You sound like an idiot. How in the world is this comparable to something oprah says?
This reminds me of how Karl Popper critiques people's opinions, at times he rejects both the pro/anti side of something, as he did in anti-naturalist history vs naturalist history arguing that both were based on a misunderstanding of the logical content of the thing in question.
In this regard you have misunderstood the logical content of the essay in question, drawing a contrast on two things that are not.
Why? The other side gets to drown us in attacks and we can't fight back? Sorry moderator your civility warnings are unwarranted and its why people lose these sort of fights. If a Nobel prize winner will get pushed out in England due to being flanked from all sides, while the nice people can't fight back.
Everyone always perceives themselves as "fighting back", i.e. sees the other side as the aggressor and oneself as merely defending. Since this bias is shared equally by all, it's guaranteed to produce nothing but escalation unless we develop the ability to be a bit more objective and respectful in our arguing.
>"Since this bias is shared equally by all, it's guaranteed to produce nothing but escalation unless we develop the ability to be a bit more objective and respectful in our arguing."
Do you honestly believe that it is 'us' who will escalate? Or is it them? Does it look like they're looking for anything else? Look at the egregious response to the essays. Yes, i'm sure we are the ones at fault. I guess i'll stop, but you are wrong in a very plain and ordinary way and I think that request was in poor taste.
He's also wrong in ways. Bullshit may not 'trick' you, but you may 'buy in to it' and that possibility is not considered in this writing by pg, where he believes that bullshit is either forced on him, or that 'it' somehow tricked him into believing it while not considering that he may be leaving a trail of his own bullshit right behind his self.
Mr Graham, I respect you and you've accomplished more that I will in my life, but I sincerely hope that this essay against "bullshit" and "arguing online" isn't you declaring that you'll be "bubbling" yourself after your last essay was met with wide disagreement.
It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else sees. And if thats the case, it's not something to be afraid of or to shut yourself off from.
I didn't read it as him suggesting that he'd stop writing, just that he'd make a conscious effort to stop defending himself from online attacks. I agree that it would be terrible if he quit writing his essays.
I think you're interpreting pg correctly. But isn't posting an essay "arguing online"?
An essay is partly a matter of working out one's thoughts on some matter. But _posting_ an essay advances some point of view with a supporting argument, attacking the beliefs of others (e.g. Sanders was not named by pg, but could have been). That seems to be _arguing_ just as much as the additional step of responding to one's critics.
I suppose what makes the latter wearying is that it's hard to hear attacks on you personally, and tedious to respond to attacks which are loud but bad. But it still seems that we should (and usually do) value those who engage with their high quality critics.
Graham’s essay that got dumped on was hardly an “original thought”. The whole “we rich people deserve to have 100x more than the poors because we’re pushing humanity forward” schtick is as old as civilization, and Graham’s version was a particularly lazy and poorly argued one.
PG claimed that some rich people "create wealth" and are thus entitled to it. He further argued that they're extra entitled to it because even if you eliminated all other sources of inequality, you couldn't stop them from creating more wealth for themselves: "creating wealth, as a source of economic inequality, is different from taking it—not just morally, but also practically, in the sense that it is harder to eradicate."
This is not a hostile but a literal interpretation of the essay and is the same viewpoint advanced by Atlas Shrugged.
> PG claimed that some rich people "create wealth" and are thus entitled to it.
Close enough. But, like, is anyone really going to argue with this? With scare quotes, sure, OK, I guess there's an example of someone out there churning out widgets from their blood-diamond-financed widget factory, and that's more of a grey area, but without weird factors like this...yes, people ought to be entitled to what they create. There are valid arguments on definitions of that (patents, land use, etc.) but all of those are disputes on how to apply the main principle, not whether it is legitimate.
> He further argued that they're extra entitled to it because even if you eliminated all other sources of inequality, you couldn't stop them from creating more wealth for themselves: "creating wealth, as a source of economic inequality, is different from taking it
This is a straw man. He didn't argue that they're "extra entitled," he simply pre-empted the (reasonable) argument that not all the rich got rich in good ways.
But in any case: your description of his argument does not match the description I responded to:
“we rich people deserve to have 100x more than the poors because we’re pushing humanity forward”
Do you think the above is a hostile interpretation? I did, so I said so.
Unpacking the whole context and philosophical debate (e.g. between libertarians and Marxists) requires a book-length argument. (But to briefly answer your question, no. “People ought to be entitled to what they create” is not a universally accepted principle.) So folks responding to Graham are mostly not going to do the topic justice.
(Side note: In a similar but less defensible way, Paul Graham’s summary of Joseph Stiglitz’s several books about inequality [to wit: “The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is to treat it as a single phenomenon. The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.”] was such a ridiculous oversimplification that I suspect either (a) Graham didn’t actually read any of Stiglitz’s books, or (b) he has extremely poor reading comprehension, or (c) his argument is not only self-serving but also entirely disingenuous.)
But anyway, you can’t just strip out all the context and pretend Paul Graham is having a purely abstract argument in a vacuum. The context today is that the level of inequality and centralization of political influence in America is at a level unseen since the 1920s, or perhaps since the gilded age. There’s a political discussion going on in the society at large about whether this development is healthy, and if not, what to do about it. Many people are angry, to the point that Paul Graham’s essay itself is full of paranoid fantasies about being “hunted”.
Anyone making an argument in modern America is implicitly talking about what direction we should be going from where we are currently, and what social/political changes we can make to get there. Most readers are going to understand such arguments with that context in mind, and only bad/lazy writers will ignore it.
* * *
Graham grew up in a well off family, went to Ivy League college and grad school, worked for a few years as a programmer for his own well-timed web startup then cashed out for tens of millions while he was a relatively young man and transitioned into venture capital, where he has been very successful. As far as I can tell he has basically never worked in any jobs other than being a student, running his own startup, or venture capital. He apparently surrounds himself with other rich techies and has no regular exposure to people outside a tiny cultural bubble. From what I can remember, his only essays which talk at all about folks less fortunate than himself are about his school experience, in particular what I can remember is whining about how English teachers are idiots and how the jocks mistreated him.
From such a position of privilege and ignorance, Graham hand-waves away all the concerns of the vast majority of people in America (not to mention the world), and spends his time justifying his own wealth and prestige and insisting that he shouldn’t have to contribute any of it back to society, with the bulk of the argument being “startups are good”, without further elaboration or analysis.
As you might imagine, this seems awfully cheesy to folks reading along who don’t happen to be multimillionaires themselves.
The way this comment devolves into personal attack is as revealing as it is distasteful. Please have the discipline not to do that on this site.
Also, please don't put things in quotation marks when they're not a quote, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609. It may seem a minor point, but it's an important one for intellectual honesty.
If extremely wealthy venture capitalists don’t want to have their motives questioned when they write essays full of unsupported and self-serving arguments and demonstrating a severe lack of empathy/social understanding, then they shouldn’t post them on the internet.
Dan: I’m sure Paul Graham and this site will both be fine whether or not you you tell his critics to keep their opinions to themselves.
(Side note: literally nobody is going to confuse my idiomatic use of quotation marks to offset a sarcastic summary of an argument which I claim is as old as civilization for a direct quotation from any particular person.)
In the general genre of PG criticism, my comments are treating him with kid gloves. For a more vigorous and amusing analysis of his essays’ analytical rigor, Maciej Cegłowski provides a gem, as expected, still just as relevant ten years later: http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
"I think Hannah Arendt said that one of the great achievements of Stalinism was to replace all discussion involving arguments and evidence with the question of motive. If someone were to say, for example, that there are many people in the Soviet Union who don't have enough to eat, it might make sense for them to respond, "It's not our fault, it was the weather, a bad harvest or something." Instead it's always, "Why is this person saying this, and why are they saying it in such and such a magazine? It must be that this is part of a plan."" - Christopher Hitchens
You're acting as if the correctness of pg's views is relevant to your misconduct on this site. But the two have nothing to do with each other. It's against the values (and rules) of HN to misrepresent what someone said or personally attack them in order to vent your spleen, regardless of how wrong they are.
Evaluating whether or not a criticism of an essay is unfair is equivalent to evaluating whether that criticism is true. It's pretty easy to take "hostility towards PG's points is forbidden" away from this moderation. It might not be entirely, technically true in every single interpretation, particularly the charitable ones you'll apply to yourself, but it's true enough.
I guess I can't be mad at you for protecting the rich people that pay your check.
> “People ought to be entitled to what they create” is not a universally accepted principle
Yes, in the society and economy we are discussing this is a universally accepted principle.
Bob is a farmer. He has the same amount of land as his neighbor, but he works twice as hard, and grows twice the number of crops to sell in a year. He has twice the income. No one would reasonably claim that he's entitled to none of what he produced. Bob's greater productivity than his neighbor is a source of income inequality - he earns twice as much!
There is a mainstream view that society has the right to tax Bob's income, so he does not receive all of what he creates. That's the debate: how much is fair? Maybe it's fair for Bob to have twice the income of his neighbor, or maybe less than twice as much. Unless Bob gets the same as his neighbor, there's income inequality because of differences in productivity.
No farmer is going to singlehandedly earn a million times what his neighbor earns. However, because of technology, this is now possible in some industries. For example, Notch is a game designer, and he singlehandedly makes a game that sells 20 million copies. Notch now has a vast income that far exceeds the typical game designer. Is this bad? What is bad about 20 million people choosing to give Notch their money in exchange for his game? I don't see anything wrong or unjust about this.
PG's essay points out that income inequality is a complex phenomenon, with multiple causes, some that are good (small groups or individuals creating amazingly valuable things) and some that are bad ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential"). PG's essay from my perspective serves to make the point that perhaps not all income equality is bad, and that there deserves to be more thought on the topic of "how much is bad?" or "what causes of income inequality are bad?", instead of treating income inequality as a one-dimensional issue that is intrinsically bad.
From my perspective, PG's point is fair. Income inequality is not intrinsically bad: when people work hard, improve, and become more productive, they earn more, leading to income inequality. This incentive to improve and produce is good, in my opinion. Perhaps what we as a society should be tackling are bad problems like "kids with no chance of reaching their potential", rather than considering income inequality to be a problem ipso facto.
I am not sure this analogy illuminates differences in productivity and resulting inequality as described. If everyone on earth had the same equal piece of land then it can be argued that the tax rate (as property taxes are) would not be on the income but fixed on the basis of the size of the land. So whatever Bob gets out of his land he would pay the same fixed amount of tax that Tom does.
But in the real world we are not born equal and we do not have access to the same size of 'land'. There are differences, sometime vast in family wealth, property, health care, education and access to nearly 'n' number of resources. Bob may be born with the land and have 'n' amount of time and the luxury to think of things like productivity, wealth, interests, life while Tom may struggle his entire life just to survive or maybe work towards getting 1/10 of the land as his entire life goal.
Moving to the real world property taxes are not fixed on income. Income tax is an entirely different tax that Bob and Tom would pay based on their income irrespective of their land holdings. If Bob is more productive he would pay more tax but I am not sure income tax or 'simple productivity' as a concept is useful to understand or explain inequality and disparity in a world where everyone does not have the same piece of land.
None of those PG communicates with believe that all income inequality is bad.
This is exactly one of the main problem with the essay. He argues against a position only very very few people really have. But it goes further than that.
PG is right claiming that you can't stop how technology creates inequality. But he is wrong if he believe that this wealth is created purely from risk taking and hard work. Of course those who are wealthy mostly work hard, but so does everyone else.
But the real issue of course is that if we can't stop technology to keep pushing wealth for some into extremes and for others to keep stalling then the wealth created is mostly due to luck and access to the right people and some timing. Not unlike a Powerball ticket but just of being born into the right context.
And so if PG wanted to show he actually understood the issue.
Instead of arguing against some straw man he could have spent some time on using his otherwise amazing ability, to think out of the box, to put forward some thoughts on how society could deal with this. Then he would have at least shown some understanding of the people he was talking about.
Instead he basically says. It's going to continue like this, but don't worry it's better than the alternatives and it's going to be good again.
Why would anyone who doesn't stand to benefit from this ever accept such a position?
I just don't see PG's thoughts as well developed here as they are in other areas and no amount of historical context is going to change that.
The problem isn't merely the dishonesty of trying to make a person and/or their argument sound much worse than they are. It's the degrading effect it has on the rest of a discussion. Once bystanders see that it's ok to throw concern for the truth out the window and optimize for indignation, every standard drops. I don't know if it's true that sharks go crazy when they smell blood, but that's what this effect reminds me of. It seems to be getting worse, and the Principle of Charity might be a rampart against it.
It's worth trying, but it probably won't work. The bitterness in this thread can't be countered with social pressure, and you can't ban people for appearing disingenuous. They believe what they're writing. These comments aren't coming from people in a mindset to observe their own actions from a distance, which is what the Principle of Charity requires.
When a commenter is convinced that a topic is very important, and that it's a moral imperative to change the minds of whoever opposes them, "zealot" is one way to describe this situation. It seems to be the underlying force behind all this bitterness.
Scrolling down in hopes of finding a reasonable comment is a recipe for disappointment. Worse, it adds fuel: Many of these comments are from people fed up with zealotry.
Ideally, the mean-spirited comments would be whisked away to the bottom of the thread, where they belong. But they're not offtopic so they can't be detached.
I've often wished for a way to view a thread without any nesting, i.e. like /newcomments but for one specific thread. That way I could at least come back later without having to scroll past the same tired meanness. It'd be a lot easier to spot the gems posted as replies.
You could as easily have said the same thing about HN at every point in its history, yet for all its weaknesses it has managed to survive as a semi-ok place for online discussion far longer than human nature, statistics, and every internet law would have predicted.
That didn't just happen by accident. To stave off inevitable decline has been the main intent behind the design of the site and all the work on it. So, bad as things sometimes appear and critical as everyone sometimes sounds, it's worth remembering that HN has a track record of finding new things that work—for a while—at slowing decay.
Check how long I've been here. Not only did I know all of that, but it's the entire reason why I left a reply, and why I've stayed on the site. The goal was to characterize the problem for you in a way that you may not have considered, and I was trying to be thorough about it. (I also tried to come up with some new idea so that it wouldn't read as a complaint, even if it was probably a bad one.)
Making the Principle of Charity part of the guidelines implies that you'll ban people who specifically refuse to follow it. When I said "It probably won't work," I meant "Remember orange usernames, and how badly it fragmented the community? Just be careful." Dealing with these people by trying to apply social pressure might backfire, since they are very vocal and motivated by something other than curiosity.
I find it odd that a comment urging us to interpret others' words charitably begins by attacking the motives of the author of a comment under discussion. If you were jacobolus, would you find this response charitable?
It's entirely possible to come to a different interpretation of a text without having an ulterior motive.
Who are your family members that are poor? I hate it when a specific class of people tries to get us feel bad about inequality when we personally know through our extended families what poverty actually is and that inequality isn't whats propelling it, it's what's saving us. The just types of inequality of course bring us more.
I think PG highlighted pretty well the mechanisms which drove away wealth inequality in the last century. I think PG commented only on the upper end on the wealth distribution scale and was of the opinion it is not a problem. He did not comment it's ok for people to be poor. These issues are not completely linked. Economics are not a zero sum game. The wealth distribution curve can hypothetically have any shape. That it tails to ridiculous numbers in the larger end is not the problem. The problem is the price level in the society, and how the wealth distribution is spread in relation to this average level. I don't think he expressed any opinions on the shape of this distribution. And this has at least three things of concern, not one. The average price level , the shape of the wealth distribution and the total wealth in the society are all dynamic.
Anyway I read his argument as "please ignore the tailing and focus on other things". This is at least my interpretation and if it's correct I agree. Jealousy never hurt any one. Extreme poverty, on the other hand, is quite detrimental to an individuals life.
Lots of people will pick fights with people who have an audience (like pg) just so they can borrow that audience for a short while.
I'm not convinced that most of the aforementioned responses weren't motivated by that. So, given that almost anything pg will write/has written will get the same treatment, why would he play their game by bothering to defend himself?
In fact, there is a pureness to insulating yourself from the cacophony of opinions that you get online: someoen will always have an adversarial opinion and life really is too short to try to address any or even some of them.
If I was him, I would let my friends be my guide to when I'm talking out of ass, rather than randos on the internet.
If you propose a radical idea like "income inequality isn't bad", you need to expect a debate because the idea is far from proven.
It sounds lame, but PG's essay is a stanza in a larger societal conversation, and conversations involve more than one person. To weigh in on one side invites response, especially if you're influential.
It certainly doesn't seem like a radical idea. Most of the responses started out with some variation of "well, we didn't mean literally all income inequality is bad. Obviously some income inequality is good. We just have too much. No one actually wants perfect income equality. pg is arguing against a strawman". In that sense, he successfully pointed out that the shorthand phrase "income inequality" causes equivocation when taken literally, where both sides of it are using to mean different things.
Unfortunately, most of the responses never made it much past identifying this confusion between the literal meaning of income inequality and what they meant, by saying we have "too much" income inequality. This is a tautology, and most responses failed to address the important question of "how much is too much?".
Most responses instead then focused on inventing or imagining a lot of things pg didn't say, things they thought he might be implying. pg responds by simplifying his essay, so that there is less stuff to read into it. People still try to read too much into it. pg gives up at responding to things he didn't say, no time for BS.
I think he added to the conversation a good point, that many people are sloppy when they refer to income inequality, and that it is not all bad, and that we need to be more precise when we talk about what the real problems are. However, people mostly ignored that...despite actually agreeing with what he actually said, they wanted to disagree with what they thought he said...
> If you propose a radical idea like "income inequality isn't bad", you need to expect a debate because the idea is far from proven.
Let's say that Bob is a farmer, and (with the same land) can grow twice as many crops to sell in a year as his neighbor nearby. In this scenario, it seems entirely appropriate to me that Bob has greater income - that is, the income of Bob and his neighbor are unequal.
Let's say that Alice is a video game designer. Alice creates an incredibly popular game called Clash of Clans that has 20 million users and earns $1.5m in revenue per day. Bob the farmer quits his job and creates a video game instead, which only sells 10 copies, since while he's great at farming he's a bad video game designer. Is it surprising or bad that the incomes of Alice and Bob are unequal?
Do you work for a living? Let's say a coworker at your place of employment comes to work and does literally nothing, every day. Does he deserve the same income as you?
No, it is not bad that people earn different amounts when they're differently productive. This incentive toward productivity drives society forward. It would be incredibly demotivating to most of the world if people were not made better off through their own efforts to become more productive, effective, and driven. I doubt anyone would argue that all income inequality is bad - instead, as a peer comment points out, the actual debate is about how much is bad, or for what reasons.
The purpose of PG's essay was to point out that income inequality has multiple components and is a complex phenomenon. He observed that technology amplifies this difference in productivity (consider the example of Alice who can make a video game and sell 20 million copies with recurring revenue; being that much more productive as a video game designer is simply impossible as a farmer.)
I read some "rebuttals" to the previous essay, and while there were definitely some valid points brought up, a lot of them seemed to me to have misinterpreted a lot of what was said. PG tweeted about feeling like a lot of his side of the "debate" was pointing out that he hadn't said something. [1]
From PG's essay "Economic Inequality": "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them... Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources."
This feels like the heart of that particular essay and displays a rather breathtaking misunderstanding of poverty, its causes and its inhabitants. This blames poor people for being poor.
How am I misreading this? I don't feel like I'm cherry-picking, I feel like I'm finding the theme of the text. If that's not it, then what is its theme? Its central idea?
From later in the same essay: "Louis Brandeis said 'We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.' That sounds plausible. But if I have to choose between ignoring him and ignoring an exponential curve that has been operating for thousands of years, I'll bet on the curve."
Again: this sounds like PG saying "In the choice between fostering political power in people at large and concentrating money in the hands of those who already have it, I'll choose the latter." What's there to misinterpret?
I thought this essay, without context, was very sweet. Life is too short. But read as a non-response to critics of the "Income Inequality" essay it takes on a callous tone.
No it doesn't. A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy. The portion you quoted makes this distinction clear: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources."
If we found a way to give everyone the same opportunities, there'd still be economic inequality. Is inequality what we should attack? It's probably better to attack the undesirable causes directly. The essay made this point clearly.
It does imply that, actually. This is a life or death topic for millions worldwide and he decided to trample all over by making an argument in a vacuum. There is a great deal of circumstance, nepotism, and luck that goes into success, and the essay read as very juvenile coming from someone as wealthy as he is.
> A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy.
If it doesn't imply that poor people are lazy, then what does it imply? That the rich and poor are equally driven, and that something other than effort (luck, inherited wealth, etc) makes the rich rich and the poor poor?
I read it as claiming that there are lucky driven people, unlucky driven people, lucky undriven people, and unlucky undriven people. And then that most rich people fall into the first category.
This is totally compatible with all poor people being in the second category, and no poor people being lazy (3rd and 4th categories).
(I disagree with his essay, but for different reasons than this.)
I see what you mean, but wouldn't that make PG's point a tautology? If the difference is "productivity," and "productivity" is defined as the intersection of luck and drive that make people rich, then all PG is saying is that "the irreducible core of [economic inequality]" is having come into possession of wealth.
It really seems like one can either read PG's essay as a Randian screed or as poorly argued cant. I saw it as the former, but I can understand reading it as the latter.
> then all PG is saying is that "the irreducible core of [economic inequality]" is having come into possession of wealth.
Not quite. He's saying (in my reading) that even if you legislate away all the other sources of inequality (even to the point of wiping out all assets and giving each citizen an equal amount of cash to start anew), inequality would still arise due to differences in personal productivity / drive.
Seems true to me, although entirely irrelevant to the topic of real world inequality.
So then he's back to saying that inequality would arise because some people are "more driven" than others. Another way to phrase that would be to say that those with less money are simply less driven. Put in uncharitable terms, they would be poor because they were lazy.
It really sounds like he believes this to be the cause of real world inequality, too:
"Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups. They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
> [saying] inequality would arise because some people are "more driven" than others [=== saying] those with less money are simply less driven.
Slow down there. You can't just take the converse of any old statement.
PG is saying: IF ((starting equal) AND (differences in drive)) THEN (ending unequal).
You are saying that PG's statement is equivalent to: IF (now unequal) THEN ((earlier equal) AND (differences in drive)). Which translates to "Poor people are poor only because of laziness."
Furthermore, the quote you provide says: IF (rich now) THEN (probably driven earlier), which crucially says nothing at all about people who are not rich now.
> Slow down there. You can't just take the converse of any old statement.
This is in the context of a hypothetical universe where "the only way left to get rich is to start startups." In that universe, PG asserts that the driven will do well, thereby creating inequality. Since we know inequality exists, some will have done less well, and "determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
To go back to what you said earlier, this isn't directly relevant to real world inequality. But the essay posits this hypothetical world as a parabolic justification for economic inequality. The essay acknowledges that "few successful founders grew up desperately poor" but refuses to engage in any discussion of why. It will only examine a simplified universe, which allows the author to make implications about the real world and then hand wave any reactions away when others engage with those implications.
If you think it was a justification of inequality then you are reading it wrong. His argument is that there are good things which inherently produce inequality, so it is too non specific of a target. We're better off attacking rent seeking and poverty than inequality as a whole.
You are missing the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition. PG's argument is that being driven is necessary, not sufficient. You have to be driven to get rich doing a startup, but being driven on its own is not enough. Thus, you can be driven and poor.
He then weakens his claim even further, as quoted in the parent: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality" such that he admits doing something really productive is not the only source of inequality. So, there is really nothing in there that implies either of things you suggest.
PG strongly implies that wealth can be created by anyone with enough drive and determination. Put another way, if you are not creating and amassing wealth, it's because you don't want it hard enough. To quote from his essay:
"Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups. They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
No, it doesn't imply that at all. It doesn't say anything about the people that aren't creating and amassing wealth. It simply says, of the people that are getting rich, most of them are driven. The thing you could get away with saying it implies is that you could have all of the other positive attributes and opportunities of those people, but not be driven and fail. It doesn't say anything the people without the opportunity or positive attributes to get rich, because being driven is a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency ]
From the perspective of that quote, the people getting rich in finance that would be switching into startups already have the combination of sufficient positive attributes and opportunities, including the necessary condition of drive/determination. If they lacked those things, they wouldn't be in that group of people that would have gotten rich in startups.
PG points out that being driven is not a necessary condition for being rich: "there are a lot of people who get rich through rent-seeking of various forms, and a lot who get rich by playing games that though not crooked are zero-sum."
Since the skills necessary to succeed in finance are distinctly different from those necessary to succeed as a startup founder, I assumed that the essay was attributing success to the one attribute it specifically calls out: determination.
PG claims that if all other avenues to wealth are shut off, then the driven and determined will "do well" at starting startups. That is not at all the same as saying that all successful startup founders are driven.
If the game is more equitable the tall centers or the driven founders will do better. If bribing the ref/lawmakers is an option then this is less true.
How is the idea that variation in productivity leads to a variation in income a "breathtaking misunderstanding of poverty"?
It's absolutely true that variation in productivity leads to a variation in income and it's also true technology acts as a lever and is increasing the variation in productivity between people.
At no point did PG say anything like what you claim it "sounds like" he is saying. The essay was an argument to attack rent-seeking, and other bad behaviors, but not the variation in productivity. It also argued that even if all rent-seeking were eliminated, there would still be variations in income because some people are far more productive than the average.
Keeping in mind that PG is a venture capitalist -- as in, a financier -- how should we apply your interpretation of his essay to PG himself? His current job is incubating companies and then collecting returns, so are you saying that PG was arguing that he is the problem?
A an example of rent collecting would be if he used his wealth to lobby for a law requiring all start-ups to have a license which an organization he controlled granted (and charged for).
He's providing incredible value/wealth to the startups he advises and invests in. I'd also argue that his essays are a great deal of wealth given to the world.
If you truly don't think he is contributing to wealth creation, I can only surmise that you really don't understand the job he performs and the wealth created by people who are good at that particular job.
Angel investing and venture capital are jobs that are also prone to the Peter Principle. What makes them different than many other jobs, especially angel investing, is that the person has promoted themselves to their own level of incompetence. Just because some (maybe many) angel investors are incompetent and don't contribute to wealth creation does not mean that none do.
His essay focused on one particular lever, technology. His original lever was technology. Now he uses other levers, economic capital, social capital and experience to create wealth. Extracting value from economic capital alone is rent seeking. This is what banks do with loans. Providing economic capital with advise on how to most intelligently make the most of the capital goes beyond mere rent seeking and enters the realm of wealth creating activities.
>>How is the idea that variation in productivity leads to a variation in income a "breathtaking misunderstanding of poverty"? It's absolutely true that variation in productivity leads to a variation in income...
No. Productivity has nothing to do with income. You can be the most productive widget-maker in the factory. That doesn't mean you will make a lot of money.
Income inequality exists and has been growing because those at the top have been reaping the increases in productivity of those at the bottom. In fact that's the entire debate: employee productivity has massively increased since the 70s, but wages have not reflected this.
> You can be the most productive widget-maker in the factory.
You are using a non economic definition of productivity, and he is using the economic one. In Economics, productivity is the value of what is produced, not the quantity.
This is really the heart of the debate: what is the origin of wealth? Is it mostly productivity, people working hard and reaping the benefits? Or is it mostly opportunity, people being in the right place at the right time, and reaping the benefits?
Where you fall on pg's essay is defined by your answer to that question.
I tend to read with a charitable eye, so I don't take the same meaning as yourself. But, he's chosen an expression that allows a lot of interpretation.
The way I read it, I assume we're talking about a cohort, and the point is, on average, the least lazy of the cohort will probably do better.
The least lazy people participating in a ponzi scheme get more money?
Obviously not, so what you're assuming and/or implying is that life is fair, that the rich deserve their success and the poor are lazy, which is exactly the point people are arguing, so you're begging the question.
>> Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources.
> This blames poor people for being poor. How am I misreading this?
FWIW, I read it differently. I think Paul is saying that even if we had a world where everyone had a truly equal opportunity, in the sense of having similar (or at least adequate) childhood nutrition, intellectual stimulation, education, etc., there would still be variations in productivity between individuals that would result in different economic outcomes.
The second quote I read simply as saying that Paul doesn't think the tendency for wealth to concentrate can be stopped.
If you want to complain that Paul could have expressed himself better, I won't argue; I agree that was by far his worst written essay. And I suspect he is genuinely pained by the reaction it received. To whatever extent this new piece is specifically a response to that reaction, I think it's more hurt than callous.
> if we had a world where everyone had a truly equal opportunity, in the sense of having similar (or at least adequate) childhood nutrition, intellectual stimulation, education, etc., there would still be variations in productivity between individuals that would result in different economic outcomes.
That argument is still missing the point. Variations you will always have, but no guarantee that the same people would come out on top, unless you believe that the hardest workers happen to mostly come from well-financed backgrounds and caucasian gene pools. There are many people who work hard all their life and never make it out of the slums. Working hard is not a differentiator, it's what gets you a seat at the table. On the way up everyone works hard. Slackers don't even compete. The difference between those who make it to the top and those who don't is mostly not effort, it is opportunity, and good instincts to leverage that opportunity. In a truly fair world the people who came out on top would be an almost completely different set of people than those who are at the top today.
I feel like the criticism of the essay was not because of its content but its theme. It felt like a defense of the current system, whether taken narrowly as SV or broadly as global capitalism. This struck a nerve because most people in their gut know that the current system is fundamentally unfair and needs to be replaced by something better. It cannot be a good system that made it so that the set of people who own as much wealth as the poorest 3 billion all fit on a yacht, and not even a very big one. People got angry because they thought he was defending the way things are, even if his actual position was more nuanced.
It's a weird essay. I think it goes wrong from the very beginning. From the second paragraph:
[B]y helping startup founders I've been helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality is bad and should be decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders. No one should be.
I think this is ridiculous. Creating new millionaires is not increasing inequality. I don't know anyone who thinks that (not to say that Paul might not have run into a few people who think that way). The problem, as you say, is the profound concentration of wealth into the hands of a few multi-billionaires. I would say also, it's the fact that the middle class in the US is actually shrinking.
The fundamental way that the wealthy can help the middle class, while helping themselves at the same time, is by investing in new businesses that create jobs. This is precisely what YC is doing! This isn't increasing inequality but decreasing it. Not only are they creating jobs directly, they're also doing so indirectly, by teaching people -- even those who don't get into their program -- how to start startups.
Founders don't get rich unless they build a successful business. And again, I don't think anybody minds that they can get rich; after all, a lot of them then either start new businesses or become angel investors themselves. There's nothing wrong with any of this, quite the contrary, and if Paul really does run into people who think there is something wrong with it, this is what he should tell them.
I would go so far as to say that YC and its ilk are among the most creative, hopeful, positive things happening in the US economy today. Though I'm not involved with them directly -- I haven't even worked for a YC company -- I am very glad to have them here in the Valley, and I'm excited to see what they do in the coming years.
Generally as a matter of rhetoric one does not pick out a single attribute to predicate of a class of people, unless one wishes to imply that other classes do not possess the attribute, or that the attribute is a sufficient condition for membership in the class.
What makes it a dirty rhetorical trick is, of course, that one can then reply to one's critics "ah, but I didn't explicitly say what you read into that".
Draw a 2x2 matrix of people who "got rich" (i.e. experienced significant rise in wealth) and are "fairly driven". This will give you four groups:
1) Got rich and weren't driven.
2) Got rich and were driven.
3) Stayed poor and weren't driven.
4) Stayed poor but were driven.
pg statement says he's been exposed with group 2, which he highlighted. You seem to accuse him of implicitly highlighting group 3, and would prefer he implicitly (explicitly?) highlights group 4.
Is that the gist of the argument?
The statements "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven." and "Most people who are fairly driven tend to get rich." are not logically equivalent.
Yep. Pg is a good enough writer that he knew what he was doing; and he would've explicitly stated if he wasn't making the social darwinism argument.
Social darwinism has always been popular with the top 0.01% (and those who strive to join thes. Whether they earned their money collecting taxes, collecting rents, as entrepreneurs, or as the product of crime, the wealthiest have always written in the manner pg did.
Part of me is outraged by this, because I used to respect pg.
Part of me is realizes that perhaps I'm the fool for thinking that pg was different in any meaningful way than any other plutocrat.
Commenters stating that the essay blames poverty on the poor really are reading something into the essay that wasn't there (at least for me). The topic of economic desparity has become such a hot and emotional one that it seems impossible to have an honest conversation about what it really looks like, what are the causes and effects, etc. It seems very important to me that we drop the tribalism and fighting so that we can have an honest /argument/ about this topic.
There really is severe suffering at the bottom of the economic scale here (SV/peninsula), and in my opinion it is the shared responsibility of those of us who have lots of options to figure out how we can help to relieve some of the suffering. However, I don't thing that needs to be the singular focus of every single discussion of economic inequlity, and I don't think it's productive to pan this essay for not really addressing that.
>Commenters stating that the essay blames poverty on the poor really are reading something into the essay that wasn't there (at least for me).
He did call those who disagree with Zuckerberg's letter envious losers, so how can you read something like the Inequality essay without that colouring it?
I skimmed the linked article and searched it for "envious losers" but didn't find the phrase you mention. It did have a nasty tone, and seemed more like a personal attack and attempt to incite anger than a reasoned response to the ideas presented.
The article presents, as an image (presumably for archiving purposes in case the tweet is deleted), a tweet from pg saying, and I quote:
@sama I think the reason you're surprised is that not being a loser yourself you underestimate the power of envy.
(in response to a tweet saying "It takes a lot for the internet to surprise me, but the general reaction to Zuck's letter did it")
As to the rest of your comment... I think you're reading something which takes an aggressive tone in promoting its argument, and mistaking that for a personal attack. There is quite a strong critique of the "startups create value" idea, beginning with the observation that they don't, really -- VCs confer value and legitimacy upon certain startups, and not on others. Which means that in a startup-based economy, such as the one pg argues for, pg and his friends would wield an enormous amount of power. In a true startup-based economy, VCs would literally be the central planners, signing off on which businesses can and can't be started (I mean, in theory someone in such an economy might privately have access to enough capital to get going without VCs, but the deck would still be heavily stacked against those people, and there aren't exactly a lot of them). And it is entirely fair game to question the motives of someone who has such a strong incentive to favor a true startup-based economy, which of course the essay does.
He suggests that social mobility is highly correlated with non-laziness (whether expressed through hard work, not hard but smart work, natural curiosity, drive to tinker with stuff, or ability to deliver on a project started without letting the inertia set in).
That does not mean that poverty is correlated with laziness.
The only logical conclusion that follows is that laziness is not highly correlated with social mobility, e.g. people who are poor and lazy have not statistically been exposed to much social mobility.
"How am I misreading this? I don't feel like I'm cherry-picking, I feel like I'm finding the theme of the text. If that's not it, then what is its theme? Its central idea?"
I don't see how he advocated a position that poor people deserve to be poor. He advocated a position where being rich is ok. These are two different things. It also focuses discussion on economics - eliminating mega-wealth should not be made priority, but the focus should be placed on poverty minimization.
You're using the colloquial definition of productivity while PG was using the economic definition. The economic definition has nothing to do with how hard you work--it has to do with your economic output. Bill Gates working at McDonalds would be tremendously unproductive (by the economic definition). A farmer who works the land manually is much less productive than one who uses a tractor, even though the manual laborer is probably working "harder" than the technology-enabled one.
I quoted PG paragraph by paragraph in my response... seems hard to misinterpret things that way. I think PG probably had more thoughts on the issue of income inequality which perhaps he thought were clear in his essay, but in fact were not clear to readers primed by awkward wording at the start.
It's pretty hard to misinterpret a lot of the things he wrote, though.
You can choose to spend your debate time defending the sanctity of the original point, or you can choose to follow the ideas that are brought to you. You can look for the kernel of intent, or you can try to swat people away for making logical fallacies.
Debate isn't always about winning. Sometimes it can just be a back and forth exploration of an interesting subject area. But you have to treat it that way.
I think this is true but hardly surprising. The average participant in an argument on the Internet is interested not in the truth but in winning. Who wins an Internet argument is thought by that participant to be decided by the audience, which is less clever than the debaters and wants quick, emotionally satisfying resolutions. It is therefore a winning strategy for him or her to ignore nuance and instead attack straw men and try to humiliate the opponent. Paul Graham's hierarchy of disagreement is inverted on Twitter.
Thinking about this long enough makes large-scale democracy very scary because it operates in the same terms on the same media.
Wide disagreement? Sure, the people who disagreed wrote essays, but people who agree are usually invisible (how do you write an essay about agreeing with some other essay? and why would you bother?). I think the reason some people got so riled up was that there was so much uncomfortable truth in those essays. Just as people usually don't bother to post when they agree with something, they usually don't bother to post when they disagree with something that is obviously nonsense. Graham's essay created the perfect storm by hitting a raw nerve with a vocal community -- but that doesn't mean there was "wide disagreement."
In general I think you're right regarding uncomfortable truths riling people up, but my response to PG was more out of a desire to correct what I perceived to be incorrect thoughts on PG's part.
I think there was in fact wide disagreement, though.
People got riled up because he touched an issue that effects people a lot in real life, is seriously effecting our society and democracy for the worse and got it really, really laughably wrong. And as one of the hyper-rich he has a bully pulpit with which to broadcast his thoughts.
Also because most of his essays are very good, so this one was uncharacteristic and surprising.
He doesn't have a "bully pulpit" because he's hyper rich. He's been writing fantastic essays that have been widely shared for much longer than YC has existed (including one responsible for modern spam filters which made email usable again 16 years ago).
Also, I think the last 2 essays pretty much nailed it. If you found them "laughably wrong", it was likely due to the assumptions you brought with you to reading them, not due to any fallacies in the content itself.
The Bayesian spam thing was already known before the essay.
Essayists should expect critiques. His argument was that technology is the creator of inequality and it can't be stopped. That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect. This is the capitalist thesis. It's not quite Randian but it's close enough that it comes across as one dimensional. In his defense he said we should focus on other drivers of inequality. However the counter to the capitalist thesis and the most direct way to address inequality is taxation.
This is the basic political argument that defines society.
>"His argument was that technology is the creator of inequality and it can't be stopped."
Not quite. The argument was that technology is a lever that multiplies the differences in productivity between us, not that it is the creator of it.
>"That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect."
Businesses generally capture this wealth. PG has argued in many essays that start-ups are a great path for the most productive of workers to capture the value of their contributions rather than cede them to existing business areas.
>However the counter to the capitalist thesis the most direct way to address inequality is taxation
But is this really what we want? Do we want to broadly discourage all wealth creation at the same time? Or would it make more sense to focus on the non-productive drivers of inequality, rent-seeking behavior etc?
The essay suggested (quite accurately) that actual taxation rate doesn't change much due to tax avoidance issues. Even now, we have what appears to be a very progressive system on the surface. But due to its complexity and many, many loopholes, those with more income pay a lower rate than average in practice. Simply declaring a top tax rate of 90% wouldn't stop this and hasn't in the past.
One loophole was the use of corporate benefits in lieu of higher pay. So yes, ideally you should organize to capture your value. Either in a startup, or a union, or a country, or a planet. Wealth is not capital. It is human ingenuity.
How much human ingenuity is equivalent to the United States' railroad network? To the Three Gorges Dam? To the physical infrastructure of the Internet? Human ingenuity allows more effective use of capital, but the sheer fact of ownership of capital can often be more valuable.
> But is this really what we want? Do we want to broadly discourage all wealth creation at the same time?
Is this a given/has this been proven? I do not believe taxation (alone) discourages wealth creation. Otherwise certain high-tax countries would not be 'creating wealth' today.
Regardless of my personal perspective, this is unfair. He stated a position which is not only widely disputed, but the dispute over which has an entire field of media and academics devoted to it, and which routinely splits the population roughly half and half (look at basically any election result in the western world). And he disagreed with your side. He's in the other 50% of the population from you.
To claim that being in the other 50% makes somebody "laughably wrong" or a "bully" is not a fair statement. (To say that there is "wide disagreement" is entirely reasonable, but to be fair one should also point out that there is also wide agreement)
This argument has been going on for centuries, with countless millions of people chipping in, without anybody really winning it. It is quite unlikely that this thread, or indeed this year, will be the place where somebody wins it. I think it is reasonable for PG to acknowledge this and bow out of the argument, and that's how I interpret what he's doing.
This isn't really about red vs. blue -- the "red" side acknowledges massive wealth inequality as a genuinely bad thing as much as the blue does (recall the president most known for trust busting, and recall the 'R' next to his name -- Republicans like markets, not wealth inequality). The two sides just have different explanations for what causes it and what will resolve it. This is about understanding an issue. The essay is indefensible; many, many people have taken the opportunity to eviscerate it because it presents such an easy target. There are plenty of other HN threads for you to peruse if you need specifics.
Half the population does not agree with the stance given in the essay. This argument has not been made for centuries; it has not been made at all because it is wildly out of sync with reality.
I would agree it's very reasonable to bow out of it because life's too short if you are a millionaire; in that case the argument really doesn't effect you so why bother with it, it's just academic.
Also "bully pulpit" doesn't have anything to do with being a bully.
I would reiterate OP of this thread: I love PG's essays and I hope this one isn't a way of saying he is dissuaded by his readership challenging him on one that didn't quite hit the mark. We read them in the first place because they never cease to provoke thought.
You have your history all wrong. If you try to squeeze the Republican party of 1900's economic policy into the current American liberalism vs. conservatism spectrum (I say squeeze because obviously the political positions of that time were different than today's), they would be liberal, and the Democrats of that time would be conservative.
So the fact that once upon a time red meant liberal, but no longer does, does not prove that economic conservatives have reducing economic inequality as a direct goal.
If you pay any attention to current political discussion, e.g. the field of Republican candidates they do NOT argue in favor of inequality. They describe it as a problem just as the Democrats do.
And of course that's false. The Democrats of the 1900s are conservative; the new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes? And Hoovervilles were created by socialist thought?
What? The New Deal was socialist, which is liberal on the American political spectrum. Calling it part of American conservatism is clearly untrue.
Virtually no Republicans have a stated goal or platform of reducing economic inequality. Pretty much every Democrat running for president does. To claim otherwise is also clearly untrue.
I suspect you are mixing up the fact that in American politics, conservatism (which is "red") consists of what Europeans would call liberalism (in fact the New Deal was part of the reason the definitions flipped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition).
The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority... with its base in liberal ideas, the white South, traditional Democrats, big city machines, and the newly empowered labor unions and ethnic minorities. The Republicans were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as an enemy of business and growth, and liberals accepting some of it and promising to make it more efficient... By 1936 the term "liberal" typically was used for supporters of the New Deal, and "conservative" for its opponents.
> the field of Republican candidates they do NOT argue in favor of inequality.
That's because they are, and have been completely fine with inequality. They have done nothing, absolutely nothing which indicates they are concerned with income inequality and propose no solutions. So when you say they do not argue in favor of inequality, you're correct. That's because they completely ignore it. They pretend it doesn't exist.
> [T]he new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes?
The New Deal was economically liberal but socially conservative; I'm inclined to say that it _was_ an iconic conservative effort. In particular, it was what gave the country enough social cohesion to win WWII; and it was what made the South lose interest in a second attempt at secession. The Southern Agrarians had spent the 1920s building a new argument for an independent CSA; once the New Deal started up, they mostly switched to supporting the US.
Funny story: not being american, my red and blue are the other way around. I'd recommend not interpreting this in terms of US politics. I'd even more strongly recommend not making claims about the beliefs of the side which you don't support.
If you want examples of why this isn't a good idea, just read any politics thread on social media, and look for the point at which they inevitably degenerate into "no, that's not what you're saying".
Since it apparently wasn't clear enough from my earlier post: the argument that has been made for centuries is that the other side doesn't exist, is clearly wrong anyway, and nobody could possibly agree with them. The main problem with this argument is that the people who make it seem to have found somebody to argue with.
If you aren't interpreting this in terms of US politics you are completely missing the context, so it makes sense how you could have misunderstood the essay/issues. PG lives in the US, works in the US, every word of what he says is in that essay is about US economics/culture. His essay is a response to the US movement to recognize and deal with income inequality, one of the primary issues US politicans are handling in preparation for the US presidential election.
And you used two paragraphs to state a rhetoric 101 textbook's definition of "straw man" -- that's not what I'm doing.
> People got riled up because he touched an issue that effects people a lot in real life, is seriously effecting [sic] our society and democracy for the worse and got it really, really laughably wrong.
What did he get wrong, specifically?
The gist of PG's essay was that inequality consists of some bad components ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential") and some good ones (e.g., people producing things of incredible value); that it's a complex phenomenon made up of multiple parts; that inequality is at least partially due to individual differences in drive and productivity; that technology amplifies these differences in productivity.
He is concerned that people do not recognize this, and believes they need to recognize this if they are going to fight the bad drivers of inequality effectively. He is concerned that people oversimplify the issue and assume that inequality is all bad, or intrinsically bad.
Really? I don't think that at all. Sikh guy here whos extended family back at home actually have to deal with poverty and could definitely use some just start up generating inequality in the area. There is just inequality.
Nope, you've completely missed the point. This entire conversation is a waste of time, for example. And yes, I am self-aware and realize that I'm adding zero value too. People will reference his "long-form" for years, while this conversation will be forgotten within days. Don't waste your time on things that add zero value, or are quickly forgotten.
Yeah, I'm curious why this essay was written. A week after having finished spending (evidently) quite a while writing two essays about economic inequality and your personal role in increasing society-wide inequality, why the sudden change to caring about spending time with your kids? And why the need to say this out loud?
This essay strongly feels like rationalizing to oneself an unwillingness to engage with reasoned criticism (of which there was quite a bit). If pg wants to spend time with his kids, good for him, that's certainly going to be more fulfilling than arguing online. But throwing arguments over the fence and then proclaiming the desire to spend time with your kids genuinely does not seem fulfilling.
No, there's no connection with this essay and the last one. He's been thinking about writing about this topic for a long time. In fact, one of the things Paul and I talk most about is that life is short and we need to savor time with our kids and do things that are meaningful to us. So trust me when I say that, as PG's wife, I believe you are mistaken.
Well don't lose your faith on HN's sense of humor, there are some of us who do get the joke :) maybe next time add a /sarcasm tag or such? I admit that it will water-down the effect, but it is better than nothing!
Dutch is a language of proverbs. One of them is 'High trees catch a lot of wind'. The further you stick your head out the bigger the chance that someone will try to score points of you, either by picking apart every word you wrote or by mis-interpreting if possible every little turn of phrase. This goes with the territory of being very visible, and Paul is now a fairly high tree in the tech landscape his essays offer easy hand-holds to those that wish to practice their written wrestling skills. This will likely get worse as YC goes on to more and more successes (pretty much un-avoidable with the speed the snowball has been going down-hill).
Since plenty of people reading Paul's essays are more than capable of figuring out the intent rather than taking pot-shots at the form in which that intent was cast I don't think given the choice between playing 'someone's wrong on the internet' and spending time with your kids there should even be a contest. On the other hand, action begets reaction and there isn't an essay that Paul wrote that did not have its share of discussion and picking apart so maybe simply accept that and totally ignore the responses?
Enjoy the time you have while you can, indeed, life is too short and I wished I could spend and had spent much more time with my kids. Before you know it they'll be borrowing your car keys and all those years that feel like they will last forever will have vanished.
While it's possible that that caused pg to write this essay when he did, the position articulated in it is completely consistent with what he's been saying for a long time. And a glance at his Twitter feed makes it clear that he finds joy in being a dad and makes it a real priority.
I disagree. This is an important topic in life. Too bad he published this one just after the previous ones about wealth inequality.
Having lost my parents some time ago and having two kids I can concur with his sentiments fully and can confirm they are spot on.
The incentive to respond to acidic comments and trolls in online discourse is a pervasive feature of the medium - and it seldom creates any value. Thus it's a perfect example of useless bullshit. The discussions are usually ephemeral in nature - quickly forgotten - and not influential. This is not to say there are no influential discussions - but that at the heat of the moment most discussions feel more important than they really are.
I think Paul Graham is just sharing his thoughts openly. He has his up and downs like everyone, but he has a public too. It's his way of sharing his inner thoughts and he's got all the rights to express himself.
I don't know what you mean by bubbling. The overall essay produces a quite useful heuristic. Perhaps the specific example is inspired by recent experience... But it has power for me.
It's amazing to watch how many young people get caught up in various online outrage missions. Hours spent browsing Twitter or Reddit to dive incredibly deep into some current news outrage is bull shit wasted time.
Get back to work and try to build something (if that's what you want). Or be with your family (if that's what you want). Or do whatever. But this stuff (including my post right now) is addicting.
> The "flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you from pausing to savor life...
I'm glad he pointed out this seemingly small detail. This took me a very long time to understand.
EDIT: It reminds me of another great post by Paul Buccheit. It's so important to have the 'heroes' of startup culture explicitly spell out these values:
> I worry that perhaps I'm communicating the wrong priorities. Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. What's most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves. If we "win", but have failed to do that, then we have lost. Winning is nothing.
I'm a more productive engineer now that I have small kids than I ever was before. I don't have time for bullshit. I don't build my own PCs, I buy Macs. I don't waste time building some over-architected nonsense on a side project, I ship the MVP. When I do take time away from my kids I maximize it by learning three or four new technologies, patterns, or libraries at once.
When you realize how short time really is you ruthlessly cut bullshit.
I just took it to mean he doesn't really value spending his time building a PC when a Mac fulfills his needs. If you truly enjoy building PCs, then it's not bullshit.
I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down to see this response. It's all subjective! Personally, I love the quiet, "zen" feeling of distraction free focus on technical work. For me, that's my anti-bullshit. I wish I could spend more time doing things like building PCs!
Of course, with all of us being different humans with different experiences and different mindsets, YMMV.
When time is scarce, you start to prioritize things that are really important to you. If your main life goal is to ship great software, then building your own PC is just taking away precious time.
As DHH said in Twist interview: "If you're not working on your best idea right now, you're doing it wrong"
That's just someone saying something in an interview. (Yes I know who DHH is.) I bet he wastes plenty of time on pedestrian things in life but that doesn't make for a very quotable soundbite, does it?
> When time is scarce, you start to prioritize things that are really important to you.
It takes me ~10 minutes to shop online and buy the parts I need to put together my own PC. When I receive it, it takes me an additional 15 minutes to unbox it, and put it all together. Then another 30 installing the OS and all the programs I will need.
That's less than an hour. Given the price difference between a Mac and a PC with the same exact equipment (same CPU, RAM, HD, etc), we're looking at ~$250 USD on the low end and ~$550 USD on the high end. Unless you're making $250 USD (or more) per hour, it's most definitely cheaper time-wise to build your own PC.
Unless you do this all day, there's no way it would take 10 minutes to research all the components that go into a PC and put it all together. Heck, even researching which model of Mac to buy took me more than two hours.
15 minutes to unbox probably doesn't include taking out the trash. :)
I'm a power user, so I need a lot of programs and setting them up properly usually takes 4-6 hours if not more. Just finding and installing proper driver for stuff like my Wacom tablet takes 30 minutes or so. Again, if you do this every day, then yes, it could be much faster. But I buy a new computer once in 4-5 years and really cannot bother to automate.
Last two times I got a new computer, it took me 2-3 days before I could work on them at full speed. It sure is worth more than $550. Not calculating the cost of stress if something does not work properly.
I have been using Linux for 7+ years and Mac for just over one year. The difference: Mac is mostly Plug and Play. Linux is often Plug and Pray. Hell, doing something simple like copy/paste on Linux still feels like a game of chance.
I love open-source and freedom, but as I got kids I became more pragmatic. The time is limited and I'd rather spend it on building stuff than figuring out some quirks in the operating system.
> Unless you do this all day, there's no way it would take 10 minutes to research all the components that go into a PC and put it all together.
No, this isn't true at all. The first time you put together your own computer, sure, maybe, it may take a bit longer. But the next time and the time after that, it becomes quicker and quicker because you already know the basics. It only takes 10 minutes to see what new GPUs or CPUs have come out.
Hell, if you didn't know anything about PCs, it would only take 5 minutes to look up all the parts in the latest Mac and order them off newegg. You could build your own exact copy of the latest mac and the research time would be negligible since you already know what parts you need since they're listed right there on the Mac SPEC sheet. And you'd save yourself hundreds of dollars.
> Last two times I got a new computer, it took me 2-3 days before I could work on them at full speed.
My 64 year old senile-ish father without any background in PCs put together his own PC and had it up and running in less than 4 hours. I don't buy 2 days at all. That's either an exaggeration or an outright lie.
> I'm a power user
A power user that cannot put together his own PC in under 2 days? I'm not sure I buy that. It's like a MLB player not being able to hit a ball that's traveling over 65 MPH. Even the pitchers are well enough versed to get hits occasionally.
> But the next time and the time after that, it becomes quicker and quicker because you already know the basics. It only takes 10 minutes to see what new GPUs or CPUs have come out.
Is this assuming that one would be building a PC with only a few years in-between?
It’s been more than 8 years since I built a PC, having assembled three of them in the past. It would definitely take me more than 10 minutes to research hardware because, after being shielded from the hardware complexity after using a Mac for so long, I’d need to research to make sure my previous knowledge of how to build a PC are still applicable.
Sure, it wouldn’t take me 2 days, and if not a lot has changed since I last built one four hours seems doable. But if I was very unsure of myself somewhere in the middle is more realistic and probably a more accurate assumption of how long it would take someone research, order and assemble a PC.
Please read my post. I could put together a PC in about 3-4 hours max. But getting all the software I need to patch, compile and configure to work properly on Linux would take the rest of the period.
Your 64 year old senile-ish father probably uses one or two applications. I use over 50 different programs.
Also, I don't care about hardware at all. Last thing I remember is that there were Slot 1 and Slot A CPUs. I would need to research stuff before even figuring out which components are compatible. Perhaps it's all user-friendly now, but back in the day I recall always missing some cable or adapter to get stuff to work (like USB-PS2 converters for mouse or VGA-HDMI converters for monitors, etc.).
I care about building software. Hardware stuff is not something I need or want to deal with.
It would be like MLB player going to a baseball bat factory to make his own bat. He just wants a good bat. He doesn't care what wood is it made of, or what material is used for coating. He wants to pay for top-notch bat and concentrate on hitting the balls.
The idea is because your time is more valuable. I'm not sure I agree with a Mac having a lower total cost of ownership in either cost or time, but that's the idea. Don't do work Apple pays Chinese laborers to do.
N.B. I realize this experience is not typical of most users.
I had an IBM laptop before I had a Mac. At least one major component had to be replaced every single year for the duration of the four years I had it. Keys broke. the screen was shite. Windows crashed constantly. I lost all my files multiple times. After having it for more than a year it ran as if someone had permanently applied the brakes and it was just grinding against them and no amount of service seemed to be able to fix this. I spent weeks searching for the specific charger I needed only for the company to ship the wrong one, then when I had to replace it a second time they no longer manufactured it so I had to buy one second hand. That machine was an utter sinkhole of money and time. I swore off Windows products that day and have not spent a dime on them since. Maybe things have gotten better since XP but I'm not about to risk it.
Now I have a Mac. I have had the same MBP for 6+ years and it has never once required service, it runs perfectly, has never lost data, and has been a charm to work with. Sure, it cost me 2x as much as the IBM but in cumulative costs that is nothing. I could easily see this laptop lasting me another year at least.
I am not saying you are wrong, just providing my experience in which the cost of ownership in money and time has in fact been lower.
Just how long ago was this? IBM laptops all used the same charger for about a decade now, the only difference is that some models require a higher maximum wattage than other. They changed over to a common connector around the same time Apple switched to MagSafe from what I can tell.
For me, owning a Mac has a much lower cost of ownership in terms of time. I boot up the computer and it's ready to go.
I don't need to reinstall the OS or download an uninstaller to remove bloatware.
I don't need to install antivirus (yeah, this one isn't required, but the reality is that there is much more malware targeting Windows).
I don't need to wait for Windows Update to finish before my computer shuts down or boots up - these are particularly painful.
I don't need to worry about programs scaling to a retina/high DPI display.
I don't need to spend time reading articles about how Windows 10 is tracking me and how to prevent it.
I don't need to worry about my laptop breaking, because if it does, I'm a genius bar appointment away from getting it fixed. If my Samsung laptop breaks, I need to ship the whole thing, likely wasting weeks.
Not everyone experiences these issues, but this is how it feels for me. I made a very gradual transition to OS X - owning PCs, building PCs, using OS X on my PCs for almost a decade, then finally buying a Retina Macbook Pro.
> I don't need to reinstall the OS or download an uninstaller to remove bloatware. I don't need to install antivirus (yeah, this one isn't required, but the reality is that there is much more malware targeting Windows). I don't need to wait for Windows Update to finish before my computer shuts down or boots up - these are particularly painful.
While some of your points are valid for *nix setups as well (in terms of hardware, etc.) you've implicitly made the assumption that the only alternative to OS X is Windows, which strikes me as somewhat off base in a place like HN.
Matches my experience. I switched from Linux to Mac after 7 years of knowing exactly which patch to apply to what piece of system (either kernel or various libs and apps) to make it work properly.
And I think twice before starting new projects. Although, I still sometimes feel like twice is not enough.
Incidentally, one of the stickiest lessons I received from my Econ 101 prof was that if you ever have a choice to go out with a couple with kids or a couple without kids, you should opt for couples with kids, for they value their leisure time as though it was ground up rhino horn.
On the other hand, how long does it really take to build a new PC? Maybe an hour for research and ordering parts... another two hours at most to put it together. Seems like a small investment for something you're going to use a lot.
Well, sure, but if you spend a bit more money it will take no time at all, because somebody else will do it for you while you get on and do something else :)
Do you have kids? Finding time to use said built PC is as precious (in the early days of children) as the time spent researching and building. I read somewhere that new parents lose 6 months of sleep in the first 18 months of having a child. Provided this estimate is wildly inaccurate, new parents are still trying to catch up 2-3 years later.
I have two kids under two, and I've built two PCs in that time. It takes a few hours, but I enjoy it. It's relaxing to do stuff like that at the end of the day. My alternatives are watching TV or reading Hacker News, and I don't see how that's any better :).
> I don't have time for bullshit. I don't build my own PCs, I buy Macs.
It is sad - and disgusting - to see this degree of arrogance in bluntly categorising those who use (or build) PCs (and not Macs) as indulging in bullshit!
I am happy that you have found a useful computer in Mac. At the same time, though, please realise that hundreds of millions of computer users choose otherwise too. And, please do not conclude that they have time for bullshit just because of that!
Whoa whoa slow down. Parent sounded like they simply don't have time to build computers anymore and that buying a Mac is just far easier (less driver issues due to the vertical stack, etc).
This seems perfectly justified and fine to me; I don't get why you're so upset by it.
> Because harsh expressions are usually gratuitous. Because blanket assertions are usually wrong. And, because combining both is rude.
This never happened though. The parent simply stated they didn't have time for bullshit then said they purchase Macs so they don't have build PCs. He / she simply stated what they considered important. It was personal, there was no blanket assertions at all and it was in the same tone as the article so what was gratuitous in this context?
> For instance, did you really need to say `Whoa whoa slow down' when you began your reply? Did that add value?
I certainly did due to the outlandishness of what I replied to. It sounded two orders of magnitude harsher and more personal than I would have expected especially on HN.
I wasn't going to reply to this because, well, bullshit. But ...
You took the worst possible interpretation of the original comment and then took it, out of context, as a personal attack. Then you posted a very nasty reply. Then, when you got called on it, you claim rudeness on the other parties.
Think about that. Re-read the entire thread. Because you not only missed the point of the OC, you missed the point of the original essay.
Cooking can be creative and relaxing. I don't find it all too different from coding which I also like :) But yeah it's relative but the worst choir... You clean yourself? I cannot imagine you find it worse than cleaning which is mindnumbing crap. Maybe cooking can be as well if you cook more or less the same every day or cook something uninspired?
I guess you are both very young; I used to think eating was a waste of time in my 20s. I was dreaming of having a nutrition drip so I didn't have to waste time cooking or eating. But nothing beats cleaning or doing laundry imho.
Well, if all you care about is value for time spent/productivity then building your own PC probably isn't the wisest decision.
On the other hand if you have more free time than money then buying a Mac would probably be not the best decision.
Context is important and I don't think OP was generalizing that every PC user is a fool. It's just not the right thing for him personally since he got kids and would rather spend time with them.
Great post, thanks.
Today I also was thinking about how it sucks to getting old. I'm 32 but I see how I'm getting older, my friends getting older and youth looks much brighter :) Value your life and time, young people, enjoy your bodies, don't risk your health, make more love, travel more :)
It's said that growing up is watching your heroes become human. I'll admit pg was (and still is) one of my heroes and the prime reason I moved across the country to join a startup. While I never got into YC, my (short) life is much better for that move. Yes, the scales dropped from my eyes as I realized just how unglamorous startup life can be and the unfailable pg started to, well, fail.
On the other hand, there's something about the following sidenote that is profoundly human but works quite the opposite of the painful shock implied in my first sentence:
> I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I get attacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me. And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!"
This is almost universally true. It is incredibly reassuring to know that even the greats struggle with this and antagonists pursue us through all walks of life. I'll admit, I've held back from publishing articles that all of my reviewers liked because I worried about the inevitable negative backlash that comes with standing for anything on the internet. Maybe one day I will publish. If so, this essay helped a great deal in getting me there.
Oh, I fell for those sour grapes hard (and might I say, you're absolutely right). It's trivially easy to find "think"pieces supporting any opinion under the sun, making my insistence on declaring grapes sour even easier.
It was used against me at one point, someone invented a personal connection to pg that just so happened to hit all of the right nerves. He was trying to get me to quit my job to work for him. Almost worked, save for a stroke of luck (pg mentioning this guy had ~5% of the credentials he claimed). It's unbelievable just how many bullets I've dodged over the years...
Hear, hear and well said. That inevitable backlash is there indeed and can stymie you out of the gate. The thing is, those who have bold ideas and/or stand for something tend to also be more sensitive to this negativity. I suppose we know that, at the end of the day, our ideas are nothing in a vacuum. As much as we'd like to blaze the trail, we need people to follow or join, not attack and tear down.
Yet, we'd like to think of ourselves as less sensitive, perhaps because we implicitly compare ourselves to the "greats" (if only in belieiving they must have what it takes to achieve what we want to achieve). But, we somehow mythologize that they are above it all, which leads to the mistaken idea that perhaps we don't have what it takes after all.
This was timely for me. A reminder to get my head back in the game, let myself off the hook for feeling the negativity, but to keep pressing forward. Feeling it is not evidence that we are too weak or soft. On the contrary, it means that we care enough about our mission. It should then be worth the inevitable bruises we'll have to take from those who find comfort in the status quo we seek to challenge or who revel in simply demeaning others.
Life is short. So why not do something about that? Are we not meant to be the very essence of creation? Is this not an age of revolutionary progress in biotechnology?
Just this past week I helped out a young company whose founders are working toward clinical translation of a method of clearance of senescent cells, one of the very first actual honest-to-goodness narrow focus rejuvenation therapies to emerge from the labs. This is something that works to repair and reverse a form of tissue damage that contributes to near all age-related disease.
This is far from the only approach to human rejuvenation presently under development.
But, you know, life is short, so pay attention or not, up to you.
I've noticed that recently pg's twitter has a lot of comments that you would see on a typical stay-at-home mom's Facebook wall. It's refreshing to see someone with the financial opportunity cost of pg opt to stay home and hang out with the kids.
While his opportunity cost is higher, he has the luxury of having "enough", i.e. being financially independent. His focus on reducing bullshit in life and spending more time at home would not be possible to the same extent without the bank account.
What we see here is the typical thoughts of a middle aged man who has already made his fortune. Nothing to see, move along.
I lived in Sydney for 8 months and Brisbane for 4 years. When thinking back, both feel like a distinct part of my life to a surprisingly equal extent. Maximizing the number of distinct phases in your life seems to me to be important in making it seem longer.
Very good point. A visit somewhere entirely new for just two weeks feels like 3 months of comparable memories to the two weeks in my regular mundane life.
It points at another approach to getting the most out of life: change as much as you can. Maybe once everyone in your family had had a few of those magical Christmases it's time to look for something else fun.
This is article is contradicting itself although it may not be so obvious. I imagine dwelling on regrets can be classified as a bullshit activity. It certainly does for me. I am sure you can infer the rest of my argument.
Just do the best you can with your time. If you become unhappy with how you spent it you can use that to inform you on future decisions but you can't change the past.
The pain of having missed significant time with someone you care about is severe, but it is also a thing you can't change.
I am not saying pg is wrong, I am pointing out a problem.
Life may be too short to worry about how you are spending your time.
> One great thing about having small children is that they make you spend time on things that matter: them. They grab your sleeve as you're staring at your phone and say "will you play with me?" And odds are that is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option.
This also has a darker cousin for some parents: since spending time with one's children is always a viable and valuable option, spending time without them becomes difficult. People without children often notice that most of their parental friends disappear. This despite the prior protestations of many that "We'll still do things after we have kids."
Undoubtedly some parents work more efficiently than their childless selves (this is also motivated by a desire to earn money to support the kids). But can they socialize more efficiently too, in particular with people who don't have kids?
Some practical ways that readers can implement this advice:
1. Don't work for a start-up, since they don't impart salary-winning experience to you, they don't pay you or provide reasonable benefits, and they also don't allow you the freedom to work on big ideas that they usually promise. The lines used to sell naive engineers on working in start-ups are as paramount to life's-too-short-bullshit as anything can be.
2. Don't agree to work in Agile/Scrum-like one-size-fits-all software management environments. Almost every single aspect of these systems is bullshit and will waste your time and break down your morale while draining away your productivity in the best years of your life.
3. Don't work in open-plan offices or even offices that merely have cubicles. It's been settled for a long, long time that even in dense urban areas, providing private offices for individual knowledge workers is extremely cost effective for businesses, as productivity, work-place cognitive health, job satisfaction, moral, etc., all go up substantially. Generally the only reasons for open-plan offices are (1) bullshit trendiness in which an organization performs a shallow copy of some other organization, (2) hyperbolic focus on short-term costs, which means you should be thinking that the upper management doesn't know what they are doing and are bullshitting you -- it's similar to seeing a company stop providing free coffee as a money-saving tactic. It's bullshit -- coffee is so cheap and the productivity and good will it brings are so valuable that it's virtually never a reasonable plan to cut it; and (3) environments where upper management get off on surveillance and cognitive manipulation, and so it becomes a company cultural value to cram everyone into big rooms where you function more like a piece of office furniture than as a worker.
Personally I would also add that life's too short for enterprise C++ and Java (the languages themselves are quite fine, but anyone telling you that some legacy system couldn't have been maintained and incrementally brought into a better state by 2016 is, once again, bullshitting you and see you as nothing but a glorified code janitor).
I think if I could give any advice to young developers, it would be that if they want management types to respect them throughout a prosperous career, they have to avoid the bullshit of the items above. If you let a manager or executive bullshit you by duping you into working for a start-up, by getting you to agree you are a child whose own creative thinking about problem solving can't be trusted and so Agile/Scrum cookbook management is needed and you must play your part, or by getting you to agree that your natural inclinations for privacy, clarity of thought, protection of productivity and time, should all be sublimated so you can be a "team player" by wearing headphones that cost more than your employer's 401k matches for the year so you can just barely function 10 feet from a foosball table, you've already lost, and it will take years to undo the damage.
I haven't done 1 but I have experienced 2 and 3 at tech companies. The scrum/agile and open plan office stuff is so bad for me that it's been all the confirmation I need to know that I need out as soon as possible into something else - life is definitely too short for that.
And only by insisting on this stuff, confidently and for very rational reasons, together as a community of engineers and developers, during employment negotiations, will we ever start achieving wider spread adoption of healthy, employee-affirming and humanity-affirming behaviors by organizations.
One might argue that its better to live in borderline poverty and be happy than submit to the crappy environments offered by American corporations mentioned above. Just make sure that you have some passions to keep you busy when living in this mode.
I understand where you are coming from, but it is not that I am buying 'the lines of bullshit that make [me] feel this way', it just so happens that I need (any) job in the tech field as a recent CS grad, and I have only started searching and I would gladly be employed even under non-ideal conditions.
This, I presume, is the predicament of at least a small portion of people in our industry. Yet, your sentiment and line of thought are interesting, and I fully agree with you. I just hope that you understand that even logical agents can be forced to take non-logical decisions given the state of affairs of the world.
> I need (any) job in the tech field as a recent CS grad
Would you take a job that offered you $1/year of wage, or a job that offered literally zero vacation days? No? Well then it means you don't need any job, but rather you are in a hurry to select some job that still meets certain minimum criteria.
You probably at least require that the job pays well enough for you to support yourself, and maybe others too, and that the job offers you access to affordable medical, dental, and life insurance. You probably also expect the job to have some range of regular hours, approximately 40-50 hours working per week, with an expectation that you do not usually need to work overtime or on weekends.
You probably also require that while you're working, you are shielded from dangerous situations (e.g. you're not writing code while dangling from a helicopter, and there's not a hole in the roof over your desk, ...).
This is a lot of stuff that you require. In fact, out of the space of all possible jobs, you're actually looking for jobs that fit into an extremely tiny niche.
These things just happen to be the most common norms around employment in the developed world. We don't have to negotiate as hard for them now, and you know why? Because people in the past negotiated extremely hard for them, and refused to take 'no' for an answer, and led strikes, lock-ins, demonstrations, bargaining agreements, and political diplomacy in order to secure either laws or strong social norms to protect these things.
When those people approached employment, they didn't say, well, I'm a beggar with few options, so I had better subject myself to anti-human treatment and just take whatever I am given.
Instead they said, I am a human being with talent and skill (and if you earned a degree in CS, you have a lot of talent and skill compared to vast sections of the working population). They said because I am a human being, I deserve to be treated with some types of basic respect and dignity and not sold bullshit excuses for anti-human conditions.
And now, the battle for employee-protecting laws or social norms (at least for developers) has shifted to be about protection of workplace privacy and productivity (get rid of Agile/Scrum and get rid of open-plan offices) and the respect to be paid fair wage and compensation for your skills (don't fall prey to start-up bullshit which argues that you ought to view certain sets of experiences or chances as valuable and be willing to trade compensation to get them).
You don't need any job. You need a job that meets your goals. When you're young you might fool yourself into thinking that sitting in an open floor plan or agreeing to be bound by Agile aren't a big part of your goals. Then you realize that managers, executives, investors, and so forth, who put you in the open-plan office and tether you to Agile/Scrum fundamentally see you as commodity labor, perfectly easy to replace, and have stopped caring whatsoever about your career progress from almost the first moment they hired you.
It would require a massive, short-term discount factor on your own personal value to make that worthwhile -- such an incredibly self-deprecating amount of discount that it realistically could only be due to a literal emergency situation -- like you need a paycheck today or you will literally die.
And I'd argue that if you have minimum salary requirements, or some fuzzy idea of regular working hours or minimum vacation requirements, then you're not at all in a situation where you need wage as a literal emergency necessitating you to deeply undervalue yourself. And even if you did, you could simply compromise on the field of labor, and do something besides CS jobs if you had to.
At any rate, I do not agree that simply being young and needing a first job is any excuse at all for being willing to tolerate open-plan offices, Agile/Scrum, or the false promises of start-ups. Just...
This was a really powerful essay. Don't know if using "8" is a good way to measure if there are not a lot of something. 8 light-years is pretty far and 8 tons is pretty heavy. But overall, great insights.
My favorite: "One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future. Fake stuff that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That's how it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape jabs into your consciousness like a pin."
This article resonated a lot with me. It verbalizes what I've been trying to do over the past year or so with my own life. For me a lot of the BS elimination on the first pass was just getting rid of distractions and interruptions, so I cut out the phone/email/chat, etc all during my working hours except for certain times, like 10 minutes after lunch and just before the end of the day. The noise was all driving me insane.
The next step was to remove things from my life that cause stress and are not worth the effort because of the BS they involve. Whether that's just life situations or clients it has been very refreshing.
The next step was to kill a lot of tv/movies, and most of my free time internet usage.
Finally, I started steadily filling in the new time gainings with things I really care about and the personal sense of well-being and accomplishment has improved drastically.
So I have no intent of doing anything other than continuing to go down this road, I've gotten in better physical shape, better health, enjoy life more, have learned a new language, visited many new places, my stress level has dropped by at last 200%, its been a very positive journey so far.
I'm trying to achieve currently what it seems you have already achieved. The problem is I cut everything out, but then there will be a moment at work where you're waiting for something (in my job for example, waiting for RHEL to install), and you decide to glance at Facebook. Then you do it a couple of times. Then you get home and decide as it's raining you won't go cycling. It all builds back up and I'm back to square one.
It feels like trying to kick smoking. I have a list of stuff I want to do (fix up my motorbikes, finish my 'day van', get back in to DH mountain biking) and a list of stuff I do (video games, drink, NetFlix, Reddit), and I always seep back to the latter one.
Might give it another go soon, life is short after all.
I think the biggest thing is to start very small. Seriously, very very small. I had for years done more or less what you describe. So I finally just decided to start super baby simple and have one tiny little goal and accomplish it. For me it was hard to eliminate looking up my news sites when I had a free minute or two. Eventually, I just deleted my bookmarks and edited my /etc/hosts and that did the trick for me.
But I didn't try to cut out those distractions and start a workout routine at the same time.
Also I didn't try to start anything else until the last goal had become kind of routine (like brushing your teeth in the morning).
There are still many things on my list to see and do and there's still stress in my life, but I feel with this method of one micro step at a time you slowly chip away in unnoticeable steps until now for me a little over a year later you've made a big noticeable dent.
oh yea, I finally quit smoking too :)
EDIT: most of my goals also had to do with eliminating stress. For instance, my "learning the language" was to just turn on the radio and listen to interesting talk shows in swedish and occasionally look up words, all which was very relaxing for me. My exercise is swimming which is super enjoyable for me and something I always look forward to (even when I didn't have the time to do it). I don't know what it would be like if you do not actually look forward to or enjoy your goals...
Does that fact that you're here on HN suggest that it's not quite working?
I ask because HN is my biggest time sync. It's the thing I grab whenever there is a moment of free time and even when their isn't. I type it into my browser without even thinking about it.
I banned it once with /etc/hosts and that lasted about 3 months or maybe it was 6. I'd still read on my phone but that wouldn't happen except out and about or at bathroom breaks.
Then at some point I turned it back on. When it got bad again I blocked it in /etc/hosts. But, it's available in a VM. I'd hoped that would be enough to discourage me but it's not. Instead my habit now is to launch the VM. It is slightly better than unblocked because I still type it into my main browser and the block keeps me off until I eventually use the VM
I'd guess I spent 2-4 hours a day on it. I woke up a 8:30 today. Other than a shower I've been on HN. It's 10:10
Virtue ethics could be a useful framework for thinking about it.
Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue talks about the concept of a tradition as forming a narrative backbone for a person's life and actions. Conversation is also crucial, and traditions can be seen as extended conversations. I suggest that Hacker News is a place where such a tradition is constructed and maintained. It gives rise to an "imagined community" [2] of this profession of startup development (which is tied into the tradition of open source hacking in interesting ways, sometimes conflicting).
In that sense browsing HN is not merely a bad habit. Maybe the negative tendency is to become a more passive participant, or just gossiping all day. Ideally the site would feed into a larger pattern of creative action, instead of only providing some click buzz relaxation. So we could think about how to use the conversation to give wind to our sails, so to speak—or just how to be more active in the actual tradition, not just the discussion surrounding it.
That's a big discussion and I've already spent an hour writing this comment, after deleting a long and boring explanation of the MacIntyre book's thesis... So I'll just say that Cal Newport's new book Deep Work was pretty inspiring for me, and it's a quick read.
I think you could formulate a dialectic where deep work and community conversation feed into each other. It's like how books are the deep artifacts that conversations can orient themselves around, and the books themselves are like concentrated results of sometimes decades-long conversations.
I think it's time for us to start questioning if we really "Want" to do these things so much (exercise) why we don't do them. Do we just want to have done them (it'd sure be nice if I had a nice bod, I should workout. I should learn 12 languages and 3 instruments too!)? Or do we think we want them? Or is there some perverse reason why our body keeps us from doing what we truly want to do in that moment?
I am following a similar strategy (almost identical) but it is not as rosy as described here.
You may lose friends because they may think you don't care enough about them since you don't call them frequently anymore (and emails do not work for everyone).
You are unreachable through the modern messengers because you refuse to waste time on a gazillion of them.
Other people update their friends through Facebook. If you opt for an alternative like email (async and focusing on message) then you may be weird for some.
Being focused is great and indeed makes wonders in productivity. Nevertheless, in most cases around 6 hours of quality mental work is the limit. The rest you have to do a lower mental effort activity. That means either writing boilerplate code, answering emails, meetings, reading hn but possibly not learning a new language or meeting new people.
Stress levels fell because you are in control of your life or so you feel since you have limited external signals. That may not be true but you can't be sure always since you have limited environmental feedback. Nevertheless, being ultra responsive means less control also for me (without getting too philosophical).
All in all, I agree with all the steps listed above. That does mean they are the path to enlightenment for everyone or without drawbacks.
Having mentioned that, I feel that for a similar strategy was net positive. Mostly because context switching has large costs and because our modern world makes money by distracting us (feeds us with us about superficial needs/lifestyle and forcing us to measure our sense of self on metrics based on narrow minded philosophies -- consumerism of info(/)products).
I'm not getting involved in the overall discussion, just wanted to highlight this gem. This is so true.
In a conversation about Netflix's announcement of worldwide availability the other day I put it this way - so much of the economy is based on cultivating and indulging in mindlessness.
If you cultivate mindfulness you see how pointless and wasteful so much of people's activities are.
Not just that, its premise is wrong. "Wasteful" and "pointless" don't have any objective definition in the context of moral value, so what seems wasteful and pointless to one person could in fact be fulfilling and meaningful to someone else.
I resonated with the article as well, for similar reasons. I think trimming the fat from you life, so to speak, frees up so much time for meaningful endeavors.
> The next step was to kill a lot of tv/movies, and most of my free time internet usage.
So I actually figured out that TV was the devil in early high school and stopped watching it almost entirely. There are very particular shows that I will follow and if that show isn't playing, the TV is off.
I also don't watch movies to kill time. I pretty much only watch movies with friends or if it's a movie that I suspect will be thought provoking.
I'm still working on the internet distraction piece. I'd love to hear strategies for wasting less time on the internet.
> Finally, I started steadily filling in the new time gainings with things I really care about
I was very fortunate that I've had this mentality from the start. I pursue what interests me. Whatever that is. Don't care if it's weird, or if I'm the oddball. I just go for it. That has led me to have the most random diverse group of hobbies/skills/life pursuits. I'm a programmer. All-American football player (and national champion). Football coach. Gamer. I'm darn good at drawing/illustration. Pretty good cook as well. I like to sew. Now I'm in med school.
I look back at everything I've accomplished, the skills I've developed, the friends I've made along the way, and the future ahead of me, and I feel like I've had a full 25 years. Like I could die tomorrow and not be too upset about how I spent my time.
I often look at other people's lives and wonder who they would be if they simply went after the things they enjoyed.
What I noticed i was doing was taking shortcuts for the past year so I can work more on my startup. First few years I barely hung out with friends. Big mistake.
Smaller shortcuts, like eating unhealthy to save some time, not showering everyday, shaving, to optimize my working time, was taking a toll on quality of life in the long term. Therefore I said to myself no shortcuts! This drastically increased my quality of life almost instantly as i take my time now to do "normal" things in life without rush. Actually enjoying it.
I also neglected working out and to do things I really like, always thinking I'll get to it once my startups takes off. Since I decided not to work after 6pm, I suddenly have a lot of free time which gave me the possibility to workout without feeling guilty and do other stuff I like.
I think I can further optimize by doing things like you described and will try some of them. Thanks for sharing.
My father's death taught me to finish the things I start. He was a software engineer in the 70s and 80s, and he taught me how to program when I was a little kid. When he died in 2011 I went through his computer, looking at the projects he was still working on. It was profoundly sad to think that these projects were frozen, that no one would ever use them. The experience of looking through his unfinished projects led me to make the transition from hobbyist programmer to professional.
It was hard to stop playing with a bunch of different projects and make myself focus on one single project, but in the end it has been extremely satisfying to finish what I start. I wish my father was still around to see what I've done, but I might never have finished anything without the lesson of his passing.
While Richman has vowed to cease being open-minded to absolute horseshit, acquaintances reflected on his approachability.
"I love Blake," coworker David Martin said. "He's such a good listener. A lot of people are closed-minded and self-absorbed, but Blake always makes an effort to hear where I'm coming from. The world could use more people like him."
I'm (only) 23 and I've felt this for a while. I've been trying to leave my small no-name company for a higher calibre job in NYC for a few months now. I guess I'm lucky because I know what I want - but I need to wade through extreme amounts of bullshit to get there. I'm very efficient with my time but if I made every second worthwhile, I'd go nuts. Sometimes BS time (videogames, the pub, etc) are necessary.
> I'm very efficient with my time but if I made every second worthwhile, I'd go nuts. Sometimes BS time (videogames, the pub, etc) are necessary.
Be careful with equating "unproductive" and bullshit. Society at large only cares about your productivity, and there is always pressure for you to do "productive" thing that advances some imaginary life ladder.
From your POV and benefits, all those productive things might all be bullshit.
Yeah. I don't consider playing video games for an hour or so to wind down "bullshit", provided they do not stop me from achieving my daily goals.
Not only are "unproductive" activities like film, video games, socializing/hanging out very enjoyable for me, but the most interesting people I've met do a lot of them. All in moderation.
A few years ago I finished my studies and became a freelancer. It took me until this year to realize that in the effort to 'value' my hours, I forgot how essential and valuable it is to spend time doing things that are relaxing and that might seem unproductive at first sight.
It reached a point where I would often work in the weekends, forego any vacation, feel guilty about the hours I did 'nothing' (out of sheer necessity), and sometimes even apply a little too much pragmatism to my friendships. I'd ask myself if the interactions were useful or somehow furthered my personal development or career, and forget that, while this is not an unimportant question, the value of a friendship can be the time spent enjoying each other's company.
This important realization came after I had worked a lot, built a relatively stable career with enough clients and a good portfolio, saved up enough money to allow me to not work for at least a year. I had reached my goals, so to speak.
But instead of stopping work and doing things I always put off, or creating things I'd been wanting to create for a long time, I ended up with a (mild) burn-out and a severe existential crisis: now that I had nothing to really worry about, I had no clue what to do with that freedom.
What am I, and what do I enjoy doing, after years of neglecting to explore this?
Currently I'm working on finding more balance, and savoring the little and big things in life. But even now, I need to make sure I have some work because when I stop, my mind just kind of panics from the freedom I have. So I'm taking it one step at a time.
Picking up gaming again has been one of those things I savor again.
Somewhat unbelievably, I still have that 1960's jeans jacket with the patch on it that says, "Do it today, tomorrow it may be illegal." And, all hail the Internet, that thing can still be bought online:
Good timing on the topic, I mean "how short is it?" when it comes to life duration. I'm at a stage of slowing down, cutting back after working for decades "at the front line". Like everyone says, it all zoomed by so fast.
Or did it? I think it reflects the point of view, when we're involved in work, all the details to take care of, we feel overwhelmed, busy, time isn't rushing by at all. But once it's history, the past, all of that is suddenly doesn't exist, it has no reality and it is packaged up in memory as though it was just a brief moment. Kind of like closing a menu what's there is hidden, except we're not reopening it, at least not the same way ever again.
Time is relative, as Einstein said, it goes quickly sitting next to a pretty girl, but a boring lecture drags on forever. The epochs across the lifespan come and go, and I think we judge the duration of experience by its currency because involvement with events in real time gives the sense of time. The meaning of a "long" or "short" time is anchored in such reality.
Anyway I've been thinking for a while that what's important is not how much time we have left to live. After all that's not something we can actually ever know. What matters is what we do with the time we have. I'd surely agree we can't afford to waste it on irrelevancies, pipe-dreams, or bitterness. Far better to do what we can, when we can do it.
I think the problem is definitely finiteness (not length).
I don't understand it when people talk about 'squeezing everything out of life' - As though you could extract real lasting substance/meaning from it.
I don't believe it's possible to "Make the most" out of life - It all adds up to 0 in the end.
"Squeezing everything out of life" implies that you're literally taking the juice out of life and storing it somewhere safe/permanent - In reality, it is like squeezing an orange and then putting the juice back inside the orange.
451 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] thread(I'll throw in, with all humility, my philistine take on philosophy: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/09/geopolitics-for-individ.... It was inspired partly by Paul Graham's previous http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, which IMO is far superior.)
This reminds me of how Karl Popper critiques people's opinions, at times he rejects both the pro/anti side of something, as he did in anti-naturalist history vs naturalist history arguing that both were based on a misunderstanding of the logical content of the thing in question.
In this regard you have misunderstood the logical content of the essay in question, drawing a contrast on two things that are not.
This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please edit incivility out of your comments when posting here.
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Do you honestly believe that it is 'us' who will escalate? Or is it them? Does it look like they're looking for anything else? Look at the egregious response to the essays. Yes, i'm sure we are the ones at fault. I guess i'll stop, but you are wrong in a very plain and ordinary way and I think that request was in poor taste.
It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else sees. And if thats the case, it's not something to be afraid of or to shut yourself off from.
Anyway good luck!
I was going to expand this thought but when I thought what some of the responses might be, I thought, "Life is too short!" and left it as is :)
An essay is partly a matter of working out one's thoughts on some matter. But _posting_ an essay advances some point of view with a supporting argument, attacking the beliefs of others (e.g. Sanders was not named by pg, but could have been). That seems to be _arguing_ just as much as the additional step of responding to one's critics.
I suppose what makes the latter wearying is that it's hard to hear attacks on you personally, and tedious to respond to attacks which are loud but bad. But it still seems that we should (and usually do) value those who engage with their high quality critics.
This is not a hostile but a literal interpretation of the essay and is the same viewpoint advanced by Atlas Shrugged.
Close enough. But, like, is anyone really going to argue with this? With scare quotes, sure, OK, I guess there's an example of someone out there churning out widgets from their blood-diamond-financed widget factory, and that's more of a grey area, but without weird factors like this...yes, people ought to be entitled to what they create. There are valid arguments on definitions of that (patents, land use, etc.) but all of those are disputes on how to apply the main principle, not whether it is legitimate.
> He further argued that they're extra entitled to it because even if you eliminated all other sources of inequality, you couldn't stop them from creating more wealth for themselves: "creating wealth, as a source of economic inequality, is different from taking it
This is a straw man. He didn't argue that they're "extra entitled," he simply pre-empted the (reasonable) argument that not all the rich got rich in good ways.
But in any case: your description of his argument does not match the description I responded to:
“we rich people deserve to have 100x more than the poors because we’re pushing humanity forward”
Do you think the above is a hostile interpretation? I did, so I said so.
(Side note: In a similar but less defensible way, Paul Graham’s summary of Joseph Stiglitz’s several books about inequality [to wit: “The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is to treat it as a single phenomenon. The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.”] was such a ridiculous oversimplification that I suspect either (a) Graham didn’t actually read any of Stiglitz’s books, or (b) he has extremely poor reading comprehension, or (c) his argument is not only self-serving but also entirely disingenuous.)
But anyway, you can’t just strip out all the context and pretend Paul Graham is having a purely abstract argument in a vacuum. The context today is that the level of inequality and centralization of political influence in America is at a level unseen since the 1920s, or perhaps since the gilded age. There’s a political discussion going on in the society at large about whether this development is healthy, and if not, what to do about it. Many people are angry, to the point that Paul Graham’s essay itself is full of paranoid fantasies about being “hunted”.
Anyone making an argument in modern America is implicitly talking about what direction we should be going from where we are currently, and what social/political changes we can make to get there. Most readers are going to understand such arguments with that context in mind, and only bad/lazy writers will ignore it.
* * *
Graham grew up in a well off family, went to Ivy League college and grad school, worked for a few years as a programmer for his own well-timed web startup then cashed out for tens of millions while he was a relatively young man and transitioned into venture capital, where he has been very successful. As far as I can tell he has basically never worked in any jobs other than being a student, running his own startup, or venture capital. He apparently surrounds himself with other rich techies and has no regular exposure to people outside a tiny cultural bubble. From what I can remember, his only essays which talk at all about folks less fortunate than himself are about his school experience, in particular what I can remember is whining about how English teachers are idiots and how the jocks mistreated him.
From such a position of privilege and ignorance, Graham hand-waves away all the concerns of the vast majority of people in America (not to mention the world), and spends his time justifying his own wealth and prestige and insisting that he shouldn’t have to contribute any of it back to society, with the bulk of the argument being “startups are good”, without further elaboration or analysis.
As you might imagine, this seems awfully cheesy to folks reading along who don’t happen to be multimillionaires themselves.
Also, please don't put things in quotation marks when they're not a quote, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609. It may seem a minor point, but it's an important one for intellectual honesty.
Dan: I’m sure Paul Graham and this site will both be fine whether or not you you tell his critics to keep their opinions to themselves.
(Side note: literally nobody is going to confuse my idiomatic use of quotation marks to offset a sarcastic summary of an argument which I claim is as old as civilization for a direct quotation from any particular person.)
In the general genre of PG criticism, my comments are treating him with kid gloves. For a more vigorous and amusing analysis of his essays’ analytical rigor, Maciej Cegłowski provides a gem, as expected, still just as relevant ten years later: http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Since life is short, that’s it for me for this thread.
Evaluating whether or not a criticism of an essay is unfair is equivalent to evaluating whether that criticism is true. It's pretty easy to take "hostility towards PG's points is forbidden" away from this moderation. It might not be entirely, technically true in every single interpretation, particularly the charitable ones you'll apply to yourself, but it's true enough.
I guess I can't be mad at you for protecting the rich people that pay your check.
Yes, in the society and economy we are discussing this is a universally accepted principle.
Bob is a farmer. He has the same amount of land as his neighbor, but he works twice as hard, and grows twice the number of crops to sell in a year. He has twice the income. No one would reasonably claim that he's entitled to none of what he produced. Bob's greater productivity than his neighbor is a source of income inequality - he earns twice as much!
There is a mainstream view that society has the right to tax Bob's income, so he does not receive all of what he creates. That's the debate: how much is fair? Maybe it's fair for Bob to have twice the income of his neighbor, or maybe less than twice as much. Unless Bob gets the same as his neighbor, there's income inequality because of differences in productivity.
No farmer is going to singlehandedly earn a million times what his neighbor earns. However, because of technology, this is now possible in some industries. For example, Notch is a game designer, and he singlehandedly makes a game that sells 20 million copies. Notch now has a vast income that far exceeds the typical game designer. Is this bad? What is bad about 20 million people choosing to give Notch their money in exchange for his game? I don't see anything wrong or unjust about this.
PG's essay points out that income inequality is a complex phenomenon, with multiple causes, some that are good (small groups or individuals creating amazingly valuable things) and some that are bad ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential"). PG's essay from my perspective serves to make the point that perhaps not all income equality is bad, and that there deserves to be more thought on the topic of "how much is bad?" or "what causes of income inequality are bad?", instead of treating income inequality as a one-dimensional issue that is intrinsically bad.
From my perspective, PG's point is fair. Income inequality is not intrinsically bad: when people work hard, improve, and become more productive, they earn more, leading to income inequality. This incentive to improve and produce is good, in my opinion. Perhaps what we as a society should be tackling are bad problems like "kids with no chance of reaching their potential", rather than considering income inequality to be a problem ipso facto.
But in the real world we are not born equal and we do not have access to the same size of 'land'. There are differences, sometime vast in family wealth, property, health care, education and access to nearly 'n' number of resources. Bob may be born with the land and have 'n' amount of time and the luxury to think of things like productivity, wealth, interests, life while Tom may struggle his entire life just to survive or maybe work towards getting 1/10 of the land as his entire life goal.
Moving to the real world property taxes are not fixed on income. Income tax is an entirely different tax that Bob and Tom would pay based on their income irrespective of their land holdings. If Bob is more productive he would pay more tax but I am not sure income tax or 'simple productivity' as a concept is useful to understand or explain inequality and disparity in a world where everyone does not have the same piece of land.
This is exactly one of the main problem with the essay. He argues against a position only very very few people really have. But it goes further than that.
PG is right claiming that you can't stop how technology creates inequality. But he is wrong if he believe that this wealth is created purely from risk taking and hard work. Of course those who are wealthy mostly work hard, but so does everyone else.
But the real issue of course is that if we can't stop technology to keep pushing wealth for some into extremes and for others to keep stalling then the wealth created is mostly due to luck and access to the right people and some timing. Not unlike a Powerball ticket but just of being born into the right context.
And so if PG wanted to show he actually understood the issue. Instead of arguing against some straw man he could have spent some time on using his otherwise amazing ability, to think out of the box, to put forward some thoughts on how society could deal with this. Then he would have at least shown some understanding of the people he was talking about.
Instead he basically says. It's going to continue like this, but don't worry it's better than the alternatives and it's going to be good again.
Why would anyone who doesn't stand to benefit from this ever accept such a position?
I just don't see PG's thoughts as well developed here as they are in other areas and no amount of historical context is going to change that.
The problem isn't merely the dishonesty of trying to make a person and/or their argument sound much worse than they are. It's the degrading effect it has on the rest of a discussion. Once bystanders see that it's ok to throw concern for the truth out the window and optimize for indignation, every standard drops. I don't know if it's true that sharks go crazy when they smell blood, but that's what this effect reminds me of. It seems to be getting worse, and the Principle of Charity might be a rampart against it.
When a commenter is convinced that a topic is very important, and that it's a moral imperative to change the minds of whoever opposes them, "zealot" is one way to describe this situation. It seems to be the underlying force behind all this bitterness.
Scrolling down in hopes of finding a reasonable comment is a recipe for disappointment. Worse, it adds fuel: Many of these comments are from people fed up with zealotry.
Ideally, the mean-spirited comments would be whisked away to the bottom of the thread, where they belong. But they're not offtopic so they can't be detached.
I've often wished for a way to view a thread without any nesting, i.e. like /newcomments but for one specific thread. That way I could at least come back later without having to scroll past the same tired meanness. It'd be a lot easier to spot the gems posted as replies.
You could as easily have said the same thing about HN at every point in its history, yet for all its weaknesses it has managed to survive as a semi-ok place for online discussion far longer than human nature, statistics, and every internet law would have predicted.
That didn't just happen by accident. To stave off inevitable decline has been the main intent behind the design of the site and all the work on it. So, bad as things sometimes appear and critical as everyone sometimes sounds, it's worth remembering that HN has a track record of finding new things that work—for a while—at slowing decay.
Making the Principle of Charity part of the guidelines implies that you'll ban people who specifically refuse to follow it. When I said "It probably won't work," I meant "Remember orange usernames, and how badly it fragmented the community? Just be careful." Dealing with these people by trying to apply social pressure might backfire, since they are very vocal and motivated by something other than curiosity.
It's entirely possible to come to a different interpretation of a text without having an ulterior motive.
Anyway I read his argument as "please ignore the tailing and focus on other things". This is at least my interpretation and if it's correct I agree. Jealousy never hurt any one. Extreme poverty, on the other hand, is quite detrimental to an individuals life.
I'm not convinced that most of the aforementioned responses weren't motivated by that. So, given that almost anything pg will write/has written will get the same treatment, why would he play their game by bothering to defend himself?
In fact, there is a pureness to insulating yourself from the cacophony of opinions that you get online: someoen will always have an adversarial opinion and life really is too short to try to address any or even some of them.
If I was him, I would let my friends be my guide to when I'm talking out of ass, rather than randos on the internet.
Is that "bubbling"?
It sounds lame, but PG's essay is a stanza in a larger societal conversation, and conversations involve more than one person. To weigh in on one side invites response, especially if you're influential.
Unfortunately, most of the responses never made it much past identifying this confusion between the literal meaning of income inequality and what they meant, by saying we have "too much" income inequality. This is a tautology, and most responses failed to address the important question of "how much is too much?".
Most responses instead then focused on inventing or imagining a lot of things pg didn't say, things they thought he might be implying. pg responds by simplifying his essay, so that there is less stuff to read into it. People still try to read too much into it. pg gives up at responding to things he didn't say, no time for BS.
I think he added to the conversation a good point, that many people are sloppy when they refer to income inequality, and that it is not all bad, and that we need to be more precise when we talk about what the real problems are. However, people mostly ignored that...despite actually agreeing with what he actually said, they wanted to disagree with what they thought he said...
Let's say that Bob is a farmer, and (with the same land) can grow twice as many crops to sell in a year as his neighbor nearby. In this scenario, it seems entirely appropriate to me that Bob has greater income - that is, the income of Bob and his neighbor are unequal.
Let's say that Alice is a video game designer. Alice creates an incredibly popular game called Clash of Clans that has 20 million users and earns $1.5m in revenue per day. Bob the farmer quits his job and creates a video game instead, which only sells 10 copies, since while he's great at farming he's a bad video game designer. Is it surprising or bad that the incomes of Alice and Bob are unequal?
Do you work for a living? Let's say a coworker at your place of employment comes to work and does literally nothing, every day. Does he deserve the same income as you?
No, it is not bad that people earn different amounts when they're differently productive. This incentive toward productivity drives society forward. It would be incredibly demotivating to most of the world if people were not made better off through their own efforts to become more productive, effective, and driven. I doubt anyone would argue that all income inequality is bad - instead, as a peer comment points out, the actual debate is about how much is bad, or for what reasons.
The purpose of PG's essay was to point out that income inequality has multiple components and is a complex phenomenon. He observed that technology amplifies this difference in productivity (consider the example of Alice who can make a video game and sell 20 million copies with recurring revenue; being that much more productive as a video game designer is simply impossible as a farmer.)
[1]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/688044252744527875
This feels like the heart of that particular essay and displays a rather breathtaking misunderstanding of poverty, its causes and its inhabitants. This blames poor people for being poor.
How am I misreading this? I don't feel like I'm cherry-picking, I feel like I'm finding the theme of the text. If that's not it, then what is its theme? Its central idea?
From later in the same essay: "Louis Brandeis said 'We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.' That sounds plausible. But if I have to choose between ignoring him and ignoring an exponential curve that has been operating for thousands of years, I'll bet on the curve."
Again: this sounds like PG saying "In the choice between fostering political power in people at large and concentrating money in the hands of those who already have it, I'll choose the latter." What's there to misinterpret?
I thought this essay, without context, was very sweet. Life is too short. But read as a non-response to critics of the "Income Inequality" essay it takes on a callous tone.
No it doesn't. A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy. The portion you quoted makes this distinction clear: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources."
If we found a way to give everyone the same opportunities, there'd still be economic inequality. Is inequality what we should attack? It's probably better to attack the undesirable causes directly. The essay made this point clearly.
If it doesn't imply that poor people are lazy, then what does it imply? That the rich and poor are equally driven, and that something other than effort (luck, inherited wealth, etc) makes the rich rich and the poor poor?
This is totally compatible with all poor people being in the second category, and no poor people being lazy (3rd and 4th categories).
(I disagree with his essay, but for different reasons than this.)
It really seems like one can either read PG's essay as a Randian screed or as poorly argued cant. I saw it as the former, but I can understand reading it as the latter.
Not quite. He's saying (in my reading) that even if you legislate away all the other sources of inequality (even to the point of wiping out all assets and giving each citizen an equal amount of cash to start anew), inequality would still arise due to differences in personal productivity / drive.
Seems true to me, although entirely irrelevant to the topic of real world inequality.
It really sounds like he believes this to be the cause of real world inequality, too:
"Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups. They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
Slow down there. You can't just take the converse of any old statement.
PG is saying: IF ((starting equal) AND (differences in drive)) THEN (ending unequal).
You are saying that PG's statement is equivalent to: IF (now unequal) THEN ((earlier equal) AND (differences in drive)). Which translates to "Poor people are poor only because of laziness."
Furthermore, the quote you provide says: IF (rich now) THEN (probably driven earlier), which crucially says nothing at all about people who are not rich now.
That's as best as I can put it.
This is in the context of a hypothetical universe where "the only way left to get rich is to start startups." In that universe, PG asserts that the driven will do well, thereby creating inequality. Since we know inequality exists, some will have done less well, and "determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
To go back to what you said earlier, this isn't directly relevant to real world inequality. But the essay posits this hypothetical world as a parabolic justification for economic inequality. The essay acknowledges that "few successful founders grew up desperately poor" but refuses to engage in any discussion of why. It will only examine a simplified universe, which allows the author to make implications about the real world and then hand wave any reactions away when others engage with those implications.
He then weakens his claim even further, as quoted in the parent: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality" such that he admits doing something really productive is not the only source of inequality. So, there is really nothing in there that implies either of things you suggest.
"Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups. They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
Since the skills necessary to succeed in finance are distinctly different from those necessary to succeed as a startup founder, I assumed that the essay was attributing success to the one attribute it specifically calls out: determination.
It's absolutely true that variation in productivity leads to a variation in income and it's also true technology acts as a lever and is increasing the variation in productivity between people.
At no point did PG say anything like what you claim it "sounds like" he is saying. The essay was an argument to attack rent-seeking, and other bad behaviors, but not the variation in productivity. It also argued that even if all rent-seeking were eliminated, there would still be variations in income because some people are far more productive than the average.
Edit: s/rents/returns/
A an example of rent collecting would be if he used his wealth to lobby for a law requiring all start-ups to have a license which an organization he controlled granted (and charged for).
Angel investing and venture capital are jobs that are also prone to the Peter Principle. What makes them different than many other jobs, especially angel investing, is that the person has promoted themselves to their own level of incompetence. Just because some (maybe many) angel investors are incompetent and don't contribute to wealth creation does not mean that none do.
His essay focused on one particular lever, technology. His original lever was technology. Now he uses other levers, economic capital, social capital and experience to create wealth. Extracting value from economic capital alone is rent seeking. This is what banks do with loans. Providing economic capital with advise on how to most intelligently make the most of the capital goes beyond mere rent seeking and enters the realm of wealth creating activities.
No. Productivity has nothing to do with income. You can be the most productive widget-maker in the factory. That doesn't mean you will make a lot of money.
Income inequality exists and has been growing because those at the top have been reaping the increases in productivity of those at the bottom. In fact that's the entire debate: employee productivity has massively increased since the 70s, but wages have not reflected this.
You are using a non economic definition of productivity, and he is using the economic one. In Economics, productivity is the value of what is produced, not the quantity.
Where you fall on pg's essay is defined by your answer to that question.
I tend to read with a charitable eye, so I don't take the same meaning as yourself. But, he's chosen an expression that allows a lot of interpretation.
The way I read it, I assume we're talking about a cohort, and the point is, on average, the least lazy of the cohort will probably do better.
The least lazy people participating in a ponzi scheme get more money?
Obviously not, so what you're assuming and/or implying is that life is fair, that the rich deserve their success and the poor are lazy, which is exactly the point people are arguing, so you're begging the question.
> This blames poor people for being poor. How am I misreading this?
FWIW, I read it differently. I think Paul is saying that even if we had a world where everyone had a truly equal opportunity, in the sense of having similar (or at least adequate) childhood nutrition, intellectual stimulation, education, etc., there would still be variations in productivity between individuals that would result in different economic outcomes.
The second quote I read simply as saying that Paul doesn't think the tendency for wealth to concentrate can be stopped.
If you want to complain that Paul could have expressed himself better, I won't argue; I agree that was by far his worst written essay. And I suspect he is genuinely pained by the reaction it received. To whatever extent this new piece is specifically a response to that reaction, I think it's more hurt than callous.
That argument is still missing the point. Variations you will always have, but no guarantee that the same people would come out on top, unless you believe that the hardest workers happen to mostly come from well-financed backgrounds and caucasian gene pools. There are many people who work hard all their life and never make it out of the slums. Working hard is not a differentiator, it's what gets you a seat at the table. On the way up everyone works hard. Slackers don't even compete. The difference between those who make it to the top and those who don't is mostly not effort, it is opportunity, and good instincts to leverage that opportunity. In a truly fair world the people who came out on top would be an almost completely different set of people than those who are at the top today.
I feel like the criticism of the essay was not because of its content but its theme. It felt like a defense of the current system, whether taken narrowly as SV or broadly as global capitalism. This struck a nerve because most people in their gut know that the current system is fundamentally unfair and needs to be replaced by something better. It cannot be a good system that made it so that the set of people who own as much wealth as the poorest 3 billion all fit on a yacht, and not even a very big one. People got angry because they thought he was defending the way things are, even if his actual position was more nuanced.
[B]y helping startup founders I've been helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality is bad and should be decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders. No one should be.
I think this is ridiculous. Creating new millionaires is not increasing inequality. I don't know anyone who thinks that (not to say that Paul might not have run into a few people who think that way). The problem, as you say, is the profound concentration of wealth into the hands of a few multi-billionaires. I would say also, it's the fact that the middle class in the US is actually shrinking.
The fundamental way that the wealthy can help the middle class, while helping themselves at the same time, is by investing in new businesses that create jobs. This is precisely what YC is doing! This isn't increasing inequality but decreasing it. Not only are they creating jobs directly, they're also doing so indirectly, by teaching people -- even those who don't get into their program -- how to start startups.
Founders don't get rich unless they build a successful business. And again, I don't think anybody minds that they can get rich; after all, a lot of them then either start new businesses or become angel investors themselves. There's nothing wrong with any of this, quite the contrary, and if Paul really does run into people who think there is something wrong with it, this is what he should tell them.
I would go so far as to say that YC and its ilk are among the most creative, hopeful, positive things happening in the US economy today. Though I'm not involved with them directly -- I haven't even worked for a YC company -- I am very glad to have them here in the Valley, and I'm excited to see what they do in the coming years.
Huh? He said all the people at the top are not lazy. "All people at the bottom are lazy" doesn't follow from his statement.
What makes it a dirty rhetorical trick is, of course, that one can then reply to one's critics "ah, but I didn't explicitly say what you read into that".
1) Got rich and weren't driven.
2) Got rich and were driven.
3) Stayed poor and weren't driven.
4) Stayed poor but were driven.
pg statement says he's been exposed with group 2, which he highlighted. You seem to accuse him of implicitly highlighting group 3, and would prefer he implicitly (explicitly?) highlights group 4.
Is that the gist of the argument?
The statements "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven." and "Most people who are fairly driven tend to get rich." are not logically equivalent.
Social darwinism has always been popular with the top 0.01% (and those who strive to join thes. Whether they earned their money collecting taxes, collecting rents, as entrepreneurs, or as the product of crime, the wealthiest have always written in the manner pg did.
Part of me is outraged by this, because I used to respect pg.
Part of me is realizes that perhaps I'm the fool for thinking that pg was different in any meaningful way than any other plutocrat.
There really is severe suffering at the bottom of the economic scale here (SV/peninsula), and in my opinion it is the shared responsibility of those of us who have lots of options to figure out how we can help to relieve some of the suffering. However, I don't thing that needs to be the singular focus of every single discussion of economic inequlity, and I don't think it's productive to pan this essay for not really addressing that.
He did call those who disagree with Zuckerberg's letter envious losers, so how can you read something like the Inequality essay without that colouring it?
https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/paul-graham-is-still-askin...
@sama I think the reason you're surprised is that not being a loser yourself you underestimate the power of envy.
(in response to a tweet saying "It takes a lot for the internet to surprise me, but the general reaction to Zuck's letter did it")
As to the rest of your comment... I think you're reading something which takes an aggressive tone in promoting its argument, and mistaking that for a personal attack. There is quite a strong critique of the "startups create value" idea, beginning with the observation that they don't, really -- VCs confer value and legitimacy upon certain startups, and not on others. Which means that in a startup-based economy, such as the one pg argues for, pg and his friends would wield an enormous amount of power. In a true startup-based economy, VCs would literally be the central planners, signing off on which businesses can and can't be started (I mean, in theory someone in such an economy might privately have access to enough capital to get going without VCs, but the deck would still be heavily stacked against those people, and there aren't exactly a lot of them). And it is entirely fair game to question the motives of someone who has such a strong incentive to favor a true startup-based economy, which of course the essay does.
He suggests that social mobility is highly correlated with non-laziness (whether expressed through hard work, not hard but smart work, natural curiosity, drive to tinker with stuff, or ability to deliver on a project started without letting the inertia set in).
That does not mean that poverty is correlated with laziness.
The only logical conclusion that follows is that laziness is not highly correlated with social mobility, e.g. people who are poor and lazy have not statistically been exposed to much social mobility.
I don't see how he advocated a position that poor people deserve to be poor. He advocated a position where being rich is ok. These are two different things. It also focuses discussion on economics - eliminating mega-wealth should not be made priority, but the focus should be placed on poverty minimization.
It's pretty hard to misinterpret a lot of the things he wrote, though.
Debate isn't always about winning. Sometimes it can just be a back and forth exploration of an interesting subject area. But you have to treat it that way.
Thinking about this long enough makes large-scale democracy very scary because it operates in the same terms on the same media.
I think there was in fact wide disagreement, though.
Also because most of his essays are very good, so this one was uncharacteristic and surprising.
Also, I think the last 2 essays pretty much nailed it. If you found them "laughably wrong", it was likely due to the assumptions you brought with you to reading them, not due to any fallacies in the content itself.
Essayists should expect critiques. His argument was that technology is the creator of inequality and it can't be stopped. That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect. This is the capitalist thesis. It's not quite Randian but it's close enough that it comes across as one dimensional. In his defense he said we should focus on other drivers of inequality. However the counter to the capitalist thesis and the most direct way to address inequality is taxation.
This is the basic political argument that defines society.
Not quite. The argument was that technology is a lever that multiplies the differences in productivity between us, not that it is the creator of it.
>"That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect."
Businesses generally capture this wealth. PG has argued in many essays that start-ups are a great path for the most productive of workers to capture the value of their contributions rather than cede them to existing business areas.
>However the counter to the capitalist thesis the most direct way to address inequality is taxation
But is this really what we want? Do we want to broadly discourage all wealth creation at the same time? Or would it make more sense to focus on the non-productive drivers of inequality, rent-seeking behavior etc?
The essay suggested (quite accurately) that actual taxation rate doesn't change much due to tax avoidance issues. Even now, we have what appears to be a very progressive system on the surface. But due to its complexity and many, many loopholes, those with more income pay a lower rate than average in practice. Simply declaring a top tax rate of 90% wouldn't stop this and hasn't in the past.
How much human ingenuity is equivalent to the United States' railroad network? To the Three Gorges Dam? To the physical infrastructure of the Internet? Human ingenuity allows more effective use of capital, but the sheer fact of ownership of capital can often be more valuable.
Is this a given/has this been proven? I do not believe taxation (alone) discourages wealth creation. Otherwise certain high-tax countries would not be 'creating wealth' today.
To claim that being in the other 50% makes somebody "laughably wrong" or a "bully" is not a fair statement. (To say that there is "wide disagreement" is entirely reasonable, but to be fair one should also point out that there is also wide agreement)
This argument has been going on for centuries, with countless millions of people chipping in, without anybody really winning it. It is quite unlikely that this thread, or indeed this year, will be the place where somebody wins it. I think it is reasonable for PG to acknowledge this and bow out of the argument, and that's how I interpret what he's doing.
Life's too short to argue red vs blue.
Half the population does not agree with the stance given in the essay. This argument has not been made for centuries; it has not been made at all because it is wildly out of sync with reality.
I would agree it's very reasonable to bow out of it because life's too short if you are a millionaire; in that case the argument really doesn't effect you so why bother with it, it's just academic.
Also "bully pulpit" doesn't have anything to do with being a bully.
I would reiterate OP of this thread: I love PG's essays and I hope this one isn't a way of saying he is dissuaded by his readership challenging him on one that didn't quite hit the mark. We read them in the first place because they never cease to provoke thought.
So the fact that once upon a time red meant liberal, but no longer does, does not prove that economic conservatives have reducing economic inequality as a direct goal.
And of course that's false. The Democrats of the 1900s are conservative; the new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes? And Hoovervilles were created by socialist thought?
Virtually no Republicans have a stated goal or platform of reducing economic inequality. Pretty much every Democrat running for president does. To claim otherwise is also clearly untrue.
I suspect you are mixing up the fact that in American politics, conservatism (which is "red") consists of what Europeans would call liberalism (in fact the New Deal was part of the reason the definitions flipped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition).
No. The New Deal is the most liberal policy enacted in American history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority... with its base in liberal ideas, the white South, traditional Democrats, big city machines, and the newly empowered labor unions and ethnic minorities. The Republicans were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as an enemy of business and growth, and liberals accepting some of it and promising to make it more efficient... By 1936 the term "liberal" typically was used for supporters of the New Deal, and "conservative" for its opponents.
That's because they are, and have been completely fine with inequality. They have done nothing, absolutely nothing which indicates they are concerned with income inequality and propose no solutions. So when you say they do not argue in favor of inequality, you're correct. That's because they completely ignore it. They pretend it doesn't exist.
The New Deal was economically liberal but socially conservative; I'm inclined to say that it _was_ an iconic conservative effort. In particular, it was what gave the country enough social cohesion to win WWII; and it was what made the South lose interest in a second attempt at secession. The Southern Agrarians had spent the 1920s building a new argument for an independent CSA; once the New Deal started up, they mostly switched to supporting the US.
If you want examples of why this isn't a good idea, just read any politics thread on social media, and look for the point at which they inevitably degenerate into "no, that's not what you're saying".
Since it apparently wasn't clear enough from my earlier post: the argument that has been made for centuries is that the other side doesn't exist, is clearly wrong anyway, and nobody could possibly agree with them. The main problem with this argument is that the people who make it seem to have found somebody to argue with.
And you used two paragraphs to state a rhetoric 101 textbook's definition of "straw man" -- that's not what I'm doing.
What did he get wrong, specifically?
The gist of PG's essay was that inequality consists of some bad components ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential") and some good ones (e.g., people producing things of incredible value); that it's a complex phenomenon made up of multiple parts; that inequality is at least partially due to individual differences in drive and productivity; that technology amplifies these differences in productivity.
He is concerned that people do not recognize this, and believes they need to recognize this if they are going to fight the bad drivers of inequality effectively. He is concerned that people oversimplify the issue and assume that inequality is all bad, or intrinsically bad.
This essay strongly feels like rationalizing to oneself an unwillingness to engage with reasoned criticism (of which there was quite a bit). If pg wants to spend time with his kids, good for him, that's certainly going to be more fulfilling than arguing online. But throwing arguments over the fence and then proclaiming the desire to spend time with your kids genuinely does not seem fulfilling.
Oh well, live and learn :)
Since plenty of people reading Paul's essays are more than capable of figuring out the intent rather than taking pot-shots at the form in which that intent was cast I don't think given the choice between playing 'someone's wrong on the internet' and spending time with your kids there should even be a contest. On the other hand, action begets reaction and there isn't an essay that Paul wrote that did not have its share of discussion and picking apart so maybe simply accept that and totally ignore the responses?
Enjoy the time you have while you can, indeed, life is too short and I wished I could spend and had spent much more time with my kids. Before you know it they'll be borrowing your car keys and all those years that feel like they will last forever will have vanished.
Better make them count!
Having lost my parents some time ago and having two kids I can concur with his sentiments fully and can confirm they are spot on.
The incentive to respond to acidic comments and trolls in online discourse is a pervasive feature of the medium - and it seldom creates any value. Thus it's a perfect example of useless bullshit. The discussions are usually ephemeral in nature - quickly forgotten - and not influential. This is not to say there are no influential discussions - but that at the heat of the moment most discussions feel more important than they really are.
It's amazing to watch how many young people get caught up in various online outrage missions. Hours spent browsing Twitter or Reddit to dive incredibly deep into some current news outrage is bull shit wasted time.
Get back to work and try to build something (if that's what you want). Or be with your family (if that's what you want). Or do whatever. But this stuff (including my post right now) is addicting.
I'm glad he pointed out this seemingly small detail. This took me a very long time to understand.
EDIT: It reminds me of another great post by Paul Buccheit. It's so important to have the 'heroes' of startup culture explicitly spell out these values:
> I worry that perhaps I'm communicating the wrong priorities. Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. What's most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves. If we "win", but have failed to do that, then we have lost. Winning is nothing.
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.fr/2012/03/eight-years-today.ht...
When you realize how short time really is you ruthlessly cut bullshit.
Of course, with all of us being different humans with different experiences and different mindsets, YMMV.
As DHH said in Twist interview: "If you're not working on your best idea right now, you're doing it wrong"
It takes me ~10 minutes to shop online and buy the parts I need to put together my own PC. When I receive it, it takes me an additional 15 minutes to unbox it, and put it all together. Then another 30 installing the OS and all the programs I will need.
That's less than an hour. Given the price difference between a Mac and a PC with the same exact equipment (same CPU, RAM, HD, etc), we're looking at ~$250 USD on the low end and ~$550 USD on the high end. Unless you're making $250 USD (or more) per hour, it's most definitely cheaper time-wise to build your own PC.
15 minutes to unbox probably doesn't include taking out the trash. :)
I'm a power user, so I need a lot of programs and setting them up properly usually takes 4-6 hours if not more. Just finding and installing proper driver for stuff like my Wacom tablet takes 30 minutes or so. Again, if you do this every day, then yes, it could be much faster. But I buy a new computer once in 4-5 years and really cannot bother to automate.
Last two times I got a new computer, it took me 2-3 days before I could work on them at full speed. It sure is worth more than $550. Not calculating the cost of stress if something does not work properly.
I have been using Linux for 7+ years and Mac for just over one year. The difference: Mac is mostly Plug and Play. Linux is often Plug and Pray. Hell, doing something simple like copy/paste on Linux still feels like a game of chance.
I love open-source and freedom, but as I got kids I became more pragmatic. The time is limited and I'd rather spend it on building stuff than figuring out some quirks in the operating system.
No, this isn't true at all. The first time you put together your own computer, sure, maybe, it may take a bit longer. But the next time and the time after that, it becomes quicker and quicker because you already know the basics. It only takes 10 minutes to see what new GPUs or CPUs have come out.
Hell, if you didn't know anything about PCs, it would only take 5 minutes to look up all the parts in the latest Mac and order them off newegg. You could build your own exact copy of the latest mac and the research time would be negligible since you already know what parts you need since they're listed right there on the Mac SPEC sheet. And you'd save yourself hundreds of dollars.
> Last two times I got a new computer, it took me 2-3 days before I could work on them at full speed.
My 64 year old senile-ish father without any background in PCs put together his own PC and had it up and running in less than 4 hours. I don't buy 2 days at all. That's either an exaggeration or an outright lie.
> I'm a power user
A power user that cannot put together his own PC in under 2 days? I'm not sure I buy that. It's like a MLB player not being able to hit a ball that's traveling over 65 MPH. Even the pitchers are well enough versed to get hits occasionally.
Is this assuming that one would be building a PC with only a few years in-between?
It’s been more than 8 years since I built a PC, having assembled three of them in the past. It would definitely take me more than 10 minutes to research hardware because, after being shielded from the hardware complexity after using a Mac for so long, I’d need to research to make sure my previous knowledge of how to build a PC are still applicable.
Sure, it wouldn’t take me 2 days, and if not a lot has changed since I last built one four hours seems doable. But if I was very unsure of myself somewhere in the middle is more realistic and probably a more accurate assumption of how long it would take someone research, order and assemble a PC.
Your 64 year old senile-ish father probably uses one or two applications. I use over 50 different programs.
Also, I don't care about hardware at all. Last thing I remember is that there were Slot 1 and Slot A CPUs. I would need to research stuff before even figuring out which components are compatible. Perhaps it's all user-friendly now, but back in the day I recall always missing some cable or adapter to get stuff to work (like USB-PS2 converters for mouse or VGA-HDMI converters for monitors, etc.).
I care about building software. Hardware stuff is not something I need or want to deal with.
It would be like MLB player going to a baseball bat factory to make his own bat. He just wants a good bat. He doesn't care what wood is it made of, or what material is used for coating. He wants to pay for top-notch bat and concentrate on hitting the balls.
I had an IBM laptop before I had a Mac. At least one major component had to be replaced every single year for the duration of the four years I had it. Keys broke. the screen was shite. Windows crashed constantly. I lost all my files multiple times. After having it for more than a year it ran as if someone had permanently applied the brakes and it was just grinding against them and no amount of service seemed to be able to fix this. I spent weeks searching for the specific charger I needed only for the company to ship the wrong one, then when I had to replace it a second time they no longer manufactured it so I had to buy one second hand. That machine was an utter sinkhole of money and time. I swore off Windows products that day and have not spent a dime on them since. Maybe things have gotten better since XP but I'm not about to risk it.
Now I have a Mac. I have had the same MBP for 6+ years and it has never once required service, it runs perfectly, has never lost data, and has been a charm to work with. Sure, it cost me 2x as much as the IBM but in cumulative costs that is nothing. I could easily see this laptop lasting me another year at least.
I am not saying you are wrong, just providing my experience in which the cost of ownership in money and time has in fact been lower.
I don't need to reinstall the OS or download an uninstaller to remove bloatware. I don't need to install antivirus (yeah, this one isn't required, but the reality is that there is much more malware targeting Windows). I don't need to wait for Windows Update to finish before my computer shuts down or boots up - these are particularly painful. I don't need to worry about programs scaling to a retina/high DPI display. I don't need to spend time reading articles about how Windows 10 is tracking me and how to prevent it. I don't need to worry about my laptop breaking, because if it does, I'm a genius bar appointment away from getting it fixed. If my Samsung laptop breaks, I need to ship the whole thing, likely wasting weeks.
Not everyone experiences these issues, but this is how it feels for me. I made a very gradual transition to OS X - owning PCs, building PCs, using OS X on my PCs for almost a decade, then finally buying a Retina Macbook Pro.
While some of your points are valid for *nix setups as well (in terms of hardware, etc.) you've implicitly made the assumption that the only alternative to OS X is Windows, which strikes me as somewhat off base in a place like HN.
And I think twice before starting new projects. Although, I still sometimes feel like twice is not enough.
Much easier to find more money than more time.
It is sad - and disgusting - to see this degree of arrogance in bluntly categorising those who use (or build) PCs (and not Macs) as indulging in bullshit!
I am happy that you have found a useful computer in Mac. At the same time, though, please realise that hundreds of millions of computer users choose otherwise too. And, please do not conclude that they have time for bullshit just because of that!
This seems perfectly justified and fine to me; I don't get why you're so upset by it.
Because harsh expressions are usually gratuitous. Because blanket assertions are usually wrong. And, because combining both is rude.
(This applies to parts of PG's essay as well!)
For instance, did you really need to say `Whoa whoa slow down' when you began your reply? Did that add value?
This never happened though. The parent simply stated they didn't have time for bullshit then said they purchase Macs so they don't have build PCs. He / she simply stated what they considered important. It was personal, there was no blanket assertions at all and it was in the same tone as the article so what was gratuitous in this context?
> For instance, did you really need to say `Whoa whoa slow down' when you began your reply? Did that add value?
I certainly did due to the outlandishness of what I replied to. It sounded two orders of magnitude harsher and more personal than I would have expected especially on HN.
You took the worst possible interpretation of the original comment and then took it, out of context, as a personal attack. Then you posted a very nasty reply. Then, when you got called on it, you claim rudeness on the other parties.
Think about that. Re-read the entire thread. Because you not only missed the point of the OC, you missed the point of the original essay.
I guess you are both very young; I used to think eating was a waste of time in my 20s. I was dreaming of having a nutrition drip so I didn't have to waste time cooking or eating. But nothing beats cleaning or doing laundry imho.
> I'm pretty sure bullshit is relative.
1. I liked to do an activity before.
2. I don't do that activity any more, nor like it.
3. I am older, so I must be wiser (or else I wasted my time)
4. Therefore the old activity was bullshit all along. All hail my personal development.
On the other hand if you have more free time than money then buying a Mac would probably be not the best decision.
Context is important and I don't think OP was generalizing that every PC user is a fool. It's just not the right thing for him personally since he got kids and would rather spend time with them.
On the other hand, there's something about the following sidenote that is profoundly human but works quite the opposite of the painful shock implied in my first sentence:
> I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I get attacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me. And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!"
This is almost universally true. It is incredibly reassuring to know that even the greats struggle with this and antagonists pursue us through all walks of life. I'll admit, I've held back from publishing articles that all of my reviewers liked because I worried about the inevitable negative backlash that comes with standing for anything on the internet. Maybe one day I will publish. If so, this essay helped a great deal in getting me there.
This is tangential to your point, but beware of sour grapes. It's an easy trap to fall into.
It was used against me at one point, someone invented a personal connection to pg that just so happened to hit all of the right nerves. He was trying to get me to quit my job to work for him. Almost worked, save for a stroke of luck (pg mentioning this guy had ~5% of the credentials he claimed). It's unbelievable just how many bullets I've dodged over the years...
Yet, we'd like to think of ourselves as less sensitive, perhaps because we implicitly compare ourselves to the "greats" (if only in belieiving they must have what it takes to achieve what we want to achieve). But, we somehow mythologize that they are above it all, which leads to the mistaken idea that perhaps we don't have what it takes after all.
This was timely for me. A reminder to get my head back in the game, let myself off the hook for feeling the negativity, but to keep pressing forward. Feeling it is not evidence that we are too weak or soft. On the contrary, it means that we care enough about our mission. It should then be worth the inevitable bruises we'll have to take from those who find comfort in the status quo we seek to challenge or who revel in simply demeaning others.
Just this past week I helped out a young company whose founders are working toward clinical translation of a method of clearance of senescent cells, one of the very first actual honest-to-goodness narrow focus rejuvenation therapies to emerge from the labs. This is something that works to repair and reverse a form of tissue damage that contributes to near all age-related disease.
This is far from the only approach to human rejuvenation presently under development.
But, you know, life is short, so pay attention or not, up to you.
It points at another approach to getting the most out of life: change as much as you can. Maybe once everyone in your family had had a few of those magical Christmases it's time to look for something else fun.
Just do the best you can with your time. If you become unhappy with how you spent it you can use that to inform you on future decisions but you can't change the past.
The pain of having missed significant time with someone you care about is severe, but it is also a thing you can't change.
I am not saying pg is wrong, I am pointing out a problem.
Life may be too short to worry about how you are spending your time.
This also has a darker cousin for some parents: since spending time with one's children is always a viable and valuable option, spending time without them becomes difficult. People without children often notice that most of their parental friends disappear. This despite the prior protestations of many that "We'll still do things after we have kids."
Undoubtedly some parents work more efficiently than their childless selves (this is also motivated by a desire to earn money to support the kids). But can they socialize more efficiently too, in particular with people who don't have kids?
1. Don't work for a start-up, since they don't impart salary-winning experience to you, they don't pay you or provide reasonable benefits, and they also don't allow you the freedom to work on big ideas that they usually promise. The lines used to sell naive engineers on working in start-ups are as paramount to life's-too-short-bullshit as anything can be.
2. Don't agree to work in Agile/Scrum-like one-size-fits-all software management environments. Almost every single aspect of these systems is bullshit and will waste your time and break down your morale while draining away your productivity in the best years of your life.
3. Don't work in open-plan offices or even offices that merely have cubicles. It's been settled for a long, long time that even in dense urban areas, providing private offices for individual knowledge workers is extremely cost effective for businesses, as productivity, work-place cognitive health, job satisfaction, moral, etc., all go up substantially. Generally the only reasons for open-plan offices are (1) bullshit trendiness in which an organization performs a shallow copy of some other organization, (2) hyperbolic focus on short-term costs, which means you should be thinking that the upper management doesn't know what they are doing and are bullshitting you -- it's similar to seeing a company stop providing free coffee as a money-saving tactic. It's bullshit -- coffee is so cheap and the productivity and good will it brings are so valuable that it's virtually never a reasonable plan to cut it; and (3) environments where upper management get off on surveillance and cognitive manipulation, and so it becomes a company cultural value to cram everyone into big rooms where you function more like a piece of office furniture than as a worker.
Personally I would also add that life's too short for enterprise C++ and Java (the languages themselves are quite fine, but anyone telling you that some legacy system couldn't have been maintained and incrementally brought into a better state by 2016 is, once again, bullshitting you and see you as nothing but a glorified code janitor).
I think if I could give any advice to young developers, it would be that if they want management types to respect them throughout a prosperous career, they have to avoid the bullshit of the items above. If you let a manager or executive bullshit you by duping you into working for a start-up, by getting you to agree you are a child whose own creative thinking about problem solving can't be trusted and so Agile/Scrum cookbook management is needed and you must play your part, or by getting you to agree that your natural inclinations for privacy, clarity of thought, protection of productivity and time, should all be sublimated so you can be a "team player" by wearing headphones that cost more than your employer's 401k matches for the year so you can just barely function 10 feet from a foosball table, you've already lost, and it will take years to undo the damage.
This, I presume, is the predicament of at least a small portion of people in our industry. Yet, your sentiment and line of thought are interesting, and I fully agree with you. I just hope that you understand that even logical agents can be forced to take non-logical decisions given the state of affairs of the world.
Would you take a job that offered you $1/year of wage, or a job that offered literally zero vacation days? No? Well then it means you don't need any job, but rather you are in a hurry to select some job that still meets certain minimum criteria.
You probably at least require that the job pays well enough for you to support yourself, and maybe others too, and that the job offers you access to affordable medical, dental, and life insurance. You probably also expect the job to have some range of regular hours, approximately 40-50 hours working per week, with an expectation that you do not usually need to work overtime or on weekends.
You probably also require that while you're working, you are shielded from dangerous situations (e.g. you're not writing code while dangling from a helicopter, and there's not a hole in the roof over your desk, ...).
This is a lot of stuff that you require. In fact, out of the space of all possible jobs, you're actually looking for jobs that fit into an extremely tiny niche.
These things just happen to be the most common norms around employment in the developed world. We don't have to negotiate as hard for them now, and you know why? Because people in the past negotiated extremely hard for them, and refused to take 'no' for an answer, and led strikes, lock-ins, demonstrations, bargaining agreements, and political diplomacy in order to secure either laws or strong social norms to protect these things.
When those people approached employment, they didn't say, well, I'm a beggar with few options, so I had better subject myself to anti-human treatment and just take whatever I am given.
Instead they said, I am a human being with talent and skill (and if you earned a degree in CS, you have a lot of talent and skill compared to vast sections of the working population). They said because I am a human being, I deserve to be treated with some types of basic respect and dignity and not sold bullshit excuses for anti-human conditions.
And now, the battle for employee-protecting laws or social norms (at least for developers) has shifted to be about protection of workplace privacy and productivity (get rid of Agile/Scrum and get rid of open-plan offices) and the respect to be paid fair wage and compensation for your skills (don't fall prey to start-up bullshit which argues that you ought to view certain sets of experiences or chances as valuable and be willing to trade compensation to get them).
You don't need any job. You need a job that meets your goals. When you're young you might fool yourself into thinking that sitting in an open floor plan or agreeing to be bound by Agile aren't a big part of your goals. Then you realize that managers, executives, investors, and so forth, who put you in the open-plan office and tether you to Agile/Scrum fundamentally see you as commodity labor, perfectly easy to replace, and have stopped caring whatsoever about your career progress from almost the first moment they hired you.
It would require a massive, short-term discount factor on your own personal value to make that worthwhile -- such an incredibly self-deprecating amount of discount that it realistically could only be due to a literal emergency situation -- like you need a paycheck today or you will literally die.
And I'd argue that if you have minimum salary requirements, or some fuzzy idea of regular working hours or minimum vacation requirements, then you're not at all in a situation where you need wage as a literal emergency necessitating you to deeply undervalue yourself. And even if you did, you could simply compromise on the field of labor, and do something besides CS jobs if you had to.
At any rate, I do not agree that simply being young and needing a first job is any excuse at all for being willing to tolerate open-plan offices, Agile/Scrum, or the false promises of start-ups. Just...
My favorite: "One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future. Fake stuff that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That's how it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape jabs into your consciousness like a pin."
The next step was to remove things from my life that cause stress and are not worth the effort because of the BS they involve. Whether that's just life situations or clients it has been very refreshing.
The next step was to kill a lot of tv/movies, and most of my free time internet usage.
Finally, I started steadily filling in the new time gainings with things I really care about and the personal sense of well-being and accomplishment has improved drastically.
So I have no intent of doing anything other than continuing to go down this road, I've gotten in better physical shape, better health, enjoy life more, have learned a new language, visited many new places, my stress level has dropped by at last 200%, its been a very positive journey so far.
It feels like trying to kick smoking. I have a list of stuff I want to do (fix up my motorbikes, finish my 'day van', get back in to DH mountain biking) and a list of stuff I do (video games, drink, NetFlix, Reddit), and I always seep back to the latter one.
Might give it another go soon, life is short after all.
But I didn't try to cut out those distractions and start a workout routine at the same time.
Also I didn't try to start anything else until the last goal had become kind of routine (like brushing your teeth in the morning).
There are still many things on my list to see and do and there's still stress in my life, but I feel with this method of one micro step at a time you slowly chip away in unnoticeable steps until now for me a little over a year later you've made a big noticeable dent.
oh yea, I finally quit smoking too :)
EDIT: most of my goals also had to do with eliminating stress. For instance, my "learning the language" was to just turn on the radio and listen to interesting talk shows in swedish and occasionally look up words, all which was very relaxing for me. My exercise is swimming which is super enjoyable for me and something I always look forward to (even when I didn't have the time to do it). I don't know what it would be like if you do not actually look forward to or enjoy your goals...
I ask because HN is my biggest time sync. It's the thing I grab whenever there is a moment of free time and even when their isn't. I type it into my browser without even thinking about it.
I banned it once with /etc/hosts and that lasted about 3 months or maybe it was 6. I'd still read on my phone but that wouldn't happen except out and about or at bathroom breaks.
Then at some point I turned it back on. When it got bad again I blocked it in /etc/hosts. But, it's available in a VM. I'd hoped that would be enough to discourage me but it's not. Instead my habit now is to launch the VM. It is slightly better than unblocked because I still type it into my main browser and the block keeps me off until I eventually use the VM
I'd guess I spent 2-4 hours a day on it. I woke up a 8:30 today. Other than a shower I've been on HN. It's 10:10
Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue talks about the concept of a tradition as forming a narrative backbone for a person's life and actions. Conversation is also crucial, and traditions can be seen as extended conversations. I suggest that Hacker News is a place where such a tradition is constructed and maintained. It gives rise to an "imagined community" [2] of this profession of startup development (which is tied into the tradition of open source hacking in interesting ways, sometimes conflicting).
In that sense browsing HN is not merely a bad habit. Maybe the negative tendency is to become a more passive participant, or just gossiping all day. Ideally the site would feed into a larger pattern of creative action, instead of only providing some click buzz relaxation. So we could think about how to use the conversation to give wind to our sails, so to speak—or just how to be more active in the actual tradition, not just the discussion surrounding it.
That's a big discussion and I've already spent an hour writing this comment, after deleting a long and boring explanation of the MacIntyre book's thesis... So I'll just say that Cal Newport's new book Deep Work was pretty inspiring for me, and it's a quick read.
I think you could formulate a dialectic where deep work and community conversation feed into each other. It's like how books are the deep artifacts that conversations can orient themselves around, and the books themselves are like concentrated results of sometimes decades-long conversations.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community
[3]: http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/
I think it's time for us to start questioning if we really "Want" to do these things so much (exercise) why we don't do them. Do we just want to have done them (it'd sure be nice if I had a nice bod, I should workout. I should learn 12 languages and 3 instruments too!)? Or do we think we want them? Or is there some perverse reason why our body keeps us from doing what we truly want to do in that moment?
You may lose friends because they may think you don't care enough about them since you don't call them frequently anymore (and emails do not work for everyone).
You are unreachable through the modern messengers because you refuse to waste time on a gazillion of them.
Other people update their friends through Facebook. If you opt for an alternative like email (async and focusing on message) then you may be weird for some.
Being focused is great and indeed makes wonders in productivity. Nevertheless, in most cases around 6 hours of quality mental work is the limit. The rest you have to do a lower mental effort activity. That means either writing boilerplate code, answering emails, meetings, reading hn but possibly not learning a new language or meeting new people.
Stress levels fell because you are in control of your life or so you feel since you have limited external signals. That may not be true but you can't be sure always since you have limited environmental feedback. Nevertheless, being ultra responsive means less control also for me (without getting too philosophical).
All in all, I agree with all the steps listed above. That does mean they are the path to enlightenment for everyone or without drawbacks.
Having mentioned that, I feel that for a similar strategy was net positive. Mostly because context switching has large costs and because our modern world makes money by distracting us (feeds us with us about superficial needs/lifestyle and forcing us to measure our sense of self on metrics based on narrow minded philosophies -- consumerism of info(/)products).
I'm not getting involved in the overall discussion, just wanted to highlight this gem. This is so true.
In a conversation about Netflix's announcement of worldwide availability the other day I put it this way - so much of the economy is based on cultivating and indulging in mindlessness.
If you cultivate mindfulness you see how pointless and wasteful so much of people's activities are.
> The next step was to kill a lot of tv/movies, and most of my free time internet usage.
So I actually figured out that TV was the devil in early high school and stopped watching it almost entirely. There are very particular shows that I will follow and if that show isn't playing, the TV is off.
I also don't watch movies to kill time. I pretty much only watch movies with friends or if it's a movie that I suspect will be thought provoking.
I'm still working on the internet distraction piece. I'd love to hear strategies for wasting less time on the internet.
> Finally, I started steadily filling in the new time gainings with things I really care about
I was very fortunate that I've had this mentality from the start. I pursue what interests me. Whatever that is. Don't care if it's weird, or if I'm the oddball. I just go for it. That has led me to have the most random diverse group of hobbies/skills/life pursuits. I'm a programmer. All-American football player (and national champion). Football coach. Gamer. I'm darn good at drawing/illustration. Pretty good cook as well. I like to sew. Now I'm in med school.
I look back at everything I've accomplished, the skills I've developed, the friends I've made along the way, and the future ahead of me, and I feel like I've had a full 25 years. Like I could die tomorrow and not be too upset about how I spent my time.
I often look at other people's lives and wonder who they would be if they simply went after the things they enjoyed.
Smaller shortcuts, like eating unhealthy to save some time, not showering everyday, shaving, to optimize my working time, was taking a toll on quality of life in the long term. Therefore I said to myself no shortcuts! This drastically increased my quality of life almost instantly as i take my time now to do "normal" things in life without rush. Actually enjoying it.
I also neglected working out and to do things I really like, always thinking I'll get to it once my startups takes off. Since I decided not to work after 6pm, I suddenly have a lot of free time which gave me the possibility to workout without feeling guilty and do other stuff I like.
I think I can further optimize by doing things like you described and will try some of them. Thanks for sharing.
It was hard to stop playing with a bunch of different projects and make myself focus on one single project, but in the end it has been extremely satisfying to finish what I start. I wish my father was still around to see what I've done, but I might never have finished anything without the lesson of his passing.
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While Richman has vowed to cease being open-minded to absolute horseshit, acquaintances reflected on his approachability.
"I love Blake," coworker David Martin said. "He's such a good listener. A lot of people are closed-minded and self-absorbed, but Blake always makes an effort to hear where I'm coming from. The world could use more people like him."
---
Be careful with equating "unproductive" and bullshit. Society at large only cares about your productivity, and there is always pressure for you to do "productive" thing that advances some imaginary life ladder.
From your POV and benefits, all those productive things might all be bullshit.
Not only are "unproductive" activities like film, video games, socializing/hanging out very enjoyable for me, but the most interesting people I've met do a lot of them. All in moderation.
It reached a point where I would often work in the weekends, forego any vacation, feel guilty about the hours I did 'nothing' (out of sheer necessity), and sometimes even apply a little too much pragmatism to my friendships. I'd ask myself if the interactions were useful or somehow furthered my personal development or career, and forget that, while this is not an unimportant question, the value of a friendship can be the time spent enjoying each other's company.
This important realization came after I had worked a lot, built a relatively stable career with enough clients and a good portfolio, saved up enough money to allow me to not work for at least a year. I had reached my goals, so to speak.
But instead of stopping work and doing things I always put off, or creating things I'd been wanting to create for a long time, I ended up with a (mild) burn-out and a severe existential crisis: now that I had nothing to really worry about, I had no clue what to do with that freedom.
What am I, and what do I enjoy doing, after years of neglecting to explore this?
Currently I'm working on finding more balance, and savoring the little and big things in life. But even now, I need to make sure I have some work because when I stop, my mind just kind of panics from the freedom I have. So I'm taking it one step at a time.
Picking up gaming again has been one of those things I savor again.
http://www.holidays.net/mlk/store/Old-60-s-70-s-Protest-type...
Or did it? I think it reflects the point of view, when we're involved in work, all the details to take care of, we feel overwhelmed, busy, time isn't rushing by at all. But once it's history, the past, all of that is suddenly doesn't exist, it has no reality and it is packaged up in memory as though it was just a brief moment. Kind of like closing a menu what's there is hidden, except we're not reopening it, at least not the same way ever again.
Time is relative, as Einstein said, it goes quickly sitting next to a pretty girl, but a boring lecture drags on forever. The epochs across the lifespan come and go, and I think we judge the duration of experience by its currency because involvement with events in real time gives the sense of time. The meaning of a "long" or "short" time is anchored in such reality.
Anyway I've been thinking for a while that what's important is not how much time we have left to live. After all that's not something we can actually ever know. What matters is what we do with the time we have. I'd surely agree we can't afford to waste it on irrelevancies, pipe-dreams, or bitterness. Far better to do what we can, when we can do it.
I don't understand it when people talk about 'squeezing everything out of life' - As though you could extract real lasting substance/meaning from it. I don't believe it's possible to "Make the most" out of life - It all adds up to 0 in the end.
"Squeezing everything out of life" implies that you're literally taking the juice out of life and storing it somewhere safe/permanent - In reality, it is like squeezing an orange and then putting the juice back inside the orange.