You can write an unbounded number of think-pieces for Salon by selecting some broad economy metric at random --- unemployment, manufacturing layoffs, elimination of defined benefit pension schemes, the escalating price of health insurance --- and joining it with a series of vignettes about SFBA tech culture (Lyft cars, Uber black car SUVs, Instacart deliveries, beer kegs in offices). All will have the same moral message: the tech elite have become a kind of decadent aristocracy, but America 2013 is really France 1794 and they'll all be sorry when the people find their new Robespierre.
This article doesn't even go that far. It simply collects a bunch of totally unrelated vignettes --- the FDA regulating 23AM, the Goldieblox/Beastie Boys kerfluffle (how you know this is a crappy piece: it attempts to distill meaning from the Goldieblox "drama"), Lyft cars --- and delivers its message entirely through an insinuating title.
You can also criticize any essay by arguing that the examples used to support the thesis are "unrelated vignettes". That's how essays work -- you make a thesis, cite several diverse examples to support the thesis, then summarize the argument.
Good essays -- the ones most worth reading -- take examples that initially seem unrelated, and tie them together via a thread that the reader may not have considered before. For example, "thoughtless disruption" might be such a thread.
It is possible to write an essay by making a thesis and citing diverse examples to support it, but this is not the only way (or best way) to write an essay worth reading. I find essays much more valuable when they provide a clear thesis, cite extensive high-powered evidence in support of that thesis, and directly address potential weaknesses in their arguments, possibly with some explanatory text to provide logical or causal inferences related to the evidence. I don't typically find that diverse examples constitute high-powered evidence, which is why I don't consider essays that follow the Salon style to be particularly compelling.
If you are willing to cherry-pick anecdotes and examples, one can make a case for almost anything, but if you are anchored to actual facts (ideally ones which are statistically valid) you provide a much closer mapping between your opinion and reality.
Perhaps we differ on what sort of texts count as essays, but I would note that many people on this site find Paul Graham's essays to be compelling, and in general his essays do not comprise a collection of disparate examples surprisingly linked through a common thread.
"Perhaps we differ on what sort of texts count as essays, but I would note that many people on this site find Paul Graham's essays to be compelling, and in general his essays do not comprise a collection of disparate examples surprisingly linked through a common thread."
I think you need to go back and re-read the essays. They're almost exclusively composed of the assertion/example style of argumentation (which is not a dig; again, this is pretty much the canonical essay format), and I think you'd be hard-pressed to hold them to the standard of "statistical validity" (again, this is fine: we're talking about literature, not a math paper).
What's going on here is that you don't agree with the thesis of this piece, but you're unwilling to engage on the merits of the argument. It's much easier to just attack the form of the essay than to counter each example.
First, my sentence was carefully constructed to say that his essays "do not comprise a collection of disparate examples surprisingly linked through a common thread." I scanned through a couple essays to confirm my impression, which is that his essays are mostly composed of his personal experience plus directly-applicable examples which are used to illustrate a point.
Secondly, I said ideally statistically valid. Good essays can be written without the use of statistically significant data properly interpreted, but the conclusions can only be as powerful as the evidence used to support them, as always. If Paul Graham's essays had included, for example, statistical data on the performance of startups that he has funded broken down by category I would consider them more highly informational.
What's going on here is that I think the level of insight and analysis that many people think is laudable in a written work, I consider shameful, and highly prone to bias and error. I never said I don't agree with the thesis of this piece (I have absolutely no dog in that fight). Perhaps you think I am the same person that you were originally responding to?
After all hard evidence dick stroking you cite pg?! He writes in exactly the same style as the Salon author!
Empirical and statistical evidence is a delightful way to make a point, but what you "hard discipline" fetishists don't realize is that there are non-empirical "goods" that run our lives.
Narratives, thoughts, feelings, intuitions, broad non-empirical world views. There's a huge world of stuff out there to which statistics just don't apply, and they are all forms of knowledge. In the most basic way it's called rationalism, and it doesn't require any statistics or empirical evidence to make a point. In a more developed way it can be called post-modern knowledge concepts.
Basically, people who constantly talk about being "hard" are just dry humping modernity, something that smart people over 100 years ago realized was a collection of myths. The hard sciences sit on a foundation of warm gooey mud.
I wasn't holding up Paul Graham's essays as a paragon of essay virtue, just as a readily available example that people in the community will be familiar with. The difference between Paul Graham writing from personal experience, and the Salon author writing down some personal experiences, is real. Conflating the two ignores the distinction between expertise and mere rhetoric.
I never stated that there is some minimum level of evidential firmness below which evidence can't be considered, but I am absolutely establishing a continuum in which statistical evidence, properly interpreted, is higher than random collections of stories drawn from the author's life by convenience to prove his conclusion once the bottom line has already been decided.
I'm not a "hard discipline fetishist" if such a thing even exists, but anything which defies empiricism almost by definition can't have any impact on the material world. There are many areas wherein I agree that statistics is not currently applicable, and I implicitly acknowledged them in my post, although perhaps without sufficient emphasis.
As for postmodernism, ye shall know them by their fruits. The hard sciences have borne iPhones, cancer treatments, space flight, psychiatric treatment, and cetera.
"but anything which defies empiricism almost by definition can't have any impact on the material world."
Hah. Like religion? Like philosophy? The non-empirical world does and always has had a bigger impact on the material world than anything else.
Science itself--the methodology as a concept--is a non-empirical metaphysics that draws conclusions about truth concepts.
I think I only come to HN so I can feel smug when 20 year old millionaire entrepreneurs (this is my imagination talking) say dumb shit. Yes, the tech sector is destroying the world and making millions while I slog away in some underpaid ivory tower... but at least I know the first thing about science! (This is what I tell myself to avoid crying)
Over the long term, you're going to be happier here if you avoid terms like "dick stroking" and "dry humping". I don't agree with your comment but found it mostly coherent and helpful. But you sabotaged it in a failed attempt to make it sound lively that just made you sound shrill.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but he did tie together the examples: all are instances of "breaking the rules" without any real rationale other than disdain for the rules. Disruption for disruption's sake.
I just don't think it's a valid counterargument to attack the author for employing a standard essay structure, especially when he re-iterates the thesis in several different ways throughout the piece.
So, the thing is (and it's quite ironical that progressive Slate can't see that) is that growing your hair long, smoking weed and reading Keruac was just as much ""breaking the rules" without any real rationale other than disdain for the rules. Disruption for disruption's sake."
This is the youth of today protesting the status quo and Slate is dreadfully reactionary and conservative.
It's a mediocre essay, and you're right that it's a little bit paint-by-numbers, but "pride cometh before the fall" has been proved right before and will be proved right again.
To hold your opinion you have to first pretend that you don't already know the socioeconomic statistics. The article assumes that you already understand that wealth is being concentrated in a tiny elite and that the tech sector is a major factor driving this concentration.
Is Silicon Valley decadent and detached from humanity? Of course it is. And it's fun. He makes this point and it's a good point. Let's all fist-bump and drink artisanal whiskey while the country crumbles and sinks beneath the ocean.
He speaks to a truth deeper than statistics, stimulating old feelings and perspectives and linking them to new contexts.
Most of us already know the statistics: the tech center is the last wealth generating thing in the country. The wealth is realized by, in part, cannibalizing other industries. This leads to the concentration of wealth in a decadent elite while the suicide rate for the average person climbs.
pg argues in one of his non-evidence based essays that this concentration of wealth is a good thing because those suicidal unemployed people who can't afford food will have TVs and smartphones. The statistics prove him wrong for the USA--tech advance does not increase the average standard of living as long as tech advance leads to wealth inequality.
FYI, you don't actually need to categorize everything you ever read into "liberal/conservative" and then cheer or boo depending on which side you've declared allegiance to.
I... want Rome to burn. The authoritarian, hierarchal power structures that exist in this country/world ("Rome") are in need of re-formation or collapse. I'm not interested in participating in that process though. I certainly would never have architected a system of the manner that exists, and I'm not interested in helping the a-holes who did do that debug it. I'd rather just live awesome, think, feel, and make cool stuff when I'm in the mood to do that.
The thing that concerns me about SF Bay Area Startup Ecosystem is that it is def. neither a meritocracy nor a technocracy. (Those systems, properly implemented allow great new things to come into the world, without the side effect of king-creation.) Right now, California is dynastic. Dynastic money, flowing into the hands of people who adopt a dynastic culture, and creating the weak sort of creations that dynastic people end up creating. It makes people rich, and dynastic, one startup team at a time. That's a problem for the world! Once the bulk of the genius-level people now tied up working on dynastic projects or on online advertising/email delivery for some behemoth company wake up to the true nature of the reality and start operating in it as true creators things will start to actually get interesting and awesome.
In the mean time I'll enjoy the delicious beer, food, and weather. And Tahoe once there's enough snow.
He makes the "elephant in the corner of the room" point that disruption is really, how much money can we make if we just ignore these laws? That doesn't scale.
I am always a little frustrated at the Salon articles, I dont even know why I read them anymore.
There is a few choice sentences I'd like to rebut:
"And while there is much to dislike about how Silicon Valley is rewriting the rules based on little more than the authority of its own arrogance"
While I get the sentiment, the problem here is that blind appeal to authority of existing laws and figures is a well known civilization anti-pattern. It causes real problems in even the medium term. The "arrogance" judgement is also subjective, since it presupposes a mindset of "Silicon Valley" (which is hardly a singular entity) that may or may not be actually there.
"This is our emergent culture: an onslaught of newness, disrespectful of status quo, law and propriety. "
There is a lot to dislike about this sentence. First off is the negative judgement of 'newness' - we KNOW from neuropsychology that novel inputs to the brain are an essential ingredient to neural plasticity. New isn't just always new, but it's part of what it means to be young in the brain.
The second part of this sentence is problematic to me. This almost reads like the author is advocating that respect to the status quo, laws, and propriety is a major virtue. Again, this is another strong civilization anti-pattern (well the same one basically). If the author isn't saying this, then what is he saying?
Look I get it, change is scary. But the reality is we as a species have wedged ourselves into a weird place. We must proceed technologically to solve our problems. That is what Silicon Valley is about - moving tech and science forward to solve problems. Yeah not all problems seem essential (snapchat), but there is plenty of people who are doing way more interesting things. But also the pro-rationality, pro-new things, pro-science culture of the bay area is one worth extending and expanding. Because the alternative truly really is fist-bumping while rome burns. Certainly don't look at Wall Street to solve these problems for us.
23 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 74.2 ms ] threadThis article doesn't even go that far. It simply collects a bunch of totally unrelated vignettes --- the FDA regulating 23AM, the Goldieblox/Beastie Boys kerfluffle (how you know this is a crappy piece: it attempts to distill meaning from the Goldieblox "drama"), Lyft cars --- and delivers its message entirely through an insinuating title.
Good essays -- the ones most worth reading -- take examples that initially seem unrelated, and tie them together via a thread that the reader may not have considered before. For example, "thoughtless disruption" might be such a thread.
If you are willing to cherry-pick anecdotes and examples, one can make a case for almost anything, but if you are anchored to actual facts (ideally ones which are statistically valid) you provide a much closer mapping between your opinion and reality.
Perhaps we differ on what sort of texts count as essays, but I would note that many people on this site find Paul Graham's essays to be compelling, and in general his essays do not comprise a collection of disparate examples surprisingly linked through a common thread.
I think you need to go back and re-read the essays. They're almost exclusively composed of the assertion/example style of argumentation (which is not a dig; again, this is pretty much the canonical essay format), and I think you'd be hard-pressed to hold them to the standard of "statistical validity" (again, this is fine: we're talking about literature, not a math paper).
What's going on here is that you don't agree with the thesis of this piece, but you're unwilling to engage on the merits of the argument. It's much easier to just attack the form of the essay than to counter each example.
Secondly, I said ideally statistically valid. Good essays can be written without the use of statistically significant data properly interpreted, but the conclusions can only be as powerful as the evidence used to support them, as always. If Paul Graham's essays had included, for example, statistical data on the performance of startups that he has funded broken down by category I would consider them more highly informational.
What's going on here is that I think the level of insight and analysis that many people think is laudable in a written work, I consider shameful, and highly prone to bias and error. I never said I don't agree with the thesis of this piece (I have absolutely no dog in that fight). Perhaps you think I am the same person that you were originally responding to?
Empirical and statistical evidence is a delightful way to make a point, but what you "hard discipline" fetishists don't realize is that there are non-empirical "goods" that run our lives.
Narratives, thoughts, feelings, intuitions, broad non-empirical world views. There's a huge world of stuff out there to which statistics just don't apply, and they are all forms of knowledge. In the most basic way it's called rationalism, and it doesn't require any statistics or empirical evidence to make a point. In a more developed way it can be called post-modern knowledge concepts.
Basically, people who constantly talk about being "hard" are just dry humping modernity, something that smart people over 100 years ago realized was a collection of myths. The hard sciences sit on a foundation of warm gooey mud.
I never stated that there is some minimum level of evidential firmness below which evidence can't be considered, but I am absolutely establishing a continuum in which statistical evidence, properly interpreted, is higher than random collections of stories drawn from the author's life by convenience to prove his conclusion once the bottom line has already been decided.
I'm not a "hard discipline fetishist" if such a thing even exists, but anything which defies empiricism almost by definition can't have any impact on the material world. There are many areas wherein I agree that statistics is not currently applicable, and I implicitly acknowledged them in my post, although perhaps without sufficient emphasis.
As for postmodernism, ye shall know them by their fruits. The hard sciences have borne iPhones, cancer treatments, space flight, psychiatric treatment, and cetera.
Hah. Like religion? Like philosophy? The non-empirical world does and always has had a bigger impact on the material world than anything else.
Science itself--the methodology as a concept--is a non-empirical metaphysics that draws conclusions about truth concepts.
I think I only come to HN so I can feel smug when 20 year old millionaire entrepreneurs (this is my imagination talking) say dumb shit. Yes, the tech sector is destroying the world and making millions while I slog away in some underpaid ivory tower... but at least I know the first thing about science! (This is what I tell myself to avoid crying)
I just don't think it's a valid counterargument to attack the author for employing a standard essay structure, especially when he re-iterates the thesis in several different ways throughout the piece.
This is the youth of today protesting the status quo and Slate is dreadfully reactionary and conservative.
Is Silicon Valley decadent and detached from humanity? Of course it is. And it's fun. He makes this point and it's a good point. Let's all fist-bump and drink artisanal whiskey while the country crumbles and sinks beneath the ocean.
He speaks to a truth deeper than statistics, stimulating old feelings and perspectives and linking them to new contexts.
Most of us already know the statistics: the tech center is the last wealth generating thing in the country. The wealth is realized by, in part, cannibalizing other industries. This leads to the concentration of wealth in a decadent elite while the suicide rate for the average person climbs.
pg argues in one of his non-evidence based essays that this concentration of wealth is a good thing because those suicidal unemployed people who can't afford food will have TVs and smartphones. The statistics prove him wrong for the USA--tech advance does not increase the average standard of living as long as tech advance leads to wealth inequality.
In fact, you'll be happier if you don't.
The thing that concerns me about SF Bay Area Startup Ecosystem is that it is def. neither a meritocracy nor a technocracy. (Those systems, properly implemented allow great new things to come into the world, without the side effect of king-creation.) Right now, California is dynastic. Dynastic money, flowing into the hands of people who adopt a dynastic culture, and creating the weak sort of creations that dynastic people end up creating. It makes people rich, and dynastic, one startup team at a time. That's a problem for the world! Once the bulk of the genius-level people now tied up working on dynastic projects or on online advertising/email delivery for some behemoth company wake up to the true nature of the reality and start operating in it as true creators things will start to actually get interesting and awesome.
In the mean time I'll enjoy the delicious beer, food, and weather. And Tahoe once there's enough snow.
There is a few choice sentences I'd like to rebut:
"And while there is much to dislike about how Silicon Valley is rewriting the rules based on little more than the authority of its own arrogance"
While I get the sentiment, the problem here is that blind appeal to authority of existing laws and figures is a well known civilization anti-pattern. It causes real problems in even the medium term. The "arrogance" judgement is also subjective, since it presupposes a mindset of "Silicon Valley" (which is hardly a singular entity) that may or may not be actually there.
"This is our emergent culture: an onslaught of newness, disrespectful of status quo, law and propriety. "
There is a lot to dislike about this sentence. First off is the negative judgement of 'newness' - we KNOW from neuropsychology that novel inputs to the brain are an essential ingredient to neural plasticity. New isn't just always new, but it's part of what it means to be young in the brain.
The second part of this sentence is problematic to me. This almost reads like the author is advocating that respect to the status quo, laws, and propriety is a major virtue. Again, this is another strong civilization anti-pattern (well the same one basically). If the author isn't saying this, then what is he saying?
Look I get it, change is scary. But the reality is we as a species have wedged ourselves into a weird place. We must proceed technologically to solve our problems. That is what Silicon Valley is about - moving tech and science forward to solve problems. Yeah not all problems seem essential (snapchat), but there is plenty of people who are doing way more interesting things. But also the pro-rationality, pro-new things, pro-science culture of the bay area is one worth extending and expanding. Because the alternative truly really is fist-bumping while rome burns. Certainly don't look at Wall Street to solve these problems for us.