> you should at least make sure that the new things you make don't net harm people or the world.
How?
Is the internet a net positive or net negative thing? How about Social Media? Is it maybe even more complex such that we can't tally up positive/negative "points" and a term like "net positive" doesn't even make sense for these things?
It's a hard question to answer but not impossible.
Here's a bit of an oversimplification:
- is what you made useful to anyone? If it's not, no one will use it so it doesn't matter.
- does what you made help people be more productive or less productive?
- does it help improve people's health or degrade it?
- does it give people what they want in the short term at the cost of harming them in the long term?
- does it help some people while actively harming others?
- does it help people but harm the environment or other creatures?
Etc.
Most failure comes from not getting past the first question. These are easy questions to ask but very hard to answer. Most startup founders make up answers and then go nowhere and waste a bunch of time/money. Even smart people doing their best fall into this trap. Our system isn't good at developing people to be good at empathizing at scale. When people try to empathize at scale they over-generalize to the point of near meaninglessness.
You will make nothing so grand as a platform used by billions so that's all irrelevant.
If you make, say, an ovulation app designed to feed user data to companies so they can fire pregnant workers before the company is required to give leave or other benefits, that's bad. Get it? You are not so incapable of distinguishing these things as you feign here. Pretending that everything is a neutral tool that might be misused for bad is child-like. Stop doing that.
“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”
"Make good new things" overlooks a critical tension: that goodness itself remains contested territory. The most transformative innovations reveal that creation's power cuts both ways. The printing press spread knowledge and literacy but also enabled propaganda wars and religious conflicts. Nuclear fission powers cities with clean energy but also destroyed Hiroshima & Nagasaki and created existential risk. The internet connects billions across continents while weakening community bonds and fragmenting our shared reality. Each breakthrough that advances humanity also challenges our moral certainties.
This suggests we need a fourth principle: "Cultivate discernment about goodness." Not merely as an afterthought, but as an essential companion to creation. Such discernment acknowledges that innovation contains both medicine and poison in the same vessel—and that our capacity to create has outpaced our ability to foresee consequences. And perhaps equally important is recognizing that meaningful contribution isn't always about creating anew, but often about cultivating what already exists: preserving, interpreting, and transmitting knowledge and practices in ways that transform both the cultivator and what is cultivated.
Yet Graham's framing—"What should one do?"—contains a deeper limitation. It positions ethics as an individual pursuit in an age where our greatest challenges are fundamentally collective. "What should one do?" seems personal, but in our connected world, doesn't the answer depend increasingly on what seven billion others are doing? When more people than ever can create or cultivate, our challenge becomes coordinating this massive, parallel work toward flourishing rather than conflict and destruction.
These principles aren't merely personal guideposts but the architecture for civilization's operating system. They point toward our central challenge: how to organize creativity and cultivation at planetary scale; how to balance the brilliant chaos of individual and organizational impetus with the steady hand of collective welfare. This balance requires new forms of governance that can channel our pursuits toward shared flourishing—neither controlling too tightly nor letting things run wild. It calls for institutions that learn and adapt as quickly as the world changes. And it asks us to embrace both freedom of pursuit and responsibility to others, seeing them as two sides of the same coin in a world where what you bring forth may shape my future.
The question isn't just what should I do, but what should we become?
Totally agreed. While not bad, this all expresses a somewhat familiar loneliness in the world from a successful tech guy like pg. I think it just happens here:
> The most impressive thing humans can do is to think. It may be the most impressive thing that can be done.
Something like this has been a marker for humanism since Pico della Mirandolla's famous "Oration on the Dignity of Man," for sure, if not Aristotle before that. But there is another viewpoint and set of frameworks that privileges the sociality and capacity for working together of humans. Isn't it, at least arguably, more impressive what we can build only together, rather than what any one of us has thought up at a given time? Ideas feel destined, individuals are products of their time; if I am not going to manifest some creative idea, it seems inevitable someone else will eventually. With the individual, it could always be otherwise, e.g., all the Einsteins who die in sweatshops, etc.
But what could not be otherwise is the brute force and cunning of people in general. Its much easier to replace a single CEO than it is an entire workforce.
I am not trying to be too damning, there are certainly worse formulations out there, and perhaps this is all a matter of emphasis. I also don't expect a guy like Paul Graham to be anything other than this kind of individualist; there is some necessary investment into the ego in order to live in the world he does, its fine. There is just the tinge of disappointment for me that this is still where we are at, when the world has such a surplus of ideas and deficit in solidarity.
> The printing press spread knowledge and literacy but also enabled propaganda wars and religious conflicts.
Not just that: it overturned existing power structures.
In particular, it democratized information in a never-before-seen way, and opened the door to universal literacy.
To many, many people, these in themselves would have seemed like the opposite of "good things". Even today, there are a great many people who believe strongly in the importance of top-down power structures and restricted information flow—and back in Gutenberg's day, there would have been many more, if only because that was what was common then.
And I believe this only enhances your primary point—that we need to "cultivate discernment about goodness". We need to not merely think about what is good for us, but what is good for all, and be honest with ourselves about those things.
All new inventions have tendencies to overturn existing power structure (i.e. disrupt the status quo). It's probably why certain cultures disincentivize innovation and spurn entrepreneurs.
But I think creative destruction is a net good, and I'd argue that micro-dosing on revolutions is essential for dynamism and social mobility.
>I think vast majority HN user won't prefer any AI generated comment.
Agreed! At the same time, there's a lot of content on here about AI, including AI-based content generation.
So, if HN users don't like being subjected to AI-generated content, why would they be OK with promoting AI, including foisting AI-based content upon others? Seems unfair, not to mention self-contradictory.
>These comments honestly just mock readers.
I looked through that poster's comment history and they seem to be participating in good faith.
People are also not great at identifying AI-generated content. (There was an experiment about AI-generated graphic art on ACX not too long ago, I assume the situation with text to be no different.)
And there's a style of "normative" English which the language models "know" by default (because they learned it from human-authored content). But nothing prevents humans from still writing in that style, and indeed many people think that this is how they writing should look in order to get their post across. (My parent comment was a joke about how readers do prioritize style over substance, and are pretty bad at identifying substance they don't already have at least some familiarity with.)
So, if that comment turned out to not be GPT-generated, you've just mocked someone for trying to share their thoughts in that way which (in their opinion) would be most accessible to others. How does that help anyone?
checks barometer Well, given we're about 6 levels deep, and on HN of all places... compute compute I guess we'd probably be either at the "recommendations to think in AAVE" or the "recommendations to start studying Russian" :-)))
Ok. So if generated comments aren't allowed, and if repetition is discouraged, why do I keep seeing these repetitive "is this GPT" comments maybe not quite on every other post but virtually every day I read something on here?
Fair's fair. "Ok GPT" seems like a shitty dunk, is all. Real low-effort, and on people trying to think for themselves no less (who are thus providing the tastiest food for any scrapers! priorities!)
If someone can't be bothered to write something, I can't be arsed to read it. I am not here to consume strings of text, but to interact with other people.
I love that. Once people realize how difficult it is to fully understand the ethical implications of one's actions, they often arrive at the defeatist conclusion that it simply doesn't matter, that there is no real difference between good and bad.
I love the idea of "cultivating discernment about goodness" because it produces agency and accountability.
pg's writing is so lazy. At best he engages with thinkers in a superficial way, further, he never expands his horizons beyond the typical cadre of classics, he says nothing of actual intellectual substance and worth, and if anything he legitimizes an uncritical stance toward the world (a sort of pseudo-intellectual neopositivism). I still think a poverty of exposure and experience in the history of philosophy and literature on the part of his audience is the only reason he gets any sort of readership.
Maybe PG is "superficial". Hmm ... It may be that commonly drilling down as deep as can is not productive and, instead, there is some wisdom that commonly productive solutions are surprisingly simplistic, i.e., "superficial"?
I can recommend several. If pg's essays have some amount of appeal to you, you are probably potentially interested in philosophy, here are just a few people who have authored works of far greater eloquence, depth, and significance than anything paul graham has ever written:
Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, Ryle, Montaigne, Maggie Nelson, Didion, Bertrand Russel, Jean Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Niklas Luhmann, Norbert Wiener, Hienz von Forester, Hans Georg Gadamer, Juergen Habermas, Rebeca Solnit...
And these are just the few people that came to mind off the cuff. If I bothered to look I could probably give you more.
These tech luminaries act as though no philosophy or significant social analysis or cultural criticism has happened in the west since Plato and Cicero, but it's simply...entirely untrue. There's a wealth of deep, enriching philosophical heritage to explore, and I think these bozos don't engage with it because they are either too lazy (much easier to read translations of the classics) too disingenuous (much easier to base your sophistry on material that is so old as to not be contested) , or too self righteous (they already possess the one truth birthed directly by the divine cells of their brains because they like the lisp programming language and worked at yahoo, so why bother to interact with the thought of others in a serious way?) to bother. Not to mention, they don't dare engage with the highly complex dedicated academic studies of the classics anyway. I doubt pg has done little more than read a modern translation of Cicero. Probably not even Leob, probably Penguin Random House. But hey, those ignorant of the gold vein will happily lop up pewter.
Thanks for that list. I've read about a third of Plato's dialogues (penguin classics, lol) but I'm still at the beginning of my philosophical journey. After I finish Plato I'll start reading the works of modern philosophers. There are many on your list I haven't even heard of.
Regarding pg, I think what happens is when people get rich they think that gives them deep philosophical insight into things. It's not just tech people, I think the same thing happened to Ray Dalio, for instance.
You realize that navel-gazing metaphysics and philosophy aren't the same thing, right? Your list contains such a quantity of intellectuals with low substance to verbiage ratio that I hope it was made in jest.
Regardless of potential faults in pg's writings, which are indeed more collected thoughts than essays. And I don't even agree with this one, creating should be left to those capable of doing it well (which means at least some degree of perfectionism, developed aesthetic sense and inspiration) and those rarely need external encouragement. The others should cultivate their virtue and maintain an iron will within a steel body, the world (both individuals and as a whole) would certainly benefit much more from this.
The list I gave is sufficiently broad (incorporating essayist, analytic philosophers, and continental philosophers) that I'm not sure how you could claim it consists of nothing but navel gazers and metaphysicians unless you didn't looks at the list carefully and made assumptions or unless you mean to write off basically all of philosophy (in fact, the basic program of more than one of the authors I mentioned was to demolish traditional metaphysics as bunk philosophy).
Bertrand Russel (along with Whitehead) and Wittgenstein are both crucial figures in the resurgence of logical research and the development of modern mathematics. Norbert Wiener, beyond his more philosophical reflections on the integration of machines into society, made significant advances in signal processing. Rousseau is one of the founding figures of modern political thought and the concept of right.
Create all the drivel you want, I don't have a problem with that. What I do think, however, is that when you are in a position of influence like pg, you have some amount of responsibility to publish works that are well researched and scientific to the extent that they can be. Scientific in the philosophical context often means work that engages in some meaningful way with tradition, or that at the very least lays out logical argument.
I would accept the stance that perhaps pg is just publishing personal musing here, and it is the fault of his audience to take them as seriously as they do, but if that's the case I feel even more strongly that reasonable and responsible people who have studied these traditions should argue against these claims and urge others to desire and seek more.
My fault for not detailing what I meant: pg's article is about the antiquity kind of philosophy answering actually important questions almost anybody alive asks himself like "how should I/one live my/his life?". This puts it in a completely different world than 20th century philosophy which is more often about metaphysics, deconstruction, post-modernism, critical theory, etc... (disclaimer: I found "Fashionable Nonsense" entertaining and have a lot of disdain for most of this).
About Russel and Wittgenstein, I obviously wasn't saying anything about their contributions to hard science. Rousseau is indeed one of the more down-to-earth thinkers listed (though his noble savage remains one of the best jokes I've ever read about).
I'll be honest with you, I think pg's writings are hard to criticize because I think they're more often "right" than not, at heart. Sure, you can criticize the lazy style that clearly doesn't aspire to be scholarly, or the broad generalizations and hand-waving (in fact, every article gets it), but arguing against the core theses isn't as easy. Though I think this one isn't one of his best days, heh.
Thanks for the clarification. You might like the work of Pierre Hadot, as it's very much in line with the idea that philosophy should mostly concern itself with questions of how individuals ought to live (the "philosophy as therapeutic practice") I'd be curious to hear which philosophers you admire.
I'd agree that not all 20th cen Philosophy is worth reading (there's a reason I didn't bring up Derrida or Lacan, for instance) but I find "meaningless word salad" accusations levied against the critical theory of the Frankfurt school and Habermas, and Foucault's work much harder to justify (I haven't read the sokal book in a while, but I don't think these thinkers were really a focus of the critique—it was more so the thought of derrida et al that followed on their heels). The Frankfurt school is sometimes a bit melodramatic and rhetorical, but their thought collectively actually does contain substantive argumentation and elaborates significant concepts that were important in establishing a critical reorientation in the new political and technological systems of the modern world, and, I think does what philosophy should: namely get us to question our own preconceptions, our social environments, and what kind of existence we should strive to achieve for self and other (in fact, Marcuse is one of the few philosophers to argue firmly for the positive beneficiary potential of technology—many of the more renowned philosophers on technology are usually far more pessimistic about its prospects, even stemming back to Socrates as rendered by Plato). The same goes for Foucault—his arguments and overall technique and program are worthy of respect, even if some of the people that adopt his ideas are overzealous and far less nuanced than he was (the debate between him and chomsky is great for instance, because they both have radically different approaches and perspectives but both get at some essential truths)
I'd say that the solidity of many of pg's theses stems from the fact that they aren't actually developed—to use this one as an example, it basically amounts to: "what should one do? make things that yield net good". That's great and all, but for this to have any real potency or meaning we'd have to elaborate what good actually means here, and it is in that analysis where actual philosophizing begins and where an empty platitude can become an actual thought worth sharing. Unfortunately, I don't think, as others seem to think, that pg is some deep thinker that is portraying deep insight "simply"—he is essentially just not a deep thinker at all. If you read any of his works with a critical eye you will note that he completely buys into the prevailing social and economic organization of the world, and that he is, in this sense, a fish who is quite happy to leave the water it swims in unexamined. He does not even really try to justify this acceptance—it is simply taken as a prior that this mode of organization must be acceptable (I assume because it made him rich and continues to make him money) and he feels no need to even justify it with any seriousness, acumen, or depth of research—at best he offers tautologies that rely on undefined terms (e.g. like we have here with "the good") for their "universal wisdom and truth". His writing is so narrowly focused on individualism that it fails to become critical. We are not isolated atoms operating in hermetically sealed tanks—any serious examination of how to live requires questioning whether or not the prevailing social conditions require modification. The only level of engagement pg has in this arena that I've seen is essentially to just try to convince people to found startups—what sparkling insight! It is this lack of critical perspective that makes much of his work worthless, in my view, yet he acts and presents his writing as though his philosophical learning is on the level of the ancients. He desperately wants to presen...
Hey, fair enough, and if you feel the article helped you reflect on your life, great.
However, the reason the lack of depth and engagement bothers me is that it is its own (perhaps unintentional) form of intellectual gatekeeping. By failing to seriously engage with much of the literary tradition, paul effectively avoids helping his readers discover this tradition, allowing them to further their reflections and develop their own ideas through further exploration. This is why I call the writing lazy specifically—it stops practically before it begins. If it's unintentional, this is laziness—deciding that a half-baked, isolated musing is worth sharing. If it's intentional, it's more malicious. A sophist benefits from ignorance. The less his audience knows the more novel or insightful his empty ideas appear.
I think the accusation of superiority is fair, I am engaging in some rhetoric myself. But the stakes are different. A comment on a community forum is not of equal potential impact as knowingly, intentionally publishing a work when you are aware that you have an audience and influence. Furthermore, it's not like pg is engaging with this particular thread of discussion or my accusation, or many for that manner. It's mostly a monologue these days.
We should demand and ask for more of leaders with influence, not less. Why set the bar lower for people we know have popularity and pull? That have platforms through which they can shape the public consciousness?
I'll also note that I only "name dropped" because someone asked. People really need to get over their emotive attachments to intelligence. I'm not saying I'm smarter than anyone else on this forum, or even pg for that matter because I don't think questions about degrees of intelligence even make sense unless you narrowly prescribe the notion and context. Stop being insecure.
> I still think a poverty of exposure and experience in the history of philosophy and literature on the part of his audience is the only reason he gets any sort of readership.
That and people who hero-worship him for his role in YC and some of his other previous business and/or technical work and assume everything he does is valuable because of that.
I personally don't think technology for the most part is good for society. It makes nature boring and predictable and life less interesting as a whole if this is true, but I don't think we even understand the degree to which technology is just ruining life for the future. We don't have adaptations to deal with anything and adaptations take tens of thousands of years if not way more to occur. The romantic thought is that technology can help us solve the problems that come up as a result of itself, but I'm less optimistic there just because of how things have been going. It seems like human nature and us not being good at understanding large complex systems as a species results in the malignant actors and developments taking root and metastasizing over time.
- global warming
- antibiotic resistance
- environmental contamination
- food quality diminishing
- explosive increase in chronic disease, especially in young people
- extinction of most other species
- fertility problems
- declining birth rates
- poly-pharmacy becoming normal
- now things related to energy consumption with AI and cryptocurrency
- huge decline in social behaviors across the population
Just seems like for every new advancement we're making new chronic issues that are barely incentivized at all for being managed and alleviated
The wheel is technology, metallurgy is technology, irrigation is technology.
Technology is vital to a functioning society.
There's certainly more debate to be had whether various bits of modern technology are net positive or net negative, but even still I personally believe modern technology is mostly neutral to very good for humanity in a vacuum and it is other forces like modern capitalism that bend it toward being harmful.
eg. Social media is very clearly having a net negative impact on modern society, but I don't believe that would still be true if it wasn't driven by algorithms created to maximize ad revenue above all other concerns.
And obviously there is some inherent coupling of modern technology and capitalism that isn't avoidable, but I don't think capitalism on its own is wholly bad, its the slavish cult-like worship of it as the only way to do things that causes it to be so destructive.
> The most impressive thing humans can do is to think.
> And the best kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has thought well, is to make good new things.
> ... but making good new things is a should in the sense that this is how to live to one's full potential.
I urge you not to take these opinions as facts. Originality is admirable, but it is not "your potential", "proof of great thoughts", or "the most impressive thing you can do".
The answer to the question: What to do? is not "Make new things", but rather begins with a simple question: In what context?
The idea of dividing people into two categories: 1) those who "take care of people and the world", and those who 2) "make good new things", is harmful.
Do? Make money enough to support self and family and then have a good family.
Understand people. With all the talk in the news about the current Disney Snow White, got out the DVD for the old Disney Cinderella: Yup, have learned enough about people to see that the many plot events are not just incidental for the drama but examples of deep fundamentals about people. In particular understand what's important for good family formation.
Understand human societies, e.g., cultures, religions, economies, politics, war and peace.
Understand academics: E.g., a lot of academics that has done research that results in good tools to enable "Make good new things" has deep contempt for doing that.
Understand, say, math, physical science, biology, medical science, nature, technology, fine arts.
I read it more like he's considering what to throw his money at, and it sounds like he wants to throw his money at companies that make good new things.
But then he doesn't really define good, makes an odd comparison to a now acclaimed pulp fiction author and then says we can only really know what is good after the fact.
Leaning on "new" so hard as part of the "good" just reduces to, "Make new-new things that aren't by every objective measure bad and see if it works out in hindsight".
It would be helpful if we understood what good and bad mean to him.
His essay from 2008[0] is just as nebulous. When you have such a hand-wavy definition of such an important term, it ultimately means you can wield your narrative to fit any conclusion you want.
With his multiple endorsements of MAGA I fear his definition of "good" is severley warped. Is ensuring the poor don't die of preventable diseases good? Not to this guy.
Yeah, this feels like an attempt to (partially preemptively?) rehabilitate his image/legacy more than anything. If he makes a blog saying how important it is to "make good new things", then surely everything he makes is a good new thing! No need to look further to see what he actually supports.
("making things rather than, say, making critical observations about things other people have made. Those are ideas too, and sometimes valuable ones, but it's easy to trick oneself into believing they're more valuable than they are. Criticism seems sophisticated")
> I mean new things in a very general sense. Newton's physics was a good new thing. Indeed, the first version of this principle was to have good new ideas. But that didn't seem general enough: it didn't include making art or music, for example, except insofar as they embody new ideas.
Art should be, yes. Unfortunately a lot of visual art being produced from art schools and shown in museums / galleries are forms of criticism. The article mentions crticism as not being a good new thing. The message they seek to convey is more of a priority than the creation of a Good Thing. (In reality modern art is a mixture of varying degrees of criticism and creation)
This is partly because modern conceptual art is about concepts so it's very easy for it to be overtaken by a political or critical message as the concept.
Forgive me, but I feel like these guidelines are enforced very selectively. Paul Graham's last post against "wokeness" staying on the front page for two days left me with a very bad taste in my mouth. Why should his political crusades not only be allowed on here but also promoted?
Similarly, why are some DOGE posts allowed to pass through the flag-filter but not others?
I'll take your comment as a hint to take a break from HN. But please, do consider further detailing what kind of political content is acceptable or not.
Your reply would make more sense to me if I had mentioned the HN guideline against using the site for political battle, but I didn't. The guidelines I listed your comment as breaking don't have anything to do with that.
But here's a response anyhow—if you look at the past explanations here:
you'll find exhaustive explanations of how we approach politics on HN. If you read some of that and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
I should add, though, that it's too much to expect moderation to be consistent. The principles by which we moderate HN are consistent, but it's not possible to apply them consistently to all the content. There's far too much content for us to process it all, and randomness is a major factor in sevreral different ways.
I don't remember too many knots, but anything that stuck was learned from that book. Amazing product: subject, content, presentation and quality construction!
My only complaint: I remember it was hard to make it fit on my bookshelf :)
> you should at least make sure that the new things you make don't net harm people or the world
That's rich coming from pg. Is he really in a position to dispense this valuable advice? Did he ever look back at his contributions to this world through this prism? Does he consider the impacts of friends he has, platforms he uses and promotes, posts he writes, on lives of other people? Does he think just withdrawing from new decisions made by (the thing) is enough to wash his hands from all the negative impacts such decisions cause? People tend to attribute good outcomes to their own contributions and hand wave bad ones to forces outside their control, and this article is a great case in point for this phenomena.
I don't know except I get the impression from reading responses to him over time that he represents something frustrating to some people here and on X.
Regardless of whom you're putting down, how right you are, or feel you are, comments like this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43370236 are badly against the site guidelines. Please don't post any more of these to HN.
It should be acceptable to criticize rich, powerful people in unemotional terms, but I wasn't even doing that. I was summarizing the other comments on this thread.
Here are examples of comments (that remain visible) that I was summarizing:
In the future I can be more careful to say something like, "Based on the comments here, people are saying that he..." but I thought that was implied in my comment already.
The question asked for specific issues with a specific person.
The comment flagged, that status apparently endorsed by your own response, answers that specific question.
It's extraordinarily difficult to write a critique of someone, particularly where that critique focuses on political, social, and personality aspects, without hitting some nerves, individually or collectively.
I'll note that HN's policy is to moderate YC firms less (and yes, that's not "not at all" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33974170>), rather than more. I'd suggest a similar approach to YC personnel, particularly current/past leadership and/or founders.
Someone should correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIK - PG stands behind current shift in USA’s status quo. That is, support of MAGA, Trump, DOGE, techno takeover of USA, that vague idea of of converting USA into totalitarian corporate city states controlled by billionaire techno class.
Though last one shouldn’t be surprising as it was endorsed by YC 10+ years ago.
Idlewords has devoted an entire essay to the topic, "Dabblers And Blowhards" (2005). As a callout quote, and one immediately preceding a long list of specific issues with pg in his own essay Maciej Cegłowski is critiquing:
It's no surprise, then, that a computer programmer would want to bask in some of the peripheral coolness that comes with painting, especially when he has an axe to grind about his own work being 'mere engineering'. Yet while this might be charming or quirky in the abstract, it gets seriously annoying when real facts start getting butchered...
I did not flag this, but I've flagged stuff before that I don't want to see more of on HN because it feels like it would ruin what I enjoy. If I need "Person did X - What happened next will surprise you", I'd go to reddit, so I'll flag that type of low-quality content.
I don't know why people flagged this, but I often had the impression that PG's content ends up on the front page because he's PG, not because it's particularly interesting or noteworthy. Maybe the people flagging it feel similar.
Until I hear a vote of no confidence from Paul for YC’s current leadership, I have no interest in anything he has to say. After all, Elon Musk — the guy cheerfully and illegally dismantling the federal government, who called my friends “parasites” for taking benefits and apparently wants to see witnesses against the president executed, who enthusiastically supports far-right populist parties like the AfD and makes suspiciously Nazi-looking salutes on stage — is still invited to YC’s AI Startup School. Garry Tan, it seems, has no problem with any of this. I’m sure he relishes a new world order where he sits on the board of Yarvin’s fever dream government.
Want to do something good, Paul? Do everything in your power to stem the bleed of encroaching fascism and neo-reactionaryism. Put your reputation and wallet on the line. Be a leader. Otherwise, you’re just posting platitudes while one of the world’s great democracies dies an agonizing death by the hands of your peers.
Reminded me instantly of the 1845 text Who Is to Blame? [1] and the 1863 follow-up What Is to Be Done? [2] that defined progressive thought in Russian until the 1917 revolution.
But this text is so escapist... I am ashamed to have read it.
I’m starting to wonder if posters are flagging everything in response to the clear political censorship going on. If everything is flagged than nothing is flagged.
Hey guys, while some of the criticism in the comments is pretty sound, keep in mind that genuine authors (and PG too) write first of all to entertain themselves, as a way to have a more clear reflection on their thinking. And they publish to learn from readers' responses.
Are you saying we shouldn't take his seriously? We shouldn't take him literally? We should give him a pass for writing axiomatic drivel with nothing concrete or thoughtful in it?
292 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 276 ms ] threadLooking forward to showing HN one day.
How?
Is the internet a net positive or net negative thing? How about Social Media? Is it maybe even more complex such that we can't tally up positive/negative "points" and a term like "net positive" doesn't even make sense for these things?
Here's a bit of an oversimplification: - is what you made useful to anyone? If it's not, no one will use it so it doesn't matter. - does what you made help people be more productive or less productive? - does it help improve people's health or degrade it? - does it give people what they want in the short term at the cost of harming them in the long term? - does it help some people while actively harming others? - does it help people but harm the environment or other creatures?
Etc.
Most failure comes from not getting past the first question. These are easy questions to ask but very hard to answer. Most startup founders make up answers and then go nowhere and waste a bunch of time/money. Even smart people doing their best fall into this trap. Our system isn't good at developing people to be good at empathizing at scale. When people try to empathize at scale they over-generalize to the point of near meaninglessness.
If you make, say, an ovulation app designed to feed user data to companies so they can fire pregnant workers before the company is required to give leave or other benefits, that's bad. Get it? You are not so incapable of distinguishing these things as you feign here. Pretending that everything is a neutral tool that might be misused for bad is child-like. Stop doing that.
— Paul Virilio
This suggests we need a fourth principle: "Cultivate discernment about goodness." Not merely as an afterthought, but as an essential companion to creation. Such discernment acknowledges that innovation contains both medicine and poison in the same vessel—and that our capacity to create has outpaced our ability to foresee consequences. And perhaps equally important is recognizing that meaningful contribution isn't always about creating anew, but often about cultivating what already exists: preserving, interpreting, and transmitting knowledge and practices in ways that transform both the cultivator and what is cultivated.
Yet Graham's framing—"What should one do?"—contains a deeper limitation. It positions ethics as an individual pursuit in an age where our greatest challenges are fundamentally collective. "What should one do?" seems personal, but in our connected world, doesn't the answer depend increasingly on what seven billion others are doing? When more people than ever can create or cultivate, our challenge becomes coordinating this massive, parallel work toward flourishing rather than conflict and destruction.
These principles aren't merely personal guideposts but the architecture for civilization's operating system. They point toward our central challenge: how to organize creativity and cultivation at planetary scale; how to balance the brilliant chaos of individual and organizational impetus with the steady hand of collective welfare. This balance requires new forms of governance that can channel our pursuits toward shared flourishing—neither controlling too tightly nor letting things run wild. It calls for institutions that learn and adapt as quickly as the world changes. And it asks us to embrace both freedom of pursuit and responsibility to others, seeing them as two sides of the same coin in a world where what you bring forth may shape my future.
The question isn't just what should I do, but what should we become?
> The most impressive thing humans can do is to think. It may be the most impressive thing that can be done.
Something like this has been a marker for humanism since Pico della Mirandolla's famous "Oration on the Dignity of Man," for sure, if not Aristotle before that. But there is another viewpoint and set of frameworks that privileges the sociality and capacity for working together of humans. Isn't it, at least arguably, more impressive what we can build only together, rather than what any one of us has thought up at a given time? Ideas feel destined, individuals are products of their time; if I am not going to manifest some creative idea, it seems inevitable someone else will eventually. With the individual, it could always be otherwise, e.g., all the Einsteins who die in sweatshops, etc.
But what could not be otherwise is the brute force and cunning of people in general. Its much easier to replace a single CEO than it is an entire workforce.
I am not trying to be too damning, there are certainly worse formulations out there, and perhaps this is all a matter of emphasis. I also don't expect a guy like Paul Graham to be anything other than this kind of individualist; there is some necessary investment into the ego in order to live in the world he does, its fine. There is just the tinge of disappointment for me that this is still where we are at, when the world has such a surplus of ideas and deficit in solidarity.
Not just that: it overturned existing power structures.
In particular, it democratized information in a never-before-seen way, and opened the door to universal literacy.
To many, many people, these in themselves would have seemed like the opposite of "good things". Even today, there are a great many people who believe strongly in the importance of top-down power structures and restricted information flow—and back in Gutenberg's day, there would have been many more, if only because that was what was common then.
And I believe this only enhances your primary point—that we need to "cultivate discernment about goodness". We need to not merely think about what is good for us, but what is good for all, and be honest with ourselves about those things.
But I think creative destruction is a net good, and I'd argue that micro-dosing on revolutions is essential for dynamism and social mobility.
Even if it were GPT-generated, why do you say it as if that's a bad thing? I thought this forum was gushing about how great AI is!
If poll is taken, I think vast majority HN user won't prefer any AI generated comment.
These comments honestly just mock readers.
Agreed! At the same time, there's a lot of content on here about AI, including AI-based content generation.
So, if HN users don't like being subjected to AI-generated content, why would they be OK with promoting AI, including foisting AI-based content upon others? Seems unfair, not to mention self-contradictory.
>These comments honestly just mock readers.
I looked through that poster's comment history and they seem to be participating in good faith.
People are also not great at identifying AI-generated content. (There was an experiment about AI-generated graphic art on ACX not too long ago, I assume the situation with text to be no different.)
And there's a style of "normative" English which the language models "know" by default (because they learned it from human-authored content). But nothing prevents humans from still writing in that style, and indeed many people think that this is how they writing should look in order to get their post across. (My parent comment was a joke about how readers do prioritize style over substance, and are pretty bad at identifying substance they don't already have at least some familiarity with.)
So, if that comment turned out to not be GPT-generated, you've just mocked someone for trying to share their thoughts in that way which (in their opinion) would be most accessible to others. How does that help anyone?
Now I only wonder what kind of depth we missed out on from this accusation taking the forefront of my post's underlying thread.
Happy International Lying Day!
(Preferably involving as little repetition as possible.)
It's not as if one can control these things just by setting rules or asking nicely! The most we can do is influence things around the edges a little.
I absolutely agree
I love that. Once people realize how difficult it is to fully understand the ethical implications of one's actions, they often arrive at the defeatist conclusion that it simply doesn't matter, that there is no real difference between good and bad.
I love the idea of "cultivating discernment about goodness" because it produces agency and accountability.
It's a 1500 word essay that says absolutely nothing at all.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You don't have to have made a movie to recognize a bad movie.
You don't have to have built a car to recognize a poorly designed car.
You don't have to have written a song to recognize unlistenable garbage.
Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, Ryle, Montaigne, Maggie Nelson, Didion, Bertrand Russel, Jean Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Niklas Luhmann, Norbert Wiener, Hienz von Forester, Hans Georg Gadamer, Juergen Habermas, Rebeca Solnit...
And these are just the few people that came to mind off the cuff. If I bothered to look I could probably give you more.
These tech luminaries act as though no philosophy or significant social analysis or cultural criticism has happened in the west since Plato and Cicero, but it's simply...entirely untrue. There's a wealth of deep, enriching philosophical heritage to explore, and I think these bozos don't engage with it because they are either too lazy (much easier to read translations of the classics) too disingenuous (much easier to base your sophistry on material that is so old as to not be contested) , or too self righteous (they already possess the one truth birthed directly by the divine cells of their brains because they like the lisp programming language and worked at yahoo, so why bother to interact with the thought of others in a serious way?) to bother. Not to mention, they don't dare engage with the highly complex dedicated academic studies of the classics anyway. I doubt pg has done little more than read a modern translation of Cicero. Probably not even Leob, probably Penguin Random House. But hey, those ignorant of the gold vein will happily lop up pewter.
Regarding pg, I think what happens is when people get rich they think that gives them deep philosophical insight into things. It's not just tech people, I think the same thing happened to Ray Dalio, for instance.
Regardless of potential faults in pg's writings, which are indeed more collected thoughts than essays. And I don't even agree with this one, creating should be left to those capable of doing it well (which means at least some degree of perfectionism, developed aesthetic sense and inspiration) and those rarely need external encouragement. The others should cultivate their virtue and maintain an iron will within a steel body, the world (both individuals and as a whole) would certainly benefit much more from this.
Bertrand Russel (along with Whitehead) and Wittgenstein are both crucial figures in the resurgence of logical research and the development of modern mathematics. Norbert Wiener, beyond his more philosophical reflections on the integration of machines into society, made significant advances in signal processing. Rousseau is one of the founding figures of modern political thought and the concept of right.
Create all the drivel you want, I don't have a problem with that. What I do think, however, is that when you are in a position of influence like pg, you have some amount of responsibility to publish works that are well researched and scientific to the extent that they can be. Scientific in the philosophical context often means work that engages in some meaningful way with tradition, or that at the very least lays out logical argument.
I would accept the stance that perhaps pg is just publishing personal musing here, and it is the fault of his audience to take them as seriously as they do, but if that's the case I feel even more strongly that reasonable and responsible people who have studied these traditions should argue against these claims and urge others to desire and seek more.
About Russel and Wittgenstein, I obviously wasn't saying anything about their contributions to hard science. Rousseau is indeed one of the more down-to-earth thinkers listed (though his noble savage remains one of the best jokes I've ever read about).
I'll be honest with you, I think pg's writings are hard to criticize because I think they're more often "right" than not, at heart. Sure, you can criticize the lazy style that clearly doesn't aspire to be scholarly, or the broad generalizations and hand-waving (in fact, every article gets it), but arguing against the core theses isn't as easy. Though I think this one isn't one of his best days, heh.
I'd agree that not all 20th cen Philosophy is worth reading (there's a reason I didn't bring up Derrida or Lacan, for instance) but I find "meaningless word salad" accusations levied against the critical theory of the Frankfurt school and Habermas, and Foucault's work much harder to justify (I haven't read the sokal book in a while, but I don't think these thinkers were really a focus of the critique—it was more so the thought of derrida et al that followed on their heels). The Frankfurt school is sometimes a bit melodramatic and rhetorical, but their thought collectively actually does contain substantive argumentation and elaborates significant concepts that were important in establishing a critical reorientation in the new political and technological systems of the modern world, and, I think does what philosophy should: namely get us to question our own preconceptions, our social environments, and what kind of existence we should strive to achieve for self and other (in fact, Marcuse is one of the few philosophers to argue firmly for the positive beneficiary potential of technology—many of the more renowned philosophers on technology are usually far more pessimistic about its prospects, even stemming back to Socrates as rendered by Plato). The same goes for Foucault—his arguments and overall technique and program are worthy of respect, even if some of the people that adopt his ideas are overzealous and far less nuanced than he was (the debate between him and chomsky is great for instance, because they both have radically different approaches and perspectives but both get at some essential truths)
I'd say that the solidity of many of pg's theses stems from the fact that they aren't actually developed—to use this one as an example, it basically amounts to: "what should one do? make things that yield net good". That's great and all, but for this to have any real potency or meaning we'd have to elaborate what good actually means here, and it is in that analysis where actual philosophizing begins and where an empty platitude can become an actual thought worth sharing. Unfortunately, I don't think, as others seem to think, that pg is some deep thinker that is portraying deep insight "simply"—he is essentially just not a deep thinker at all. If you read any of his works with a critical eye you will note that he completely buys into the prevailing social and economic organization of the world, and that he is, in this sense, a fish who is quite happy to leave the water it swims in unexamined. He does not even really try to justify this acceptance—it is simply taken as a prior that this mode of organization must be acceptable (I assume because it made him rich and continues to make him money) and he feels no need to even justify it with any seriousness, acumen, or depth of research—at best he offers tautologies that rely on undefined terms (e.g. like we have here with "the good") for their "universal wisdom and truth". His writing is so narrowly focused on individualism that it fails to become critical. We are not isolated atoms operating in hermetically sealed tanks—any serious examination of how to live requires questioning whether or not the prevailing social conditions require modification. The only level of engagement pg has in this arena that I've seen is essentially to just try to convince people to found startups—what sparkling insight! It is this lack of critical perspective that makes much of his work worthless, in my view, yet he acts and presents his writing as though his philosophical learning is on the level of the ancients. He desperately wants to presen...
However, the reason the lack of depth and engagement bothers me is that it is its own (perhaps unintentional) form of intellectual gatekeeping. By failing to seriously engage with much of the literary tradition, paul effectively avoids helping his readers discover this tradition, allowing them to further their reflections and develop their own ideas through further exploration. This is why I call the writing lazy specifically—it stops practically before it begins. If it's unintentional, this is laziness—deciding that a half-baked, isolated musing is worth sharing. If it's intentional, it's more malicious. A sophist benefits from ignorance. The less his audience knows the more novel or insightful his empty ideas appear.
I think the accusation of superiority is fair, I am engaging in some rhetoric myself. But the stakes are different. A comment on a community forum is not of equal potential impact as knowingly, intentionally publishing a work when you are aware that you have an audience and influence. Furthermore, it's not like pg is engaging with this particular thread of discussion or my accusation, or many for that manner. It's mostly a monologue these days.
We should demand and ask for more of leaders with influence, not less. Why set the bar lower for people we know have popularity and pull? That have platforms through which they can shape the public consciousness?
I'll also note that I only "name dropped" because someone asked. People really need to get over their emotive attachments to intelligence. I'm not saying I'm smarter than anyone else on this forum, or even pg for that matter because I don't think questions about degrees of intelligence even make sense unless you narrowly prescribe the notion and context. Stop being insecure.
That and people who hero-worship him for his role in YC and some of his other previous business and/or technical work and assume everything he does is valuable because of that.
- global warming - antibiotic resistance - environmental contamination - food quality diminishing - explosive increase in chronic disease, especially in young people - extinction of most other species - fertility problems - declining birth rates - poly-pharmacy becoming normal - now things related to energy consumption with AI and cryptocurrency - huge decline in social behaviors across the population
Just seems like for every new advancement we're making new chronic issues that are barely incentivized at all for being managed and alleviated
Technology is vital to a functioning society.
There's certainly more debate to be had whether various bits of modern technology are net positive or net negative, but even still I personally believe modern technology is mostly neutral to very good for humanity in a vacuum and it is other forces like modern capitalism that bend it toward being harmful.
eg. Social media is very clearly having a net negative impact on modern society, but I don't believe that would still be true if it wasn't driven by algorithms created to maximize ad revenue above all other concerns.
And obviously there is some inherent coupling of modern technology and capitalism that isn't avoidable, but I don't think capitalism on its own is wholly bad, its the slavish cult-like worship of it as the only way to do things that causes it to be so destructive.
Tens and tens of billions are spent to generate cute pics instead of same tech applied to radiology, diseases cure, etc.
I urge you not to take these opinions as facts. Originality is admirable, but it is not "your potential", "proof of great thoughts", or "the most impressive thing you can do".
The answer to the question: What to do? is not "Make new things", but rather begins with a simple question: In what context?
The idea of dividing people into two categories: 1) those who "take care of people and the world", and those who 2) "make good new things", is harmful.
Understand people. With all the talk in the news about the current Disney Snow White, got out the DVD for the old Disney Cinderella: Yup, have learned enough about people to see that the many plot events are not just incidental for the drama but examples of deep fundamentals about people. In particular understand what's important for good family formation.
Understand human societies, e.g., cultures, religions, economies, politics, war and peace.
Understand academics: E.g., a lot of academics that has done research that results in good tools to enable "Make good new things" has deep contempt for doing that.
Understand, say, math, physical science, biology, medical science, nature, technology, fine arts.
Leaning on "new" so hard as part of the "good" just reduces to, "Make new-new things that aren't by every objective measure bad and see if it works out in hindsight".
It would be helpful if we understood what good and bad mean to him.
[0] - https://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
Do you have a source for this that I can read up on?
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/07/20
"thoughts by a billionaire. self-praising. spiritually enriching. sophisticated. 'high' value"
"thoughts by a commoner. critical. base. self-deluding juvenile hack work. 'low' value"
"thoughts by a billionaire about how critics are delusional and self-important. Sophisticated irony. philosophically challenging. 'high' value"
"suppose I say the author is giving himself a pass for the companies he funds?"
"sophomoric. intellectually sterile. 'low' value"
Reminds me of my own "ai art", The Marlboro Man riding a chrome blow up dog.
"sophomoric. intellectually sterile. 'low' value"
> I mean new things in a very general sense. Newton's physics was a good new thing. Indeed, the first version of this principle was to have good new ideas. But that didn't seem general enough: it didn't include making art or music, for example, except insofar as they embody new ideas.
This is partly because modern conceptual art is about concepts so it's very easy for it to be overtaken by a political or critical message as the concept.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Similarly, why are some DOGE posts allowed to pass through the flag-filter but not others?
I'll take your comment as a hint to take a break from HN. But please, do consider further detailing what kind of political content is acceptable or not.
But here's a response anyhow—if you look at the past explanations here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
you'll find exhaustive explanations of how we approach politics on HN. If you read some of that and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
I should add, though, that it's too much to expect moderation to be consistent. The principles by which we moderate HN are consistent, but it's not possible to apply them consistently to all the content. There's far too much content for us to process it all, and randomness is a major factor in sevreral different ways.
https://charlieharrington.com/create-wonderful-things-be-goo...
My only complaint: I remember it was hard to make it fit on my bookshelf :)
That's rich coming from pg. Is he really in a position to dispense this valuable advice? Did he ever look back at his contributions to this world through this prism? Does he consider the impacts of friends he has, platforms he uses and promotes, posts he writes, on lives of other people? Does he think just withdrawing from new decisions made by (the thing) is enough to wash his hands from all the negative impacts such decisions cause? People tend to attribute good outcomes to their own contributions and hand wave bad ones to forces outside their control, and this article is a great case in point for this phenomena.
Disappointing response.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Here are examples of comments (that remain visible) that I was summarizing:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515252
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43526888
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43527106
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515723
In the future I can be more careful to say something like, "Based on the comments here, people are saying that he..." but I thought that was implied in my comment already.
Generally it's a good idea to explicitly disambiguate intent (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
The comment flagged, that status apparently endorsed by your own response, answers that specific question.
It's extraordinarily difficult to write a critique of someone, particularly where that critique focuses on political, social, and personality aspects, without hitting some nerves, individually or collectively.
I'll note that HN's policy is to moderate YC firms less (and yes, that's not "not at all" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33974170>), rather than more. I'd suggest a similar approach to YC personnel, particularly current/past leadership and/or founders.
Though last one shouldn’t be surprising as it was endorsed by YC 10+ years ago.
Hence - people are now much more critical of him.
It's no surprise, then, that a computer programmer would want to bask in some of the peripheral coolness that comes with painting, especially when he has an axe to grind about his own work being 'mere engineering'. Yet while this might be charming or quirky in the abstract, it gets seriously annoying when real facts start getting butchered...
<https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm>
From a flagged subthread here, several prior criticisms on HN:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515252
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43526888
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43527106
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515723
(From: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43529517>.)
Why? Who can say? One would have to ask them, and that wouldn't work anyhow.
I don't know why people flagged this, but I often had the impression that PG's content ends up on the front page because he's PG, not because it's particularly interesting or noteworthy. Maybe the people flagging it feel similar.
Want to do something good, Paul? Do everything in your power to stem the bleed of encroaching fascism and neo-reactionaryism. Put your reputation and wallet on the line. Be a leader. Otherwise, you’re just posting platitudes while one of the world’s great democracies dies an agonizing death by the hands of your peers.
But this text is so escapist... I am ashamed to have read it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Is_to_Blame%3F
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F_(novel)
Protests are usually found outside the gates, not in the lounge while sipping on the complimentary coffee.
Are you saying we shouldn't take his seriously? We shouldn't take him literally? We should give him a pass for writing axiomatic drivel with nothing concrete or thoughtful in it?