[HN Gopher] Brown Political Review Interviews Paul Graham
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Brown Political Review Interviews Paul Graham
Author : davnicwil
Score : 61 points
Date : 2020-03-12 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (brownpoliticalreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (brownpoliticalreview.org)
| nancycut10 wrote:
| hackers for hire : https://www.hackerslist.co/how-it-works/
| davnicwil wrote:
| > At the time I worried all of life might be a similarly
| pointless jumping through hoops, but fortunately in college I
| discovered there was a thin stream of people in the world who
| were interested in ideas and making new stuff, and I've tried to
| stay in that stream ever since
|
| This really stood out to me - what an excellent articulation of
| the intrinsic reason why founders want to be founders.
| itronitron wrote:
| It strikes me as rather pretentious for someone to think that
| the 'stream of people that are interested in ideas and make new
| stuff' is _thin_
| cgrealy wrote:
| You could probably rephrase that into the 'stream of people
| that are interested in ideas and make new stuff _and then
| actually do something about it_ ' is thin.
| [deleted]
| kick wrote:
| Why do people always ask him the same questions? Is it the
| easiest way to get an interview with him these days, promising
| that you'll clone previous interviews?
|
| Someone needs to sit him down and do nothing but ask about
| programming languages for an hour or two at some point.
|
| On the other hand, the question about his homepage was neat.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Yeah someone should do a Joe Rogan style interview with PG.
| beigeoak wrote:
| "That's crazy Paul. Have you ever done DMT?"
| arman_ashrafian wrote:
| I would like to see him on lex fridman's podcast
| kick wrote:
| Rogan and Fridman both ask very shallow questions. I want
| to see him get grilled by someone familiar with the subject
| matter. Anything less gets questions about the lowest
| common denominator.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| How about Eric Weinstein? He asks great questions on The
| Portal.
| kick wrote:
| I find him lacking intellectual curiosity, although I've
| only had limited exposure to him. Do you have something
| you'd recommend for a "deeper look" into him or his work?
| brenden2 wrote:
| There's a certain degree of survivorship bias. They do what
| gets the clicks, and what gets the clicks is what you're mostly
| likely to see.
| bitwize wrote:
| > Earnestness. This seems a rather Victorian quality to care
| about, but the founders who end up doing the best are all
| earnest. They're not starting a startup because it's the cool
| thing to do, or to make a quick buck, but because it's how they
| want to work.
|
| Ironically, PG accidentally helped create today's phony Silly
| Valley culture, because after YC's first few big wins with
| earnest founders, people started smelling money, and gold-rushing
| douchebags colonized the nascent startup scene in its infancy.
| trav4225 wrote:
| Perhaps somewhat true, but I was around SV in the '90s and the
| same phony startup culture was alive and well back then,
| perhaps even more than today.
| divbzero wrote:
| Earnestness is difficult to fake indefinitely. At some point,
| you'll either be revealed or have acted for so long that you
| actually become earnest.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| It's pretty important being Earnest, and yes, if you pretend
| too long and too hard to be Earnest in the end it will turn
| out you actually were Earnest all along.
| sombremesa wrote:
| I heard WeWorks CEO did pretty well for himself. Boy, was he
| earnest.
| [deleted]
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > I studied philosophy because of what it seemed to be. It seemed
| to promise a direct route to the most general truths.
|
| I pursued this illusion for some time as well. Then the first
| 50-some pages of Sartre's _Being and Nothingness_ started a turn
| toward my present view that 20th-century academic philosophy is
| on the whole little more than a sophistical hustle.
| morelisp wrote:
| > on the whole little more than a sophistical hustle.
|
| Funny, this is also what philosophers think about modern tech
| companies.
| powerset wrote:
| Even if that's true about some modern philosophy, the old stuff
| is still worth studying!
| claudiawerner wrote:
| I wonder, then, how many experts in the discipline, and lay
| people (including me) come away with exactly the opposite
| conclusion.
|
| If you're going to fault Sartre and talk about 20th c. academic
| philosophy, you may as well also fault Hegel or Nietzche or
| Marx for their 18th and 19th c. philosophy, and then Heraclitus
| for his 4th century BC obscurities. Maybe you only meant
| "continental" philosophy, but you'd probably need
| metaphilosophy to argue the point as to what is genuine and a
| "sophistical hustle".
|
| Apparently the people who study Sartre come out with some
| pretty interesting ideas[0]. It's a little tiring to hear
| people reading 50 pages of a French philosopher known for his
| difficulty and concluding that 20th c. academic philosophy is
| sophistry(?!)[1] A non-mathematician might just say the same
| thing about Erdos. The fact that people feel comfortable making
| such sweeping judgements on a wide-ranging and deep discipline
| is frankly shocking. You're not alone, however; the gwern.net
| guy has done the same.
|
| [0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
|
| [1] Sartre mostly wrote books on philosophy, rather than
| publishing in academic journals, alongside plays and novels. If
| you mean to talk about "academic philosophy", Sartre is
| certainly not your best example. Neither would Marx or Nietzche
| be good examples. Heidegger and Hegel maybe.
| keiferski wrote:
| > The fact that people feel comfortable making such sweeping
| judgements on a wide-ranging and deep discipline is frankly
| shocking. You're not alone, however; the gwern.net guy has
| done the same.
|
| It's par for the course in tech, unfortunately. I think tech
| leadership in particular would benefit from a rigorous
| education in ethics.
| keiferski wrote:
| Sartre is one philosopher from one movement (Existentialism).
| "Academic philosophy" also doesn't really mean anything. The
| two main schools of thought in academic Western philosophy are
| analytical and continental. They have essentially nothing to do
| with each other. Sartre is associated more with continentals,
| but this is an anachronistic association. Even then, he is one
| thinker among thousands.
|
| This is akin to eating a potato, disliking it, and swearing off
| all vegetables.
| techbio wrote:
| Potatoes are fine without philosophizing, and so are
| vegetables.
| [deleted]
| spencerwgreene wrote:
| Q: "What is the most promising startup idea you've heard that
| didn't succeed?"
|
| PG: "Maybe Pebble. It could have been the next Apple. But
| hardware startups are a bitch. External factors can kill you in a
| way that doesn't happen with software, and you can't do things as
| gradually as you can with software."
|
| This answer stood out to me the most since many of the other
| questions are answered somewhat in his essays already.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| I loved my Pebble. I wore the classic one till it broke. I wish
| they had stayed around.
| [deleted]
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