Earnest is my favourite word for describing that beautiful part during a child's development where they haven't yet had a negative experience from expressing themselves earnestly. That window of time where if you ask if they know something they would proudly reply "no!" because they have no idea that there might be shame in not knowing something.
I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of fear of retribution/shame but I'm always a bit sad when I get in trouble because I was straight forward but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes.
Once in my 20s I hung out with some young teenagers at a summer camp for reasons. One night we were talking and one girl started asking questions and the rest of the group sneered at her "not knowing". She ignored them and kept asking because I was earnest and knowledgeable. Five minutes turned to an hour and I think everyone in that group learned (or at least heard) more about the origins of the universe, stellar evolution, evolution, chemistry, physics, etc, than they had learned in school up to that point.
I sometimes wonder what happened to those people. I suspect the girl who asked questions ended up way more knowledgeable than the other 10 combined.
I'm with you here buddy. seems like he was doing something shady the way he expressed it. probably lonely and providing alcohol/drugs for minors in order to have company.
c'mon catch people a break.
Maybe they were a former alchy giving AA advice to troubled kids, maybe they don't like talking about their religion online
maybe GP was baiting for this to get a response from you, have you considered contacting them? something like "consider not making posts that make it look like you're doing something bad with children"
> I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of fear of retribution/shame but I'm always a bit sad when I get in trouble because I was straight forward but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes.
You might enjoy reading these two posts and discussions:
I've also written about this effect, called Lampshading: https://www.swyx.io/lampshading/ asking the "stupid question" is a strength when done in taste.
One of the most powerful things you can do as a senior engineer for juniors is to show by example that it's OK to ask questions and to not know all the answers. Especially if you can see that someone else isn't sure but dares not ask that question.
Thanks for introducing me to that term! Right up there with 'bikeshedding' as my top new word this year.
I lampshade frequently. My typical use-case: senior dev says something I think is mistaken, but nobody else questions it. How do I know whether they're just humoring him, or if they are all mentally translating between what he said & what he meant? (Btw, people do this translation often -- nobody wants to be a pedant.) Lampshading is a great way of getting people to "pop the 'why' stack" as well. https://mikebroberts.com/2003/07/29/popping-the-why-stack/
I think you have too much optimism regarding the value of people's earnest expressions. Children are children and so their earnestness is cute and endearing (in most instances)--adults are far less charming and far more petty, self-indulgent, spineless, fickle, fearful.
Social media is a cesspool largely due to all this earnestness. Fear of retribution and shame is helpful in mitigating the self-absorption embedded in most people. We'd all like to think there's something special in all of us and that the world will benefit from the light of our creativity if it was set free. Truth be told, very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists.
People should appreciate the template of conformity that allows them to find a place in the world and not let advertising, that often leverages the idea of uniqueness to sell things, diminish the value of their mediocrity. No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs. We know because if that's who you were, that's who you'd be. Some people seem to find success in art and innovation operating in the same repressive environment, so maybe the environment is not the problem. Maybe earnestness just isn't your thing and fear/conformity is the better strategy.
No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs. We know because if that's who you were, that's who you'd be.
This statement cannot be allowed to stand uncontested. It suggests that everyone is exactly where they ought to be, that all bullying and harassment and isolation that keeps people from reaching their potential is right and just.
The only thing I'm suggesting is that freedom doesn't spare you from mediocrity.
Real oppression, an experience the US professional middle class is largely spared of, the type experienced by the citizens of Venezuela or the people currently being held in Xinjiang re-education camps, is truly insurmountable and requires large macro shifts to institute change. To suggest individual bullying, harassment and isolation are counted as so insurmountable to a person's theoretical "potential" that the environment must change first to prompt it, is an illustration of the deep self-absorption very few people have the privilege to experience.
I thought it was about becoming the next Steve Jobs, as in billionaire founder. They tend to grow up with great privilege. Evidently there are great obstacles for the middle class, such as favoritism for the already affluent. As in any country, it has little to with actual capability.
Surely Venezuela could have less social mobility, but it isn't actually that great in the west.
By your thesis, there shouldn’t then be people who, having achieved greatness, fall from it because of a negative experience. But of course every field is littered with these examples, great people crippled by the loss of someone they love, an injury, or simply being unable to cope with some awful thing that happened to them in childhood. It’s practically a cliche.
Really, your argument is a fairly irrelevant appeal - because worse circumstances exist in the world (something so inevitably true as to be pointless to state), there is nothing to complain about. While it’s good to have perspective about where one is more fortunate than others, people deal with their own circumstances and not those of others, so it’s functionally meaningless to raise this point. Someone being abused by their spouse or grieving over the loss of a child can maybe take intellectual comfort in the fact that their lot is better than someone in a prison camp, but this kind of diversion does absolutely nothing to alleviate their circumstances.
It isn't so much that people are incapable of doing anything but mimicking what already exists, as most people only notice and appreciate things that conform to what they already know. There's a large amount of art and music just waiting for blessing to get super popular, not because it's good, but because people need to be told what "good" is.
> We'd all like to think there's something special in all of us and that the world will benefit from the light of our creativity if it was set free. Truth be told, very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists. ...
> No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs.
There's a premise here that unless you are Picasso or Steve Jobs, you have nothing to contribute - and that if you aren't changing the world in a significant way, you are mediocre. People change themselves, their families, their communities, their friends and neighbors lives - most of what we get from the world is in those micro, personal interactions. Friends have done infinitely more for me than Jobs or Picasso.
There's also an assumption that "very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists", which doesn't at all match my experience of people.
I find that almost everyone has much to offer, but you need to give them space and confidence to be earnest. You need to listen, and each one has so much to tell - perspectives that open up new worlds. If your attitude is the one you describe, it's self-fulfilling.
So this should be good news to you. Why is it important to you to advocate for bad news?
> People should appreciate the template of conformity that allows them to find a place in the world and not let advertising, that often leverages the idea of uniqueness to sell things, diminish the value of their mediocrity.
Being mediocre is such a scary prospect given the requirement of differentiation for professional and personal attainment, that people seem to ignore its existence entirely. Any minor differentiator is magnified to represent a "uniqueness" which frees the person from the burden of the mediocre. I agree, everyone has something to contribute and the large swaths of mediocre people drive our civilization forward--but why can't they just be mediocre? Why is it bad news?
> Earnest is my favourite word for describing that beautiful part during a child's development where they haven't yet had a negative experience from expressing themselves earnestly. ... but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes.
And we’re narrowing that window by exposing children to social politics earlier on through likes and upvotes and whatnot.
This is a different definition of "earnest" from the one pg is using in the article, although there probably is a relationship between them: children at the age you describe are interested in things for the sake of the things themselves and not for what the child can get out of them, and "expressing yourself" is one of those things they're interested in for the sake of the thing itself. It's much easier for young children to be like this because all of the stuff that older people think about that basically boils down to "how is this going to affect what other people think of me?" isn't even visible to the children, so it doesn't clutter up their mental processes.
> It's a bigger social error to seem naive in most European countries than it is in America, and this may be one of subtler reasons startups are less commmon there. Founder culture is completely at odds with sophisticated cynicism.
I have a high opinion of pg, but mocking an entire continent for non-earnestness because it doesn't make as much money as the US (because they have more startups because, supposedly, the Americans are less cynical than the Europeans) is borderline cynic (and I say that as a cynic myself).
Money, and judging almost everything through the prism of money, is one of the most cynical things we do have right now in our society, and as such I appreciate more a "Greed is good discourse" because it shows its cynicism in plain view and does not try to hide it behind a veil of good intentions, like texts as this one do.
Comparing the US to Sweden it seems to other way around to me. Americans assume that all of government and all companies are evil. If that isn't absolute cynicism I don't know what is. (Plus it enables evil since it is expected so there is little anger.)
Plus the whole thing with Americans being hopelessly naive against religion, the one area they should absolutely be cynical and/or uninterested like Swedes.
>non-earnestness because it doesn't make as much money as the US (because they have more startups [...] , and judging almost everything through the prism of money,
You're interpreting the blog essay unfairly. PG isn't looking at everything (such as "earnestness") only through the prism of money. It's a blog post with deliberately limited scope.
His first sentence sets the context for the rest of the essay: "Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about _startups_."
Yes, we all know there can be other activities to also express earnestness such as creating art paintings, music, parenting, volunteering, teaching, etc. but he omits those and discusses it in relation to startups because... startups is what he often specializes in writing about. It doesn't look like mocking Europe to me.
I understand you want a more universal essay (measures of earnestness beyond startups) but that's not necessary for PG's blog audience.
I hear what you're saying and there might be some truth to it. I didn't read that "sophisticated cynicism" as very mocking. You could even say he's calling them cooler than us, in a very earnest kind of a way.
Well, except that it flies in the face of American culture being considered "the coolest" in the world. Heck, the modern meaning even comes from (African) Americans !
Yes, you’re seeing two very different value systems run up against each other. Paul Graham obviously has a bias toward thinking the “founder culture” value system is better...but this stance ignores the fact that the European, more traditional culture leads to greater balance —stricter/better regulations around tech and privacy, ownership, and in most places labor.
In America you can make pretty much anything happen but at the cost of living in a society which is lax in terms of regulation, the consequences of which we’re seeing quite palpably this year (workplace discrimination, horrible environmental damage, etc.). While I won’t knock anyone for admitting they don’t know something, not every ignorant person looks for answers once those answers directly go against their agenda. This is what snobbishness, to a certain extent, helps regulate.
It’s seems weird because the UK and Europe had the original founders! I guess the Vikings might have been the first but they typically plundered as an enterprise. Focusing on character traits as a societal descriptor kind of comes off like saying that the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur!
So I imagine reality is different than these tropes.
But it is interesting to ask why does Scandinavia have more startups per capita than other countries?
Like structural racism are there structural components that drive startups?
Not only that , in many parts of the world (LATAM for example) American institutions are not considered earnest at all, you know they all have underhanded motives.
Oh. All I know to expect from seeing that is a weird kind of popularity, agreement and participation you don't see for other blogs posted on HN, sometimes with the other half-or-so of comments being annoyed with Paul Graham.
Does HN covertly promote all links to that blog or is there something more substantial to it?
I didn’t know this, and I’ve been using HN for years now, thanks for the information. I just thought Paul Graham was some super popular vaguely tech person.
I should have recalled this sooner, but it happened to me once, too.
I was doing a product demo of a remotely operated device with a guy from AT&T. We were supposed to be able to communicate through the device but it wasn't working well. They'd just rolled out a new network and it was spotty. I suggested at one point that we use text messages as a back up for communicating and I actually asked him if he was ok with that.
He says, 'Yeah, no problem. My name's on the patent.' 'huh?', 'I'm on the SMS patent.'
Is this a tongue in cheek reference to Ken Thompson’s trick in “reflections on trusting trust”? [1] if so, it wins the 2020 award for originality in HN conspiracy theories!
Got it. I am aware of the history. I was reading too much into your comment. I thought you were joking that PG may have used the Thompson trick to juice scores for his posts on HN.
My perception is that one drawback of earnestness is that it often comes off as just being boring. The most earnest people I know are not popular. The most popular people I know are more like twinkle-in-the-eye-kind-of-BS-but-not-pathological-liars.
I don't mean to say "grr, why aren't nerds more popular!". I mean more that this specific kind of earnestness seems to preclude the playing of certain conversational games that most people seem to enjoy. Earnestness, for example, is pretty far away from my conception of "playful" or "flirty" or even "fun".
I've met some people like that. But only because they are earnest and also have a boring interest or just one or two interests. Not very common in my experience.
Earnestness is what happens when people "let the guard down" and just be themselves. That's a rare state for a lot of people, who have spent a lifetime trying to be anyone but who they really are.
Exactly, there’s nothing inherently boring about being earnest. You can be earnest and boring but you could also be earnest with a good sense of humor and an interest in film history or software engineering. I’m not going to go all in on pg’s earnestness essay but it’s a positive trait and if you have genuine interests, there’s a good chance being earnest makes you more interesting when discussing interests because you are less likely to be invested in impressing other people with your interest. If you’re earnest your interests tend to scratch your itches of curiosity. But if you are earnest and uncurious then yes you may be boring.
This made me think that there are two type of not-earnestness: "what's in in it for me?" and "what's in it for others?" The first type is what [office] politics is about. The second type is rare and an example of it is when a doctor could tell a patient point-blank that he has 2 months left, but instead strongly recommends to go on a 2 months round-the-world trip and even invents a plausible cause [such trips help so much that savings on meds are multiples of the trip's cost].
> That's a rare state for a lot of people, who have spent a lifetime trying to be anyone but who they really are.
If you do it enough, who you "really are" is someone who doesn't enjoy letting their guard down. Who's to say that's not your "authentic" self at that point?
Can you expand on the boringness? That conflicts with what I think because I believe that engaging hobbies are that vitality which manifests as “playful” and “fun”. Are you willing to try something new, and if you do, are you willing to learn to do it well enough to enjoy it.
Engaging with a hobby tends to involve making it part of me - the hobbies I haven’t committed to actually liking and just performed have always been the ones that get lost in the shuffle of things. Even more so, being so committed to a hobby pushes me to do more heavy lifting when it comes to doing it socially.
(Edit) After a bit more thought I decided an example would be good:
I love Jorge Luis Borges, so when my book club finally decided to read him I took the time to rate many of the stories, trying to collect an essence of his magical, gaucho, and mystical stories to help focus our discussion. That is what I mean —- to love something so much that effort becomes effortless because you’re bursting at the seems hoping to share. In this way we didn’t just read “Library of Babel”, but some of the little mysteries that show a different touch of his craft.
It seems to me that the perception of boringness can come as a result of earnestness being very niche/focused. Your example is a great one! But if anybody who is not a fan or doesn't know Borges, they would probably find a person earnestly passionately about his writing quite boring -- as one can only have the time and mental energy to be truly earnest about so many things.
In contrast, GP's example of popular people are likely those who are good at faking that kind of deep interest in many things, tailored to their present company, so that they attract a few people from many different crowds. Of course, this is based on my own experience only; in certain circles I can feel quite loquacious and come off as extroverted -- usually because of an earnestly shared interest -- but in most cases I think I come across as boring or even introverted!
The founders I have worked with (who became billionaires) are quite boring.
In pretty much every social gathering with them, they were silent (brooding) and didn't have interesting things to say about things and didn't seem interested to hold a conversation on their own. They seemed to be content listening to others talk.
But in work related meetings, when it came to making crazy bets they were extremely passionate about their belief and commitment and made those decisions like a boss. (They had personality flaws (they could be perceived as rude, unpolished etc in those situations) and they made mistakes when they became insecure while making high-stakes decisions as stakes became bigger.)
In most other cases (in not so crazy decisions that needed to be made everyday), they showed great amount of trust in others. They also showed genuine humility - they didn't assume expertise they didn't have and didn't try to assert that they are the boss.
I have come to believe that the founders mindset and behavior is crucial in attracting and retaining the right kind of talented next 10 employees. After that crucial bit, it is those 10 employees who determine the success probability of the company to a great extent. That founding/forming team is a bigger determinant of success rather than just the founders or just those initial employees by themselves.
We might be getting at different parts of "earnest", which an internet search defines as "resulting from or showing intense and sincere conviction". Your post is about intensity, and I guess mine is about sincerity.
I think jtanderson’s comment clarified the difference for me. Mustering intensity for me means being sincerely interested, so I actually wasn’t seeing the difference.
Personal favorite, I actually think it links well to this discussion of earnestness.
- Man on Pink Corner
A bar story, the characters are a bit rough on the edges. Action packed.
- The Lottery of Babylon
Mystical world where a
lottery runs everything.
- Three Versions of Judas
This is a good example of Borges combining non-fictional and fictional elements, he is doing a critical analysis on a fictional author be made up regarding the “real” role of Judas.
- Deutsches Requiem
Part of his explorations on fascism and nazism, written contemporarily (1946) so it has a bit more rawness.
- On Exactitude in Science
The title well describes this short piece.
- In Memoriam, JFK
Also short and incredibly well-written.
- The Zahir
The Zahir creates obsession, to the point of driving the obsessed insane.
As someone who is most likely on the more boring end of the spectrum, I agree with many parts of your comment :)
Still, I have learned that being earnest and being fun are not opposites. Sometimes earnest people are spending most of their time focused on work (and if they are good natured, its fun to work with them!). But one can get better at being fun if you value and prioritize having fun with other people for its own sake.
I have also found that folks (including me) particularly enjoy friends who are earnest about their work / side projects. I especially enjoy spending time with friends who are earnestly interested in areas I know little about. Their energy and enthusiasm are infectious and talking to them about their area opens these clear windows into new worlds that are otherwise hard to find.
Earnest but interesting is sometimes a recipe for drama. Nothing worse than being well-meaning, right about something and saying something no one really wants to hear.
If you have any sense whatsoever, you intentionally shoot for "boring" while being publicly earnest.
Remember: "May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse. There's a downside to being interesting.
I initially wrote it without the word Chinese and felt like the sentence didn't convey "This is intended to wish you ill." I felt it sounded more like "This is a swear word."
I think you have a non-standard personal definition of “earnest”. As I understand the words, earnestness and playfulness are completely orthogonal/unrelated attributes.
As mentioned in another comment here, I Googled the definition of "earnest", and it mentions "sincere and intense conviction". My post focuses on sincerity which (perhaps in an extreme form) seems to require honesty and an aversion to misrepresentation. This kind of aversion would seem to make play and humor harder.
Still, the above chain of reasoning is longer and less convincing than I thought it would be.
No. Narcissists are the popular ones because they can't stop hoarding attention, including yours.
Someone earnest can have an incredible sense of humor and a sharp intellectual mind. They can be kind, well-meaning, and respectful. And, they'll leave you alone. So you might have to poke them with a stick a couple of times.
Social media is populated with narcissists competing for virality on every platform. Highly entertaining, yes. A waste of all of our time including theirs? Probably.
Great. Now my company's engineering recruiting email "honest and earnest" turn of phrase about culture is less likely to make candidates pause and consider why I focused on that, but instead probably gets classified as regurgitating whatever everyone read on HN. :)
Goodheart's law at work. This is why you have to change metrics every six months. Just when I figured out "engagement," now "earnestness." Now a potential issue that you're probably already aware of is that many of these traits can serve as culture / age filters.
Yep, although I'm thinking "honest and earnest" is further from a typical metric, and closer to the end goal.
One of my concerns, when I decided to be very forthright in the intro email, was that it would simply be taken as a cheat-sheet by a poor-match candidate for what culture to fake.
But I figured there would be a greater risk that we'd miss recognizing or resonating with some of the best candidates, because they were trying to stick to the rules that the interview prep books told them.
(Funny: were my company to become a FAANG, then the interview prep industry would coach everyone on the exact 5 notes to hit, at what formulaic points in the process. And to practice expressions of curiosity, to have ready in reaction to standard prompts by interviewer. Dictionaries eventually would be updated to redefine "genuine" to mean projecting a particular kind of professional persona mandated by my company. :)
I think diversity of ideas and influences is inherently valuable in an organization, and to find it, we have to be thoughtful and not jump to conclusions.
For example, even if we announce that speaking up is safe and encouraged, that's going to be more familiar to some, and others will take a while to integrate it and adapt it.
I can definitely imagine, say, 2 engineers founding a company, and the company thus far was built on caffeinated whiteboard sessions, where they were comfortable shouting out their ideas, grabbing the marker from the other, etc. It worked for them so far, so it would be understandable if they think that's their culture and would be a key to ongoing success of the company. But if, for their next hire, they're passing over every introverted thinker, person raised being told not to interrupt, etc.-- then I'd suspect they'd probably be missing out on a ton of skills that their org will probably need, and also personally missing out on traits/practices/behaviors/etc. from which they'd grow by being influenced and meeting halfway. (I think this is tricky example, since the whiteboard jam session is a very appealing idea to a lot of us, and we might ascribe mythical power to it. But I think it's also easy to imagine some big design insight coming in a pause in the excitement, from someone who was standing slightly back from the flailing markers, and who hadn't said much in the first hour of battle. Or even from someone who went off to work something out on the computer, that was being missed in the endorphin rush of whiteboard eureka.)
It would be interesting to see YC to move to funding with less regard to business plan. I know they already do this but what if you totally threw out the market research and gut feeling about the usefulness of the product and gave people 500k based on their interest and ability only.
I'm pretty sure that's how it works already. They are looking mostly for teams of people, not a perfect plan. It's just that, building a business plan successfully is a decent project for assessing the effectiveness of a team.
Though I agree with much of this article off earnestness can also be terrible in some circumistances. When people earnestly pursue something abhorrent or deluded.
> When people earnestly pursue something abhorrent or deluded.
Which is exactly what happens all the time. People like the "airbnbs" thinking they can make the world a better place and pursuing their delusion with earnestness, only to cause bigger problems in the end.
I wish capitalists could at least be honest and admit they found an inefficiency in the market to exploit and they just want to profit from it. At least there's no hypocrisy in that.
> Interestingly, just as the word "nerd" implies earnestness even when used as a metaphor, the word "politics" implies the opposite. It's not only in actual politics that earnestness seems to be a handicap, but also in office politics and academic politics.
I don't think this is always the case. I've found that no matter the size of the business, they are made up of people, and people have bullshit detectors. When you are able to speak truth and find meaning in an earnest way, people will follow you, peers will respect you, and executives will listen.
In politics, the word "technocrat" is used to try to carve out a divide between specific intellectual talent and political leadership talent, with a heavy implication that these are mutually exclusive.
I think that's how PG is using "earnest" here. He presents it first as a compliment but goes on to suggest that it is exclusive from understanding other people's motivations, and by extension, exclusive from business leadership.
And on the other side, “politics” is anathema to “nerds” and technocrats because good technocrats typically have a nice mix of the old school sociopathic qualities required to succeed in business along with technical chops. They don’t like politics because they typically lack emotional intelligence, don’t comprehend the need for empathy, and think their experience is the only experience that matters. They likewise usually have a regressive ultra-utilitarian philosophy.
This doesn’t apply to everyone or any actual human beings of course, but since we’re talking about abstract made up nonsense character types, might as well go along with it.
> In politics, the word "technocrat" is used to try to carve out a divide between specific intellectual talent and political leadership talent, implication being that these are exclusive.
No, in politics, “technocrat” describes an advocate of rule by an elite of technical experts. When applied to a candidate for office, it often more specifically designates someone who sees their own self-evaluated membership in such an elite as their primary qualification for office. It does not designate actual talent, nor does it imply anything about the separation between different types of talent.
PG seems to have a cynical conception of what "politics" is, since he seems to be saying that practising it is anathema to earnestness.
I understand what he means if by "politics" he means self-interest and hoodwinking voters. And that may be his experience of politicians, but it doesn't define the field any more than Mulligans define golf. Champion golfers don't take Mulligans, don't kick their ball closer to the hole, and don't miscount strokes. They are all far too earnest, and have been since they started in the sport.
Likewise with politics. MLK did what he did because he cared for the rights of people. So did Thomas Jefferson, They're not the only ones, though it is difficult to come up with examples that are universally admired because when it comes to politics, we all have different opinions, because we all have different interests.
But what is politics? When I studied it at university, we learned on the first day that politics is just who gets what, where, when, and how, in a society.
Anyone who fights for the rights of other people in society, whether for left or right, for rich or for poor, may be earnest, and virtuous in the eyes of their peers.
But I kinda feel like your example proves the point, because I've never seen MLK described as a "politician" or "political figure". Politics as most people understand it is the process of deciding who ought to run the government, and King specifically avoided discussing this (https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/sta...) because he felt that doing so would undercut his mission of social change.
> Politics as most people understand it is the process of deciding who ought to run the government
That's a narrow definition, sometimes known as "party politics". And that well might be what PG was referring to. The limitation of party politics in America, and other places, is that to become an elected representative you need money for advertising, which you have to get from somewhere, e.g. donations. These usually come with the expectation of a quid pro quo; oil companies want pipelines across the commons and lax pollution laws. They get these by buying politicians.
And so there is a contradiction in a "democracy" like the USA whereby votes are in the hands of the people, but the ability to stand for office is in the hands of the financiers. It leads to a duplicity, which is possibly why PG describes "politics" as anathema to earnestness.
But politics is more than that. Politics is who gets what, when where and how. It exists in classrooms and workplaces, and cars full of screaming kids on a hot day.
It most certainly exists in the competition to have ideas funded by VC. So, in fact, PG is a skilful politician. He just practises his craft outside of party politics.
Ultimately, I guess, "politics" is just a word which can be defined however we want. So I can't tell you that you're wrong or the definition you're using is untrue.
It's not obvious to me that a definition of "politics" which groups together party politics, funding startups, and screaming kids coming home from soccer practice provides much useful insight into the world. At best, it's an imprecise statement of the same sentiment as "everything is physics", that party politics has a large influence on how the world looks. At worst, and I've seen it used quite frequently in this way, it's a sleight of hand maneuver used to slip party politics into contexts where it'd otherwise be excluded.
"Everything is physics" might be true, but as you say, it isn't very useful because it is too broad a brush. That's why we talk about atomic physics, astrophysics, dynamics, optics, nuclear physics, quantum physics, and for that matter, chemistry, and inorganic chemistry. Each of these is a discipline with its own nomenclature and epistemology that enable practitioners to home in on the elements they study in sufficient detail, with an efficiency of language.
Similarly, politics.
To answer the question, what is your hourly rate of pay and why is it so, we have to turn to politics. Physics won't help us, nor will chemistry. Politics is the appropriate discipline, because in politics humans are the atoms, and their interactions are described by the laws of politics.
Your hourly rate of pay is a function only partially of the legislation enacted by your elected representatives. Your state legislature may set a minimum hourly rate of pay. Whether that rate applies to your job, and to you personally, depends on a number of other human interactions, both in the present and throughout history, which occurred independently to the legislature.
And whether you have your job, which pays $X per hour, or another job, which pays $Y per hour, is a function of... that's right, politics. Or more precisely, labor relations, market forces, race relations, immigration, what school you went to, how much funding your school received, what companies your local layers of government attracted to your area. These factors are in turn influenced by taxation, investment law, transport infrastructure, natural resources, environmental regulations... everywhere you look for the answer to the question What is your hourly rate of pay, you encounter a different sub-discipline of... politics.
Sure! I don't mean to deny the importance of the insight; a lot of people do have seriously mistaken beliefs about how social and economic facts come to be, and learning a bit of political science is a critical part of correcting those mistakes.
The problem is that electoral politics, at least as practiced recently in the US, rarely has much to do with this. I'm on a few donor lists, so I got a lot of political fundraising emails over the past year, and out of the candidates I can remember only one was focused on society and how we can make it better. The other candidates talked primarily, if not exclusively, about how terrible their Congressional opponents are and how useful my help would be to defeat their villainous ways. Whatever term you use to refer to this category of activity, I don't think someone with an earnest interest in improving the world would choose to regularly participate in it.
> out of the candidates I can remember only one was focused on society and how we can make it better.
Sounds like you encountered one earnest type?
I tried to think of contemporary examples but I couldn’t think of any that would be universally admired. That got me thinking about the meaning of “earnestness” and then I wondered whether I might have conflated it with “virtuous” too much in my own conception.
I suppose it’s just as possible to be earnestly libertarian as it is to be earnestly egalitarian.
There might be as many earnest members of the NRA as there are earnest members of the NAACP and the ACLU.
Fact checking aside, who do you think is more earnest, 45 or 44?
Not making things worse is another expression of making things better. I also dislike where politics has gone in terms of how it's being exercised these days, but I would agree that the building blocks of politics are still, how do we make decisions as a group. Some people have managed to pretend the most important decision is that "person X most not enact their agenda", but it comes from the same root.
My understanding of 'politics' is: when power is transacted via social influence instead of money. This is why you get corporate politics. The financial incentives within the company (such as bonuses & raises) aren't strong enough to transmit the required forces. Soft power steps in to fill the vacuum.
Pretty good definition. I don't know if it deserves the hate it gets. I've heard politics described as, relationships. And the more I think of it that way, the more acceptable, and even positive, it seems.
Would you rather do things because your boss exercises role power (I'm your boss and you must do what I say), or because you like, respect, and trust your boss (relationship power)?
I'm going to expand on this a bit, possibly against my better judgment. I believe Paul Graham has a point here, and it's a good one. In intellectual pursuits, there's a spectrum from dealing purely with nature and facts, to dealing with human perceptions. To pick what I hope is a reasonably neutral example, doing the science to get containment of a fusion reaction is on one end of the spectrum. Planning and engineering a project to do it is in the middle. And making the case that carbon-based energy production poses an existential threat to humanity and that we should be investing hundreds of billions into fusion energy is on the other. All these inform each other, and I (personally) don't make a value judgment on which is most virtuous or most important.
The salient thing is that Paul Graham did not choose a somewhat neutral example. Rather, he chose one that is perhaps at the very center of the culture wars, and has done so using a highly emotionally loaded word. Because he is someone who knows how to use words, I can fairly confidently conclude that he is effectively declaring his position on the issue.
That doesn’t explain what’s wrong with using the search as an example if a person thinks there is a problem with the research which shows up for that search.
The search has thousands of results. Tomorrow's top results could be entirely different. I've only seen 2 people say they read today's top result. They didn't see what was wrong with it.[1][2]
No. My view is probably he didn't read any of those papers. He has to know most of his audience won't. He has to know the search results could change too. So he was just sneering at the words.
Changing the search terms is just more evidence he wasn't pointing to any particular research.
The link is deliberately suggesting that any research on race is bogus (and the edit uses another general keyword across a general search, which still deliberately suggests that). This suggests to me either:
1. you deny white supremacy exists - in my opinion, that's the more generous reading, or,
2. you acknowledge that it exists but wish to publicly state the view that it is not worth any research hours. That is itself white supremacy, plus the intent to cause harm.
There is no credible third option. You suggest intellectual immaturity or narrow-mindedness (from someone with a PhD), but those would come in addition to either 1 or 2 applying, not instead of.
Using childishness as an excuse for racism is still racism, especially if you are a grown adult. Your excusing this as just childishness is embarrassing.
“The link is deliberately suggesting that any research on race is bogus“
If this statement were true, then would be merit to your conclusions.
However it’s obviously not true.
The link clearly does suggest that the kinds of academic paper that search yields are bogus.
The original search was for “hermeneutic” “dialectics” “hegemonic” “intersectionality” “whiteness” (as best I can reconstruct).
This is quite obviously not a search for ‘any research on race’.
Indeed it is clearly a search for a very narrow kind of academic writing on ‘whiteness’, which itself is a term only used in a subset of academic theorizing about race.
Most kinds of research on race do not include these search terms.
Obviously PG does think this narrow subfield is bogus.
It’s puzzling that you have concluded that this means he thinks that ‘any’ research on race is bogus.
The best way I can made sense of this is to figure that you think that any criticism of academic writing about race is equivalent to denying white supremacy.
> It’s puzzling that you have concluded that this means he thinks that ‘any’ research on race is bogus.
So: any research on race is fine, but using the words 'whiteness', 'racialized' or now 'intersectionality' (this word appears newly to me) makes it bogus...
Half of the results on Google Scholar which mention 'white supremacy' contain at least one of those three words, broadly consistently since 1990.
How do you talk in any useful way about race relations without ever using those words? Awkwardly, in modern academia.
- You can't now easily define what "white" means in your context (since this definition is not fixed or absolute), for example, so how can we understand the foundation of your work?
- You don't now have a word for talking about how the experience of being a woman or disabled or gay etc is different (or not) for black people than it is for white people.
- You don't now have a word for the experience of ethnic or cultural groups becoming discriminated against with political involvement.
It's akin to saying research in computer science is fine, but the words 'algorithm', 'lisp', or 'big data' show it to be bogus.
> So: any research on race is fine, but using the words 'whiteness', 'racialized' or now 'intersectionality' (this word appears newly to me) makes it bogus...
Again, a puzzling interpretation.
A couple of points, it’s fairly obvious that PG doesn’t expect people to go through every single search result past the first few.
Search results with the conjunction of those words are listed first. You have mistakenly used the word ‘or’, but search engines place ‘and’ results first.
PG doesn’t use the term ‘white’ anywhere. That has been introduced by you. He uses the term ‘whiteness’.
I am a little surprised you conflate these two terms, since in both the academic discourse, and in activism about race, these words do not mean the same thing.
> How do you talk in any useful way about race relations without ever using those words?
It’s not clear what this question has to do with what PG wrote, and the rest of your post seems to hinge on its relevance.
PG didn’t say anything about people not using words. He posted a link to a search he expected would prioritize examples of the kind of research he thinks is bogus.
Generally when we do a Google search, we assume that the first few results will be the most relevant, not that every result is equally relevant.
See my earlier point - search prioritizes results that contain as many of these terms as possible.
To summarize: Your comment seems to be based on two misunderstandings. One about how Google search works, and the other about how the meaning of the word ‘whiteness’ differs from the word ‘white’ in contemporary discourse on race.
Also, I note that you conflate search results with research. These aren’t the same thing.
I looked at the references on the other end of the link. I expected it to be a particular article with all four of those words in the title. It was not; it was just a search for those four words.
The top result is an article about the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (d. 1968), who was among other things one of the leaders of the theological opposition to the Third Reich and its subversion of Christian belief in service of white-supremacist ideology. The article says that Barth's interpretation of Romans 2 provides us a way today to avoid commingling Christian identity and whiteness.
It's certainly possible for someone who believes white supremacy exists (and is worth opposing) to think that academic work that reads Barth today to counter racial superiority disguised as Christianity is of low value. I'd say it's pretty unlikely.
To be fair, this is not the most charitable interpretation. The most charitable interpretation is that the author of the essay has never seriously read any academic work involving the words "hermeneutic," "dialectic," "hegemonic," or "whiteness" and they're just four words that he thinks mean nothing, and that he didn't actually read the results in the Google Scholar search before a middlebrow dismissal (to use his own term) of the results. That would make him like the vast majority of the folks who deny the existence of white supremacy - dismissing serious opposition to it as silly instead of specifically disbelieving it.
I read the linked paper out of curiosity. It's a theological paper arguing against forms of Christianity that are based on the world-view of whiteness; instead Christianity should move toward a "decolonial option". The paper's arguments are based on the famous theologian Karl Barth and his commentary on Romans 2, so it's not easy reading.
Is this bogus? If you consider theology bogus, then yes. But the paper is highly relevant to current US politics with the influence of evangelical churches and their embrace of a white-centered model of the world. (Although it doesn't explicitly get into politics.)
One irony of linking to this paper is that religion is highly marked by earnestness, and this paper even more so. The paper's author is clearly genuinely interested in this subject as a "theology nerd". She is writing not for personal gain but to make the world a better place.
I think PG is engaging in a very common form of fallacy, the assumption that everyone agrees with his judgement on an issue (in this case the uselessness of certain avenues of research and endeavor) and thus that their intentions must be viewed by interpreting their actions in light of that ascribed belief, so if they are engaging in the endeavors he finds useless, they must also be doing so through a lack of earnestness.
This is a common way of converting a difference in judgement about the value of particular activities into a characterization of dishonesty and fraudulent activity; when done accidentally it is a sign of lack of ability to recognize differences in viewpoints, when done intentionally it's technique of avoiding debate on the issue on which agreement is assumed through the distraction of casting moral aspersions at those who disagree.
I can choose to see (or not) that the prisoner being walked down the street is shackled. And maybe there are some good reasons for choosing not to see.
But it seems the beginning of sanity for that prisoner, herself, to see her chains.
[EDIT: Every statement here is a basic fact, easily verifiable and backed by reputable scholarship and reaearch. Controversy comes from peoples dislike of the implication of these facts, not the truthfulness of the statements themselves. TBH I think downvoters should be ashamed of themselves. Or, better educate themselves.]
What? No.
White supremacy is literally a cop murdering a man by pressing his knee on the guys neck until he dies, with the cops buddies standing by and watching.
White supremacy is Ahmad Arbery being murdered while jogging because he was black:
White supremacy is the crack epidemic being treated primarily like a criminal issue in the 80s, and the opioid epidemic today being treated primarily like a health issue. Why? Because the crack epidemic primarily effected black people, and the opioid epidemic white people.
White supremacy is racist housing policies where Black people can’t get loans:
I understand the discomfort, confusion, and frustration that can arise when talking about racism and white supremacy, and there certainly are plenty of people who don’t express themselves in the most palatable way about it or who also believe things that may not be true.
But white supremacy is a real thing and if you take fifteen minutes online and look at wikipedia, and the articles I shared (in particular The Atlantic ones), then you’ll see that it’s real, it’s a thing.
And at that point it’s then not a question of what anybody sees, but rather what you yourself choose to accept.
> White supremacy is literally a cop murdering a man by pressing his knee on the guys neck until he dies, with the cops buddies standing by and watching
That is not white supremacy until you prove he did it because the victim was black and not because other reasons (like him being a bully cop). So under that criteria any white person killed by a black person was victim of black supremacy.
A better example of white supremacy is white people in liberal cities taking over the BLM movement and making all about themselves.
[EDIT: tl;dr is if a bully cop targets someone black because they know they can get away with it because the person is black, not white, that's still an example of white supremacy / systemic racism in action.]
No. Fuck off, seriously.
Do you actually believe that about the murder of George Floyd? Do you actually think that cop would have behaved that way if George Floyd was white?
What you said only makes any sense in a fantasy world where you simply ignore the facts of police violence over the last several decades.
Or maybe you’re ignorant, i.e. uneducated, in which case I would encourage you to read more and better material on the subject.
How could someone deny white supremacy? White supremacy is everywhere. It is watching us right now. It is reading along with you as you read this. This morning, I had white supremacy on my toast.
Wait a minute.... my toast is made of.... white bread.
I earnestly think his writing has an overindulgent fandom here. Every single blog post rockets to the top and, in my opinion, they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or persuasion. He may write snappily, but is every single post worthy of Han's top slot?
Yes. It’s because of who he is. If I wrote this post, it would not have the same meaning as if he wrote it.
I know that sounds counterintuitive, but the reason is that we know that PG has huge experience of and access to startup founders and seen their outcomes and has had a great deal of opportunity to formulate thoughts like like this on the basis of what he has seen.
I have experience of startups too. I could have written something like this, but it genuinely wouldn’t have been as meaningful coming from me, because I don’t have the same perspective as he does.
I think if your perspective has enabled you to know things you wouldn't have otherwise, _most_ of that should just come through from the writing. It should be possible for you to write in a way that's convincing independently of who you are.
A different person might not have been able to produce the same essay, but if the essay is the same, who the author is shouldn't matter too much (for a good essay).
What we know about PG’s experience is a huge prior that shapes how we interpret what he writes.
I think this probably explains some of the polarization we see in the comments - people who don’t know who he is see this as just a dumb blog post that seems to be getting too much karma. People who do, see it as insight from someone who is in a position to actually know something.
I'm not saying PG asserting some insight is the same as some random person asserting it: certainly PG has some prior we should take into account.
But I think good essays are ones where you don't need to really rely on that prior. A good essay is one that convinces you that what it's saying is true, instead of just asserting it and relying on the reputation of the author.
If an essay doesn't convince you directly, then:
a) the author just didn't take the time to provide an explanation
b) the explanation is too complex, or too difficult to materialize, it's something you just develop an intuition about
c) it can't convince you directly because it's not actually true
If you trust the author on the subject matter enough such that you're in a/b territory, then while I think an essay that explained more would be a better one, an essay that doesn't is still valuable.
But I think at least one concern is that we're actually in c territory. Especially with stuff like "picking winning companies", I'm hesitant to take things at face-value. It's such a complicated thing to predict, it's easy to succumb to survivorship bias. I'm not convinced that PG is just so good at it that things should be taken at face-value.
I think this is a very obvious no-true Scotsman fallacy around the notion of a ‘good’ essay, plus a straw man of what PG wrote: “just asserting something and relying on the reputation of the author”, and one of what I wrote: “that things should be take at face-value.”
It is fairly obvious that persuasive writing often convinces people of things which we are either not true, or meaningless.
It’s also fairly obvious that all authors perspectives are formed by experience, and that knowing about that experience is informative of how we interpret what they say. This is simply true of all human communications.
I can’t really see what you are trying to accomplish by insisting there is something called a ‘good’ essay, whose hallmark is it’s persuasiveness in the absence of knowledge about the author.
Certainly there are some sincere essays that do fulfill this criteria, but it’s what also exactly what a cult leader or marketing agency would be aiming to achieve with their writing.
I would make the case that being persuaded by an essay is an epistemically salient signal which can be thought of as a red flag that we may be being manipulated by someone we wouldn’t choose to be manipulated by.
When we experience it, the responsible thing to do is to inform ourselves more about the author and their experience rather than to lionize the piece of writing.
Re. strawman: maybe this is a good essay, but I was referencing Dumblydorr's assertion that if someone else had written this essay it would be considered mediocre/not make it to the top of HN, and your response that this is irrelevant, since the author _is_ in fact PG.
I'm not sure where the no-true Scottsman is?
> I can’t really see what you are trying to accomplish by insisting there is something called a ‘good’ essay, whose hallmark is it’s persuasiveness in the absence of knowledge about the author.
Really? This seems entirely non-controversial to me. It's more-or-less "don't judge a book by its cover". Maybe I was over-emphasizing _how_ important this is ("hallmark" is probably too strong), but all-else-equal, a text being able to rely on the arguments made within as opposed to who the author is seems positive. And I think there's _obviously_ metrics by which you can judge an essay's good-ness beyond its author.
[SSC][0] is a good example. I think he writes very interesting essays that captivate and convince people on their own. The only "reputation" he had when he started was that he was psychiatrist. Recently he's gotten a bit more popular, but still, his reputation is just "someone who writes good essays".
Are you suggesting it's dangerous that SSC writes good, convincing essays, despite the fact that he's not some well-known figure?
If you have no previous knowledge of a cult, getting convinced by their writing seems to be more about getting convinced by bad arguments than it is about attempting to consider arguments directly. And once you're already in a cult, I think it's a very common feature to have members rely only on the reputation of the cult leader without trying to think critically about the actual things they're saying.
Like, let's say someone gets indoctrinated into a cult. You could say "Yeah, see, if they had just discounted the cult leader due to their reputation instead of trying to actually read what they had to say, they wouldn't have gotten indoctrinated." I guess? But they could have also used more scrutiny in examining the arguments? And if the reader isn't using scrutiny to examine the arguments, why do we think they're going to make good decisions about whose reputation to trust?
> Are you suggesting it's dangerous that SSC writes good, convincing essays, despite the fact that he's not some well-known figure?
Of course not. What did I write that would suggest that?
> cult, getting convinced by their writing seems to be more about getting convinced by bad arguments than it is about attempting to consider arguments directly.
Your criterion for a ‘good’ essay was that it is convincing in the absence of knowledge of who the author is.
For someone who is persuaded, both SSC and the cult leader’s writings both meet this criterion.
How would you modify your criterion to distinguish the two?
> Of course not. What did I write that would suggest that?
> being persuaded by an essay is ... a red flag that we may be being manipulated by someone we wouldn’t choose to be manipulated by
I was persuaded by SSC essays, despite not knowing much about the author. Was that a red flag? Was it bad that I remained convinced by them despite not finding out much about what experiences in his background have shaped his perspective?
> How would you modify your criterion to distinguish the two?
The distinguishing factor is in what you should be persuaded by.
If a "cult leader" is able to convince you of something by presenting you with good arguments, maybe they aren't a cult leader/it's not crazy to believe whatever they're selling.
If someone's convinced of cultish notions because they were persuaded by bad arguments, I'd say the primary remediation is "don't be persuaded by bad arguments", not "don't listen to people unless you know who they are". I wouldn't say the second statement is terrible advice, but it's not the primary problem.
Nope, I came to the same conclusion as your parent, when I wondered why every one of these threads for the last several years has been full of dismissal and criticism, and why the phrase "out of touch" gets flogged like a dead horse. I've been reading pg for 17 years, so I know who he is, what he's done, where he's coming from, his writing style... I can take his essays for what they are with all that context. Of course his opinions and perspective are what they are, because it's literally his life's work to identify potentially successful founders before they're successful.
Also, I don't suffer from that HN thing where nobody can simply consider an article, or do follow-up research themselves, without measurability, studies and citations, as if they're petrified they might become epistemically infected and be wrong about something that probably doesn't even impact their life in the slightest.
I have read PG essays for the last 4-5 something years. YC was never under my radar before that. The first time I saw ‘PG essays’, I was excited because I thought they meant PG Wodehouse who is my favourite author ever and I was excited that YC reads Wodehouse together.
Alas..that wasn’t the case. But I don’t regret the PG essays and have come to appreciate them over the years. I think it’s because I didn’t have any expectation about this person’s writing or prior knowledge about PG. But not knowing who Paul Graham was and reading them for the first time, I couldn’t figure out the enthusiasm around it. Maybe it was my disappointment that they weren’t by my PG. But over time, I have come to appreciate it.
These are what I call ‘through my lens’ writings. The words derive weight from the cult of personality. And the lens they see the world through..
But what you are describing is just an appeal to authority.
It's quite possible that putting the assertions of the text in the context of this particular authority does give it more credibility, but I've also heard that same authority make some very poor assertions.
Just look at the objective criticism that some of the posts gather. Sometimes, there are really major, easily contradicted flaws in these texts.
You’re going to need to explain how you conclude that I am making an appeal to authority.
I didn’t say anything about the validity of his argument. Only that it means something different and more interesting given his experience, than it would coming from someone else.
Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us than when a random blogger is wrong.
> You’re going to need to explain how you conclude that I am making an appeal to authority.
Because of your phrasing: "Yes. It’s because of who he is."
> Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us than when a random blogger is wrong.
Relative to each other, perhaps.
However, is something wrong by PG more interesting than literally every other topic being discussed on HN, so that it "rockets to the top", to quote the comment you initially replied to.
In that phrase, “Yes. It’s because of who he is.”, I am not referring to the validity of his argument. I am explaining the fact that his posts receive a lot of attention.
There is simply no appeal to authority being made.
The rest of your comment isn’t clear, are you saying there is something wrong with people finding PG’s pieces interesting?
I beg someone out there, please run an experiment that reposts PG’s articles on Medium.com with a different author’s name. All things equal, I wouldn’t doubt that HN would start giving these posts a proper vote count.
But then again, some people are more equal than others. shrug
On average, his writings are definitely more worthy of discussion than the newest JS framework or somebody doing something with old or underpowered hardware. Perhaps most of the once-top posts aren't as exciting as one would believe?
>they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or persuasion
He’s not writing research papers. He’s just a thoughtful guy with a lot of experience sharing his ideas as concisely as possible. Part of the reason the posts are so interesting is because of the discussions they prompt - I wouldn’t mistake the level of interest on HN for everybody treating these as gospel.
I mean, you're using a site which self-selects for his target demographic. He's the founder of a VC company which created the site your visiting and apparently his blog gets 15 million page views per year. I think it's just a numbers game, not fandom.
I'm not defending what he writes, but this posts are generally fun to read and think about. Sometimes I don't agree with him or find holes in his arguments, but there's usually a nugget of truth you can take away. They're just blog posts, he doesn't need to be infallible.
The occasional self-promotion from the people running the site is a price I'm willing to pay to use the site.
Part of what I once said about why Def Leppard songs were meaningful to me:
A group of young men singing about love who also stood by their talented but now severely handicapped band member after he lost an arm is something that spoke to my soul. To me, these people had to know something more than pretty words. There had to be something deeper in their songs than just "sex, drugs and rock and roll."
Words never stand completely on their own. What they mean to people is shaped by context, history and reputation.
Hacker News wasn't always a space with 5 million unique visitors per month who mostly barely know each other. When I originally joined in 2009, it had a sense of community.
I never got to be one of the "insiders" in that community. I was a visitor looking in from the outside.
But it did exist and many of those people still come here, though their presence isn't obvious. I don't think you can tell who pg's friends are by who says what on Hacker News.
I've always respected the man, though he and I were never friends. I respected him because of how he comported himself here when he was in my mind just a moderator for a forum that I participated on, before he was big time famous and big time wealthy, when his wealth was measured in words starting with M, not B.
I don't read every single thing he writes and I never have. But I certainly take his words seriously when I do sometimes read them.
He has a PhD and he suggested to his girlfriend that the two of them should start a company together. That company is, of course, YC.
I feel like it gets little press as a "pro diversity" company, but it's a big company with a woman founder and that's true because of Paul Graham. It was not Jessica Livingston who came up with the idea.
It's sort of a stealth diversity thing and I generally don't say too much about that because I think that's the best way to do diversity and I don't want to ruin it by calling a lot of attention to it.
But we've had a pandemic all year and the entire world is cranky as all hell -- me included -- and it's just rubbing me the wrong way that people are so desperate to find a dog to kick these days. So I feel a need to give a bit of pushback here lately.
> The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly this is also the region with the highest number of successful startups per capita.
I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” or “The British are terrible cooks.” Absent any evidence to back them up, many such statements in PG’s essays seem to be an expression of his prejudices. The very least he could do is to provide some criterion the reader can use to test “earnestness” at the population scale.
In this case, I imagine that he started from “Scandinavia is the region with the highest number of startups per capita” and inferred that this must mean that they are more earnest, rather than going the other way around.
Why do you assume bad faith? Having worked closely with folks from many parts of Europe as an early stage founder, folks from Scandinavia certainly seem to take “naive” or “earnest” efforts of founders more seriously than other parts of Europe (or even Asia for that matter).
PG says “the most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia [and therefore it has more successful startups]”. Afaict GP is saying PG doesn’t believe what he is saying and is disingenuously suggesting causality just to support his main thesis.
His posts aren’t fact based, they’re mostly an expression of his feelings.
A great example are his 5-6 posts talking about how the most important facet of a programming language is its brevity (https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sex...). At no point does he cite any facts backing that up. Even when the brevity chasing language he created failed to gain traction, he didn’t see that as an indication to recheck his assumptions.
In other words, “feelings don’t care about your facts”. But hey, there’s a market for that sort of article. So who are we to judge?
I think you folks are holding PG to a standard that the vast majority of essays which hit the HN frontpage would not meet.
Even this critical essay looks like it fails to meet its own standard.
A "profoundly unserious" writer which is "mired in intuition and incuriosity"? Nowhere in the post are these terms rigorously defined!
And look! The author accuses Graham of "tantalizing the reader by reducing complex problems down to singular, nebulous concepts" without mentioning principal component analysis! "Profoundly unserious", I say.
The vast majority of essays submitted to HN don’t reach the front page because the author isn’t famous. Whereas PG rockets to the top of the front page within an hour of submission.
Even then, the average HN comments section is highly sceptical of any claims in any post. The top comment is usually critiquing the link for one reason or another. For some reason, that wasn’t the case with PG articles. You’re only remarking about this now because HN is finally holding PG to the same standard that others are.
I value PG's opinion more than a rando blogger because he's very successful, has observed a lot of data about what makes startups successful, seems unusually serious about being correct, and has written a lot of things I consider insightful in the past. He's a name I know and I click it when I see it on HN. There are a lot of other people with similar HN clout, patio11 for instance.
I haven't noticed a trend for comments on PG articles to be less critical. If anything I think I've noticed users feeling a need to be more critical (as I feel your comment illustrates).
It's OK to hold pg to a higher standard than others in terms of factually supporting his claims. Fine. Just be clear that you are doing so. It's fine to remind others not to take his word as gospel as well.
I mean it's at least technically quite possible that someone like PG would have a very good intuitive understanding for what works and what doesn't, without this meaning that he is able to systematise this implicit knowledge in such a way that it is empirically solid and/or can be usefully taught to others.
This is similar to the fact that experts are not always the best teachers, or that a rhetorically skilled speaker/writer is not necessarily a competent linguist or literary scientist, or how many great musicians know little about music theory.
Of course, you are correct that many, many other tech bloggers don't back up their claims either (most notoriously the "I did this thing once at company X, it worked ok, and now I'm preaching it as a new gospel (but it hasn't even been a year that we did this and we don't understand the long-term implications of it yet)" blog posts). I think this is in general a real shame because it leads to all the cargo culting madness that's so prevalent in the industry.
In PG's case, I find that most of his blog posts read like post hoc rationalisations based on sweeping generalisations (e.g. that you can be either "earnest" or jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a particularly false dichotomy). Which wouldn't nearly bother me as much if they weren't also often full of thinly veiled contempt for different kinds of people (e.g. people who are actually good at bringing people together). It sometimes reads to me as a sort of "I was bullied/excluded as a nerdy teenager and now I'm gonna show them how much better nerds are and why they will (or at least should) rule the world". In a world where we increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies making decisions that impact all of us, including people completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't think this is a very good position to take.
You make a good point: while PG may be able to intuitively pick out "winners," this does not mean he will be successful at making those intuitions explicit, as he attempts to do in his blog posts.
>I mean it's at least technically quite possible that someone like PG would have a very good intuitive understanding for what works and what doesn't
Fair point
>you can be either "earnest" or jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a particularly false dichotomy
I'm looking at the essay and I'm not seeing where it says this? Maybe I just forgot.
>people who are actually good at bringing people together
From the essay (in a footnote):
>It's interesting how many different ways there are not to be earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant, to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to be orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make. This pattern suggests that earnestness is not one end of a continuum, but a target one can fall short of in multiple dimensions.
The closest thing on the list to "bringing people together" in my mind would be being cool, which isn't very close IMO.
>In a world where we increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies making decisions that impact all of us, including people completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't think this is a very good position to take.
I don't trust the general population to make decisions either--see our current president for an example of what they can sometimes go for.
The typical reaction to PG essays on HN has been the exact same flavor of negative for many, many years now. Go back and read the comments on his previous submissions. PG himself even wrote an essay about uncharitable criticism and basically exited the site in 2015.
It's very surprising to me that anyone could think that, in 2020, it's new and original to bash PG articles on HN.
Scandinavian countries have very high trust societies, based on any survey that looked into this. Why that is is a difficult question and leads us very far. Is it money? Where did the money come from? Oil (but that's not there in all Nordic countries)? Lack of war? Did the lack of war come from their high trust? Or the geographic distance to warring nations and empires of Europe? Is it related to the cold environment, perhaps harder to conquer and less valuable for empires? Do social temperaments have to do with climate? Is it about their genetic homogeneity? Which one is the cause of which? If they go in cycles what influences what in the strongest way? It's a very complicated issue!
It's too reductionist to take only the part "earnest, therefore startup". Sort of implying that if only other nations were also more earnest they'd also have startups and wealth, disregarding all the possibly good reasons that those other nations have not to be trusting/earnest.
But it's also too dismissive to say to this that it's "national stereotyping" therefore it immediately must be false and there can be no connection at all between earnestness/trust and startups in the case of Scandinavia.
Trust is something that is defined and measurable. And yes you’re right, it is complicated. But the complexity isn’t helped by introducing a random thing called “earnestness” without a way to measure that.
Scandinavian countries are not really countries. More like a family club. (This is starting to change though)
When everybody is just like you, it leads to high trust, no us vs them mentality. Same is true in eg. South Korea and Japan.
Contrast this with their
similarily northern neighbour Russia, which is basically the America of eastern europe. A nation resulting from a melting pot
of ethnicitiess, languages, cultures (most current Russians are really assimilated from smaller native cultures, their great grandparents didn't identify as Russian). And the end result? Corruption. Everybody just tries to milk public funds as much as they can, and so forth.
While I'm not disagreeing with your proposed cause to high trust within a culture, I disagree with 'high diversity causing corruption'. I think the corruption issues in eastern europe are a whole different conversation and I'm not sure how diversity in ethnicity would necessarily cause that.
Poland (and most of Eastern Europe) has been steamrolled repeatedly by neighboring empires which have imposed what amounted to foreign governments. These governments ruled despite, not due to, the local populations. Ergo secret police, network of informants, etc, just to control the population.
It's hard to have very high trust levels when your own government and state are working against you and when your coworkers and neighbors can at any time rat you out for unpatriotic activities.
I meant they escaped the world wars and the rest of the turmoils of the 20th century. Largely because they didn't have deep historic conflicts with the rest of the big empires.
I mean, sure, not completely, they definitely had some of their population deported by Nazis, but it wasn't such a major impact as elsewhere in Europe.
Well, Norway collaborated with the nazis and sympathised for some of their ideas at the time, for example Norway had been experimenting with eugenics programs since the 20s when they started to sterilise mentally hill patients and made it legal in 1934.
But the king of Norway and members of the army escaped to London and directed the resistance from there.
Ask the Jews that owned the houses and nursing homes that were confiscated for the Lebensborn project and the kids that survived it (not many), what they think about it.
Others had it worse doesn't mean they escaped the war and its consequences.
If the eastern block is where you draw the line, you could argue that many parts of Europe escaped the war.
They had a head start after WW 2 for sure. Earlier they were not affected by Ottoman wars like the Balkans and other Eastern Europe (the extent of destruction and de population that brought was beyond imagination), nor a Moorish occupation like in Iberia. Scandinavia was not razed to the ground and drastically depopulated in recent centuries.
Finland is somewhat exceptional among the Nordics as they were quite poor and had some shit to deal with from Russia (and Sweden) but managed to become rich and high trust.
They have been at war for 2 centuries like much of Europe.
Depending on who you ask, Ottomans were their allied or their enemies in Scandinavia, at times they have been both like Denmark allied of Ottomans against Russia that then switched side and sided with Russia that gave them land from Sweden.
There were big differences between Scandinavian countries and they have been at war for a long time.
Denmark for example owned Ghana, like Belgium owned Congo.
They were richer than say Finland.
France has been involved in less wars during the same time span.
Another example: Spain and Portugal weren't bombed during WW2, they were not occupied, they stayed mostly neutral, but didn't develop an high trust society.
The lack of feudalism as a contrast to other nations and the excess of Lutheranism were mostly a long time ago as was the Hanseatic league. And while Scandinavia looks homogeneous to outsiders, especially to those from far away, the three countries have distinct characters and distinct histories. Part of how each behaves has to do with the climate and topology of each country as well as the accidents of history in recent centuries. At least one Danish king was famous for picking fights with his neighbours which is one reason why Denmark is so small, Sweden had a French king for a while which left its mark on the language and the structures of society. Norway for a long time was simply far away and difficult to travel in which means that decentralisation worked as there was almost no choice. Towns only 10 km apart on the map might have very distinct dialects because there is a mountain in the way meaning that it is a 100 km trip from one to the other.
The glib answers, as I suspect you were saying, are usually wrong or very partial (in both senses of the word).
Denmark and Sweden have been at war with each other so many times you can't give an exact number as it becomes difficult to say when it's a prolonged war and when it's 2 seperate wars.
Not to disagree but I believe that the nature of their government, the social democracy, that empowers people and their needs, built up the trust they have in each other and their representatives.
It's also the reason why they accept very high rates of taxation in exchange for public services that actually work and benefit the population.
Depicting Scandinavia as an uniform land where a genetically homogeneous spawn lives is also misleading.
For example in Denmark 86% of the population is Danish descent, same goes for Norway, in Sweden 18% of the population was born in another country.
In Italy, which is not particularly famous for its genetic uniformity, 90% of the population was born in Italy from Italian parents.
What seems uniform in Europe, except for Scandinavia, is the distrust
European countries shows that average trust in the police tends to be higher than trust in the political and the legal systems. And trust in the political system is particularly low – in fact much lower than interpersonal trust for all countries except Switzerland. On the other hand, trust in the police is notably high, and in the majority of European countries people trust the police more than they trust each other
Italy has the highest level of trust in the Mediterranean area, around 30%, while France, Spain and Greece are below 20%.
Netherlands have the same level of Scandinavia (>60%), Germany is around 50%.
My personal belief is that the society trust is directly proportional to the level of social conflict.
Not surprisingly France, where social conflict is quite high (which I don't think is bad per sé) has the lower level of trust in Europe (~18%), except for Romania.
Well, there is a well known cliché of people in Northern Europe being more cool-headed than in Southern Europe. You can see how it would translate to earnestness being more or less punished in social situations...
(Yet it would also come with being more or less "cool", which is opposite to what pg suggests, so I guess I have no idea ! XD)
I think it’s a cultural thing. Take France. My anecdotal experience is that the bourgeoisie seem to place a certain social capital on having a degree from the right school. Entrepreneurialism is something to be studied, not attempted. Hard to take a risk with that kind of social expectation.
> What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France?
Experience, perhaps?
As a French who lived a number of years in Scandinavia, it is day and night. It doesn't mean that people in those countries never cheat, but in France, the default attitude is cheating. Always. About everything and anything. Even when there is nothing to win and being straight or earnest would be much easier. It is exhausting.
> This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,”
I can't speak for Sweden or Denmark but here in Norway great store is set on straightforwardness, plain speaking, and trust. Generally you are assumed to be telling the truth and if you say that you will do something then people will assume that you mean it and possess the necessary skill. This sort of atmosphere means that there is less bureaucracy involved in getting things done, paperwork is on the whole simpler than elsewhere. Doing your duty and pulling together are important features of life in Norway.
Whether any of this is really the cause of there being more startups in Scandinavia than elsewhere is something I'm not able to answer, but the earnestness is certainly present.
The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge of it.
My personal experience is that life is simpler here than in my country of origin (UK); mostly things 'Just Work (tm)' and that might be why startups are more common.
> The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge of it.
Is this a downside, or has the rest of the word devalued its academic qualifications by lowering its standards, failing to seriously tackle cheating, and (relevant to postgraduate degrees and academic titles) prioritising novelty and sensation at the expense of rigour?
I've never seen the inside of a top UK or US university, so I can't be sure that they're churning out meaningless undergrad degrees, but they certainly seem to be complicit in these trends at the level of publishing and hiring/promotion/tenure.
The specific example I had in mind was an acquaintance who held a doctorate from Trinity, Dublin. and it was quite a while ago. So no, I don't think devalued qualifications was the issue.
> I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously.
They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest, it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises.
Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers have Portuguese nationality.
I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia.
I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the facts are definitely not there.
If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with a very different idea of what being earnest means.
It’s also absolutely the opposite of my experience. I’ve met a bunch of Swedes, Norwegians, Finns and Danes and they are some of the most sophisticated and cynical folks I’ve had the pleasure of working with.
Perhaps the particularly dry brand of Scandinavian pragmatic irony is lost on pg because pg is too earnest to notice that they’re on the other side of a zetetic event horizon.
This is what you see if you look at the Perceptions of Corruption Index. That only looks at the public sector (not private companies), but one could reasonably assume the two correlate:
Odd to see a stress on interest in a problem for its own sake from pg, who has elsewhere written that the startup economy would be crippled by raising taxes on people who had already gotten fabulously rich. If being in it for the money is "the wrong motive" to do a startup, downgrading the potential financial gains from set-for-dynasty to merely set-for-life would seem to be a way of ditching the poseurs...
"People's motives are as mixed in Silicon Valley as anywhere else. Even the founders motivated mostly by money tend to be at least somewhat interested in the problem they're solving, and even the founders most interested in the problem they're solving also like the idea of getting rich."
Yeah, but the parent talks about 'raising taxes on people who had already gotten fabulously rich', not some kind of radical egalitarianism. You'd have to be very strongly money-motivated to be deterred by the prospect of merely having hundreds of millions rather than a billion, or a couple billion rather than several billion, or whatever.
I feel this... I don't want billions for myself, I want billions so I can fund moonshot projects. If starting my business in a foreign country with no wealth tax is the difference between being a millionaire and a billionaire, I will strongly consider relocating.
It seems like it'd be easy to create a charity funded with your wealth that provides grants to innovators. You can do this even in a country with a large wealth tax.
The world also has an awful lot of yachts and private jets for me to really buy the argument that billionaires really want the money to give it away. So maybe democratic control over that wealth ends up being better on average, even if you truly are committed to giving away all of your wealth in the way that maximally benefits humanity.
Sure, interested in how the problem they're solving may get them a pot of gold.
Founders aren't motivated by the problem no more than athletes are motivated by the love of the game. Children are motivated in that manner. But not adults.
Startups, like sports, are a business. The only concern is money. That is the ends. The startup, problem, etc are just the means to that end.
Every founder is motivated by money. It just sounds tacky and cheap to say you did it for money, so everyone builds up some silly story - "to help people", "to solve a problem", "cause it was a passion", "to create jobs for the community", "create value for others", etc. Nope. It was all for money. No need to be embarrassed about it.
> downgrading the potential financial gains from set-for-dynasty to merely set-for-life would seem to be a way of ditching the poseurs
I've really started to think that inheritance is one of the biggest problem we have. Each one has the right to their own worth and riches acquired through their own effort, but if you pass those on afterwards then you create a dynasty that defeats the point of meritocracy and equality of opportunity. The incentives then become tribal, to your family, to your friends, and not simply a realization of your earnest passion.
1. The elite will still hand down a superior education and social connections to their progeny, so their children will still be privileged, just not ridiculously so like they are today
2. This will incentivize parents to invest more in their children's soft development, rather than just handing down their wealth and calling it a day
It seems to me the subtle miscommunication between billionaires and the rest of us is the rest of us are asking “what ever will you do with a dynasty” and many billionaires, I think, have a mental model of “I have proven I can employ this wealth more effectively than bureaucrats, and I like to solve big problems, and wealth makes it easier to solve big problems.”
This is a huge generalization we could easily find counter-examples and counter-arguments for, but we could also probably find fair arguments FOR this view, like Bill Gates.
Anyway, I think it’s probably a fair summary of how someone like PG could simultaneously hold the two ideas “don’t start a startup for money” and “higher taxes are a bad idea” at the same time. Which is not to say that he’s right, but I don’t think he’s incongruent.
> It seems to me the subtle miscommunication between billionaires and the rest of us is the rest of us are asking “what ever will you do with a dynasty” and many billionaires, I think, have a mental model of “I have proven I can employ this wealth more effectively than bureaucrats, and I like to solve big problems, and wealth makes it easier to solve big problems.”
> This is a huge generalization we could easily find counter-examples and counter-arguments for, but we could also probably find fair arguments FOR this view, like Bill Gates.
You're correct in identifying the mental model in operation, but you're missing the fact that the people in question are profoundly deluded.
Staggering piles of money (including Bill Gates') were, almost without exception, a result of the ability to capture value, not the ability to create it. And this is worth noting: many of the most significant decisions that led to increasing the value being captured were value destroying, such as "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run".
That isn't to say that value wasn't created at all (quite a lot was), but only that it isn't quite what is measured by, and rewarded with, wealth.
In the most benign cases of extreme wealth, much (even most) of the value captured IS also created by the person or organization doing the capturing, but invariably, more value is being captured than created (or at least, the market believes that will eventually be the case).
I don't disbelieve you, but do you have evidence to back this up? That is, do you have evidence that suggests value capture at the price of value creation is more important than value creation itself?
If you don't capture the value you create, you don't become staggeringly wealthy.
If you capture value you don't create, you become staggeringly wealthy.
Note that I am not claiming that value isn't being created at all in that second scenario, just that the entity capturing the value isn't creating it.
If you capture value while destroying some, the picture gets more complicated, as it depends on the nature of the feedback loops involved. It isn't too hard to see examples in the wild of organizations pursuing strategies aimed at getting a larger slice of the pie, or at getting slices of more pies, rather than strategies that are aimed at getting the size or number of pies to grow overall.
I didn’t miss any facts. I was deliberately cagey because this line of debate your comment enters is irrelevant to my larger point: the arguments may be wrong, or right, or any number of other conclusions, but they aren’t incongruent with each other.
That's because this essay doesn't exist in isolation, it's a defense against the (entirely accurate) claim that his interest in Lisp for its own sake hasn't changed the world, only his business skills have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400184
If you don't have that context, then the essay is in fact very confusing: the beginning of it says that caring about money is the wrong motivation, and the end of it says how good it is that you now get money from earnestly working on things. What it's actually doing is trying to convince people that there's a connection between his financial success and his earnest work on Lisp, and more generally that successful startups (who apparently still need VC investment) tend to be successful because they deserve it, not because they happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right access to capital.
Retrospectively ascribing success to character traits that we favour is subjective to the point of meaninglessness.
Earnestness, like any other trait or 'virtue' is not innate or absolute. Everyone has the capacity to exhibit this trait or be seen to exhibit it, when refracted through the non-objective lens of someone else's bias and perception. For example, a politician for partyX is seen to be an earnest 'straight man' who cares deeply by his supporters, while supporters of partyY view him as a reckless oaf.
To promote the use of personality traits as a predictor of success is naive at best.
Well, here is an article by a Nobel prize winner, reviewing a large amount of empirical evidence that personality traits predict success. See particularly section 4.
In my view, there is a uniquely American fiction that there exists for everyone some pursuit that both (a) will satisfy their passion and (b) be highly remunerative. Your job is to find that pursuit. And if you fail, I guess it's because you weren't earnest enough.
I don't doubt that successful founders are highly motivated by the challenges of their work. But the suggestion that the point isn't to build a business and make money is, I'm sorry to say, typical of the self-serving retconning we are starting to see from those at the top. And that we have always seen from Silicon Valley: "Don't Be Evil," "We're Changing the World," "Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected."
*Thanks to my mom, barber, third grade teacher, roommate, dog and barista for reading drafts of this comment.
Not speaking for all Americans, but I've never believed that (a) and (b) are both out there if I can simultaneously solve them. I chose to give one preference and then did the best to support the other. It's an optimization activity that may or may not achieve satisfaction on either one.
It's the outliers who become wealthy doing what they love. No illusions there.
The other 'responsibility' we take collectively is to strive to create circumstances where the process of pursuing (a) and (b) is not impeded by society.
I agree and don’t believe in the fiction either, but just because many or even most Americans do (or do not) believe in the fiction does not preclude it from being fair to describe it as “uniquely American” - in my mind OP was pointing out the origin of this worldview and the source of most of its advocacy and propagation, and I think they’re right?
> It's the outliers who become wealthy doing what they love. No illusions there.
More than that, even if you love your work, there will still be moments you hate it. That's why we get paid/need rewards.
People generally love an idealized version of their work, where everything works the first time, there is no grunge work, people are pleasant and cooperate with you.
If you're interested in X for its own sake, you are very unlikely to want to turn that into a business. Unless you're also interested in business and money for their own sakes - both of which should trigger very justified cynicism, because there are far more effective ways to make the world a better place than by getting extremely rich after an IPO.
I disagree. There are many problems that can only be solved by a self-funding organization which sells its solutions to consumers - aka a business.
Suppose I would like to build entertaining, educational toys for children. Should I do it as a hobbyist? No. If I seriously want many children to benefit, I will have to get the toys to them, and producing them will take money. Should I get a grant from a charity? No: only children can judge whether a toy is fun, and if I ask charities to be the judge I will end up optimizing the toys to appeal to the charities, not the children. (The same applies to becoming a charity myself, or to asking for a government grant.) Instead, I should sell toys to children and their parents. That way, I may be able to tell whether I have succeeded in my goal.
The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback. Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism.
The list of businesspeople who are genuinely interested in what they do is long. It ranges from Steve Wozniak down to your local bookshop owner. Paul Graham claims that the best businesspeople are always interested.
> The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback. Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism.
True, but many of the markets we have are neither free nor fair. And even if they were, we should exercise caution before concluding that what is discovered is a need. Markets are equally capable of exploiting wants, socially conditioned propensities, addictions, manifestations of the subconscious, etc.
Even developments which appear unambiguously good can lead to unexpected side effects and easily overlooked externalities.
I want to sell the world on the idea of Capabilities Based Security... which means no product, nothing to profit from, which means no help from Silicon Valley at all. 8(
No matter how earnest, or driven... if there's no profit in it, nobody there cares.
I dunno, do you have any friends with deep pockets and chaotic energy?
In seriousness, no clue. Forking the financial system, which crypto is arguably intended to do, seems hard enough. Forking the kernel (as I understand you propose) seems even harder; you can't rely on traction from anyone with spare hardware, you'd need voluntary opt-in from established players, right?
I'd never heard of capabilities until I followed your comment to your blog, though, so thanks.
Forking the kernel won't help. There needs to be a new security model... Genode is a step in that direction... I've been waiting for them to get something to the point where I can get it working well enough to be a daily driver.
It's possible someone could get the drivers going on a Raspberry Pi 4, which would be close enough. I think it'll happen next year some time.
Would you mind helping me understand your idea better, then? I gleaned my (mistaken) assumption from your Capabilities Digest:
> The principle of least privilege is the solution to this whole mess, but it has to be applied from the kernel all the way up the stack. This is a lot of forking work to do.[0]
Forking the Linux kernel would just result in another monolithic Linux kernel, with all the drivers all tied in.
There are microkernels, which is the specific thing Linus Torvalds didn't want to do when he started Linux. In capability based systems, not even the drivers have access to everything. Any given process is giving a list of capabilities, like file handles to resources, and those are the ONLY things that process can access.
Consider a word processor... under Windows, Linux, etc the application calls a system dialog box to select the directory/file name, the uses that name to open a handle to the files, because the assumption is that any program you run should have full access to all of your stuff.
The fork of that word processor in a capabilities based OS would call the OS, and the OS would show you a similar dialog box, but the OS would then return the file capability to the word processor... it wouldn't be able to access anything else.
Consider the Linux model as handing over your wallet at a checkout, and the Capabilities model as handing over exact change. People are used to handling actual money and thinking in terms of risk like that... thus they would do well in a capabilities based system, and from their perspective not a lot has changed.
From the application programmer perspective, opening/saving files is a bit different, but everything else stays the same. The big plus is that no matter how bad any application crashes, due to bug or deliberate fuzzing, etc... it can't be used to take over the system, like it could in Linux.
We could stop having to worry about security when writing applications, and only worry about it in systems programming, where it belongs.
Genode runs on a variety of microkernels, the nice thing about them is they only do a very few things, so adapting to a new one shouldn't be hard, nor dangerous.
I do a lot of things simply to do the thing for its own sake and I've gotten a lot of feedback that people "value" the wonderful things I do out of the goodness of my heart. And I was homeless for years and hearing that shit about how much everyone "appreciated" how much I "cared" and all this shit while mostly not giving me money for it.
The assumption that people should do things for free is an assumption that they have vast resources to spend on benefiting others with no expectation of getting any of that back. Or that they should serve as slave labor out of "virtue."
Having done the latter, let me tell you it sucks. In the extreme.
If you want the world to be healthy, you need to find ways to do good works that pay your bills and you need to find ways to engage in symbiotic relationships where benefiting others comes back to you. The word for that is generally business.
I would like to keep working on the same things I've worked on for years but turn it into an actual business that pays my bills. There is nothing I want more desperately than to do X for its own sake and somehow also live in comfort because I do good things in this shitty world full of shitty people who all want something for free and are happy to take freebies literally from a homeless woman if they can get away with it.
If you're interested in X for its own sake, you're quite likely to want to do it for a living. This is true even of things like music and art. Not saying you _will_ be able to do it for a living, but it is normal that if you're interested in X for its own sake, you would at least investigate whether you could make that your full time job.
Now, in regards to things like an IPO specifically, I think it would depend on whether or not you need a lot of other people to help you get X done. If you need to hire a lot of other people, then you might need an investment in order to do that if you cannot rely on getting that many volunteers. And in that case, to get the investment, there probably has to be the prospect of an IPO.
My observed experience is that trying to get grants for something, is not materially easier or less political than trying to get investments to fund it.
Fully disagree. Making a living doing what I find truly interesting is perhaps one of the greatest blessings to me in life. One of the better ways to do that is to turn it into a business, or at least a nice self-employment gig.
I believe it's possible to be very interested in business and money and still end up with an ethically credible result.
The problem is that we(in the broader sense of the working world) don't treat those concepts as an "artistic medium" to which additional principles and ideas are needed to structure and shape the outcomes, rather, we just use them as scorekeeping for a nebulous measure of life success, which results in founders laboring hard over the business equivalent of a fart joke, because they're only aiming to min-max response for effort.
The measure of what's an "impactful" business is socially constructed within the arbitrage of what we could potentially strive for against what societal conditions currently allow. Entrepreneurs, as a group, are always testing the boundaries of that arbitrage. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but it's hard to find balance in the arrangement because they aren't able to do their study in private: part of the deal is that they demand access to significant resources to make it happen, and that occasional violations get overlooked in the name of progress. In a time like now when the population is mostly asking for relief measures, it looks indulgent, and sometimes it is.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadI seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of fear of retribution/shame but I'm always a bit sad when I get in trouble because I was straight forward but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes.
I sometimes wonder what happened to those people. I suspect the girl who asked questions ended up way more knowledgeable than the other 10 combined.
c'mon catch people a break. Maybe they were a former alchy giving AA advice to troubled kids, maybe they don't like talking about their religion online
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You might enjoy reading these two posts and discussions:
"The power of ignorance" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23041281
"Asking questions" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22729028
I lampshade frequently. My typical use-case: senior dev says something I think is mistaken, but nobody else questions it. How do I know whether they're just humoring him, or if they are all mentally translating between what he said & what he meant? (Btw, people do this translation often -- nobody wants to be a pedant.) Lampshading is a great way of getting people to "pop the 'why' stack" as well. https://mikebroberts.com/2003/07/29/popping-the-why-stack/
Social media is a cesspool largely due to all this earnestness. Fear of retribution and shame is helpful in mitigating the self-absorption embedded in most people. We'd all like to think there's something special in all of us and that the world will benefit from the light of our creativity if it was set free. Truth be told, very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists.
People should appreciate the template of conformity that allows them to find a place in the world and not let advertising, that often leverages the idea of uniqueness to sell things, diminish the value of their mediocrity. No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs. We know because if that's who you were, that's who you'd be. Some people seem to find success in art and innovation operating in the same repressive environment, so maybe the environment is not the problem. Maybe earnestness just isn't your thing and fear/conformity is the better strategy.
*grammar edits
This statement cannot be allowed to stand uncontested. It suggests that everyone is exactly where they ought to be, that all bullying and harassment and isolation that keeps people from reaching their potential is right and just.
Real oppression, an experience the US professional middle class is largely spared of, the type experienced by the citizens of Venezuela or the people currently being held in Xinjiang re-education camps, is truly insurmountable and requires large macro shifts to institute change. To suggest individual bullying, harassment and isolation are counted as so insurmountable to a person's theoretical "potential" that the environment must change first to prompt it, is an illustration of the deep self-absorption very few people have the privilege to experience.
Nothing is right or just in this context.
Surely Venezuela could have less social mobility, but it isn't actually that great in the west.
Really, your argument is a fairly irrelevant appeal - because worse circumstances exist in the world (something so inevitably true as to be pointless to state), there is nothing to complain about. While it’s good to have perspective about where one is more fortunate than others, people deal with their own circumstances and not those of others, so it’s functionally meaningless to raise this point. Someone being abused by their spouse or grieving over the loss of a child can maybe take intellectual comfort in the fact that their lot is better than someone in a prison camp, but this kind of diversion does absolutely nothing to alleviate their circumstances.
The environment is still a problem, it's just that these people found a way to work past it (through great privilege or uncontested personality)
I find it funny you chose Steve Jobs, a renowned narcissist in what could reasonably be called an argument warning against embracing narcissism.
> No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs.
There's a premise here that unless you are Picasso or Steve Jobs, you have nothing to contribute - and that if you aren't changing the world in a significant way, you are mediocre. People change themselves, their families, their communities, their friends and neighbors lives - most of what we get from the world is in those micro, personal interactions. Friends have done infinitely more for me than Jobs or Picasso.
There's also an assumption that "very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists", which doesn't at all match my experience of people.
I find that almost everyone has much to offer, but you need to give them space and confidence to be earnest. You need to listen, and each one has so much to tell - perspectives that open up new worlds. If your attitude is the one you describe, it's self-fulfilling.
So this should be good news to you. Why is it important to you to advocate for bad news?
Being mediocre is such a scary prospect given the requirement of differentiation for professional and personal attainment, that people seem to ignore its existence entirely. Any minor differentiator is magnified to represent a "uniqueness" which frees the person from the burden of the mediocre. I agree, everyone has something to contribute and the large swaths of mediocre people drive our civilization forward--but why can't they just be mediocre? Why is it bad news?
And we’re narrowing that window by exposing children to social politics earlier on through likes and upvotes and whatnot.
I have a high opinion of pg, but mocking an entire continent for non-earnestness because it doesn't make as much money as the US (because they have more startups because, supposedly, the Americans are less cynical than the Europeans) is borderline cynic (and I say that as a cynic myself).
Money, and judging almost everything through the prism of money, is one of the most cynical things we do have right now in our society, and as such I appreciate more a "Greed is good discourse" because it shows its cynicism in plain view and does not try to hide it behind a veil of good intentions, like texts as this one do.
Plus the whole thing with Americans being hopelessly naive against religion, the one area they should absolutely be cynical and/or uninterested like Swedes.
You're interpreting the blog essay unfairly. PG isn't looking at everything (such as "earnestness") only through the prism of money. It's a blog post with deliberately limited scope.
His first sentence sets the context for the rest of the essay: "Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about _startups_."
Yes, we all know there can be other activities to also express earnestness such as creating art paintings, music, parenting, volunteering, teaching, etc. but he omits those and discusses it in relation to startups because... startups is what he often specializes in writing about. It doesn't look like mocking Europe to me.
I understand you want a more universal essay (measures of earnestness beyond startups) but that's not necessary for PG's blog audience.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/10/cool-the-etymology-...
Besides, I would not put that opinion on him. pg isn't what I'd call a mainstream thinker.
In America you can make pretty much anything happen but at the cost of living in a society which is lax in terms of regulation, the consequences of which we’re seeing quite palpably this year (workplace discrimination, horrible environmental damage, etc.). While I won’t knock anyone for admitting they don’t know something, not every ignorant person looks for answers once those answers directly go against their agenda. This is what snobbishness, to a certain extent, helps regulate.
So I imagine reality is different than these tropes.
But it is interesting to ask why does Scandinavia have more startups per capita than other countries?
Like structural racism are there structural components that drive startups?
Oh. All I know to expect from seeing that is a weird kind of popularity, agreement and participation you don't see for other blogs posted on HN, sometimes with the other half-or-so of comments being annoyed with Paul Graham.
Does HN covertly promote all links to that blog or is there something more substantial to it?
I was doing a product demo of a remotely operated device with a guy from AT&T. We were supposed to be able to communicate through the device but it wasn't working well. They'd just rolled out a new network and it was spotty. I suggested at one point that we use text messages as a back up for communicating and I actually asked him if he was ok with that.
He says, 'Yeah, no problem. My name's on the patent.' 'huh?', 'I'm on the SMS patent.'
1 - https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
I don't mean to say "grr, why aren't nerds more popular!". I mean more that this specific kind of earnestness seems to preclude the playing of certain conversational games that most people seem to enjoy. Earnestness, for example, is pretty far away from my conception of "playful" or "flirty" or even "fun".
If you do it enough, who you "really are" is someone who doesn't enjoy letting their guard down. Who's to say that's not your "authentic" self at that point?
Engaging with a hobby tends to involve making it part of me - the hobbies I haven’t committed to actually liking and just performed have always been the ones that get lost in the shuffle of things. Even more so, being so committed to a hobby pushes me to do more heavy lifting when it comes to doing it socially.
(Edit) After a bit more thought I decided an example would be good:
I love Jorge Luis Borges, so when my book club finally decided to read him I took the time to rate many of the stories, trying to collect an essence of his magical, gaucho, and mystical stories to help focus our discussion. That is what I mean —- to love something so much that effort becomes effortless because you’re bursting at the seems hoping to share. In this way we didn’t just read “Library of Babel”, but some of the little mysteries that show a different touch of his craft.
My favorite is the Secret Miracle, though. The idea of finishing your masterpiece in abstract of the fame, recognition, even impact is beautiful.
Here’s the ones we read and discussed:
Man on Pink Corner
The Secret Miracle
The lottery of Babylon
Three Versions of Judas
Deutsches Requiem
On Exactitude in Science
In Memoriam, JFK
The Zahir
In contrast, GP's example of popular people are likely those who are good at faking that kind of deep interest in many things, tailored to their present company, so that they attract a few people from many different crowds. Of course, this is based on my own experience only; in certain circles I can feel quite loquacious and come off as extroverted -- usually because of an earnestly shared interest -- but in most cases I think I come across as boring or even introverted!
In pretty much every social gathering with them, they were silent (brooding) and didn't have interesting things to say about things and didn't seem interested to hold a conversation on their own. They seemed to be content listening to others talk.
But in work related meetings, when it came to making crazy bets they were extremely passionate about their belief and commitment and made those decisions like a boss. (They had personality flaws (they could be perceived as rude, unpolished etc in those situations) and they made mistakes when they became insecure while making high-stakes decisions as stakes became bigger.)
In most other cases (in not so crazy decisions that needed to be made everyday), they showed great amount of trust in others. They also showed genuine humility - they didn't assume expertise they didn't have and didn't try to assert that they are the boss.
I have come to believe that the founders mindset and behavior is crucial in attracting and retaining the right kind of talented next 10 employees. After that crucial bit, it is those 10 employees who determine the success probability of the company to a great extent. That founding/forming team is a bigger determinant of success rather than just the founders or just those initial employees by themselves.
Thank you for the comment, learned something.
- The Secret Miracle
Personal favorite, I actually think it links well to this discussion of earnestness.
- Man on Pink Corner
A bar story, the characters are a bit rough on the edges. Action packed.
- The Lottery of Babylon
Mystical world where a lottery runs everything.
- Three Versions of Judas
This is a good example of Borges combining non-fictional and fictional elements, he is doing a critical analysis on a fictional author be made up regarding the “real” role of Judas.
- Deutsches Requiem
Part of his explorations on fascism and nazism, written contemporarily (1946) so it has a bit more rawness.
- On Exactitude in Science
The title well describes this short piece.
- In Memoriam, JFK
Also short and incredibly well-written.
- The Zahir
The Zahir creates obsession, to the point of driving the obsessed insane.
Still, I have learned that being earnest and being fun are not opposites. Sometimes earnest people are spending most of their time focused on work (and if they are good natured, its fun to work with them!). But one can get better at being fun if you value and prioritize having fun with other people for its own sake.
I have also found that folks (including me) particularly enjoy friends who are earnest about their work / side projects. I especially enjoy spending time with friends who are earnestly interested in areas I know little about. Their energy and enthusiasm are infectious and talking to them about their area opens these clear windows into new worlds that are otherwise hard to find.
If you have any sense whatsoever, you intentionally shoot for "boring" while being publicly earnest.
Remember: "May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse. There's a downside to being interesting.
Can't win for losing. ;)
Another (possibly better) saying to illustrate the downside might be "The nail that sticks out gets hammered."
Cliff Stoll is the most earnest person I have talked to in the past year, and also one of the most playful and fun. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU
I think you have a non-standard personal definition of “earnest”. As I understand the words, earnestness and playfulness are completely orthogonal/unrelated attributes.
Still, the above chain of reasoning is longer and less convincing than I thought it would be.
Someone earnest can have an incredible sense of humor and a sharp intellectual mind. They can be kind, well-meaning, and respectful. And, they'll leave you alone. So you might have to poke them with a stick a couple of times.
Social media is populated with narcissists competing for virality on every platform. Highly entertaining, yes. A waste of all of our time including theirs? Probably.
Earnest people are always the first to say “I don’t know”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25088200
One of my concerns, when I decided to be very forthright in the intro email, was that it would simply be taken as a cheat-sheet by a poor-match candidate for what culture to fake.
But I figured there would be a greater risk that we'd miss recognizing or resonating with some of the best candidates, because they were trying to stick to the rules that the interview prep books told them.
(Funny: were my company to become a FAANG, then the interview prep industry would coach everyone on the exact 5 notes to hit, at what formulaic points in the process. And to practice expressions of curiosity, to have ready in reaction to standard prompts by interviewer. Dictionaries eventually would be updated to redefine "genuine" to mean projecting a particular kind of professional persona mandated by my company. :)
I think diversity of ideas and influences is inherently valuable in an organization, and to find it, we have to be thoughtful and not jump to conclusions.
For example, even if we announce that speaking up is safe and encouraged, that's going to be more familiar to some, and others will take a while to integrate it and adapt it.
I can definitely imagine, say, 2 engineers founding a company, and the company thus far was built on caffeinated whiteboard sessions, where they were comfortable shouting out their ideas, grabbing the marker from the other, etc. It worked for them so far, so it would be understandable if they think that's their culture and would be a key to ongoing success of the company. But if, for their next hire, they're passing over every introverted thinker, person raised being told not to interrupt, etc.-- then I'd suspect they'd probably be missing out on a ton of skills that their org will probably need, and also personally missing out on traits/practices/behaviors/etc. from which they'd grow by being influenced and meeting halfway. (I think this is tricky example, since the whiteboard jam session is a very appealing idea to a lot of us, and we might ascribe mythical power to it. But I think it's also easy to imagine some big design insight coming in a pause in the excitement, from someone who was standing slightly back from the flailing markers, and who hadn't said much in the first hour of battle. Or even from someone who went off to work something out on the computer, that was being missed in the endorphin rush of whiteboard eureka.)
Problem solved!
(Do I needy a winky or something to clue people that this is intended as good clean fun?)
Which is exactly what happens all the time. People like the "airbnbs" thinking they can make the world a better place and pursuing their delusion with earnestness, only to cause bigger problems in the end.
I wish capitalists could at least be honest and admit they found an inefficiency in the market to exploit and they just want to profit from it. At least there's no hypocrisy in that.
I don't think this is always the case. I've found that no matter the size of the business, they are made up of people, and people have bullshit detectors. When you are able to speak truth and find meaning in an earnest way, people will follow you, peers will respect you, and executives will listen.
I think that's how PG is using "earnest" here. He presents it first as a compliment but goes on to suggest that it is exclusive from understanding other people's motivations, and by extension, exclusive from business leadership.
I take it as an underhanded compliment.
This doesn’t apply to everyone or any actual human beings of course, but since we’re talking about abstract made up nonsense character types, might as well go along with it.
No, in politics, “technocrat” describes an advocate of rule by an elite of technical experts. When applied to a candidate for office, it often more specifically designates someone who sees their own self-evaluated membership in such an elite as their primary qualification for office. It does not designate actual talent, nor does it imply anything about the separation between different types of talent.
I've never seen that usage - in my experience, a technocrat is always the (supposed) expert, not the advocate for expert rule.
Wikipedia commonly uses "advocate for technocracy" on the relevant biography pages.
I understand what he means if by "politics" he means self-interest and hoodwinking voters. And that may be his experience of politicians, but it doesn't define the field any more than Mulligans define golf. Champion golfers don't take Mulligans, don't kick their ball closer to the hole, and don't miscount strokes. They are all far too earnest, and have been since they started in the sport.
Likewise with politics. MLK did what he did because he cared for the rights of people. So did Thomas Jefferson, They're not the only ones, though it is difficult to come up with examples that are universally admired because when it comes to politics, we all have different opinions, because we all have different interests.
But what is politics? When I studied it at university, we learned on the first day that politics is just who gets what, where, when, and how, in a society.
Anyone who fights for the rights of other people in society, whether for left or right, for rich or for poor, may be earnest, and virtuous in the eyes of their peers.
That's a narrow definition, sometimes known as "party politics". And that well might be what PG was referring to. The limitation of party politics in America, and other places, is that to become an elected representative you need money for advertising, which you have to get from somewhere, e.g. donations. These usually come with the expectation of a quid pro quo; oil companies want pipelines across the commons and lax pollution laws. They get these by buying politicians.
And so there is a contradiction in a "democracy" like the USA whereby votes are in the hands of the people, but the ability to stand for office is in the hands of the financiers. It leads to a duplicity, which is possibly why PG describes "politics" as anathema to earnestness.
But politics is more than that. Politics is who gets what, when where and how. It exists in classrooms and workplaces, and cars full of screaming kids on a hot day.
It most certainly exists in the competition to have ideas funded by VC. So, in fact, PG is a skilful politician. He just practises his craft outside of party politics.
It's not obvious to me that a definition of "politics" which groups together party politics, funding startups, and screaming kids coming home from soccer practice provides much useful insight into the world. At best, it's an imprecise statement of the same sentiment as "everything is physics", that party politics has a large influence on how the world looks. At worst, and I've seen it used quite frequently in this way, it's a sleight of hand maneuver used to slip party politics into contexts where it'd otherwise be excluded.
"Everything is physics" might be true, but as you say, it isn't very useful because it is too broad a brush. That's why we talk about atomic physics, astrophysics, dynamics, optics, nuclear physics, quantum physics, and for that matter, chemistry, and inorganic chemistry. Each of these is a discipline with its own nomenclature and epistemology that enable practitioners to home in on the elements they study in sufficient detail, with an efficiency of language.
Similarly, politics.
To answer the question, what is your hourly rate of pay and why is it so, we have to turn to politics. Physics won't help us, nor will chemistry. Politics is the appropriate discipline, because in politics humans are the atoms, and their interactions are described by the laws of politics.
Your hourly rate of pay is a function only partially of the legislation enacted by your elected representatives. Your state legislature may set a minimum hourly rate of pay. Whether that rate applies to your job, and to you personally, depends on a number of other human interactions, both in the present and throughout history, which occurred independently to the legislature.
And whether you have your job, which pays $X per hour, or another job, which pays $Y per hour, is a function of... that's right, politics. Or more precisely, labor relations, market forces, race relations, immigration, what school you went to, how much funding your school received, what companies your local layers of government attracted to your area. These factors are in turn influenced by taxation, investment law, transport infrastructure, natural resources, environmental regulations... everywhere you look for the answer to the question What is your hourly rate of pay, you encounter a different sub-discipline of... politics.
The problem is that electoral politics, at least as practiced recently in the US, rarely has much to do with this. I'm on a few donor lists, so I got a lot of political fundraising emails over the past year, and out of the candidates I can remember only one was focused on society and how we can make it better. The other candidates talked primarily, if not exclusively, about how terrible their Congressional opponents are and how useful my help would be to defeat their villainous ways. Whatever term you use to refer to this category of activity, I don't think someone with an earnest interest in improving the world would choose to regularly participate in it.
Sounds like you encountered one earnest type?
I tried to think of contemporary examples but I couldn’t think of any that would be universally admired. That got me thinking about the meaning of “earnestness” and then I wondered whether I might have conflated it with “virtuous” too much in my own conception.
I suppose it’s just as possible to be earnestly libertarian as it is to be earnestly egalitarian.
There might be as many earnest members of the NRA as there are earnest members of the NAACP and the ACLU.
Fact checking aside, who do you think is more earnest, 45 or 44?
43 or 42?
Your football teams QB or your opponent’s?
People use a broader definition of politics all the time. Office politics. Geopolitics. Realpolitik. Identity politics. Political correctness.
Would you rather do things because your boss exercises role power (I'm your boss and you must do what I say), or because you like, respect, and trust your boss (relationship power)?
[1] Oscar Wilde, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Earnes...
I'm going to expand on this a bit, possibly against my better judgment. I believe Paul Graham has a point here, and it's a good one. In intellectual pursuits, there's a spectrum from dealing purely with nature and facts, to dealing with human perceptions. To pick what I hope is a reasonably neutral example, doing the science to get containment of a fusion reaction is on one end of the spectrum. Planning and engineering a project to do it is in the middle. And making the case that carbon-based energy production poses an existential threat to humanity and that we should be investing hundreds of billions into fusion energy is on the other. All these inform each other, and I (personally) don't make a value judgment on which is most virtuous or most important.
The salient thing is that Paul Graham did not choose a somewhat neutral example. Rather, he chose one that is perhaps at the very center of the culture wars, and has done so using a highly emotionally loaded word. Because he is someone who knows how to use words, I can fairly confidently conclude that he is effectively declaring his position on the issue.
It seems like you are equating rejecting papers like that, with denying white supremacy.
Would it be possible for someone to think that particular kind of academic work is of low value, and yet still think white supremacy is real?
Would your hypothetical someone append the word 'whiteness' to their primary example search illustrating bogus research?
And now he changed the search terms.[3]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400495
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400289
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25402638
And it seems like he has removed the word ‘whiteness’.
Is he still ‘denying the existence of white supremacy’?
Changing the search terms is just more evidence he wasn't pointing to any particular research.
And ‘sneering’ doesn’t seem unrealistic, given that he used the word bogus.
But the thread we are having this discussion on is about him ‘Denying the existence of white supremacy’.
I don’t think anyone has said anything which justifies such a charge.
I think one can easily accuse him of is intellectually immature behavior or narrow-mindedness. But not a lot more.
1. you deny white supremacy exists - in my opinion, that's the more generous reading, or,
2. you acknowledge that it exists but wish to publicly state the view that it is not worth any research hours. That is itself white supremacy, plus the intent to cause harm.
There is no credible third option. You suggest intellectual immaturity or narrow-mindedness (from someone with a PhD), but those would come in addition to either 1 or 2 applying, not instead of.
Using childishness as an excuse for racism is still racism, especially if you are a grown adult. Your excusing this as just childishness is embarrassing.
If this statement were true, then would be merit to your conclusions.
However it’s obviously not true.
The link clearly does suggest that the kinds of academic paper that search yields are bogus.
The original search was for “hermeneutic” “dialectics” “hegemonic” “intersectionality” “whiteness” (as best I can reconstruct).
This is quite obviously not a search for ‘any research on race’.
Indeed it is clearly a search for a very narrow kind of academic writing on ‘whiteness’, which itself is a term only used in a subset of academic theorizing about race.
Most kinds of research on race do not include these search terms.
Obviously PG does think this narrow subfield is bogus.
It’s puzzling that you have concluded that this means he thinks that ‘any’ research on race is bogus.
The best way I can made sense of this is to figure that you think that any criticism of academic writing about race is equivalent to denying white supremacy.
So: any research on race is fine, but using the words 'whiteness', 'racialized' or now 'intersectionality' (this word appears newly to me) makes it bogus...
Half of the results on Google Scholar which mention 'white supremacy' contain at least one of those three words, broadly consistently since 1990.
How do you talk in any useful way about race relations without ever using those words? Awkwardly, in modern academia.
- You can't now easily define what "white" means in your context (since this definition is not fixed or absolute), for example, so how can we understand the foundation of your work?
- You don't now have a word for talking about how the experience of being a woman or disabled or gay etc is different (or not) for black people than it is for white people.
- You don't now have a word for the experience of ethnic or cultural groups becoming discriminated against with political involvement.
It's akin to saying research in computer science is fine, but the words 'algorithm', 'lisp', or 'big data' show it to be bogus.
Again, a puzzling interpretation.
A couple of points, it’s fairly obvious that PG doesn’t expect people to go through every single search result past the first few.
Search results with the conjunction of those words are listed first. You have mistakenly used the word ‘or’, but search engines place ‘and’ results first.
PG doesn’t use the term ‘white’ anywhere. That has been introduced by you. He uses the term ‘whiteness’.
I am a little surprised you conflate these two terms, since in both the academic discourse, and in activism about race, these words do not mean the same thing.
> How do you talk in any useful way about race relations without ever using those words?
It’s not clear what this question has to do with what PG wrote, and the rest of your post seems to hinge on its relevance.
PG didn’t say anything about people not using words. He posted a link to a search he expected would prioritize examples of the kind of research he thinks is bogus.
Generally when we do a Google search, we assume that the first few results will be the most relevant, not that every result is equally relevant.
See my earlier point - search prioritizes results that contain as many of these terms as possible.
To summarize: Your comment seems to be based on two misunderstandings. One about how Google search works, and the other about how the meaning of the word ‘whiteness’ differs from the word ‘white’ in contemporary discourse on race.
Also, I note that you conflate search results with research. These aren’t the same thing.
There is absolutely nothing to suggest that he denies the existence of white supremacy.
That just isn’t implied by the link.
The top result is an article about the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (d. 1968), who was among other things one of the leaders of the theological opposition to the Third Reich and its subversion of Christian belief in service of white-supremacist ideology. The article says that Barth's interpretation of Romans 2 provides us a way today to avoid commingling Christian identity and whiteness.
It's certainly possible for someone who believes white supremacy exists (and is worth opposing) to think that academic work that reads Barth today to counter racial superiority disguised as Christianity is of low value. I'd say it's pretty unlikely.
To be fair, this is not the most charitable interpretation. The most charitable interpretation is that the author of the essay has never seriously read any academic work involving the words "hermeneutic," "dialectic," "hegemonic," or "whiteness" and they're just four words that he thinks mean nothing, and that he didn't actually read the results in the Google Scholar search before a middlebrow dismissal (to use his own term) of the results. That would make him like the vast majority of the folks who deny the existence of white supremacy - dismissing serious opposition to it as silly instead of specifically disbelieving it.
- no, he did not read the results and had no specific academic work in mind, he just listed some words he didn't like
- he still doesn't like words about the academic study of race
- he somehow didn't learn the meaning of "phenomenology" in his Ivy-League philosophy degree, either
Is this bogus? If you consider theology bogus, then yes. But the paper is highly relevant to current US politics with the influence of evangelical churches and their embrace of a white-centered model of the world. (Although it doesn't explicitly get into politics.)
One irony of linking to this paper is that religion is highly marked by earnestness, and this paper even more so. The paper's author is clearly genuinely interested in this subject as a "theology nerd". She is writing not for personal gain but to make the world a better place.
This is a common way of converting a difference in judgement about the value of particular activities into a characterization of dishonesty and fraudulent activity; when done accidentally it is a sign of lack of ability to recognize differences in viewpoints, when done intentionally it's technique of avoiding debate on the issue on which agreement is assumed through the distraction of casting moral aspersions at those who disagree.
But it seems the beginning of sanity for that prisoner, herself, to see her chains.
What? No.
White supremacy is literally a cop murdering a man by pressing his knee on the guys neck until he dies, with the cops buddies standing by and watching.
White supremacy is Ahmad Arbery being murdered while jogging because he was black:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/202...
White supremacy is the crack epidemic being treated primarily like a criminal issue in the 80s, and the opioid epidemic today being treated primarily like a health issue. Why? Because the crack epidemic primarily effected black people, and the opioid epidemic white people.
White supremacy is racist housing policies where Black people can’t get loans:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/chicago...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-rac...
I understand the discomfort, confusion, and frustration that can arise when talking about racism and white supremacy, and there certainly are plenty of people who don’t express themselves in the most palatable way about it or who also believe things that may not be true.
But white supremacy is a real thing and if you take fifteen minutes online and look at wikipedia, and the articles I shared (in particular The Atlantic ones), then you’ll see that it’s real, it’s a thing.
And at that point it’s then not a question of what anybody sees, but rather what you yourself choose to accept.
That is not white supremacy until you prove he did it because the victim was black and not because other reasons (like him being a bully cop). So under that criteria any white person killed by a black person was victim of black supremacy.
A better example of white supremacy is white people in liberal cities taking over the BLM movement and making all about themselves.
Sounds like Earnestness
No. Fuck off, seriously.
Do you actually believe that about the murder of George Floyd? Do you actually think that cop would have behaved that way if George Floyd was white?
What you said only makes any sense in a fantasy world where you simply ignore the facts of police violence over the last several decades.
Or maybe you’re ignorant, i.e. uneducated, in which case I would encourage you to read more and better material on the subject.
Wait a minute.... my toast is made of.... white bread.
I know that sounds counterintuitive, but the reason is that we know that PG has huge experience of and access to startup founders and seen their outcomes and has had a great deal of opportunity to formulate thoughts like like this on the basis of what he has seen.
I have experience of startups too. I could have written something like this, but it genuinely wouldn’t have been as meaningful coming from me, because I don’t have the same perspective as he does.
A different person might not have been able to produce the same essay, but if the essay is the same, who the author is shouldn't matter too much (for a good essay).
What we know about PG’s experience is a huge prior that shapes how we interpret what he writes.
I think this probably explains some of the polarization we see in the comments - people who don’t know who he is see this as just a dumb blog post that seems to be getting too much karma. People who do, see it as insight from someone who is in a position to actually know something.
But I think good essays are ones where you don't need to really rely on that prior. A good essay is one that convinces you that what it's saying is true, instead of just asserting it and relying on the reputation of the author.
If an essay doesn't convince you directly, then:
a) the author just didn't take the time to provide an explanation
b) the explanation is too complex, or too difficult to materialize, it's something you just develop an intuition about
c) it can't convince you directly because it's not actually true
If you trust the author on the subject matter enough such that you're in a/b territory, then while I think an essay that explained more would be a better one, an essay that doesn't is still valuable.
But I think at least one concern is that we're actually in c territory. Especially with stuff like "picking winning companies", I'm hesitant to take things at face-value. It's such a complicated thing to predict, it's easy to succumb to survivorship bias. I'm not convinced that PG is just so good at it that things should be taken at face-value.
It is fairly obvious that persuasive writing often convinces people of things which we are either not true, or meaningless.
It’s also fairly obvious that all authors perspectives are formed by experience, and that knowing about that experience is informative of how we interpret what they say. This is simply true of all human communications.
I can’t really see what you are trying to accomplish by insisting there is something called a ‘good’ essay, whose hallmark is it’s persuasiveness in the absence of knowledge about the author.
Certainly there are some sincere essays that do fulfill this criteria, but it’s what also exactly what a cult leader or marketing agency would be aiming to achieve with their writing.
I would make the case that being persuaded by an essay is an epistemically salient signal which can be thought of as a red flag that we may be being manipulated by someone we wouldn’t choose to be manipulated by.
When we experience it, the responsible thing to do is to inform ourselves more about the author and their experience rather than to lionize the piece of writing.
I'm not sure where the no-true Scottsman is?
> I can’t really see what you are trying to accomplish by insisting there is something called a ‘good’ essay, whose hallmark is it’s persuasiveness in the absence of knowledge about the author.
Really? This seems entirely non-controversial to me. It's more-or-less "don't judge a book by its cover". Maybe I was over-emphasizing _how_ important this is ("hallmark" is probably too strong), but all-else-equal, a text being able to rely on the arguments made within as opposed to who the author is seems positive. And I think there's _obviously_ metrics by which you can judge an essay's good-ness beyond its author.
[SSC][0] is a good example. I think he writes very interesting essays that captivate and convince people on their own. The only "reputation" he had when he started was that he was psychiatrist. Recently he's gotten a bit more popular, but still, his reputation is just "someone who writes good essays".
Are you suggesting it's dangerous that SSC writes good, convincing essays, despite the fact that he's not some well-known figure?
If you have no previous knowledge of a cult, getting convinced by their writing seems to be more about getting convinced by bad arguments than it is about attempting to consider arguments directly. And once you're already in a cult, I think it's a very common feature to have members rely only on the reputation of the cult leader without trying to think critically about the actual things they're saying.
Like, let's say someone gets indoctrinated into a cult. You could say "Yeah, see, if they had just discounted the cult leader due to their reputation instead of trying to actually read what they had to say, they wouldn't have gotten indoctrinated." I guess? But they could have also used more scrutiny in examining the arguments? And if the reader isn't using scrutiny to examine the arguments, why do we think they're going to make good decisions about whose reputation to trust?
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/
Of course not. What did I write that would suggest that?
> cult, getting convinced by their writing seems to be more about getting convinced by bad arguments than it is about attempting to consider arguments directly.
Your criterion for a ‘good’ essay was that it is convincing in the absence of knowledge of who the author is.
For someone who is persuaded, both SSC and the cult leader’s writings both meet this criterion.
How would you modify your criterion to distinguish the two?
> being persuaded by an essay is ... a red flag that we may be being manipulated by someone we wouldn’t choose to be manipulated by
I was persuaded by SSC essays, despite not knowing much about the author. Was that a red flag? Was it bad that I remained convinced by them despite not finding out much about what experiences in his background have shaped his perspective?
> How would you modify your criterion to distinguish the two?
The distinguishing factor is in what you should be persuaded by.
If a "cult leader" is able to convince you of something by presenting you with good arguments, maybe they aren't a cult leader/it's not crazy to believe whatever they're selling.
If someone's convinced of cultish notions because they were persuaded by bad arguments, I'd say the primary remediation is "don't be persuaded by bad arguments", not "don't listen to people unless you know who they are". I wouldn't say the second statement is terrible advice, but it's not the primary problem.
Also, I don't suffer from that HN thing where nobody can simply consider an article, or do follow-up research themselves, without measurability, studies and citations, as if they're petrified they might become epistemically infected and be wrong about something that probably doesn't even impact their life in the slightest.
Alas..that wasn’t the case. But I don’t regret the PG essays and have come to appreciate them over the years. I think it’s because I didn’t have any expectation about this person’s writing or prior knowledge about PG. But not knowing who Paul Graham was and reading them for the first time, I couldn’t figure out the enthusiasm around it. Maybe it was my disappointment that they weren’t by my PG. But over time, I have come to appreciate it.
These are what I call ‘through my lens’ writings. The words derive weight from the cult of personality. And the lens they see the world through..
It's quite possible that putting the assertions of the text in the context of this particular authority does give it more credibility, but I've also heard that same authority make some very poor assertions.
Just look at the objective criticism that some of the posts gather. Sometimes, there are really major, easily contradicted flaws in these texts.
I didn’t say anything about the validity of his argument. Only that it means something different and more interesting given his experience, than it would coming from someone else.
Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us than when a random blogger is wrong.
Because of your phrasing: "Yes. It’s because of who he is."
> Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us than when a random blogger is wrong.
Relative to each other, perhaps.
However, is something wrong by PG more interesting than literally every other topic being discussed on HN, so that it "rockets to the top", to quote the comment you initially replied to.
There is simply no appeal to authority being made.
The rest of your comment isn’t clear, are you saying there is something wrong with people finding PG’s pieces interesting?
But then again, some people are more equal than others. shrug
I do think they get more attention than ones written by others, but, hey; it's his baby, so it's not surprising that they go so well.
For myself, I have always practiced Honor, Integrity, Honesty and Earnestness. Has nothing to do with business. It's a personal philosophy.
It did me well, when I worked for a Japanese company, but tends to elicit scorn, when dealing with Americans.
He’s not writing research papers. He’s just a thoughtful guy with a lot of experience sharing his ideas as concisely as possible. Part of the reason the posts are so interesting is because of the discussions they prompt - I wouldn’t mistake the level of interest on HN for everybody treating these as gospel.
I'm not defending what he writes, but this posts are generally fun to read and think about. Sometimes I don't agree with him or find holes in his arguments, but there's usually a nugget of truth you can take away. They're just blog posts, he doesn't need to be infallible.
The occasional self-promotion from the people running the site is a price I'm willing to pay to use the site.
A group of young men singing about love who also stood by their talented but now severely handicapped band member after he lost an arm is something that spoke to my soul. To me, these people had to know something more than pretty words. There had to be something deeper in their songs than just "sex, drugs and rock and roll."
https://genevievefiles.blogspot.com/2020/04/anger-management...
Words never stand completely on their own. What they mean to people is shaped by context, history and reputation.
Hacker News wasn't always a space with 5 million unique visitors per month who mostly barely know each other. When I originally joined in 2009, it had a sense of community.
I never got to be one of the "insiders" in that community. I was a visitor looking in from the outside.
But it did exist and many of those people still come here, though their presence isn't obvious. I don't think you can tell who pg's friends are by who says what on Hacker News.
I've always respected the man, though he and I were never friends. I respected him because of how he comported himself here when he was in my mind just a moderator for a forum that I participated on, before he was big time famous and big time wealthy, when his wealth was measured in words starting with M, not B.
I don't read every single thing he writes and I never have. But I certainly take his words seriously when I do sometimes read them.
He has a PhD and he suggested to his girlfriend that the two of them should start a company together. That company is, of course, YC.
I feel like it gets little press as a "pro diversity" company, but it's a big company with a woman founder and that's true because of Paul Graham. It was not Jessica Livingston who came up with the idea.
It's sort of a stealth diversity thing and I generally don't say too much about that because I think that's the best way to do diversity and I don't want to ruin it by calling a lot of attention to it.
But we've had a pandemic all year and the entire world is cranky as all hell -- me included -- and it's just rubbing me the wrong way that people are so desperate to find a dog to kick these days. So I feel a need to give a bit of pushback here lately.
Thank you for a perfect description of the situation.
That's all it takes.
I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” or “The British are terrible cooks.” Absent any evidence to back them up, many such statements in PG’s essays seem to be an expression of his prejudices. The very least he could do is to provide some criterion the reader can use to test “earnestness” at the population scale.
In this case, I imagine that he started from “Scandinavia is the region with the highest number of startups per capita” and inferred that this must mean that they are more earnest, rather than going the other way around.
A great example are his 5-6 posts talking about how the most important facet of a programming language is its brevity (https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sex...). At no point does he cite any facts backing that up. Even when the brevity chasing language he created failed to gain traction, he didn’t see that as an indication to recheck his assumptions.
In other words, “feelings don’t care about your facts”. But hey, there’s a market for that sort of article. So who are we to judge?
Even this critical essay looks like it fails to meet its own standard.
A "profoundly unserious" writer which is "mired in intuition and incuriosity"? Nowhere in the post are these terms rigorously defined!
And look! The author accuses Graham of "tantalizing the reader by reducing complex problems down to singular, nebulous concepts" without mentioning principal component analysis! "Profoundly unserious", I say.
Anyway, pg himself has been clear about rejecting seriousness as a virtue multiple times. See this essay for instance http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html
Even then, the average HN comments section is highly sceptical of any claims in any post. The top comment is usually critiquing the link for one reason or another. For some reason, that wasn’t the case with PG articles. You’re only remarking about this now because HN is finally holding PG to the same standard that others are.
I haven't noticed a trend for comments on PG articles to be less critical. If anything I think I've noticed users feeling a need to be more critical (as I feel your comment illustrates).
It's OK to hold pg to a higher standard than others in terms of factually supporting his claims. Fine. Just be clear that you are doing so. It's fine to remind others not to take his word as gospel as well.
This is similar to the fact that experts are not always the best teachers, or that a rhetorically skilled speaker/writer is not necessarily a competent linguist or literary scientist, or how many great musicians know little about music theory.
Of course, you are correct that many, many other tech bloggers don't back up their claims either (most notoriously the "I did this thing once at company X, it worked ok, and now I'm preaching it as a new gospel (but it hasn't even been a year that we did this and we don't understand the long-term implications of it yet)" blog posts). I think this is in general a real shame because it leads to all the cargo culting madness that's so prevalent in the industry.
In PG's case, I find that most of his blog posts read like post hoc rationalisations based on sweeping generalisations (e.g. that you can be either "earnest" or jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a particularly false dichotomy). Which wouldn't nearly bother me as much if they weren't also often full of thinly veiled contempt for different kinds of people (e.g. people who are actually good at bringing people together). It sometimes reads to me as a sort of "I was bullied/excluded as a nerdy teenager and now I'm gonna show them how much better nerds are and why they will (or at least should) rule the world". In a world where we increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies making decisions that impact all of us, including people completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't think this is a very good position to take.
Fair point
>you can be either "earnest" or jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a particularly false dichotomy
I'm looking at the essay and I'm not seeing where it says this? Maybe I just forgot.
>people who are actually good at bringing people together
From the essay (in a footnote):
>It's interesting how many different ways there are not to be earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant, to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to be orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make. This pattern suggests that earnestness is not one end of a continuum, but a target one can fall short of in multiple dimensions.
The closest thing on the list to "bringing people together" in my mind would be being cool, which isn't very close IMO.
>In a world where we increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies making decisions that impact all of us, including people completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't think this is a very good position to take.
I don't trust the general population to make decisions either--see our current president for an example of what they can sometimes go for.
The typical reaction to PG essays on HN has been the exact same flavor of negative for many, many years now. Go back and read the comments on his previous submissions. PG himself even wrote an essay about uncharitable criticism and basically exited the site in 2015.
It's very surprising to me that anyone could think that, in 2020, it's new and original to bash PG articles on HN.
It's too reductionist to take only the part "earnest, therefore startup". Sort of implying that if only other nations were also more earnest they'd also have startups and wealth, disregarding all the possibly good reasons that those other nations have not to be trusting/earnest.
But it's also too dismissive to say to this that it's "national stereotyping" therefore it immediately must be false and there can be no connection at all between earnestness/trust and startups in the case of Scandinavia.
When everybody is just like you, it leads to high trust, no us vs them mentality. Same is true in eg. South Korea and Japan.
Contrast this with their similarily northern neighbour Russia, which is basically the America of eastern europe. A nation resulting from a melting pot of ethnicitiess, languages, cultures (most current Russians are really assimilated from smaller native cultures, their great grandparents didn't identify as Russian). And the end result? Corruption. Everybody just tries to milk public funds as much as they can, and so forth.
It's hard to have very high trust levels when your own government and state are working against you and when your coworkers and neighbors can at any time rat you out for unpatriotic activities.
If I wanted a glib answer I'd attribute it to a combination of less feudalism and more Lutheranism, plus a bit of Hanseatic trading.
I mean, sure, not completely, they definitely had some of their population deported by Nazis, but it wasn't such a major impact as elsewhere in Europe.
The WWII in Scandinavia was particularly bad, including the occupation of Norway and Denmark.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Weserübung
They did escape the contemporary ones the same way any other country in Europe did anyway.
But the king of Norway and members of the army escaped to London and directed the resistance from there.
Ask the Jews that owned the houses and nursing homes that were confiscated for the Lebensborn project and the kids that survived it (not many), what they think about it.
Others had it worse doesn't mean they escaped the war and its consequences.
If the eastern block is where you draw the line, you could argue that many parts of Europe escaped the war.
But it would be historically false.
Finland is somewhat exceptional among the Nordics as they were quite poor and had some shit to deal with from Russia (and Sweden) but managed to become rich and high trust.
They have been at war for 2 centuries like much of Europe.
Depending on who you ask, Ottomans were their allied or their enemies in Scandinavia, at times they have been both like Denmark allied of Ottomans against Russia that then switched side and sided with Russia that gave them land from Sweden.
https://i.redd.it/4r4yx17hf9a51.png
There were big differences between Scandinavian countries and they have been at war for a long time.
Denmark for example owned Ghana, like Belgium owned Congo.
They were richer than say Finland.
France has been involved in less wars during the same time span.
Another example: Spain and Portugal weren't bombed during WW2, they were not occupied, they stayed mostly neutral, but didn't develop an high trust society.
It must be something else.
The lack of feudalism as a contrast to other nations and the excess of Lutheranism were mostly a long time ago as was the Hanseatic league. And while Scandinavia looks homogeneous to outsiders, especially to those from far away, the three countries have distinct characters and distinct histories. Part of how each behaves has to do with the climate and topology of each country as well as the accidents of history in recent centuries. At least one Danish king was famous for picking fights with his neighbours which is one reason why Denmark is so small, Sweden had a French king for a while which left its mark on the language and the structures of society. Norway for a long time was simply far away and difficult to travel in which means that decentralisation worked as there was almost no choice. Towns only 10 km apart on the map might have very distinct dialects because there is a mountain in the way meaning that it is a 100 km trip from one to the other.
The glib answers, as I suspect you were saying, are usually wrong or very partial (in both senses of the word).
Denmark and Sweden have been at war with each other so many times you can't give an exact number as it becomes difficult to say when it's a prolonged war and when it's 2 seperate wars.
A simplified list: https://useless-denmarkfacts.tumblr.com/post/125179860721/al...
It's also the reason why they accept very high rates of taxation in exchange for public services that actually work and benefit the population.
Depicting Scandinavia as an uniform land where a genetically homogeneous spawn lives is also misleading.
For example in Denmark 86% of the population is Danish descent, same goes for Norway, in Sweden 18% of the population was born in another country.
In Italy, which is not particularly famous for its genetic uniformity, 90% of the population was born in Italy from Italian parents.
What seems uniform in Europe, except for Scandinavia, is the distrust
European countries shows that average trust in the police tends to be higher than trust in the political and the legal systems. And trust in the political system is particularly low – in fact much lower than interpersonal trust for all countries except Switzerland. On the other hand, trust in the police is notably high, and in the majority of European countries people trust the police more than they trust each other
Italy has the highest level of trust in the Mediterranean area, around 30%, while France, Spain and Greece are below 20%.
Netherlands have the same level of Scandinavia (>60%), Germany is around 50%.
My personal belief is that the society trust is directly proportional to the level of social conflict.
Not surprisingly France, where social conflict is quite high (which I don't think is bad per sé) has the lower level of trust in Europe (~18%), except for Romania.
(Yet it would also come with being more or less "cool", which is opposite to what pg suggests, so I guess I have no idea ! XD)
Experience, perhaps?
As a French who lived a number of years in Scandinavia, it is day and night. It doesn't mean that people in those countries never cheat, but in France, the default attitude is cheating. Always. About everything and anything. Even when there is nothing to win and being straight or earnest would be much easier. It is exhausting.
> This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,”
Well, this assertion is equally true :-D
Whether any of this is really the cause of there being more startups in Scandinavia than elsewhere is something I'm not able to answer, but the earnestness is certainly present.
The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge of it.
My personal experience is that life is simpler here than in my country of origin (UK); mostly things 'Just Work (tm)' and that might be why startups are more common.
Is this a downside, or has the rest of the word devalued its academic qualifications by lowering its standards, failing to seriously tackle cheating, and (relevant to postgraduate degrees and academic titles) prioritising novelty and sensation at the expense of rigour?
I've never seen the inside of a top UK or US university, so I can't be sure that they're churning out meaningless undergrad degrees, but they certainly seem to be complicit in these trends at the level of publishing and hiring/promotion/tenure.
They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest, it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises.
Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers have Portuguese nationality.
I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia.
I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the facts are definitely not there.
If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with a very different idea of what being earnest means.
Perhaps the particularly dry brand of Scandinavian pragmatic irony is lost on pg because pg is too earnest to notice that they’re on the other side of a zetetic event horizon.
https://jakubmarian.com/corruption-perceptions-index-of-euro...
And yeah, most of the time, brits are relatively bad cooks.
http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
I feel this... I don't want billions for myself, I want billions so I can fund moonshot projects. If starting my business in a foreign country with no wealth tax is the difference between being a millionaire and a billionaire, I will strongly consider relocating.
It seems like it'd be easy to create a charity funded with your wealth that provides grants to innovators. You can do this even in a country with a large wealth tax.
The world also has an awful lot of yachts and private jets for me to really buy the argument that billionaires really want the money to give it away. So maybe democratic control over that wealth ends up being better on average, even if you truly are committed to giving away all of your wealth in the way that maximally benefits humanity.
Founders aren't motivated by the problem no more than athletes are motivated by the love of the game. Children are motivated in that manner. But not adults.
Startups, like sports, are a business. The only concern is money. That is the ends. The startup, problem, etc are just the means to that end.
Every founder is motivated by money. It just sounds tacky and cheap to say you did it for money, so everyone builds up some silly story - "to help people", "to solve a problem", "cause it was a passion", "to create jobs for the community", "create value for others", etc. Nope. It was all for money. No need to be embarrassed about it.
I've really started to think that inheritance is one of the biggest problem we have. Each one has the right to their own worth and riches acquired through their own effort, but if you pass those on afterwards then you create a dynasty that defeats the point of meritocracy and equality of opportunity. The incentives then become tribal, to your family, to your friends, and not simply a realization of your earnest passion.
1. The elite will still hand down a superior education and social connections to their progeny, so their children will still be privileged, just not ridiculously so like they are today
2. This will incentivize parents to invest more in their children's soft development, rather than just handing down their wealth and calling it a day
This is a huge generalization we could easily find counter-examples and counter-arguments for, but we could also probably find fair arguments FOR this view, like Bill Gates.
Anyway, I think it’s probably a fair summary of how someone like PG could simultaneously hold the two ideas “don’t start a startup for money” and “higher taxes are a bad idea” at the same time. Which is not to say that he’s right, but I don’t think he’s incongruent.
> This is a huge generalization we could easily find counter-examples and counter-arguments for, but we could also probably find fair arguments FOR this view, like Bill Gates.
You're correct in identifying the mental model in operation, but you're missing the fact that the people in question are profoundly deluded.
Staggering piles of money (including Bill Gates') were, almost without exception, a result of the ability to capture value, not the ability to create it. And this is worth noting: many of the most significant decisions that led to increasing the value being captured were value destroying, such as "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run".
That isn't to say that value wasn't created at all (quite a lot was), but only that it isn't quite what is measured by, and rewarded with, wealth.
In the most benign cases of extreme wealth, much (even most) of the value captured IS also created by the person or organization doing the capturing, but invariably, more value is being captured than created (or at least, the market believes that will eventually be the case).
If you capture value you don't create, you become staggeringly wealthy.
Note that I am not claiming that value isn't being created at all in that second scenario, just that the entity capturing the value isn't creating it.
If you capture value while destroying some, the picture gets more complicated, as it depends on the nature of the feedback loops involved. It isn't too hard to see examples in the wild of organizations pursuing strategies aimed at getting a larger slice of the pie, or at getting slices of more pies, rather than strategies that are aimed at getting the size or number of pies to grow overall.
If you don't have that context, then the essay is in fact very confusing: the beginning of it says that caring about money is the wrong motivation, and the end of it says how good it is that you now get money from earnestly working on things. What it's actually doing is trying to convince people that there's a connection between his financial success and his earnest work on Lisp, and more generally that successful startups (who apparently still need VC investment) tend to be successful because they deserve it, not because they happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right access to capital.
Earnestness, like any other trait or 'virtue' is not innate or absolute. Everyone has the capacity to exhibit this trait or be seen to exhibit it, when refracted through the non-objective lens of someone else's bias and perception. For example, a politician for partyX is seen to be an earnest 'straight man' who cares deeply by his supporters, while supporters of partyY view him as a reckless oaf.
To promote the use of personality traits as a predictor of success is naive at best.
https://www.dphu.org/uploads/attachements/books/books_4871_0...
I don't doubt that successful founders are highly motivated by the challenges of their work. But the suggestion that the point isn't to build a business and make money is, I'm sorry to say, typical of the self-serving retconning we are starting to see from those at the top. And that we have always seen from Silicon Valley: "Don't Be Evil," "We're Changing the World," "Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected."
*Thanks to my mom, barber, third grade teacher, roommate, dog and barista for reading drafts of this comment.
It's the outliers who become wealthy doing what they love. No illusions there.
The other 'responsibility' we take collectively is to strive to create circumstances where the process of pursuing (a) and (b) is not impeded by society.
More than that, even if you love your work, there will still be moments you hate it. That's why we get paid/need rewards.
People generally love an idealized version of their work, where everything works the first time, there is no grunge work, people are pleasant and cooperate with you.
Suppose I would like to build entertaining, educational toys for children. Should I do it as a hobbyist? No. If I seriously want many children to benefit, I will have to get the toys to them, and producing them will take money. Should I get a grant from a charity? No: only children can judge whether a toy is fun, and if I ask charities to be the judge I will end up optimizing the toys to appeal to the charities, not the children. (The same applies to becoming a charity myself, or to asking for a government grant.) Instead, I should sell toys to children and their parents. That way, I may be able to tell whether I have succeeded in my goal.
The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback. Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism.
The list of businesspeople who are genuinely interested in what they do is long. It ranges from Steve Wozniak down to your local bookshop owner. Paul Graham claims that the best businesspeople are always interested.
True, but many of the markets we have are neither free nor fair. And even if they were, we should exercise caution before concluding that what is discovered is a need. Markets are equally capable of exploiting wants, socially conditioned propensities, addictions, manifestations of the subconscious, etc.
Even developments which appear unambiguously good can lead to unexpected side effects and easily overlooked externalities.
No matter how earnest, or driven... if there's no profit in it, nobody there cares.
How do you suggest I market this idea?
In seriousness, no clue. Forking the financial system, which crypto is arguably intended to do, seems hard enough. Forking the kernel (as I understand you propose) seems even harder; you can't rely on traction from anyone with spare hardware, you'd need voluntary opt-in from established players, right?
I'd never heard of capabilities until I followed your comment to your blog, though, so thanks.
It's possible someone could get the drivers going on a Raspberry Pi 4, which would be close enough. I think it'll happen next year some time.
> The principle of least privilege is the solution to this whole mess, but it has to be applied from the kernel all the way up the stack. This is a lot of forking work to do.[0]
[0]: http://capabilitiesdigest.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-root-caus...
There are microkernels, which is the specific thing Linus Torvalds didn't want to do when he started Linux. In capability based systems, not even the drivers have access to everything. Any given process is giving a list of capabilities, like file handles to resources, and those are the ONLY things that process can access.
Consider a word processor... under Windows, Linux, etc the application calls a system dialog box to select the directory/file name, the uses that name to open a handle to the files, because the assumption is that any program you run should have full access to all of your stuff.
The fork of that word processor in a capabilities based OS would call the OS, and the OS would show you a similar dialog box, but the OS would then return the file capability to the word processor... it wouldn't be able to access anything else.
Consider the Linux model as handing over your wallet at a checkout, and the Capabilities model as handing over exact change. People are used to handling actual money and thinking in terms of risk like that... thus they would do well in a capabilities based system, and from their perspective not a lot has changed.
From the application programmer perspective, opening/saving files is a bit different, but everything else stays the same. The big plus is that no matter how bad any application crashes, due to bug or deliberate fuzzing, etc... it can't be used to take over the system, like it could in Linux.
We could stop having to worry about security when writing applications, and only worry about it in systems programming, where it belongs.
Does that help?
The assumption that people should do things for free is an assumption that they have vast resources to spend on benefiting others with no expectation of getting any of that back. Or that they should serve as slave labor out of "virtue."
Having done the latter, let me tell you it sucks. In the extreme.
If you want the world to be healthy, you need to find ways to do good works that pay your bills and you need to find ways to engage in symbiotic relationships where benefiting others comes back to you. The word for that is generally business.
I would like to keep working on the same things I've worked on for years but turn it into an actual business that pays my bills. There is nothing I want more desperately than to do X for its own sake and somehow also live in comfort because I do good things in this shitty world full of shitty people who all want something for free and are happy to take freebies literally from a homeless woman if they can get away with it.
Now, in regards to things like an IPO specifically, I think it would depend on whether or not you need a lot of other people to help you get X done. If you need to hire a lot of other people, then you might need an investment in order to do that if you cannot rely on getting that many volunteers. And in that case, to get the investment, there probably has to be the prospect of an IPO.
My observed experience is that trying to get grants for something, is not materially easier or less political than trying to get investments to fund it.
The problem is that we(in the broader sense of the working world) don't treat those concepts as an "artistic medium" to which additional principles and ideas are needed to structure and shape the outcomes, rather, we just use them as scorekeeping for a nebulous measure of life success, which results in founders laboring hard over the business equivalent of a fart joke, because they're only aiming to min-max response for effort.
The measure of what's an "impactful" business is socially constructed within the arbitrage of what we could potentially strive for against what societal conditions currently allow. Entrepreneurs, as a group, are always testing the boundaries of that arbitrage. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but it's hard to find balance in the arrangement because they aren't able to do their study in private: part of the deal is that they demand access to significant resources to make it happen, and that occasional violations get overlooked in the name of progress. In a time like now when the population is mostly asking for relief measures, it looks indulgent, and sometimes it is.