority, of HN readers.
Another thing I don't like, which I've seen many other HN readers express that they also don't like, is over-politicization. That leads me to realize there's more about that line that I don't like besides just being dumb. The joke is lame, and by using the word "whiteness," it's deeply, unnecessarily, politicized.
A note for people seeing the essay now: he's quietly changed the link to be "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic racialized phenomenology." (Which makes it even clearer that he doesn't have a reasoned argument at any specific target in mind, just "tee-hee postmodern bogus." Also that he forgot he needs to hide his power level.)
EDIT: He's quietly changed the link again to remove "racialized."
In context though - 'earnestness' here is a quality looked for in academic founders and is being looked at as an ability to solve important problems that other people care about.
The humanities studying hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness don't have that. In particular, the entire field has come up with no useful commentary on 'hegemonic whiteness', hermeneutic or otherwise, that leads to problem solving. It isn't a culture that is producing strong startup founders like STEM does. It's fair to say they are less earnest in the way PG is using the term; the humanities isn't where people go to solve real-world problems.
Humanities is arguably at the base of some very successful companies (arguably Apple, for example). Hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness is the base of some profoundly ... albinophobe? I dunno, they're racist and don't like white people ... arguments and nothing admirable that I have yet encountered.
The "bogus" comment falls in a paragraph about ventures where the earnest don't generally win. So the first question to ask is: do the earnest generally win in that kind of academic field? I don't know much about that field, but I'm guessing probably not just because it is too closely tied to politics. If you earnestly persue research, you are likely to find something that contradicts the current political fashions, and end up buried. So in that sense, PG is probably right.
The next question is: is he inappropriately dismissive (or even insulting) to the field over all? Does is have value that he unfairly dismisses? You seem to think so.
But even if so, pretty much everyone needs to be dismissive about a lot of stuff. At least he's transparent about where his blind spots are.
> you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness."
First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." <
That represents philosophy in general about as well as say Theranos represents startups in general.
And that's maybe part of the point, that when interest in the work for its own sake (how fine details of things preserve and amplify culture on the one hand, or medical testing on the other hand) take a backseat to interest in what you can get from it (fill in the blanks here ^-^ ) things don't go so well.
It's also worth noting that Paul Graham has an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He knows (at least) the first three words, and he knows that they aren't nonsense.
What he also knows is that he's whistling to a specific audience, and that that audience either doesn't know those words or thinks that any sort of academic terms of art in the humanities are already nonsense.
In sum: for an essay titled "Earnestness," it's a shockingly dishonest rhetorical tactic.
How anyone can claim to read someone else's mind like you do here is beyond me, or even claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad 30+ years ago or how he reacted to it at the time. If I know pg, he would have reacted exactly the same way as now—but more likely he just avoided taking such courses in the first place.
Making these obviously bogus claims so you can attack someone else for, of all things, dishonesty, is pretty shocking even for this thread. I'm not saying that out of disrespect for philosophy, or postmodernism for that matter [1]. What you wrote is just such a breach of basic fairness and exactly what that site guideline asks to avoid.
I do think I broke the site's guidelines by not assuming good faith. So I apologize for that.
> How you can claim to read someone else's mind like this is beyond me, or even for that matter claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad curriculum 30 years ago or how he reacted to it at the time. If I know pg, he would have reacted exactly the same way as now—but more likely he just avoided taking such courses in the first place.
I studied analytical philosophy in college, like he did. I didn't take a single class on postmodernism. I bring that up because these terms are universal and not tied specifically to PoMo (or even continental) philosophy. That's where my doubt comes from: someone who studied philosophy should know these terms, and should know that popular awareness of them is limited to the spooky PoMo stuff.
I believe you and find that interesting but it seems to me you're talking about your education, not pg's. Those terms aren't universal and, as I'm sure you know, there's also a strain in analytical philosophy that takes pride in not knowing anything about that stuff. Besides that, skepticism about postmodernism generally was as widespread then as it is now, especially among technical people, and I'd be shocked if that hasn't always been his view. Certainly it was 10 or 15 years ago, whenever it was that I first read him refer to it.
In defense of Paul, I'm reminded of work highlighted by the twitter account Real Peer Review (once banned and now reincarnated). It highlights various bits of so-called scholarship that looks like political ideology dressed up in fancy words and financed by taxpayers. "Decolonizing math" and things like that. Some recent examples:
I wouldn't expect taxpayers to finance my church. I'm not sure why I'm on the hook to fund this particular non-falsifiable dogma that I vehemently disagree with.
That seems to be a bizarre conclusion, since churches are very often tax advantaged.
If these authors are able to write grant proposals and get funding, then clearly someone thinks they are producing something of value. You cannot see the value, so you declare there must not be any?
It is a politico-religious movement. Of course people that side with that movement find value in funding people to produce texts in its tradition and educate students in its ways of talking. I don't.
Well, what isn't? LOL. That and 'cultural marxism' are just scary/meaningful-sounding terms people make up to label and then defame something they don't like.
They're terms that are broad and just accurate enough to describe something, but too vague and imprecise to actually describe anything.
Let me help. You dislike academics who study and analyze society and culture to discover it's biases, unspoken assumptions, and so on, and you don't like that they critique society for the oppressive elements which they believe they've found.
I.e. social justice. Critiques of capitalism. Critiques of systemic racism.
Criticize something specific so we can talk about it. But, the reason you aren't accurate or specific is because if you were, whatever argument you are trying to make would rapidly fall apart.
And I'd love to be proved wrong! Share a specific critique. We can talk about Marxists, neo-Marxists, communists, libertarian anarchism, Progressive Democrats, Social Democrats, The New Left, Poststructuralism, Structuralism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism (though that one's a bit vague), Feminism, Intersectionalism, Third-wave Feminism, Liberation Theology (the current Pope has roots in Liberation Theology, which was a point of contention), and so on.
Or maybe you don't like Democrats? Social Progressives? The entire field of Gender Studies?
Pick something you don't like and let's talk about it.
But, I'd bet your own lack of education (which I don't mean as an insult, more so a factual description - I'm uneducated about, say, genetics) on the things you criticize makes it difficult to do so.
And I'd bet your true dislike is something you'd be shunned for expressing, which is why you hide behind nonsense-phrases that function as dog whistles.
Because we all kinda know what you mean, even though you didn't actually say it.
Hello! I think I addressed some of the points you are making in my response to the user dvt. TLDR, there's low-quality research in "falsifiable" fields too.
But actually, I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding what your point is, could you help me? I mentioned a specific line that Paul Graham wrote, then said it was "dumb" for the reasons I outlined. Then, in defense of Paul Graham, you posted links to tweets to snippets of research absolutely without any context at all. How would I know whether that research is good or not? I have no training in any of those fields.
I'm really confused about how what you posted defended Paul. Did you want me to see that someone wrote the words "decolonizing" and "math" together and subsequently think that it is stupid, after all, to write the words "hegemonic" and "whiteness" in the same paper?
Are you claiming here that every productive institution in society is capitalist?
Also for what it's worth, I don't see attacks on science in any things you link. I see, perhaps, a call for more empiricism in certain fields, and a call for recognition of our society and it's flaws, and how those flaws may extend into systems embedded within our society, such as the scientific community and our educational system.
I mean, it's clear you agree with some of these criticisms: in the same post you staunchly defend science as, presumably a source of everything productive, but criticize "academia". Yet how do you propose to differentiate between the two? You're both criticizing different parts of the social system scientific discourse is embedded in. What makes the other criticism inherently invalid?
> The end of this line of thinking is to destroy mathematical education and leave children ignorant
I want to call out specifically that there is absolutely nothing you've quoted that supports this claim.
I hold a graduate degree. I have a certain affection for academia. It's with great sadness that I watch a once-great institution shamble down the path to perdition.
Hopefully we find a way to renew it, or else to do basic science outside of it
one of the surest signs that someone is full of it is that they have a long history of essays with no citations. PG's essays almost never cite anyone else's work or act as continuations onto a line of thinking started by another person. PG wants to discredit the entire concept of academia because he knows that his work does not actually stand up to scrutiny.
hehe, curious (perhaps deliberate?) examples. This is maybe all very plainly obvious to you, but: Foucault's description of the panopticon, his description of discipline, and especially the continuation of this line of thinking by Deleuze's notion of _societies of control_ is extremely relevant for people who visit HN. How these topics relate to the work that most of the HN community does is explored very fully in Alexander Galloway's book "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization" (here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol). Also I find it especially hilarious that the first "BS" word that he uses is hermeneutics; it's almost as if he's saying "you only have my permission to take my work at face value".
I think you misunderstand the genre of essay that pg practices. It's a form of thinking out loud, and intensely personal—a way of finding out how one understands oneself and the world by writing about it. This is actually the origin of the term 'essay', which means 'attempt' and is intrinsically informal. Citations would be out of place.
I'm going to post one more time, just because I think there's a bit of a misconception here.
You're absolutely correct about the origin of the word "Essay." It comes from the French word "essais," meaning "test" or "attempt." The form as we know it was invented by Montaigne, whose essays are indeed informal and personal. They're also uniformly excellent, and I'd recommend them to anyone. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne
However, if you click on virtually any of the essays in the link above, you'll find an essay that is packed with references and quotations. Quotations are a form of direct citation. Sometimes Montaigne misquotes, but this was well before the information age, and he was often working off of memory, so I think we can excuse his lapses.
However, if we are to use the origins of the essay as an example, I don't think we can say that the form necessarily resists citation.
I'm glad you brought up Montaigne; I was going to, but then realized that people would accuse me of comparing pg to the classics and get mad about that too.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare informal quotes to "citations" in the modern sense. The point is that this is an informal, highly personal genre. There are people, as you probably know, who claim that Montaigne invented not only the essay, but the modern idea of a personal self by writing them. So to accuse pg of being too personal or self-referential in his essays is a misunderstanding. The way his writing gets under people's skin is certainly interesting though.
is your argument that he's a genre writer and his genre is his own cult of personality, and that his pieces should not be judged on the coherence of their arguments, because making strong arguments is not the point of his writing?
my argument is that PG's writing is weak specifically because he rejects dialectics. Your argument is essentially that he's writing in a genre that is not dialectic in nature. This is like if I said "I don't like this cookie because it is not sweet" and you said "the cookie is not sweet therefore your argument is invalid".
Seems like he doesn't make money off of wannabees but rather the successful ones, no?
PG has been quite respected in the valley for a while so its surprising to me that people suddenly dislike him.
What was the turning point for you?
> Seems like he doesn't make money off of wannabees but rather the successful ones, no?
Depends on your definition of success. Founding a business that operates at loss but is subsidized in a false economy of other businesses doing the exact same thing is not a good definition of mine, and that's the vast majority of bay area startups.
> What was the turning point for you?
I've always found him to be an anti-intellectual, like much of modern tech.
Yeah this is something he writes about regularly, and it is certainly anachronistic. I also think it's important for rich nerds to justify their position to themselves somehow, and to have some imagined hardship to point to in their past that helps explain their superiority (ha!) over the non-nerds. In reality, it's mostly a bunch of rich kids who would have been rich no matter what nonsense they got up to. Maybe not billionaire rich, but rich enough for the distinction to be sort of meaningless.
I think PG falls into numerous traps in this piece, and many other posts, but I appreciate his writing all the same. In particular, I think the idea that making some business, even if trying to solve a "serious" problem, can never really be fully earnest. There is so little room for pure problem solving, it's all politics. There are more than enough talented people, more than enough funding, to solve all sorts of problems. What remains is the negotiation about who will get the opportunity. Politics.
Earnestness aligns well with the powerful idea of "Strong opinions, loosely held".
Being very convinced of ones ideas, but readily willing to change them in the face of new evidence, is a trait of a person who cares a lot but also has no hidden agenda.
I love PG, but some of his essays lately seem to make me sad, like he's out of touch. I know plenty of earnest (and, frankly, quite talented) people. What they lack is capital and guidance (and maybe some discipline and motivation, to be fair). But, they will read a PG essay and say, "Hey! That's me! Why can't PG invest in me?". To which case, they quickly realize, "Oh, cause I can't show that I can make any money from my idea. Or, because I'm not savvy at manipulating people or presenting my ideas well." Or something like that.
Not much. The idea that through hard work you can get anywhere, no matter where you come from, is just a gigantic delusion and a lie we've been insistently taught to believe.
There's billions of people working daily harder than any CEO just to bring food to their families. They will never become rich.
I think the point of the essay is not that being earnest is enough to get funded, but rather than being earnest is NOT a disadvantage. There's a goodly chunk of the populace, even within tech, who might believe that it is, and I think the point of the essay is to demonstrate that it is not, and in fact it is even an advantage.
> Starting a successful startup makes you rich and famous. So a lot of the people trying to start them are doing it for those reasons. Instead of what? Instead of interest in the problem for its own sake. That is the root of earnestness. [2]
What a load of pretentious twaddle this is. People have gotten rich on completely idiotic ideas, whereas people pursuing interesting ideas for their own sake have lived poor lives.
A lot of the people forming startups to get rich are actually pretty smart and have plenty of ideas they could chase for their own sake, while becoming poor in the process.
"I wanna get rich" is honest, which is close cousin of earnest.
To get rich, it does have to have an interest in a particular problem domain for its own sake: the domain of how to get people to part with their money, in your favor. That's it. If you make that domain your passion, you will likely end up well-off. If any other domain is your passion, then you should probably pair up with someone whose passion is that one.
> it may be possible to be completely cynical and still be very funny
I guess this depends on how hard you want to laugh, but would you say George Carlin or Dave Chappelle are not cynical? I don't think earnestness and cynicism are so dichotomous.
I don't understand why Paul Graham puts himself out there in the public sphere like this. To read all the haters and cynicism here that he gets in response - a lesser man like myself would just say screw it and walk away.
Like his critics here are terribly accomplished people. Paul Graham is a expert with a proven track record and some multiple of billions of "market votes" behind him. But the armchair critics on HN know better. I expect that on YouTube comments, I have higher expectations here.
Whatever his motivations, I enjoy his essays and find them thought provoking. I just hope the peanut gallery here and elsewhere doesn't discourage him.
Retrospectively ascribing success to character traits that we favour is subjective to the point of meaninglessness.
Earnestness, like any other trait or 'virtue' is not innate or absolute. Everyone has the capacity to exhibit this trait or be seen to exhibit it, when refracted through the non-objective lens of someone else's bias and perception. For example, a politician for partyX is seen to be an earnest 'straight man' who cares deeply by his supporters, while supporters of partyY view him as a reckless oaf.
To promote the use of personality traits as a predictor of success is naive at best.
Well, here is an article by a Nobel prize winner, reviewing a large amount of empirical evidence that personality traits predict success. See particularly section 4.
> It's interesting how many different ways there are NOT to be earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant, to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to be orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make.
The majority of negative comments here fall squarely under the description of clever cynic.
I'd wager most commenters are proud of their skepticism. Speaking truth to power makes the world a better place.
But, what's the opportunity cost to being cynical?
Being cynical takes energy. And, doing so in an intellectually sound manner takes even more energy.
All the earnestness in the world can't help when all you want to do is share a good idea, and make sure people know what's really possible.
It drives me nuts that we still have computer virii, and a whole field of "computer security professionals", when it could all be solved, and was, but Unix short-circuited history, and we've got this mess instead.
The biggest display of naivete and arrogance to me is sincerely believing you can improve the world through capitalism.
How many failed shared economy experiments did we have that only made things worse?
Take AirBnb. An apparently great idea, it became popular because many needed an additional income to survive, to the point people accepted the idea of having strangers sleep in their houses for money as the norm.
Beside the incredible damage AirBnb did to the housing situation in many cities -in my city, 35% of the housing is now AirBnb only. Locals have been forced out of their own city-, did the "airbnbs" ever think that the problem they were trying to solve (people in need of more money just to survive) was caused exactly by capitalism, the same mechanism they thought they could use to make the world "a better place"?
This is spin, and it's important to understand why it's spin, because somewhat unusually, this essay seeks to prevent you from using your critical reasoning facilities.
Here's the context: This essay is, at its core, a rebuttal to https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sex... , which makes the argument that while Paul Graham is undeniably an extraordinarily successful businessman, he's not that successful of a public intellectual, and in particular that one of the major things he's tried to be a public intellectual about - namely, Lisp / programming language design - has been a field where he has basically no successes to show.
(Before you argue "Arc didn't fail, you're using it right now," please read the post in question, which addresses this.)
So, now PG comes out with an essay arguing how "earnestness" and being "naive" is important - that being interested in a problem for its own sake is valuable, regardless of results - and throws in a comment on how "would-be intellectuals find it so difficult to understand Silicon Valley," i.e., that Silicon Valley is immune from the sorts of (constructive) criticism intellectuals usually have internally. Then he shifts gears right at the end to talking about making money and its relationship with "earnestness" (after introducing the essay by saying that they're conflicting motivations) and how ever since Henry Ford, working on the thing you're passionate about has been more closely entwined with making money.
"But," you say, "this essay doesn't talk about that other essay at all! How do we know it's a response to it?" I invite you to reread this essay closely, knowing the context I'm claiming it has, and I think you'll find it makes more sense. It no longer looks like a disjointed collection of interesting ideas, and there seems to be a reason now why it's worth advocating earnestness and naivete (and dismissing Twitter critics in a footnote).
What this essay has done by the end is argued, like Balaji Srinivasan did but more subtly, that it doesn't matter whether you're good at the thing you're earnest about by traditional measures; if you tried really hard and you made money, it's the ultimate sign you were good at it all along, and you don't need to evaluate your work on the merits as traditional. It's a deflection of the criticism that PG is an above-average Lisper but a world expert businessman - which is hardly a "criticism," really. PG is, without a doubt, a Lisp nerd, earnest about Lisp, but what he's shipped (extremely successfully!) is a change to how the world creates businesses, not a change to how the world writes code. But for some reason, he wants you to keep thinking of him as a successful Lisp nerd.
In my view, there is a uniquely American fiction that there exists for everyone some pursuit that both (a) will satisfy their passion and (b) be highly remunerative. Your job is to find that pursuit. And if you fail, I guess it's because you weren't earnest enough.
I don't doubt that successful founders are highly motivated by the challenges of their work. But the suggestion that the point isn't to build a business and make money is, I'm sorry to say, typical of the self-serving retconning we are starting to see from those at the top. And that we have always seen from Silicon Valley: "Don't Be Evil," "We're Changing the World," "Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected."
*Thanks to my mom, barber, third grade teacher, roommate, dog and barista for reading drafts of this comment.
Not speaking for all Americans, but I've never believed that (a) and (b) are both out there if I can simultaneously solve them. I chose to give one preference and then did the best to support the other. It's an optimization activity that may or may not achieve satisfaction on either one.
It's the outliers who become wealthy doing what they love. No illusions there.
The other 'responsibility' we take collectively is to strive to create circumstances where the process of pursuing (a) and (b) is not impeded by society.
I agree and don’t believe in the fiction either, but just because many or even most Americans do (or do not) believe in the fiction does not preclude it from being fair to describe it as “uniquely American” - in my mind OP was pointing out the origin of this worldview and the source of most of its advocacy and propagation, and I think they’re right?
> It's the outliers who become wealthy doing what they love. No illusions there.
More than that, even if you love your work, there will still be moments you hate it. That's why we get paid/need rewards.
People generally love an idealized version of their work, where everything works the first time, there is no grunge work, people are pleasant and cooperate with you.
Yet another PG essay in which he defines as positive characteristics those which he thinks he has, and in broad strokes completely dismisses the value of anything else.
Another ridiculous thing of this essay is the outstanding moral character granted to SV founders. For sure, a fraction of them is guided by objectives different than money in their pursuits but that fraction is dwarfed by people in other fields, like academy, social work and NGOs. There is nothing in the startup culture that makes me thing of nobler, more earnest, more enlightened people.
These essays are getting ridiculous. We get it, you have tons of experience funding companies so it helps you to do a competent job filtering the candidates.But after that it is pretty much a crap-shoot, and all this theorizing are just post-hoc rationalizations to satisfy your ego.
Have you read the last few of these essays posted here? Every single one of them I've read can be summarized as such: "I wish to focus on a certain characteristic. I will hint or explicitly state that negative qualities of said characteristic are found predominately in fields I do not care to work in and often have a negative stereotype about, and also hint or explicitly state that positive qualities are found predominately in fields I do care to. It so happens these positive qualities tend to be qualities I am ascribing to myself in this essay, or have ascribed to myself in the past."
Here is a choice selection:
"Do the earnest always win? Not always. It probably doesn't matter much in politics, or in crime, or in certain types of business that are similar to crime, like gambling, personal injury law, patent trolling, and so on. Nor does it matter in academic fields at the more bogus end of the spectrum. And though I don't know enough to say for sure, it may not matter in some kinds of humor: it may be possible to be completely cynical and still be very funny."
There's very little to be charitable about when reading that. It shows a profound lack of consideration for the fields and topics PG is dismissing out of hand, to the point where one seriously wonders whether he's actually given any more thought to it than whatever reaction from his own youth he's channeling in the moment.
Then there are the unsupported assertions that litter these essays, and they're all more or less alike in character: "Nerds in high school become Kings in adulthood". It's actually not only trite, but overbroad. In some ways it's true, but in many others it's not, but PG tends to generalize the former in his essays.
It's easy to insist on being charitable, but it's a bit harder when there's just so little to work with.
I don't think there's so little to be charitable about. But in any case the GP was a snarky, shallow dismissal, which is not what we want here, regardless of who the target is. From a moderation point of view your comment is totally different and I don't have a problem with it.
Btw, pg has been talking about earnestness for years—same with the topics of his other recent essays—and he has always written in this style. I don't think he's changed a bit. People have always gotten pissed off by them too. If there's a difference in public perception now it's a combination of his social status having changed [1] and the online climate having gotten steadily more acidic.
> But in any case the GP was a snarky, shallow dismissal, which is not what we want here, regardless of who the target is.
So no plausible charitable interpretation this time? A little bit hypocritical dont you think? I think you are confusing your role of moderator with one of mindless cheerleader. But who knows? Maybe that's part of the job so no judgment there.
I don't see a plausible interpretation of "all this theorizing are just post-hoc rationalizations to satisfy your ego" that isn't a snarky, shallow dismissal (of someone's work, btw, as the site guidelines ask you specifically not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and a personal attack to boot.
I've posted so many moderation comments over the years that I'm comfortable saying "regardless of who the target is". If anyone bothered to look through that backlog (not that anyone would or should), they'd find me responding that way across a pretty full spectrum of positions and views [1], depending on whoever or whatever the commenter breaking the guidelines was going after. I don't see why threads about pg essays should be excluded from bog-standard moderation.
(It's true that I've also been posting some of my personal views in this thread and the last pg essay thread, but those are different from moderation replies. You can tell them apart by whether or not they say "please" and link to the HN guidelines.)
What's the difference between post-hoc rationalization and learning from experience though? I don't see him making any claims of pre-ordained success or that luck isn't a factor, he's just pointing out a quality he's seen to be valuable in the context of startups and how it can be a contra-indicator to the type of BS artist that proliferate around any kind of profitable industry.
Sure we can always question motivations (eg. yours could be envy or sour grapes), but that is unproductive.
I think the original comment was directed at the seemingly pretentious nature of the essay. How do you quantify earnestness? Being sincere? I get the “we like demo over slides”, “2 founder over 1 founder” kinda thing, but talking about virtue and moral character seems like PG is struggling to find things to do after retirement. Philosophical musings are almost always due to too much time on hand and assumed profundity of one’s own thought process. Hence the post hoc rationalisation? Maybe?
Plus as it is said by someone in the other comment, success(especially in entrepreneurial ventures) is so much more like playing a game of roulette than it is like running a race. Luck! Lots of Luck! And chance does not fit well with assumed observations. It is a measurement bias that is being masked as concrete conclusions.
I think he lays it out pretty well: earnestness is more than sincerity, it's dedication to solving a problem for its own sake rather than as a means to an end. I'm not sure why you want that to be quantifiable, but I don't see that as being useful since Goodhart's law then kicks in.
I do agree that on a single continuum from roulette to race, entrepreneurship is closer to roulette, but it's a limited framing because entrepreneurship is neither a well-defined rote exercise like a marathon nor a discrete probabilistic event like flipping a coin. To the contrary, building a company is a continuous feedback loop involving thousands of decisions over which an entrepreneur has complete agency. The uncomfortable truth is twofold: founders' choices do affect outcomes, but those outcomes are not predictable and have no direct relationship to ones own perception of merit, hard work, fairness, or morals. Getting hung up on the luck aspect and whether or not some successful person is humble enough is a defense mechanism that ultimately gets in the way of maximizing your own success.
It is to realize whether learning is possible at all. What can you learn from a successful game of rolling dice, from a successful game of flipping a coin? Was it the way you moved your wrist or did you you just luck out?
I won't go that far. But I will say that, contra his earlier writing, pg's recent stuff has a real "feedback in the bubble" feel. It's still treating SV culture as it was fifteen years ago and not really willing to engage with or even nod to the way the industry and its effects on society have evolved.
So e.g. Airbnb is still a hero story about disruption even as it settles into an established power and its inconvenient side effects on things like the real estate industry become apparent.
It's not that he's wrong, or that I even disagree with this particular essay. I just think the world has kinda moved on from this model of innovation and we need to be solving different problems than how to make the next batch of kids rich.
In 2005 we didn't have the cloud, which lets you start a startup for next to nothing. We didn't have Lean Startup type books, podcasts and social media post from insiders which let us self educate on how business and startups worked. And we didn't have hundreds of VCs and billions of dollars chasing the next kid with a hot startup.
It would be interesting to see a essay from PG on why YC is still necessary.
AWS launched in 2006. The cloud was very much a part of and a driver of the earlier boom. It's not something that's arrived since. The cloud, too, is old news.
I'm not taking a position on whether or not YC is "necessary". I'm saying that fifteen years ago it was clear to most of us that YC was making society better. Now? It's really not clear.
15 years ago SV was the same as now, there was never a nobler past. There has always been externalities than the tech companies are willing to sweep under the rug if it helps them to make money.
I think that's wrong, though. Through 2010 or so (very roughly) there was still a ton of unmined valued in straightforward applications of technology. I mean, sure, stuff goes wrong and there are bad aspects of culture, but looking at the industry through the Web 2.0 period it was really easy to convince yourself that this was all a Net Good Thing and making the world a better place (and that's true of Airbnb too!).
It's just not as true now. That fruit has been picked. There are still product ideas but they're about exploiting edges of an industry that has real problems, and not about fixing them.
I mean, whether the desire is there or not, the YC model isn't going to fix the climate crisis, or the disaster that the media ecosystem has become, or the increasingly dire level of income inequality in our society. And getting to my original point: pg's recent writings seem like he's made peace with that and is happy just chipping out new corners of the tech ecosystem and not Solving Problems People Have.
The world was drowning in electronic devices garbage, many containing toxic materials.
American companies were taking advantage of highly exploitative conditions in the third world, especially China.
Microsoft made millions "extorting" high licence fees for its software in many cases from poor 3rd world countries who had few option for what it was a de-facto monopoly.
Patent trolls were rampant,SCO was trying to kill Linux, all with MS funding.
RIIA was abusing the legal system, suing for millions a grandma who downloaded a couple of songs.
You may think whatever you want, but being ignorant of basic facts make your opinion a little bit better than total irrelevance.
Yes, but the bad side-effects of e.g. fake news and hate speech on FB and Twitter, "industry disruptions" driving wages down, etc., maybe weren't all that readily apparent 15 years ago.
yea its general tech/sv thought leader styles content. there's the other guy on twitter nevel or something? i cant remember. i hate follow a bunch of these guys idk why really. they're like living memes but also really rich with cult like following. im probably just a hater though. who can never be sure these days.
Naval Ravikant is a bit of a "head in the clouds" type, but he does have some genuinely interesting ideas that are worth paying attention to.
The problem with both Ravikant and Graham is that they're pontificating in a space where the ideas seem superficially trite but become powerful when applied.
I think of Dale Carnegie's book 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' as a good illustration of this. People around here especially love to hate on it, but that's because they don't quite understand the point of it. The point of that book (and of the musings of people like Ravikant and Graham) is to explain to people that success is a product of attitude and behavior as much as it is a product of intellect. That simple ideas, routinely applied, can yield wondrous outcomes. And, perhaps most importantly, that the ingredient for success absent in most STEM-inclined minds is the capacity to restrain analytical/cynical impulses in just the right way.
Neither Ravikant nor Graham is an intellectual slouch. They have noteworthy backgrounds in STEM that categorically refute any possible accusation of dimwittedness. When they decide to discuss 'soft' ideas, it's because their experience in the real world, pattern matching against countless observations made in the trenches of the tech industry, has taught them that these ideas are crucial.
> The actual point of the article is to really just drop the -- quote -- "bogus" -- dogwhistle so all the other racists can identify them.
Wow. That's beyond being uncharitable.
Also, as I mentioned elsewhere down below at length, I think bogus is too kind a word for that kind of crap masquerading as an academic discipline.
But to get back to the actual content, I think he's got a point. There is no substitute for genuine passion and interest - otherwise known as eagerness. Little surprise it should be a signal of success.
But hey what would one of the world's most successful venture capitalists know about it - you're the real expert on the subject.
There are plenty of people who have genuine passion and interest yet don't succeed. Sounds like survivor bias. Funny that you also appeal to authority -- PG cant possibly be wrong because he is rich and successful :).
Also studying society/people is an academic discipline. There is plenty of hard science which is equally "bogus". What about bad neural network papers, or bad physics papers?
Regardless, these things are not new ideas, or something people don't know about. Yes being eager/earnest can help. Yes bad papers exist. The issue is why choose that particular example? Why are all of PG's blog posts exactly the same -- none of them have anything particularly deep or offer new insight -- but there always seems to be controversial content mixed into the supposedly honest discussion.
If they are not doing it deliberately and its somehow internalised then people should at least call them out.
Remember if you took logic in college, appeal to authority is only a fallacy when the authority is not a domain expert. In this case it's quite valid.
> What about bad neural network papers, or bad physics papers?
That is a logical fallacy. It's called false equivalence. Just because there are some bad hard science papers does not mean gender studies is on the same level.
If anyone needs to be called out here on their behavior it is the humanities in academia and the insanity they are harboring and encouraging. I find no fault with PGs reference.
I'm going to expand on this a bit, possibly against my better judgment. I believe Paul Graham has a point here, and it's a good one. In intellectual pursuits, there's a spectrum from dealing purely with nature and facts, to dealing with human perceptions. To pick what I hope is a reasonably neutral example, doing the science to get containment of a fusion reaction is on one end of the spectrum. Planning and engineering a project to do it is in the middle. And making the case that carbon-based energy production poses an existential threat to humanity and that we should be investing hundreds of billions into fusion energy is on the other. All these inform each other, and I (personally) don't make a value judgment on which is most virtuous or most important.
The salient thing is that Paul Graham did not choose a somewhat neutral example. Rather, he chose one that is perhaps at the very center of the culture wars, and has done so using a highly emotionally loaded word. Because he is someone who knows how to use words, I can fairly confidently conclude that he is effectively declaring his position on the issue.
I looked at the references on the other end of the link. I expected it to be a particular article with all four of those words in the title. It was not; it was just a search for those four words.
The top result is an article about the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (d. 1968), who was among other things one of the leaders of the theological opposition to the Third Reich and its subversion of Christian belief in service of white-supremacist ideology. The article says that Barth's interpretation of Romans 2 provides us a way today to avoid commingling Christian identity and whiteness.
It's certainly possible for someone who believes white supremacy exists (and is worth opposing) to think that academic work that reads Barth today to counter racial superiority disguised as Christianity is of low value. I'd say it's pretty unlikely.
To be fair, this is not the most charitable interpretation. The most charitable interpretation is that the author of the essay has never seriously read any academic work involving the words "hermeneutic," "dialectic," "hegemonic," or "whiteness" and they're just four words that he thinks mean nothing, and that he didn't actually read the results in the Google Scholar search before a middlebrow dismissal (to use his own term) of the results. That would make him like the vast majority of the folks who deny the existence of white supremacy - dismissing serious opposition to it as silly instead of specifically disbelieving it.
That doesn’t explain what’s wrong with using the search as an example if a person thinks there is a problem with the research which shows up for that search.
The search has thousands of results. Tomorrow's top results could be entirely different. I've only seen 2 people say they read today's top result. They didn't see what was wrong with it.[1][2]
No. My view is probably he didn't read any of those papers. He has to know most of his audience won't. He has to know the search results could change too. So he was just sneering at the words.
Changing the search terms is just more evidence he wasn't pointing to any particular research.
The link is deliberately suggesting that any research on race is bogus (and the edit uses another general keyword across a general search, which still deliberately suggests that). This suggests to me either:
1. you deny white supremacy exists - in my opinion, that's the more generous reading, or,
2. you acknowledge that it exists but wish to publicly state the view that it is not worth any research hours. That is itself white supremacy, plus the intent to cause harm.
There is no credible third option. You suggest intellectual immaturity or narrow-mindedness (from someone with a PhD), but those would come in addition to either 1 or 2 applying, not instead of.
Using childishness as an excuse for racism is still racism, especially if you are a grown adult. Your excusing this as just childishness is embarrassing.
“The link is deliberately suggesting that any research on race is bogus“
If this statement were true, then would be merit to your conclusions.
However it’s obviously not true.
The link clearly does suggest that the kinds of academic paper that search yields are bogus.
The original search was for “hermeneutic” “dialectics” “hegemonic” “intersectionality” “whiteness” (as best I can reconstruct).
This is quite obviously not a search for ‘any research on race’.
Indeed it is clearly a search for a very narrow kind of academic writing on ‘whiteness’, which itself is a term only used in a subset of academic theorizing about race.
Most kinds of research on race do not include these search terms.
Obviously PG does think this narrow subfield is bogus.
It’s puzzling that you have concluded that this means he thinks that ‘any’ research on race is bogus.
The best way I can made sense of this is to figure that you think that any criticism of academic writing about race is equivalent to denying white supremacy.
> It’s puzzling that you have concluded that this means he thinks that ‘any’ research on race is bogus.
So: any research on race is fine, but using the words 'whiteness', 'racialized' or now 'intersectionality' (this word appears newly to me) makes it bogus...
Half of the results on Google Scholar which mention 'white supremacy' contain at least one of those three words, broadly consistently since 1990.
How do you talk in any useful way about race relations without ever using those words? Awkwardly, in modern academia.
- You can't now easily define what "white" means in your context (since this definition is not fixed or absolute), for example, so how can we understand the foundation of your work?
- You don't now have a word for talking about how the experience of being a woman or disabled or gay etc is different (or not) for black people than it is for white people.
- You don't now have a word for the experience of ethnic or cultural groups becoming discriminated against with political involvement.
It's akin to saying research in computer science is fine, but the words 'algorithm', 'lisp', or 'big data' show it to be bogus.
> So: any research on race is fine, but using the words 'whiteness', 'racialized' or now 'intersectionality' (this word appears newly to me) makes it bogus...
Again, a puzzling interpretation.
A couple of points, it’s fairly obvious that PG doesn’t expect people to go through every single search result past the first few.
Search results with the conjunction of those words are listed first. You have mistakenly used the word ‘or’, but search engines place ‘and’ results first.
PG doesn’t use the term ‘white’ anywhere. That has been introduced by you. He uses the term ‘whiteness’.
I am a little surprised you conflate these two terms, since in both the academic discourse, and in activism about race, these words do not mean the same thing.
> How do you talk in any useful way about race relations without ever using those words?
It’s not clear what this question has to do with what PG wrote, and the rest of your post seems to hinge on its relevance.
PG didn’t say anything about people not using words. He posted a link to a search he expected would prioritize examples of the kind of research he thinks is bogus.
Generally when we do a Google search, we assume that the first few results will be the most relevant, not that every result is equally relevant.
See my earlier point - search prioritizes results that contain as many of these terms as possible.
To summarize: Your comment seems to be based on two misunderstandings. One about how Google search works, and the other about how the meaning of the word ‘whiteness’ differs from the word ‘white’ in contemporary discourse on race.
Also, I note that you conflate search results with research. These aren’t the same thing.
I read the linked paper out of curiosity. It's a theological paper arguing against forms of Christianity that are based on the world-view of whiteness; instead Christianity should move toward a "decolonial option". The paper's arguments are based on the famous theologian Karl Barth and his commentary on Romans 2, so it's not easy reading.
Is this bogus? If you consider theology bogus, then yes. But the paper is highly relevant to current US politics with the influence of evangelical churches and their embrace of a white-centered model of the world. (Although it doesn't explicitly get into politics.)
One irony of linking to this paper is that religion is highly marked by earnestness, and this paper even more so. The paper's author is clearly genuinely interested in this subject as a "theology nerd". She is writing not for personal gain but to make the world a better place.
I think PG is engaging in a very common form of fallacy, the assumption that everyone agrees with his judgement on an issue (in this case the uselessness of certain avenues of research and endeavor) and thus that their intentions must be viewed by interpreting their actions in light of that ascribed belief, so if they are engaging in the endeavors he finds useless, they must also be doing so through a lack of earnestness.
This is a common way of converting a difference in judgement about the value of particular activities into a characterization of dishonesty and fraudulent activity; when done accidentally it is a sign of lack of ability to recognize differences in viewpoints, when done intentionally it's technique of avoiding debate on the issue on which agreement is assumed through the distraction of casting moral aspersions at those who disagree.
I can choose to see (or not) that the prisoner being walked down the street is shackled. And maybe there are some good reasons for choosing not to see.
But it seems the beginning of sanity for that prisoner, herself, to see her chains.
I didn’t know this, and I’ve been using HN for years now, thanks for the information. I just thought Paul Graham was some super popular vaguely tech person.
I should have recalled this sooner, but it happened to me once, too.
I was doing a product demo of a remotely operated device with a guy from AT&T. We were supposed to be able to communicate through the device but it wasn't working well. They'd just rolled out a new network and it was spotty. I suggested at one point that we use text messages as a back up for communicating and I actually asked him if he was ok with that.
He says, 'Yeah, no problem. My name's on the patent.' 'huh?', 'I'm on the SMS patent.'
Is this a tongue in cheek reference to Ken Thompson’s trick in “reflections on trusting trust”? [1] if so, it wins the 2020 award for originality in HN conspiracy theories!
Got it. I am aware of the history. I was reading too much into your comment. I thought you were joking that PG may have used the Thompson trick to juice scores for his posts on HN.
I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of fear of retribution/shame but I'm always a bit sad when I get in trouble because I was straight forward but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes.