[HN Gopher] Earnestness
___________________________________________________________________
Earnestness
Author : jger15
Score : 276 points
Date : 2020-12-12 14:33 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| zuhayeer wrote:
| It seems there's always been a correlation between earnestness
| and humility too.
|
| Earnest people are always the first to say "I don't know"
| pietrovismara wrote:
| The biggest display of naivete and arrogance to me is sincerely
| believing you can improve the world through capitalism.
|
| How many failed shared economy experiments did we have that only
| made things worse?
|
| Take AirBnb. An apparently great idea, it became popular because
| many needed an additional income to survive, to the point people
| accepted the idea of having strangers sleep in their houses for
| money as the norm.
|
| Beside the incredible damage AirBnb did to the housing situation
| in many cities -in my city, 35% of the housing is now AirBnb
| only. Locals have been forced out of their own city-, did the
| "airbnbs" ever think that the problem they were trying to solve
| (people in need of more money just to survive) was caused exactly
| by capitalism, the same mechanism they thought they could use to
| make the world "a better place"?
| austincheney wrote:
| _Earnestness_ is some mix of ethics and disclosure. Perhaps
| _truth_ coupled with reasonable expectations (honesty meets
| humility) would be a better characterization, but most people
| don't really know what truth, or rather alignment, really entail
| in a purely communication capacity.
|
| The challenge with earnestness is not everybody can either attain
| or receive it. It is a gift that takes a certain level of
| intellectual capability and personality to appreciate otherwise
| it's written off as unintelligible or an insult.
| courtf wrote:
| > _it may be possible to be completely cynical and still be very
| funny_
|
| I guess this depends on how hard you want to laugh, but would you
| say George Carlin or Dave Chappelle are _not_ cynical? I don 't
| think earnestness and cynicism are so dichotomous.
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| I think this essay would be more effective if the author defined
| what _they_ mean by "earnest". I _think_ based on the essay, they
| mean seriousness + sincerity. But there is also a sense that the
| author considers "correct" as part of the definition:
|
| >"when you call someone earnest, you're making a statement about
| their motives. It means both that they're doing something _for
| the right reasons_ [my emphasis] and they're trying as hard as I
| can"
|
| So why assume that "interest in the problem" is intrinsically
| good? Do we really believe it's not possible for a politician to
| be addressing the problem of "improving people's lives" via the
| intermediate aim of "gaining political power"? So why wouldn't
| that also be classified as "earnest"? If a gang leader is
| addressing the problem of "keeping our guys safe", and therefore
| murders members of a rival gang who pose a threat to them,
| wouldn't that also be "earnest"? Is it just because the author
| holds people working individually on a certain class of problems
| to be admirable, while having a much more negative view or
| politicians and criminals?
|
| [Edit: I forgot to mention that I think there are some good
| points in this essay, and I agree with many of them, but I think
| it leaves some important areas unexplored]
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > Do we really believe it's not possible for a politician to be
| addressing the problem of "improving people's lives" via the
| intermediate aim of "gaining political power"?
|
| In my limited understanding the writers of the US Constitution
| held exactly this belief: that the government would be run by
| imperfect and self-interested actors. They introduced
| mechanisms like separation of powers to play them off against
| each other to the benefit of the governed. It seems as we've
| moved from that focus on outcomes to judging people based on
| the purity of their motives.
| danhak wrote:
| In my view, there is a uniquely American fiction that there
| exists for everyone some pursuit that both (a) will satisfy their
| passion and (b) be highly remunerative. Your job is to find that
| pursuit. And if you fail, I guess it's because you weren't
| earnest enough.
|
| I don't doubt that successful founders are highly motivated by
| the challenges of their work. But the suggestion that _the point_
| isn 't to build a business and make money is, I'm sorry to say,
| typical of the self-serving retconning we are starting to see
| from those at the top. And that we have always seen from Silicon
| Valley: "Don't Be Evil," "We're Changing the World," "Facebook's
| mission is to make the world more open and connected."
|
| *Thanks to my mom, barber, third grade teacher, roommate, dog and
| barista for reading drafts of this comment.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| Not speaking for all Americans, but I've never believed that
| (a) and (b) are both out there if I can simultaneously solve
| them. I chose to give one preference and then did the best to
| support the other. It's an optimization activity that may or
| may not achieve satisfaction on either one.
|
| It's the outliers who become wealthy doing what they love. No
| illusions there.
|
| The other 'responsibility' we take collectively is to strive to
| create circumstances where the process of pursuing (a) and (b)
| is not impeded by society.
| oblio wrote:
| > It's the outliers who become wealthy doing what they love.
| No illusions there.
|
| More than that, even if you love your work, there will still
| be moments you hate it. That's why we get paid/need rewards.
|
| People generally love an idealized version of their work,
| where everything works the first time, there is no grunge
| work, people are pleasant and cooperate with you.
| rrdharan wrote:
| I agree and don't believe in the fiction either, but just
| because many or even most Americans do (or do not) believe in
| the fiction does not preclude it from being fair to describe
| it as "uniquely American" - in my mind OP was pointing out
| the origin of this worldview and the source of most of its
| advocacy and propagation, and I think they're right?
| jamesmehaffey wrote:
| I have never bothered to classify the personality traits of the
| people I enjoy spending time with, but there is nothing more
| exciting and interesting than being around a group of nerds who
| are trying to solve a problem or whatever. people who never get a
| chance to experience that process really just cannot understand
| the mindset. It is nice to get paid, but I would probably want to
| be involved in that sort of thing anyway. I simply thought that
| is how nerdy and eccentric people behave.
| kamilszybalski wrote:
| I guess it's also true that earnestness often leads pursuits
| resulting in "build it and they will come".
| neilv wrote:
| Great. Now my company's engineering recruiting email "honest and
| earnest" turn of phrase about culture is less likely to make
| candidates pause and consider why I focused on that, but instead
| probably gets classified as regurgitating whatever everyone read
| on HN. :)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25088200
| analog31 wrote:
| Goodheart's law at work. This is why you have to change metrics
| every six months. Just when I figured out "engagement," now
| "earnestness." Now a potential issue that you're probably
| already aware of is that many of these traits can serve as
| culture / age filters.
| kazinator wrote:
| "Earnestness sounds like a boring, even Victorian virtue."
|
| Well, that's because it's even in the title of a Victorian book:
| _The Importance of being Earnest_ , Oscar Wilde.
| nbzso wrote:
| Future sadly needs more morality and honesty, the concept of
| monetary hyper-success created by SV has ruined the idea of
| balance between passionate craftsmanship and modest business
| enterprise. Today everyone wants to be big and powerful and we
| feel the impact of business size as users everyday. Success in
| life cannot be limited to "be a billionaire" just because. At
| this point in time I consider this trend as a dark religion and
| an evil cult.
| bob33212 wrote:
| It would be interesting to see YC to move to funding with less
| regard to business plan. I know they already do this but what if
| you totally threw out the market research and gut feeling about
| the usefulness of the product and gave people 500k based on their
| interest and ability only.
| psyc wrote:
| YC reportedly cares mainly about the traits of the founders,
| and expects that they might well pivot to a completely
| different plan.
| darkerside wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's how it works already. They are looking
| mostly for teams of people, not a perfect plan. It's just that,
| building a business plan successfully is a decent project for
| assessing the effectiveness of a team.
| [deleted]
| machinelearning wrote:
| I wonder who the intended audience of this post is?
| omalleyt wrote:
| Every essay is about how and why Paul Graham had a hard time in
| high school
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles
| of money say that they started their companies to make the world
| better. The situation seems made for mockery.
|
| To be fair a lot of startup origin stories are so ridiculously
| fake that they seem like they could have only been created as a
| mockery of earnestness. Like the founders know they're lying,
| they know everyone else knows they're lying, and they're just
| doing it anyway as a weird flex or whatever.
|
| Say what you will about Bezos, but at least he was honest that he
| just put every CPG product into a spreadsheet and discovered that
| books had by far the best unit economics and flywheel potential,
| rather than making up some bullshit backstory story about
| childhood literacy or whatever.
| dcx wrote:
| I went looking for the source of this anecdote, I believe this
| is it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgzi_jUBu9U
| jonmc12 wrote:
| > Can you imagine a more important change than one in the
| relationship between intellectual curiosity and money?
|
| Semantics and edge conditions aside, no. I can't imagine a more
| important change; this is truly a concise and meaningful
| question. The world will be a little bit better if you ask your 3
| closest peers this question.
|
| Including semantics, I believe our language must provide a
| thought framework to guide intellectual curiosity towards
| sustainability; ie, named classes of intellectual curiosity that
| create more opportunity for intellectual curiosity. Further, our
| language must meaningfully relate the concepts of intellectual
| curiosity, economic productivity and capital. For example,
| discussing the relationship between global economic productivity
| and the potential of a viral pandemic could frame problems in a
| way that promote intellectual inquiry, incentivized by capital,
| to preserve future economic productivity.
|
| Including edge conditions, I believe we at least need to
| constrain intellectual curiosity that would harm. Part of this
| goes back to semantics; ie, what is harm? But another component
| exists around cultural norms of transparency, regulation and
| authority.
| war1025 wrote:
| I think it's interesting that PG seems to so often focus on the
| whole "nerd" thing.
|
| Maybe it was just a happy accident of my adolescence, but the
| whole "nerd" stereotype never seemed to apply to anyone or be
| used against them.
|
| People were singled out for other reasons, but academics or
| interests along those lines was never one of them.
| courtf wrote:
| Yeah this is something he writes about regularly, and it is
| certainly anachronistic. I also think it's important for rich
| nerds to justify their position to themselves somehow, and to
| have some imagined hardship to point to in their past that
| helps explain their superiority (ha!) over the non-nerds. In
| reality, it's mostly a bunch of rich kids who would have been
| rich no matter what nonsense they got up to. Maybe not
| billionaire rich, but rich enough for the distinction to be
| sort of meaningless.
|
| I think PG falls into numerous traps in this piece, and many
| other posts, but I appreciate his writing all the same. In
| particular, I think the idea that making some business, even if
| trying to solve a "serious" problem, can never really be fully
| earnest. There is so little room for pure problem solving, it's
| all politics. There are more than enough talented people, more
| than enough funding, to solve all sorts of problems. What
| remains is the negotiation about who will get the opportunity.
| Politics.
| [deleted]
| Bresenhams_Line wrote:
| > Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles
| of money say that they started their companies to make the world
| better. The situation seems made for mockery. How can these
| founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible they
| sound?
|
| I can't speak for someone like Kara Swisher, but attempting to
| channel her, I don't think she would think it is beyond belief
| that some hacker teenager who dropped out of a good college to
| work on X was earnest that they were trying to make the world
| better.
|
| The mockery over naivete and implausibility comes from that those
| teenagers will walk into a VC office on Sand Hill Road, where
| they will sign over various rights for the future. They will then
| form a Delaware corporation. With plans to raise more VC, after
| that an IPO, and finally dividends. Which means what? What came
| from those who did this in the past?
|
| - The Steve Jobs orchestrated formerly secret cabal, that
| included Eric Schmidt and others, to drive down engineer salaries
| in the Bay.
|
| - Social networks amplifying traffic saying Covid is a hoax, and
| here we are with 3000 dying of Covid in the US on Wednesday.
|
| - The widespread spying and surveillance of people that almost
| all these companies have a hand in - even Adobe has become a
| surveillance company.
|
| It's the thinking that the corporations that will be the IBMs,
| Oracles and Microsofts of the future are there to "make the world
| better". It is risible.
| tim333 wrote:
| Microsoft kind of started with
|
| >"When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we
| had big dreams about software," recalls Gates. "We had dreams
| about the impact it could have. We talked about a computer on
| every desk and in every home. It's been amazing to see so much
| of that dream become a reality and touch so many lives. I never
| imagined what an incredible and important company would spring
| from those original ideas."
|
| Which is kind of world better if you like computers. Of course
| companies change as they grow.
| greentimer wrote:
| "There's nothing morally wrong with starting a startup to make
| money."
|
| This shows how ignorant Paul Graham is on certain subjects.
| srean wrote:
| Could you elaborate ?
| kabirgoel wrote:
| > The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not
| surprisingly this is also the region with the highest number of
| successful startups per capita.
|
| I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously.
| What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than,
| say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, "The
| French make great lovers," or "The British are terrible cooks."
| Absent any evidence to back them up, many such statements in PG's
| essays seem to be an expression of his prejudices. The very least
| he could do is to provide some criterion the reader can use to
| test "earnestness" at the population scale.
|
| In this case, I imagine that he started from "Scandinavia is the
| region with the highest number of startups per capita" and
| inferred that this must mean that they are more earnest, rather
| than going the other way around.
| varjag wrote:
| Believe it or not, Europe is actually a diverse place with
| numerous cultures, each with own social norms and behaviours.
| tcldr wrote:
| I think it's a cultural thing. Take France. My anecdotal
| experience is that the bourgeoisie seem to place a certain
| social capital on having a degree from the right school.
| Entrepreneurialism is something to be studied, not attempted.
| Hard to take a risk with that kind of social expectation.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I can't speak for Sweden or Denmark but here in Norway great
| store is set on straightforwardness, plain speaking, and trust.
| Generally you are assumed to be telling the truth and if you
| say that you will do something then people will assume that you
| mean it and possess the necessary skill. This sort of
| atmosphere means that there is less bureaucracy involved in
| getting things done, paperwork is on the whole simpler than
| elsewhere. Doing your duty and pulling together are important
| features of life in Norway.
|
| Whether any of this is really the cause of there being more
| startups in Scandinavia than elsewhere is something I'm not
| able to answer, but the earnestness is certainly present.
|
| The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian
| institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic
| qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution
| that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge
| of it.
|
| My personal experience is that life is simpler here than in my
| country of origin (UK); mostly things 'Just Work (tm)' and that
| might be why startups are more common.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| I am European (Eng/Ger) and totally agree with his assessment.
|
| And yeah, most of the time, brits are relatively bad cooks.
| wott wrote:
| > What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest
| than, say, Germany or France?
|
| Experience, perhaps?
|
| As a French who lived a number of years in Scandinavia, it is
| day and night. It doesn't mean that people in those countries
| never cheat, but in France, the _default_ attitude is cheating.
| Always. About everything and anything. Even when there is
| nothing to win and being straight or earnest would be much
| easier. It is exhausting.
|
| > This seems no better than to say, "The French make great
| lovers,"
|
| Well, this assertion is equally true :-D
| romanoderoma wrote:
| > I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this
| seriously.
|
| They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest,
| it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises.
|
| Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux
| has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has
| more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three
| don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers
| have Portuguese nationality.
|
| I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model
| society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia.
|
| I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and
| my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the
| facts are definitely not there.
|
| If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical
| region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is
| not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and
| Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in
| absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with
| a very different idea of what being earnest means.
| ajju wrote:
| Why do you assume bad faith? Having worked closely with folks
| from many parts of Europe as an early stage founder, folks from
| Scandinavia certainly seem to take "naive" or "earnest" efforts
| of founders more seriously than other parts of Europe (or even
| Asia for that matter).
| nindalf wrote:
| GP didn't assume bad faith. They just want some evidence for
| the assertion, or even an objective way to measure this
| quality.
| ajju wrote:
| PG says "the most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia
| [and therefore it has more successful startups]". Afaict GP
| is saying PG doesn't believe what he is saying and is
| disingenuously suggesting causality just to support his
| main thesis.
| inopinatus wrote:
| It's also absolutely the opposite of my experience. I've met a
| bunch of Swedes, Norwegians, Finns and Danes and they are some
| of the most sophisticated and cynical folks I've had the
| pleasure of working with.
|
| Perhaps the particularly dry brand of Scandinavian pragmatic
| irony is lost on pg because pg is too earnest to notice that
| they're on the other side of a zetetic event horizon.
| nindalf wrote:
| His posts aren't fact based, they're mostly an expression of
| his feelings.
|
| A great example are his 5-6 posts talking about how the most
| important facet of a programming language is its brevity
| (https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-
| sex...). At no point does he cite any facts backing that up.
| Even when the brevity chasing language he created failed to
| gain traction, he didn't see that as an indication to recheck
| his assumptions.
|
| In other words, "feelings don't care about your facts". But
| hey, there's a market for that sort of article. So who are we
| to judge?
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| I think you folks are holding PG to a standard that the vast
| majority of essays which hit the HN frontpage would not meet.
|
| Even this critical essay looks like it fails to meet its own
| standard.
|
| A "profoundly unserious" writer which is "mired in intuition
| and incuriosity"? Nowhere in the post are these terms
| rigorously defined!
|
| And look! The author accuses Graham of "tantalizing the
| reader by reducing complex problems down to singular,
| nebulous concepts" without mentioning principal component
| analysis! "Profoundly unserious", I say.
|
| Anyway, pg himself has been clear about rejecting seriousness
| as a virtue multiple times. See this essay for instance
| http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html
| nindalf wrote:
| The vast majority of essays submitted to HN don't reach the
| front page because the author isn't famous. Whereas PG
| rockets to the top of the front page within an hour of
| submission.
|
| Even then, the average HN comments section is highly
| sceptical of any claims in any post. The top comment is
| usually critiquing the link for one reason or another. For
| some reason, that wasn't the case with PG articles. You're
| only remarking about this now because HN is finally holding
| PG to the same standard that others are.
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| I value PG's opinion more than a rando blogger because
| he's very successful, has observed a lot of data about
| what makes startups successful, seems unusually serious
| about being correct, and has written a lot of things I
| consider insightful in the past. He's a name I know and I
| click it when I see it on HN. There are a lot of other
| people with similar HN clout, patio11 for instance.
|
| I haven't noticed a trend for comments on PG articles to
| be less critical. If anything I think I've noticed users
| feeling a need to be _more_ critical (as I feel your
| comment illustrates).
|
| It's OK to hold pg to a higher standard than others in
| terms of factually supporting his claims. Fine. Just be
| clear that you are doing so. It's fine to remind others
| not to take his word as gospel as well.
| Tainnor wrote:
| I mean it's at least technically quite possible that
| someone like PG would have a very good intuitive
| understanding for what works and what doesn't, without
| this meaning that he is able to systematise this implicit
| knowledge in such a way that it is empirically solid
| and/or can be usefully taught to others.
|
| This is similar to the fact that experts are not always
| the best teachers, or that a rhetorically skilled
| speaker/writer is not necessarily a competent linguist or
| literary scientist, or how many great musicians know
| little about music theory.
|
| Of course, you are correct that many, many other tech
| bloggers don't back up their claims either (most
| notoriously the "I did this thing once at company X, it
| worked ok, and now I'm preaching it as a new gospel (but
| it hasn't even been a year that we did this and we don't
| understand the long-term implications of it yet)" blog
| posts). I think this is in general a real shame because
| it leads to all the cargo culting madness that's so
| prevalent in the industry.
|
| In PG's case, I find that most of his blog posts read
| like post hoc rationalisations based on sweeping
| generalisations (e.g. that you can be either "earnest" or
| jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a
| particularly false dichotomy). Which wouldn't nearly
| bother me as much if they weren't also often full of
| thinly veiled contempt for different kinds of people
| (e.g. people who are actually good at bringing people
| together). It sometimes reads to me as a sort of "I was
| bullied/excluded as a nerdy teenager and now I'm gonna
| show them how much better nerds are and why they will (or
| at least should) rule the world". In a world where we
| increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies
| making decisions that impact all of us, including people
| completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't
| think this is a very good position to take.
| kabirgoel wrote:
| You make a good point: while PG may be able to
| intuitively pick out "winners," this does not mean he
| will be successful at making those intuitions explicit,
| as he attempts to do in his blog posts.
| csallen wrote:
| "...finally holding PG to the same standard..."
|
| The typical reaction to PG essays on HN has been the
| exact same flavor of negative for many, many years now.
| Go back and read the comments on his previous
| submissions. PG himself even wrote an essay about
| uncharitable criticism and basically exited the site in
| 2015.
|
| It's very surprising to me that anyone could think that,
| in 2020, it's new and original to bash PG articles on HN.
| dustingetz wrote:
| Feelings^W "pattern matching"
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Scandinavian countries have very high trust societies, based on
| any survey that looked into this. Why that is is a difficult
| question and leads us very far. Is it money? Where did the
| money come from? Oil (but that's not there in all Nordic
| countries)? Lack of war? Did the lack of war come from their
| high trust? Or the geographic distance to warring nations and
| empires of Europe? Is it related to the cold environment,
| perhaps harder to conquer and less valuable for empires? Do
| social temperaments have to do with climate? Is it about their
| genetic homogeneity? Which one is the cause of which? If they
| go in cycles what influences what in the strongest way? It's a
| very complicated issue!
|
| It's too reductionist to take only the part "earnest, therefore
| startup". Sort of implying that if only other nations were also
| more earnest they'd also have startups and wealth, disregarding
| all the possibly good reasons that those other nations have not
| to be trusting/earnest.
|
| But it's also too dismissive to say to this that it's "national
| stereotyping" therefore it immediately must be false and there
| can be no connection at all between earnestness/trust and
| startups in the case of Scandinavia.
| nindalf wrote:
| Trust is something that is defined and measurable. And yes
| you're right, it is complicated. But the complexity isn't
| helped by introducing a random thing called "earnestness"
| without a way to measure that.
| qwerty1234599 wrote:
| Scandinavian countries are not really countries. More like a
| family club. (This is starting to change though)
|
| When everybody is just like you, it leads to high trust, no
| us vs them mentality. Same is true in eg. South Korea and
| Japan.
|
| Contrast this with their similarily northern neighbour
| Russia, which is basically the America of eastern europe. A
| nation resulting from a melting pot of ethnicitiess,
| languages, cultures (most current Russians are really
| assimilated from smaller native cultures, their great
| grandparents didn't identify as Russian). And the end result?
| Corruption. Everybody just tries to milk public funds as much
| as they can, and so forth.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Poland is very uniform in term of cultural background and
| origins (and everyone is white), and yet has very low trust
| levels.
| oblio wrote:
| Poland (and most of Eastern Europe) has been steamrolled
| repeatedly by neighboring empires which have imposed what
| amounted to foreign governments. These governments ruled
| despite, not due to, the local populations. Ergo secret
| police, network of informants, etc, just to control the
| population.
|
| It's hard to have very high trust levels when your own
| government and state are working against you and when
| your coworkers and neighbors can at any time rat you out
| for unpatriotic activities.
| trap_chateau wrote:
| While I'm not disagreeing with your proposed cause to high
| trust within a culture, I disagree with 'high diversity
| causing corruption'. I think the corruption issues in
| eastern europe are a whole different conversation and I'm
| not sure how diversity in ethnicity would necessarily cause
| that.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Everyone forgets the Swedish empire. And the man whose name
| is a synonym for traitor, Vikrund Quisling. Scandinavia has
| hardly escaped war.
|
| If I wanted a glib answer I'd attribute it to a combination
| of less feudalism and more Lutheranism, plus a bit of
| Hanseatic trading.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| It's Vidkun Quisling.
|
| The lack of feudalism as a contrast to other nations and
| the excess of Lutheranism were mostly a long time ago as
| was the Hanseatic league. And while Scandinavia looks
| homogeneous to outsiders, especially to those from far
| away, the three countries have distinct characters and
| distinct histories. Part of how each behaves has to do with
| the climate and topology of each country as well as the
| accidents of history in recent centuries. At least one
| Danish king was famous for picking fights with his
| neighbours which is one reason why Denmark is so small,
| Sweden had a French king for a while which left its mark on
| the language and the structures of society. Norway for a
| long time was simply far away and difficult to travel in
| which means that decentralisation worked as there was
| almost no choice. Towns only 10 km apart on the map might
| have very distinct dialects because there is a mountain in
| the way meaning that it is a 100 km trip from one to the
| other.
|
| The glib answers, as I suspect you were saying, are usually
| wrong or very partial (in both senses of the word).
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I meant they escaped the world wars and the rest of the
| turmoils of the 20th century. Largely because they didn't
| have deep historic conflicts with the rest of the big
| empires.
|
| I mean, sure, not completely, they definitely had some of
| their population deported by Nazis, but it wasn't such a
| major impact as elsewhere in Europe.
| romanoderoma wrote:
| They definitely did not escape any recent war.
|
| The WWII in Scandinavia was particularly bad, including
| the occupation of Norway and Denmark.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Weserubung
|
| They did escape the contemporary ones the same way any
| other country in Europe did anyway.
| oblio wrote:
| Norway and Denmark (as well as France) were treated with
| kiddie gloves compared to what occupation in Eastern
| Europe meant.
| anubidiocane wrote:
| Well, Norway collaborated with the nazis and sympathised
| for some of their ideas at the time, for example Norway
| had been experimenting with eugenics programs since the
| 20s when they started to sterilise mentally hill patients
| and made it legal in 1934.
|
| But the king of Norway and members of the army escaped to
| London and directed the resistance from there.
|
| Ask the Jews that owned the houses and nursing homes that
| were confiscated for the Lebensborn project and the kids
| that survived it (not many), what they think about it.
|
| Others had it worse doesn't mean they escaped the war and
| its consequences.
|
| If the eastern block is where you draw the line, you
| could argue that many parts of Europe escaped the war.
|
| But it would be historically false.
| silvestrov wrote:
| > Lack of war?
|
| Denmark and Sweden have been at war with each other so many
| times you can't give an exact number as it becomes difficult
| to say when it's a prolonged war and when it's 2 seperate
| wars.
|
| A simplified list: https://useless-
| denmarkfacts.tumblr.com/post/125179860721/al...
| apsec112 wrote:
| This is what you see if you look at the Perceptions of
| Corruption Index. That only looks at the public sector (not
| private companies), but one could reasonably assume the two
| correlate:
|
| https://jakubmarian.com/corruption-perceptions-index-of-euro...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Well, there _is_ a well known cliche of people in Northern
| Europe being more cool-headed than in Southern Europe. You can
| see how it would translate to earnestness being more or less
| punished in social situations...
|
| (Yet it would also come with being more or less "cool", which
| is opposite to what pg suggests, so I guess I have no idea !
| XD)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| If you're interested in X for its own sake, you are _very_
| unlikely to want to turn that into a business. Unless you 're
| also interested in business and money for their own sakes - both
| of which should trigger very justified cynicism, because there
| are far more effective ways to make the world a better place than
| by getting extremely rich after an IPO.
| darkhorse13 wrote:
| Fully disagree. Making a living doing what I find truly
| interesting is perhaps one of the greatest blessings to me in
| life. One of the better ways to do that is to turn it into a
| business, or at least a nice self-employment gig.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| If you're interested in X for its own sake, you're quite likely
| to want to do it for a living. This is true even of things like
| music and art. Not saying you _will_ be able to do it for a
| living, but it is normal that if you're interested in X for its
| own sake, you would at least investigate whether you could make
| that your full time job.
|
| Now, in regards to things like an IPO specifically, I think it
| would depend on whether or not you need a lot of other people
| to help you get X done. If you need to hire a lot of other
| people, then you might need an investment in order to do that
| if you cannot rely on getting that many volunteers. And in that
| case, to get the investment, there probably has to be the
| prospect of an IPO.
|
| My observed experience is that trying to get grants for
| something, is not materially easier or less political than
| trying to get investments to fund it.
| dash2 wrote:
| I disagree. There are many problems that can only be solved by
| a self-funding organization which sells its solutions to
| consumers - aka a business.
|
| Suppose I would like to build entertaining, educational toys
| for children. Should I do it as a hobbyist? No. If I seriously
| want many children to benefit, I will have to get the toys to
| them, and producing them will take money. Should I get a grant
| from a charity? No: only children can judge whether a toy is
| fun, and if I ask charities to be the judge I will end up
| optimizing the toys to appeal to the charities, not the
| children. (The same applies to becoming a charity myself, or to
| asking for a government grant.) Instead, I should sell toys to
| children and their parents. That way, I may be able to tell
| whether I have succeeded in my goal.
|
| The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about
| achieving something, you should seek useful feedback.
| Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism.
|
| The list of businesspeople who are genuinely interested in what
| they do is long. It ranges from Steve Wozniak down to your
| local bookshop owner. Paul Graham claims that the best
| businesspeople are _always_ interested.
| walleeee wrote:
| > The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious
| about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback.
| Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism.
|
| True, but many of the markets we have are neither free nor
| fair. And even if they were, we should exercise caution
| before concluding that what is discovered is a _need_.
| Markets are equally capable of exploiting wants, socially
| conditioned propensities, addictions, manifestations of the
| subconscious, etc.
|
| Even developments which appear unambiguously good can lead to
| unexpected side effects and easily overlooked externalities.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I want to sell the world on the idea of Capabilities Based
| Security... which means no product, nothing to profit from,
| which means no help from Silicon Valley at all. 8(
|
| No matter how earnest, or driven... if there's no profit in
| it, nobody there cares.
|
| How do you suggest I market this idea?
| dash2 wrote:
| My claim wasn't "all problems can be solved by building a
| firm". It was "some problems can only be solved by
| building a firm".
| walleeee wrote:
| I dunno, but I don't think I'd go to the valley for help
| if I wanted to build something that would destroy its
| predominant profit model. Do you have any friends with
| deep pockets and chaotic energy?
|
| Thanks for sharing, in seriousness. I didn't know what
| capabilities entailed in a security context until I
| followed your comment to your blog.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I do a lot of things simply to do the thing for its own sake
| and I've gotten a lot of feedback that people "value" the
| wonderful things I do out of the goodness of my heart. And I
| was homeless for years and hearing that shit about how much
| everyone "appreciated" how much I "cared" and all this shit
| while mostly not giving me money for it.
|
| The assumption that people should do things for free is an
| assumption that they have vast resources to spend on benefiting
| others with no expectation of getting any of that back. Or that
| they should serve as slave labor out of "virtue."
|
| Having done the latter, let me tell you it sucks. In the
| extreme.
|
| If you want the world to be healthy, you need to find ways to
| do good works that pay your bills and you need to find ways to
| engage in symbiotic relationships where benefiting others comes
| back to you. The word for that is generally _business._
|
| I would like to keep working on the same things I've worked on
| for years but turn it into an actual business that pays my
| bills. There is nothing I want more desperately than to do X
| for its own sake and somehow also live in comfort because I do
| good things in this shitty world full of shitty people who all
| want something for free and are happy to take freebies
| literally from a homeless woman if they can get away with it.
| adamsea wrote:
| tl;dr nerds are honest good and pure (aka earnest) and thus
| deserving when they achieve success and wealth.
|
| Non-nerds are dishonest and impure and maybe even bad.
| [deleted]
| rayiner wrote:
| What a great article. "Earnest" describes some of my favorite
| people not just in business but in life.
| cambalache wrote:
| These essays are getting ridiculous. We get it, you have tons of
| experience funding companies so it helps you to do a competent
| job filtering the candidates.But after that it is pretty much a
| crap-shoot, and all this theorizing are just post-hoc
| rationalizations to satisfy your ego.
| dasil003 wrote:
| What's the difference between post-hoc rationalization and
| learning from experience though? I don't see him making any
| claims of pre-ordained success or that luck isn't a factor,
| he's just pointing out a quality he's seen to be valuable in
| the context of startups and how it can be a contra-indicator to
| the type of BS artist that proliferate around any kind of
| profitable industry.
|
| Sure we can always question motivations (eg. yours could be
| envy or sour grapes), but that is unproductive.
| bernulli wrote:
| It is to realize whether learning is possible at all. What
| can you learn from a successful game of rolling dice, from a
| successful game of flipping a coin? Was it the way you moved
| your wrist or did you you just luck out?
| johnnujler wrote:
| I think the original comment was directed at the seemingly
| pretentious nature of the essay. How do you quantify
| earnestness? Being sincere? I get the "we like demo over
| slides", "2 founder over 1 founder" kinda thing, but talking
| about virtue and moral character seems like PG is struggling
| to find things to do after retirement. Philosophical musings
| are almost always due to too much time on hand and assumed
| profundity of one's own thought process. Hence the post hoc
| rationalisation? Maybe?
|
| Plus as it is said by someone in the other comment,
| success(especially in entrepreneurial ventures) is so much
| more like playing a game of roulette than it is like running
| a race. Luck! Lots of Luck! And chance does not fit well with
| assumed observations. It is a measurement bias that is being
| masked as concrete conclusions.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I think he lays it out pretty well: earnestness is more
| than sincerity, it's dedication to solving a problem for
| its own sake rather than as a means to an end. I'm not sure
| why you want that to be quantifiable, but I don't see that
| as being useful since Goodhart's law then kicks in.
|
| I do agree that on a single continuum from roulette to
| race, entrepreneurship is closer to roulette, but it's a
| limited framing because entrepreneurship is neither a well-
| defined rote exercise like a marathon nor a discrete
| probabilistic event like flipping a coin. To the contrary,
| building a company is a continuous feedback loop involving
| thousands of decisions over which an entrepreneur has
| complete agency. The uncomfortable truth is twofold:
| founders' choices _do_ affect outcomes, but those outcomes
| are not predictable and have no direct relationship to ones
| own perception of merit, hard work, fairness, or morals.
| Getting hung up on the luck aspect and whether or not some
| successful person is humble enough is a defense mechanism
| that ultimately gets in the way of maximizing your own
| success.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that 's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| sidlls wrote:
| Have you read the last few of these essays posted here? Every
| single one of them I've read can be summarized as such: "I
| wish to focus on a certain characteristic. I will hint or
| explicitly state that negative qualities of said
| characteristic are found predominately in fields I do not
| care to work in and often have a negative stereotype about,
| and also hint or explicitly state that positive qualities are
| found predominately in fields I do care to. It so happens
| these positive qualities tend to be qualities I am ascribing
| to myself in this essay, or have ascribed to myself in the
| past."
|
| Here is a choice selection:
|
| "Do the earnest always win? Not always. It probably doesn't
| matter much in politics, or in crime, or in certain types of
| business that are similar to crime, like gambling, personal
| injury law, patent trolling, and so on. Nor does it matter in
| academic fields at the more bogus end of the spectrum. And
| though I don't know enough to say for sure, it may not matter
| in some kinds of humor: it may be possible to be completely
| cynical and still be very funny."
|
| There's very little to be charitable about when reading that.
| It shows a profound lack of consideration for the fields and
| topics PG is dismissing out of hand, to the point where one
| seriously wonders whether he's actually given any more
| thought to it than whatever reaction from his own youth he's
| channeling in the moment.
|
| Then there are the unsupported assertions that litter these
| essays, and they're all more or less alike in character:
| "Nerds in high school become Kings in adulthood". It's
| actually not only trite, but overbroad. In some ways it's
| true, but in many others it's not, but PG tends to generalize
| the former in his essays.
|
| It's easy to insist on being charitable, but it's a bit
| harder when there's just so little to work with.
| dang wrote:
| I don't think there's so little to be charitable about. But
| in any case the GP was a snarky, shallow dismissal, which
| is not what we want here, regardless of who the target is.
| From a moderation point of view your comment is totally
| different and I don't have a problem with it.
|
| Btw, pg has been talking about earnestness for years--same
| with the topics of his other recent essays--and he has
| always written in this style. I don't think he's changed a
| bit. People have always gotten pissed off by them too. If
| there's a difference in public perception now it's a
| combination of his social status having changed [1] and the
| online climate having gotten steadily more acidic.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25233038
| cambalache wrote:
| Under that premise nothing can be criticized. Even Mein Kampf
| must have a "charitable" interpretation.
| dang wrote:
| Note that word plausible.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > But after that it is pretty much a crap-shoot, and all this
| theorizing are just post-hoc rationalizations to satisfy your
| ego.
|
| On the other hand, all these baby boomers with money seeking to
| reinvent themselves as trend-predicting geniuses... at least
| they write checks.
|
| Whom are you going to get money from instead, mom and dad?
| Someone has to take risks.
| jhawk28 wrote:
| Is he trying to stroke his ego, or is pg trying to signal to
| potential founders what qualities he is looking for? I would
| think the latter.
| newacct583 wrote:
| I won't go that far. But I will say that, contra his earlier
| writing, pg's recent stuff has a real "feedback in the bubble"
| feel. It's still treating SV culture as it was fifteen years
| ago and not really willing to engage with or even nod to the
| way the industry and its effects on society have evolved.
|
| So e.g. Airbnb is still a hero story about disruption even as
| it settles into an established power and its inconvenient side
| effects on things like the real estate industry become
| apparent.
|
| It's not that he's wrong, or that I even disagree with this
| particular essay. I just think the world has kinda moved on
| from this model of innovation and we need to be solving
| different problems than how to make the next batch of kids
| rich.
| cambalache wrote:
| 15 years ago SV was the same as now, there was never a nobler
| past. There has always been externalities than the tech
| companies are willing to sweep under the rug if it helps them
| to make money.
| Tainnor wrote:
| Yes, but the bad side-effects of e.g. fake news and hate
| speech on FB and Twitter, "industry disruptions" driving
| wages down, etc., maybe weren't all that readily apparent
| 15 years ago.
| newacct583 wrote:
| I think that's wrong, though. Through 2010 or so (very
| roughly) there was still a ton of unmined valued in
| straightforward applications of technology. I mean, sure,
| stuff goes wrong and there are bad aspects of culture, but
| looking at the industry through the Web 2.0 period it was
| really easy to convince yourself that this was all a Net
| Good Thing and making the world a better place (and that's
| true of Airbnb too!).
|
| It's just not as true now. That fruit has been picked.
| There are still product ideas but they're about exploiting
| edges of an industry that has real problems, and not about
| fixing them.
|
| I mean, whether the desire is there or not, the YC model
| isn't going to fix the climate crisis, or the disaster that
| the media ecosystem has become, or the increasingly dire
| level of income inequality in our society. And getting to
| my original point: pg's recent writings seem like he's made
| peace with that and is happy just chipping out new corners
| of the tech ecosystem and not Solving Problems People Have.
| cambalache wrote:
| In 2010 it was old old old news that:
|
| The world was drowning in electronic devices garbage,
| many containing toxic materials.
|
| American companies were taking advantage of highly
| exploitative conditions in the third world, especially
| China.
|
| Microsoft made millions "extorting" high licence fees for
| its software in many cases from poor 3rd world countries
| who had few option for what it was a de-facto monopoly.
|
| Patent trolls were rampant,SCO was trying to kill Linux,
| all with MS funding.
|
| RIIA was abusing the legal system, suing for millions a
| grandma who downloaded a couple of songs.
|
| You may think whatever you want, but being ignorant of
| basic facts make your opinion a little bit better than
| total irrelevance.
| bob33212 wrote:
| In 2005 we didn't have the cloud, which lets you start a
| startup for next to nothing. We didn't have Lean Startup type
| books, podcasts and social media post from insiders which let
| us self educate on how business and startups worked. And we
| didn't have hundreds of VCs and billions of dollars chasing
| the next kid with a hot startup.
|
| It would be interesting to see a essay from PG on why YC is
| still necessary.
| newacct583 wrote:
| AWS launched in 2006. The cloud was very much a part of and
| a driver of the earlier boom. It's not something that's
| arrived since. The cloud, too, is old news.
|
| I'm not taking a position on whether or not YC is
| "necessary". I'm saying that fifteen years ago it was clear
| to most of us that YC was making society better. Now? It's
| really not clear.
| [deleted]
| benatkin wrote:
| The word "earnest" seems a bit antiquated to me. I've rarely used
| it since I was a child, except in the phrase "earnest money".
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earnest-money.asp
|
| I guess "honest", "dedicated", "non-flaky", "good follow-
| through", and "good track record" would be terms I would use to
| communicate it instead.
|
| Edit: oops, I hadn't yet read the second paragraph.
| hootbootscoot wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYMw_dlnVH0&ab_channel=Ernes...
| darepublic wrote:
| Though I agree with much of this article off earnestness can also
| be terrible in some circumistances. When people earnestly pursue
| something abhorrent or deluded.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| > When people earnestly pursue something abhorrent or deluded.
|
| Which is exactly what happens all the time. People like the
| "airbnbs" thinking they can make the world a better place and
| pursuing their delusion with earnestness, only to cause bigger
| problems in the end.
|
| I wish capitalists could at least be honest and admit they
| found an inefficiency in the market to exploit and they just
| want to profit from it. At least there's no hypocrisy in that.
| geofft wrote:
| This is spin, and it's important to understand _why_ it 's spin,
| because somewhat unusually, this essay seeks to _prevent_ you
| from using your critical reasoning facilities.
|
| Here's the context: This essay is, at its core, a rebuttal to
| https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sex... ,
| which makes the argument that while Paul Graham is undeniably an
| extraordinarily successful _businessman_ , he's not that
| successful of a _public intellectual_ , and in particular that
| one of the major things he's tried to be a public intellectual
| about - namely, Lisp / programming language design - has been a
| field where he has basically no successes to show.
|
| For most people, that would be wonderful. I'm about 25 years
| younger than PG, and I've been interested ("earnestly," as he
| would say) in software packaging for a long time. If the Ghost of
| Christmas Future came to me and said, in 25 years you won't have
| really changed the field of software packaging but you'll be a
| billionaire who's helped thousands of people work on their life's
| dream, I'd say, wow, awesome. But that's not enough for PG, who
| took it as a personal attack
| (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1336005166626197506 - the
| author of the above post was not "mad" in any sense, just trying
| to talk about a serious conversation) and his VC buddies
| attempted to rebut this "silly essay" by arguing loudly that it
| didn't matter if Arc failed because it wasn't important and PG
| has made tons of money
| (https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336043592339472388 ,
| https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336056247481630721 ,
| https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336048188264828929,
| https://twitter.com/m2jr/status/1336146070485626882).
|
| (Before you argue "Arc didn't fail, you're using it right now,"
| please read the post in question, which addresses this.)
|
| So, now PG comes out with an essay arguing how "earnestness" and
| being "naive" is important - that being interested in a problem
| for its own sake is valuable, regardless of results - and throws
| in a comment on how "would-be intellectuals find it so difficult
| to understand Silicon Valley," i.e., that Silicon Valley is
| immune from the sorts of (constructive) criticism intellectuals
| usually have internally. Then he shifts gears right at the end to
| talking about making money and its relationship with
| "earnestness" (after introducing the essay by saying that they're
| conflicting motivations) and how ever since Henry Ford, working
| on the thing you're passionate about has been more closely
| entwined with making money.
|
| "But," you say, "this essay doesn't talk about that other essay
| at all! How do we know it's a response to it?" I invite you to
| reread this essay closely, knowing the context I'm claiming it
| has, and I think you'll find it makes more sense. It no longer
| looks like a disjointed collection of interesting ideas, and
| there seems to be a reason now why it's worth advocating
| earnestness and naivete (and dismissing Twitter critics in a
| footnote).
|
| What this essay has done by the end is argued, like Balaji
| Srinivasan did but more subtly, that it doesn't matter whether
| you're good at the thing you're earnest about by traditional
| measures; if you tried really hard and you made money, it's the
| ultimate sign you were good at it all along, and you don't need
| to evaluate your work on the merits as traditional. It's a
| deflection of the criticism that PG is an above-average Lisper
| but a world expert businessman - which is hardly a "criticism,"
| really. PG is, without a doubt, a Lisp nerd, earnest about Lisp,
| but what he's shipped (extremely successfully!) is a change to
| how the world creates businesses, not a change to how the world
| writes code. But for some reason, he wants you to keep thinking
| of him as a successful Lisp nerd.
| darkerside wrote:
| > Interestingly, just as the word "nerd" implies earnestness even
| when used as a metaphor, the word "politics" implies the
| opposite. It's not only in actual politics that earnestness seems
| to be a handicap, but also in office politics and academic
| politics.
|
| I don't think this is always the case. I've found that no matter
| the size of the business, they are made up of people, and people
| have bullshit detectors. When you are able to speak truth and
| find meaning in an earnest way, people will follow you, peers
| will respect you, and executives will listen.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| PG seems to have a cynical conception of what "politics" is,
| since he seems to be saying that practising it is anathema to
| earnestness.
|
| I understand what he means if by "politics" he means self-
| interest and hoodwinking voters. And that may be his experience
| of politicians, but it doesn't define the field any more than
| Mulligans define golf. Champion golfers don't take Mulligans,
| don't kick their ball closer to the hole, and don't miscount
| strokes. They are all far too earnest, and have been since they
| started in the sport.
|
| Likewise with politics. MLK did what he did because he cared
| for the rights of people. So did Thomas Jefferson, They're not
| the only ones, though it is difficult to come up with examples
| that are universally admired because when it comes to politics,
| we all have different opinions, because we all have different
| interests.
|
| But what is politics? When I studied it at university, we
| learned on the first day that politics is just who gets what,
| where, when, and how, in a society.
|
| Anyone who fights for the rights of other people in society,
| whether for left or right, for rich or for poor, may be
| earnest, and virtuous in the eyes of their peers.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| But I kinda feel like your example proves the point, because
| I've never seen MLK described as a "politician" or "political
| figure". Politics as most people understand it is the process
| of deciding who ought to run the government, and King
| specifically avoided discussing this
| (https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-
| papers/documents/sta...) because he felt that doing so would
| undercut his mission of social change.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > Politics as most people understand it is the process of
| deciding who ought to run the government
|
| That's a narrow definition, sometimes known as "party
| politics". And that well might be what PG was referring to.
| The limitation of party politics in America, and other
| places, is that to become an elected representative you
| need money for advertising, which you have to get from
| somewhere, e.g. donations. These usually come with the
| expectation of a quid pro quo; oil companies want pipelines
| across the commons and lax pollution laws. They get these
| by buying politicians.
|
| And so there is a contradiction in a "democracy" like the
| USA whereby votes are in the hands of the people, but the
| ability to stand for office is in the hands of the
| financiers. It leads to a duplicity, which is possibly why
| PG describes "politics" as anathema to earnestness.
|
| But politics is more than that. Politics is who gets what,
| when where and how. It exists in classrooms and workplaces,
| and cars full of screaming kids on a hot day.
|
| It most certainly exists in the competition to have ideas
| funded by VC. So, in fact, PG is a skilful politician. He
| just practises his craft outside of party politics.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Ultimately, I guess, "politics" is just a word which can
| be defined however we want. So I can't tell you that
| you're wrong or the definition you're using is untrue.
|
| It's not obvious to me that a definition of "politics"
| which groups together party politics, funding startups,
| and screaming kids coming home from soccer practice
| provides much useful insight into the world. At best,
| it's an imprecise statement of the same sentiment as
| "everything is physics", that party politics has a large
| influence on how the world looks. At worst, and I've seen
| it used quite frequently in this way, it's a sleight of
| hand maneuver used to slip party politics into contexts
| where it'd otherwise be excluded.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| King was a political figure for sure.
|
| People use a broader definition of politics all the time.
| Office politics. Geopolitics. Realpolitik. Identity
| politics. Political correctness.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Politics might be the hardest to be earnest in... and yet we
| _must_ , for the future's sake !
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| In politics, the word "technocrat" is used to try to carve out
| a divide between specific intellectual talent and political
| leadership talent, with a heavy implication that these are
| mutually exclusive.
|
| I think that's how PG is using "earnest" here. He presents it
| first as a compliment but goes on to suggest that it is
| exclusive from understanding other people's motivations, and by
| extension, exclusive from business leadership.
|
| I take it as an underhanded compliment.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In politics, the word "technocrat" is used to try to carve
| out a divide between specific intellectual talent and
| political leadership talent, implication being that these are
| exclusive.
|
| No, in politics, "technocrat" describes an advocate of rule
| by an elite of technical experts. When applied to a candidate
| for office, it often more specifically designates someone who
| sees their own self-evaluated membership in such an elite as
| their primary qualification for office. It does not designate
| _actual_ talent, nor does it imply anything about the
| separation between different types of talent.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| > No, in politics, "technocrat" describes an advocate of
| rule by an elite of technical experts.
|
| I've never seen that usage - in my experience, a technocrat
| is always the (supposed) expert, not the advocate for
| expert rule.
|
| Wikipedia commonly uses "advocate for technocracy" on the
| relevant biography pages.
| voidhorse wrote:
| And on the other side, "politics" is anathema to "nerds" and
| technocrats because good technocrats typically have a nice
| mix of the old school sociopathic qualities required to
| succeed in business along with technical chops. They don't
| like politics because they typically lack emotional
| intelligence, don't comprehend the need for empathy, and
| think their experience is the only experience that matters.
| They likewise usually have a regressive ultra-utilitarian
| philosophy.
|
| This doesn't apply to everyone or any actual human beings of
| course, but since we're talking about abstract made up
| nonsense character types, might as well go along with it.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| "I am never so happy as when I am really engaged in good earnest,
| & it makes me most wonderfully cheerful & merry at other times,
| which is curious & very satisfactory."
|
| -- Ada Lovelace
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Starting a successful startup makes you rich and famous. So a
| lot of the people trying to start them are doing it for those
| reasons. Instead of what? Instead of interest in the problem for
| its own sake. That is the root of earnestness. [2]_
|
| What a load of pretentious twaddle this is. People have gotten
| rich on completely idiotic ideas, whereas people pursuing
| interesting ideas for their own sake have lived poor lives.
|
| A lot of the people forming startups to get rich are actually
| pretty smart and have plenty of ideas they could chase for their
| own sake, while becoming poor in the process.
|
| "I wanna get rich" is honest, which is close cousin of earnest.
|
| To get rich, it does have to have an interest in a particular
| problem domain for its own sake: the domain of how to get people
| to part with their money, in your favor. That's it. If you make
| that domain your passion, you will likely end up well-off. If any
| other domain is your passion, then you should probably pair up
| with someone whose passion is that one.
| tim333 wrote:
| Google is perhaps a counter example - they were interested in
| how to index the web without much idea on how to monetize.
| Worked out quite well.
| rel2thr wrote:
| Not sure if gambling should have been lumped in with the other
| professions. A successful long term gambler looks a lot like a
| hacker in my experience
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| The importance of being Earnest. [1]
|
| [1] Oscar Wilde,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Earnes...
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| Earnest is my favourite word for describing that beautiful part
| during a child's development where they haven't yet had a
| negative experience from expressing themselves earnestly. That
| window of time where if you ask if they know something they would
| proudly reply "no!" because they have no idea that there might be
| shame in not knowing something.
|
| I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of
| fear of retribution/shame but I'm always a bit sad when I get in
| trouble because I was straight forward but adult politics is
| sadly complex sometimes.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the
| damage of fear of retribution /shame but I'm always a bit sad
| when I get in trouble because I was straight forward but adult
| politics is sadly complex sometimes._
|
| You might enjoy reading these two posts and discussions:
|
| "The power of ignorance"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23041281
|
| "Asking questions"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22729028
| swyx wrote:
| I've also written about this effect, called Lampshading:
| https://www.swyx.io/lampshading/ asking the "stupid question"
| is a strength when done in taste.
| pjc50 wrote:
| One of the most powerful things you can do as a senior
| engineer for juniors is to show by example that it's OK to
| ask questions and to not know all the answers. Especially
| if you can see that someone else isn't sure but dares not
| ask that question.
| boh wrote:
| I think you have too much optimism regarding the value of
| people's earnest expressions. Children are children and so
| their earnestness is cute and endearing (in most
| instances)--adults are far less charming and far more petty,
| self-indulgent, spineless, fickle, fearful.
|
| Social media is a cesspool largely due to all this earnestness.
| Fear of retribution and shame is helpful in mitigating the
| self-absorption embedded in most people. We'd all like to think
| there's something special in all of us and that the world will
| benefit from the light of our creativity if it was set free.
| Truth be told, very few people are capable of much past
| mimicking and repeating what already exists.
|
| People should appreciate the template of conformity that allows
| them to find a place in the world and not let advertising, that
| often leverages the idea of uniqueness to sell things, diminish
| the value of their mediocrity. No, given the proper "freedom"
| to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs.
| We know because if that's who you were, that's who you'd be.
| Some people seem to find success in art and innovation
| operating in the same repressive environment, so maybe the
| environment is not the problem. Maybe earnestness just isn't
| your thing and fear/conformity is the better strategy.
|
| *grammar edits
| nitrogen wrote:
| _No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't
| be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs. We know because if that's
| who you were, that's who you'd be._
|
| This statement cannot be allowed to stand uncontested. It
| suggests that everyone is exactly where they ought to be,
| that all bullying and harassment and isolation that keeps
| people from reaching their potential is right and just.
| boh wrote:
| The only thing I'm suggesting is that freedom doesn't spare
| you from mediocrity.
|
| Real oppression, an experience the US professional middle
| class is largely spared of, the type experienced by the
| citizens of Venezuela or the people currently being held in
| Xinjiang re-education camps, is truly insurmountable and
| requires large macro shifts to institute change. To suggest
| individual bullying, harassment and isolation are counted
| as so insurmountable to a person's theoretical "potential"
| that the environment must change first to prompt it, is an
| illustration of the deep self-absorption very few people
| have the privilege to experience.
|
| Nothing is right or just in this context.
| ResearchCode wrote:
| I thought it was about becoming the next Steve Jobs, as
| in billionaire founder. They tend to grow up with great
| privilege. Evidently there are great obstacles for the
| middle class, such as favoritism for the already
| affluent. As in any country, it has little to with actual
| capability.
|
| Surely Venezuela could have less social mobility, but it
| isn't actually that great in the west.
| legel wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Twain wrote of this: I was glad to be able to
| answer promptly. "I don't know!" I said.
| Razengan wrote:
| > _Earnest is my favourite word for describing that beautiful
| part during a child 's development where they haven't yet had a
| negative experience from expressing themselves earnestly. ...
| but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes._
|
| And we're narrowing that window by exposing children to social
| politics earlier on through likes and upvotes and whatnot.
| boxed wrote:
| Once in my 20s I hung out with some young teenagers at a summer
| camp for _reasons_. One night we were talking and one girl
| started asking questions and the rest of the group sneered at
| her "not knowing". She ignored them and kept asking because I
| was earnest and knowledgeable. Five minutes turned to an hour
| and I think everyone in that group learned (or at least heard)
| more about the origins of the universe, stellar evolution,
| evolution, chemistry, physics, etc, than they had learned in
| school up to that point.
|
| I sometimes wonder what happened to those people. I suspect the
| girl who asked questions ended up way more knowledgeable than
| the other 10 combined.
| warent wrote:
| The sentence you opened this up with comes across kind of
| concerning and gross. For reasons?
| bluntfang wrote:
| I'm with you here buddy. seems like he was doing something
| shady the way he expressed it. probably lonely and
| providing alcohol/drugs for minors in order to have
| company.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > it sounds shady so it probably was
|
| c'mon catch people a break. Maybe they were a former
| alchy giving AA advice to troubled kids, maybe they don't
| like talking about their religion online
| [deleted]
| warent wrote:
| Great point, thanks for the perspective
| [deleted]
| boxed wrote:
| My gf was a camp mentor in fact. A totally boring an
| irrelevant fact. Thus the hand wavy thing.
| dang wrote:
| That crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed
| here, so please don't.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| gabereiser wrote:
| I'm glad I wasn't the only one who shuttered at that
| sentence. A better one would have been "as a camp mentor in
| my 20s"...
| mikewarot wrote:
| All the earnestness in the world can't help when all you want to
| do is share a good idea, and make sure people know what's really
| possible.
|
| It drives me nuts that we still have computer virii, and a whole
| field of "computer security professionals", when it could all be
| solved, and was, but Unix short-circuited history, and we've got
| this mess instead.
| iWorshipFAANGS wrote:
| If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as "academic
| bogus," you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic
| dialectic hegemonic whiteness."
|
| First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article
| returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain
| of academic words he thought represented useless academic
| research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus."
|
| I think this is pretty dumb, for multiple reasons.
|
| First of all, all of those terms have long historical uses in
| academia. -hermeneutics. Meaning close text interpretation.
| Probably the oldest forms of literary criticism. -dialetics.
| Broadly meaning "an conversation between two opposing points."
| Term dates back to Aristotle. -Hegemony. Meaning "a dominating
| power." Critical term in International relations. -Whiteness. The
| quality of having the color white. Also relates to the concept of
| race, which is an important topic in the history of America.
| Melville wrote about both color and race at the same time in his
| bogus book Moby Dick.
|
| So maybe these all have long histories, but as soon as you chain
| these terms together, we all know what happens: PoMo madness! Bad
| Faithery.
|
| I myself used to think that the "post-modern" philosophers like
| Derrida and Focault were all a bunch of drivel. Then I read them
| and I found out a lot interesting things to say.
|
| PG seems to think that all "useless" research in this is done for
| some non-earnest intention. This is not a new; he said in "How to
| Do what you love" that no one would seriously look for symbol in
| Conrad for fun (interesting, Genius.com seems to have tons of
| amateur criticism). Now it seems like he's getting a little
| fiestier, specifically singling out "whiteness."
|
| His site, he's free to single out whatever he wants. But the fact
| is that humanities research absolutely does expand human
| knowledge of the world, in a way that SaaS startups cannot. It's
| also done, if one can believe, in earnest.
|
| Feel free to tell me I'm not being fair to the article. However
| you respond, I'll be sure to take a few key words, stick them in
| google scholar search, and come back at you with a nice big
| BOGUS.
| throwawayback wrote:
| In defense of Paul, I'm reminded of work highlighted by the
| twitter account Real Peer Review (once banned and now
| reincarnated). It highlights various bits of so-called
| scholarship that looks like political ideology dressed up in
| fancy words and financed by taxpayers. "Decolonizing math" and
| things like that. Some recent examples:
|
| https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/133532437242123879...
|
| https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/132655686041831424...
|
| https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/128234439739327284...
|
| https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/131274252267491738...
|
| (NSFW)
| https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/128226118909190553...
|
| (NSFW)
| https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/130979001821976166...
|
| I wouldn't expect taxpayers to finance my church. I'm not sure
| why I'm on the hook to fund this particular non-falsifiable
| dogma that I vehemently disagree with.
| __float wrote:
| That seems to be a bizarre conclusion, since churches are
| very often tax advantaged.
|
| If these authors are able to write grant proposals and get
| funding, then clearly someone thinks they are producing
| something of value. You cannot see the value, so you declare
| there must not be any?
| throwawayback wrote:
| It is a politico-religious movement. Of course people that
| side with that movement find value in funding people to
| produce texts in its tradition and educate students in its
| ways of talking. I don't.
| adamsea wrote:
| > It is a politico-religious movement.
|
| Well, what isn't? LOL. That and 'cultural marxism' are
| just scary/meaningful-sounding terms people make up to
| label and then defame something they don't like.
|
| They're terms that are broad and just accurate enough to
| describe _something_ , but too vague and imprecise to
| actually describe _anything_.
|
| Let me help. You dislike academics who study and analyze
| society and culture to discover it's biases, unspoken
| assumptions, and so on, and you don't like that they
| critique society for the oppressive elements which they
| believe they've found.
|
| I.e. social justice. Critiques of capitalism. Critiques
| of systemic racism.
|
| Criticize something specific so we can talk about it.
| But, the reason you aren't accurate or specific is
| because if you were, whatever argument you are trying to
| make would rapidly fall apart.
|
| And I'd love to be proved wrong! Share a specific
| critique. We can talk about Marxists, neo-Marxists,
| communists, libertarian anarchism, Progressive Democrats,
| Social Democrats, The New Left, Poststructuralism,
| Structuralism, Critical Theory, Postmodernism (though
| that one's a bit vague), Feminism, Intersectionalism,
| Third-wave Feminism, Liberation Theology (the current
| Pope has roots in Liberation Theology, which was a point
| of contention), and so on.
|
| Or maybe you don't like Democrats? Social Progressives?
| The entire field of Gender Studies?
|
| Pick something you don't like and let's talk about it.
|
| But, I'd bet your own lack of education (which I don't
| mean as an insult, more so a factual description - I'm
| uneducated about, say, genetics) on the things you
| criticize makes it difficult to do so.
|
| And I'd bet your true dislike is something you'd be
| shunned for expressing, which is why you hide behind
| nonsense-phrases that function as dog whistles.
|
| Because we all kinda know what you mean, even though you
| didn't actually say it.
| iWorshipFAANGS wrote:
| Hello! I think I addressed some of the points you are making
| in my response to the user dvt. TLDR, there's low-quality
| research in "falsifiable" fields too.
|
| But actually, I'm having a bit of a hard time understanding
| what your point is, could you help me? I mentioned a specific
| line that Paul Graham wrote, then said it was "dumb" for the
| reasons I outlined. Then, in defense of Paul Graham, you
| posted links to tweets to snippets of research absolutely
| without any context at all. How would I know whether that
| research is good or not? I have no training in any of those
| fields.
|
| I'm really confused about how what you posted defended Paul.
| Did you want me to see that someone wrote the words
| "decolonizing" and "math" together and subsequently think
| that it is stupid, after all, to write the words "hegemonic"
| and "whiteness" in the same paper?
| throwawayback wrote:
| An attack on "whiteness" is often paired with an attack on
| scientific and/or capitalist principles. In my experience,
| if you see someone use the word "whiteness", what follows
| is blatant bad-faith racism, often attacking the
| foundations of every productive institution in society.
| Somehow, it is granted academic legitimacy. See for
| example:
|
| https://twitter.com/ByronYork/status/1283372233730203651
|
| https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/12037840211483402
| 2...
|
| https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1290645039572496
| 3...
|
| Paul is painting with a broad-brush here. "Hermeneutic" for
| example is sometimes used in good faith inquiry. But
| academia has burned so much credibility with me as it has
| become more of an activist enterprise, that I understand
| the impulse to dismiss it. At this point, I put the burden
| on defenders of postmodern linguistics to convince me that
| a piece of writing isn't dishonest, evil, or fluff.
|
| Here's a recent paper from Seattle Public Schools on adding
| social justice principles to Mathematics. It includes such
| topics as "What is my mathematical identity?", "Who holds
| power in a mathematics classroom?", "Who gets to say if an
| answer is right?" and "Can we change mathematics from an
| individual to a collective enterprise?". The end of this
| line of thinking is to destroy mathematical education and
| leave children ignorant. But at least when they
| underperform in life, they will be left with the political
| tools to blame it on "hegemony" and "whiteness". This is an
| ideological cancer.
|
| https://www.k12.wa.us/sites/default/files/public/socialstud
| i...
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Are you claiming here that every productive institution
| in society is capitalist?
|
| Also for what it's worth, I don't see attacks on science
| in any things you link. I see, perhaps, a call for more
| empiricism in certain fields, and a call for recognition
| of our society and it's flaws, and how those flaws may
| extend into systems embedded within our society, such as
| the scientific community and our educational system.
|
| I mean, it's clear you agree with some of these
| criticisms: in the same post you staunchly defend science
| as, presumably a source of everything productive, but
| criticize "academia". Yet how do you propose to
| differentiate between the two? You're both criticizing
| different parts of the social system scientific discourse
| is embedded in. What makes the other criticism inherently
| invalid?
|
| > The end of this line of thinking is to destroy
| mathematical education and leave children ignorant
|
| I want to call out specifically that there is
| _absolutely_ nothing you 've quoted that supports this
| claim.
| throwawayback wrote:
| I hold a graduate degree. I have a certain affection for
| academia. It's with great sadness that I watch a once-
| great institution shamble down the path to perdition.
|
| Hopefully we find a way to renew it, or else to do basic
| science outside of it
| zemo wrote:
| one of the surest signs that someone is full of it is that they
| have a long history of essays with no citations. PG's essays
| almost never cite anyone else's work or act as continuations
| onto a line of thinking started by another person. PG wants to
| discredit the entire concept of academia because he knows that
| his work does not actually stand up to scrutiny.
|
| hehe, curious (perhaps deliberate?) examples. This is maybe all
| very plainly obvious to you, but: Foucault's description of the
| panopticon, his description of discipline, and especially the
| continuation of this line of thinking by Deleuze's notion of
| _societies of control_ is extremely relevant for people who
| visit HN. How these topics relate to the work that most of the
| HN community does is explored very fully in Alexander
| Galloway's book "Protocol: How Control Exists After
| Decentralization" (here:
| https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol). Also I find it
| especially hilarious that the first "BS" word that he uses is
| hermeneutics; it's almost as if he's saying "you only have my
| permission to take my work at face value".
| roenxi wrote:
| In context though - 'earnestness' here is a quality looked for
| in academic founders and is being looked at as an ability to
| solve important problems that other people care about.
|
| The humanities studying hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic
| whiteness don't have that. In particular, the entire field has
| come up with no useful commentary on 'hegemonic whiteness',
| hermeneutic or otherwise, that leads to problem solving. It
| isn't a culture that is producing strong startup founders like
| STEM does. It's fair to say they are less earnest in the way PG
| is using the term; the humanities isn't where people go to
| solve real-world problems.
|
| Humanities is arguably at the base of some very successful
| companies (arguably Apple, for example). Hermeneutic dialectic
| hegemonic whiteness is the base of some profoundly ...
| albinophobe? I dunno, they're racist and don't like white
| people ... arguments and nothing admirable that I have yet
| encountered.
| dvt wrote:
| I'm upvoting you because I think you make a fair and well-
| thought-out argument. With that said, there's certainly a hand-
| waviness to "soft" fields like gender studies or
| ethnomusicology (I took classes in both, just out of
| curiosity).
|
| And no matter how much you think Derrida or Focault contributed
| to philosophy, I would argue it pales in comparison to their
| Analytic contemporaries (Godel, Lewis, Anscombe, Moore, etc.).
| I was extremely skeptical of philosophers like Nietzsche and
| after a couple of semesters, I definitely appreciated the
| Continentals a bit more -- but not enough to take him (and his
| ilk) as seriously as I take the aforementioned. The problem
| lies with falsifiability: it's too easy to claim one just
| doesn't "get" whiteness, or critical theory, or what-have-you.
|
| PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very
| positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in
| humanities is -- apologies -- bogus.
| [deleted]
| adamsea wrote:
| To be fair there's a _ton_ of hand-waviness on HN about the
| hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing. It 's not that
| different, IMHO : ).
|
| > PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very
| positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in
| humanities is -- apologies -- bogus.
|
| True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy
| you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things
| who think that anything not quantifiable in the way that they
| are used to is bunk.
|
| Also I'll just throw out, in terms of impact, Baudrillard's
| work kinda hits the nail on the head when it comes to the
| internet. You can't quantify the impact of literature or more
| qualitative philosophy as easily, and, one can only know as
| time goes on.
|
| I'm not the first to say this, obviously. Baudrillard's quote
| seems scary-accurate of today:
|
| "Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double,
| the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a
| territory, a referential being or substance. It is the
| generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A
| hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does
| it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the
| territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the
| territory."
| nullsense wrote:
| >To be fair there's a ton of hand-waviness on HN about the
| hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing.
|
| MongoDB is webscale.
| jkestner wrote:
| For the uninitiated:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
| sameers wrote:
| > True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in
| philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic
| side of things who think that anything not quantifiable in
| the way that they are used to is bunk.
|
| I am glad you pointed that out. Anecdotally, I have found
| that "philosophy" to many in the tech industry when used
| perjoratively means Continental vs Analytic philosophy.
| Plus, even with analytic philosophy, when people recognize
| it as the sort of thing that Russell and his lineage worked
| on, they don't really get what these philosophers "cared
| about" - that it mattered to them if mathematical symbolism
| expressed truths about the Universe in a metaphysical
| sense. They weren't just manipulating symbols to prove
| consistency etc.
|
| To me, Wittgenstein's concerns portray the bridge between
| the two major schools (well, naturally, he was a European
| who chose to go study under Russell, the Englishman) very
| well. He cared about the formalism, but he also cared that
| it made sense in terms of finding meaning in the world.
|
| Somehow, it's the latter struggle that seems to pass by
| unnoticed when "techie people" (to generalize) think of the
| work of philosophers.
| rewqpoijdlgh wrote:
| Baudrillard was definitely onto something with his analysis
| of the Gulf War. For Americans it was advertised as a war,
| but it wasn't much more than a one-sided slaughter.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| There is, but I've moved away from characterizing it as hand-
| waviness. In something concrete like math, I think using
| hand-waviness is appropriate to describe someone skipping
| over something they could explain in detail.
|
| In other fields, the frameworks present don't allow for the
| same degree of analysis, and that's just the way it is. It's
| kind of like comparing logic programming to an ML model. The
| model can be very accurate, but we likely cannot dissect it
| and understand what it does in the way that we can with logic
| programming.
|
| To put it another way, a math professor whose blog I followed
| said something along the lines of math is hard because it's
| easy, and other fields are easy because they're hard.
| iWorshipFAANGS wrote:
| Thanks for responding politely. I'll respond to both points.
|
| 1.
|
| I don't want to say there's not a lot of hand-waviness in
| "soft" fields. Actually, I don't really know much about that,
| I've never participated in any "professional" humanities
| research. I do read papers from the humanities, though, but
| only about things that interest me. So I'm a true amateur.
|
| I have, however, participated in academic research in what I
| think you call a "hard" field, in computer vision and image
| processing. I promise you, there's a great deal of
| obfuscation in that field too :-).
|
| I think PG would say that whereas what I'm describing are
| instances of bad faith in fields that do have earnestness,
| people who publish papers that contain the words "whiteness"
| and "dialectics" are just standard actors in fields where
| earnestness is not even possible. I think he doesn't know
| what he's talking about.
|
| 2.
|
| I don't want to argue about who has or hasn't contributed
| more(whatever that means) to philosophy. But fortunately I
| live in a world where I can read both Godel and Foucault, and
| I'm happy for that. I don't even have to pick a side, because
| the two wrote about wildly different domains.
|
| But I don't think having falsifiability encompasses the end
| all be all of what we can explore in writing. Isn't that more
| the goal of proper experimental set-up? Even Wittgenstein,
| who I believe apprehended better than anyone the world in its
| logical constituency and relation, recognized the limitation
| of the logical method[1].
|
| [1]. http://www.kfs.org/jonathan/witt/t654en.html
| enriquto wrote:
| > "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology
|
| I don't know anything about gender studies, but regarding
| ethnomusicology, you can be assured that it is a bona-fide,
| hard subject, even involving and motivating non-elementary
| math. The study of timbre and harmony in western music is
| rather dry, since it is overwhelmingly dominated by wind and
| string instruments that have one-dimensional, harmonic
| spectra. Even western percussion instruments are
| painstakingly tuned to have integer partials. The study of
| ethnomusicology opens an incredibly wide field of different
| types of instruments and their harmonies that is a godsend
| for modern musical theory (and, in turn, it helps to
| understand western harmony as a concrete particular case
| among an infinite ensemble of possibilities). See, e.g.
|
| https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-
| mus...
|
| this is a serious textbook about ethnomusicology and linear
| PDE on Riemannian manifolds.
|
| What were your ethnomusicology classes about? They might be
| really bad, if you ended up thinking that it is a "soft"
| subject.
| telesilla wrote:
| I agree with you on the depth and seriousness of the
| subject. Some fascinating studies include:
|
| Saga's Sorrow: Femininities of Despair in the Music of
| Radical White Nationalism
|
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.3.0
| 4...
|
| Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the
| U.S.-Mexico Border
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265829427_Transnat
| i...
|
| Is Birdsong Music? Outback Encounters with an Australian
| Songbird
|
| https://books.google.com/books/about/Is_Birdsong_Music.html
| ?...
| woodruffw wrote:
| It's also worth noting that Paul Graham has an undergraduate
| degree in philosophy. He knows (at least) the first three
| words, and he knows that they aren't nonsense.
|
| What he _also_ knows is that he 's whistling to a specific
| audience, and that _that_ audience either doesn 't know those
| words _or_ thinks that any sort of academic terms of art in the
| humanities are already nonsense.
|
| In sum: for an essay titled "Earnestness," it's a shockingly
| dishonest rhetorical tactic.
| rriepe wrote:
| I've noticed that everyone who claims to hear dog whistles
| is, in fact, a dog.
| woodruffw wrote:
| This would imply that anybody who has studied a subject
| enough to recognize references to that subject is, in fact,
| the subject itself.
|
| It's obvious on face value that criminal prosecutors aren't
| (necessarily) criminals and that WWII historians aren't
| (necessarily) neo-Nazis.
|
| If you're going to accuse people who know about a subject
| of being that subject, be less oblique about it.
| rriepe wrote:
| There's no deeper reading to my post. I'm claiming that
| you're literally a dog.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Better than a featherless biped, I guess.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought
| represented useless academic research, and then told himself
| these "tee-hee postmodern bogus."
|
| Yep. That rubs me the wrong way too.
|
| One characteristic of truly earnest people is that they're non-
| judgemental and open to new ideas and experiences. If one can
| get past the boilerplate, there's some really cool ideas in
| postmodernism. I think PG is being the opposite of earnest in
| that pithy, incurious takedown.
| chmod600 wrote:
| The "bogus" comment falls in a paragraph about ventures where
| the earnest don't generally win. So the first question to ask
| is: do the earnest generally win in that kind of academic
| field? I don't know much about that field, but I'm guessing
| probably not just because it is too closely tied to politics.
| If you earnestly persue research, you are likely to find
| something that contradicts the current political fashions, and
| end up buried. So in that sense, PG is probably right.
|
| The next question is: is he inappropriately dismissive (or even
| insulting) to the field over all? Does is have value that he
| unfairly dismisses? You seem to think so.
|
| But even if so, pretty much everyone needs to be dismissive
| about a lot of stuff. At least he's transparent about where his
| blind spots are.
| adamsea wrote:
| None of what you are saying responds to what the parent
| poster actually said.
|
| You're constructing your own argument and then claiming the
| other person was arguing what you're arguing, but did a bad
| job of it.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Have you ever read a codebase that accomplishes very little,
| yet has a million layers of abstraction? With classes like
| `MainApplicationBeanInjectionFactoryBuilder`?
|
| I think the scathing point was that much can be written about
| nothing, and one way to obscure your content is to use language
| such as "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness".
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Exactly! Whoever said humanities academics have a monopoly on
| obscurantism?
| adamsea wrote:
| Parent's point was that while those phrases sound like word
| jumble to some, they actually have very specific and well-
| understood meanings.
|
| Imagine a non-techie person listen to two software engineers
| talking. Closures, event bubbling, monads, abstract classes -
| they'd say the same thing.
|
| Can someone without CS / programming knowledge really judge a
| good abstraction versus a bad one? Similarly, it's arrogant
| of us to assume we can do the same in the humanities, because
| it means we assume the humanities are easy / trivial and so
| on, which they are not.
|
| It's like the "my kid could paint that" cliche of Modernist
| painting - maybe your kid could, but, you saying that just
| indicates that you aren't educated about what the artist is
| doing, why they choose to do it, and the previous works of
| art the artist is responding to or in dialogue with.
|
| Kind of like, "why can't everything be HTML/CSS, with maybe a
| little JQuery?" Sure, you have a point, but there are clearly
| more sophisticated use-cases where that approach is not the
| most effective, and, your saying that kinda indicates you may
| not have encountered or had to deal with those use-cases.
|
| Truth be told I think computer science, at least the parts of
| it where you get to create abstractions which then define the
| bounds of what is possible within that programming paradigm
| (see - word jumble!) is closer to the "soft" humanities than
| many are aware of or would care to see.
|
| Tech folks tend to love/desire "certainty" in one form
| another, and, the easiest way to achieve that is to rule out
| everything which is "uncertain", and, constrain your domain
| until "certainty" can be achieved. Which can be a great
| approach for certain technical problems, but also IMHO
| results in ignorant behavior towards anything which threatens
| said certainty.
| pgwhalen wrote:
| I enjoyed this comment - as someone that is occasionally
| skeptical of these lofty ideas in the humanities, the
| analogy to abstractions/concepts in programming never
| occurred to me.
|
| On the certainty thing, though - I see what you're saying
| about tech folks desiring certainty, but I've also found
| that quantitative or hard-science thinkers are often very
| good at dealing with uncertainty. One reason being that
| they have the strongest sense of what true certainty is,
| and the ability to measure uncertainty relative to that.
| For example, proving the efficacy of a vaccine: we really
| can be extremely certain that a vaccine is effective. Other
| areas of study (that I believe are still entirely valid and
| important), just can't achieve that level of rigor.
|
| I should note my views may be skewed as the entirety of my
| career has been as a software engineer at an options
| trading firm, where we are buying and selling uncertainty
| in a sense, so we have to be comfortable with it.
|
| After writing that all out.. maybe I'm just confirming you
| example of constraining uncertainty until there can be
| certainty, or at least a well-quantified form of
| uncertainty.
| adamsea wrote:
| Thank you! Much appreciated.
|
| > I've also found that quantitative or hard-science
| thinkers are often very good at dealing with uncertainty.
| One reason being that they have the strongest sense of
| what true certainty is, and the ability to measure
| uncertainty relative to that.
|
| That's an excellent point and I agree with you. My
| statement about tech folks and certainty was a bit too
| broad, tbh, and maybe expresses some personal frustration
| as much as anything.
|
| At the end of the day we're all human and vulnerable to
| the same tricks of psychology and human foibles.
|
| [EDIT: I want to share in a quote another poster shared
| that's relevant to our discussion: 'Math is hard because
| it is easy. The humanities are easy because they are
| hard.'
|
| It's not just about math being quantifiable, but that
| there's a much lower barrier of entry to discuss "the
| humanities" - justice, ethics, the meaning of life, etc.
| Maybe a good analogy would be we can all discuss the
| weather, but that means sometimes we think meteorologists
| are just quacks? : )].
| anubidiocane wrote:
| But what is the layman term for "hermeneutic dialectic
| hegemonic whiteness"?
|
| And why a researcher should use it?
|
| Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an
| implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda
| calculus"
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an
| implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda
| calculus"_
|
| ---
|
| _The company wasn 't called Y Combinator yet. At first we
| called it Cambridge Seed. But that name never saw the light
| of day, because by the time we announced it a few days
| later, we'd changed the name to Y Combinator. We realized
| early on that what we were doing could be national in scope
| and we didn't want a name that tied us to one place._
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html
|
| Why did you choose the name "Y Combinator?"
|
| _The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer
| science. It 's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a
| program that runs programs; we're a company that helps
| start companies._
|
| https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/
|
| _Then he named his startup incubator after a LISP
| function._
|
| https://www.quora.com/How-did-Y-Combinator-get-its-name
|
| I want to say that I read somewhere -- maybe in comments on
| HN -- that the Lamda part of that is also a reference to
| the starting letter for Lisp which stuck in my mind due to
| the mostly forgotten two quarters of Greek I had eons ago.
| But I'm super short of sleep and can't be arsed to go
| digging for more explanations/citations for why it got the
| name it got as random crap to do on a Saturday afternoon
| while failing to be productive due to the aforementioned
| lack of sleep.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| > But what is the layman term for "hermeneutic dialectic
| hegemonic whiteness"?
|
| "A deep dialogue on the overwhelming power wielded by white
| people".
|
| > And why a researcher should use it?
|
| I get that fields have their different choices of jargon,
| my point is it's hard to misrepresent bad content when it's
| written like the above example.
|
| > Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an
| implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda
| calculus"
|
| touche
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Your paraphrase loses some of the reference of the
| original. The terms chosen there have legacies and
| specific meanings within their disciplines
| adamsea wrote:
| Also want to add to the parent post that "hermeneutic
| dialectic hegemonic whiteness" is actually just a bunch
| of keywords and I doubt a competent academic would use
| that particular phrase.
|
| It's easier for me to imagine, "The hermeneutics of
| hegemonic whiteness", "The dialectic of whiteness and
| hegemony", etc.
|
| I have a hard time imagining "hermeneutic" and
| "dialectic" together because of what those words actually
| mean. I feel like you'd see one or the other in the kind
| of phrase / term / sentence we are discussing.
|
| "Hermeneutics" is defined as: "the branch of knowledge
| that deals with interpretation, especially of the Bible
| or literary texts." It started with close reading of the
| Bible and today can encompass close reading and analysis
| of literature or be used in a more general way to talk
| about a sort of abstracted, looking-at-the-symbols-within
| approach to analyzing something.
|
| "Dialectic" is literally a dialogue between two people,
| the term originating with Ancient Greece and Socrate's
| approach to philosophy. Hegel retconned it to also
| include a sort of evolution-through-competition where two
| things (for lack of a better word) logically opposite to
| each other butt heads and produce a "synthesis" - not
| unlike the "marketplace of ideas".
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/
|
| "This "textbook" Being-Nothing-Becoming example is
| closely connected to the traditional idea that Hegel's
| dialectics follows a thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern,
| which, when applied to the logic, means that one concept
| is introduced as a "thesis" or positive concept, which
| then develops into a second concept that negates or is
| opposed to the first or is its "antithesis", which in
| turn leads to a third concept, the "synthesis", that
| unifies the first two "
| Uhhrrr wrote:
| ""
| tim333 wrote:
| While it's not very Hacker News, 'humour' can have some value.
| Here's Calvin and Hobbes on much the same stuff
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2d/fa/65/2dfa65a534f5851ae849...
| iWorshipFAANGS wrote:
| Ah man, humor! I like humor too.
|
| I bet me liking humor puts me in a sizable minority, if not
| even silent majority, of HN readers.
|
| Another thing I don't like, which I've seen many other HN
| readers express that they also don't like, is over-
| politicization. That leads me to realize there's more about
| that line that I don't like besides just being dumb. The joke
| is lame, and by using the word "whiteness," it's deeply,
| unnecessarily, politicized.
| svat wrote:
| No doubt postmodernists have something interesting to say. But
| as the question is one of earnestness rather than importance or
| interestingness, consider some examples:
|
| > Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of
| _jouissance_ , not in itself, or even in the form of an image,
| but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is
| equivalent to the [?]-1 of the signification produced above, of
| the _jouissance_ that it restores by the coefficient of its
| statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).
|
| This is from Lacan who elsewhere refers to point-set topology
| and uses terms from it (bounded, compactness, etc) with no
| connection to their mathematical meaning, and here he invokes
| [?]-1. I got this reference from "Postmodernism and its
| problems with science" by Jean Bricmont (the original link has
| been excluded from the Wayback Machine, but PDF here: https://w
| ww.researchgate.net/profile/Jean_Bricmont/publicati...).
|
| Bricmont co-wrote the book _Impostures intellectuelles_
| (French) / _Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals '
| Abuse of Science_ (English) with Alan Sokal (after the Sokal
| affair). Not repeating the criticism in the above PDF or in
| their book, but consider a couple of responses to the book:
|
| * (From https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fashionable_
| Nonse...) Bruce Fink accused the authors of _demanding that
| "serious writing" do nothing other than "convey clear
| meanings."_
|
| * Luce Irigaray, who argued that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation"
| because it "privileges the speed of light over other speeds
| that are vitally necessary to us [...] privileged what goes the
| fastest", and that the science of fluid mechanics is under-
| developed because it is a quintessentially feminine topic, has,
| in her entry on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
| (https://iep.utm.edu/irigaray/), an actual section titled
| "Opaque Writing Style", which, if I'm reading correctly, says
| that it is intentional. The _London Review of Books_ carried a
| review (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n14/john-
| sturrock/le-pau... , reference via
| https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/tallis.html ; see also
| the many links on Sokal's page:
| https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/) of Sokal and Bricmont's
| book that defends her by saying:
|
| > Irigaray's invocations of the sciences concerned may be worse
| than dodgy, but in that libertarian province of the
| intellectual world in which she functions, far better wild and
| contentious theses of this sort than the stultifying rigour so
| inappropriately demanded by Sokal and Bricmont.
|
| My point is: in all fields you can find better and worse
| writers, you can find people "playing the game" or being
| unnecessarily obscure. Of course I don't know all the jargon of
| all fields, and my first instinct when something doesn't make
| sense will always be that it's me who has failed to understand,
| to trust that the authors are in fact saying something
| meaningful that a trained person in the field could understand
| with enough effort. But IMO a failure to be clear must at least
| be seen as a failure; when a field as a whole rejects clarity
| or correctness itself (even as at least an aspirational ideal),
| and considers it perfectly acceptable and defensible to abuse
| terminology from another field simply for prestige and effect
| (really, see the examples from Bricmont and Sokal, and
| responses thereto), then it seems a betrayal of this trust (the
| authors aren't _failing_ to be clear; they aren 't even
| _trying_! and everyone thinks this is fine!); it seems
| reasonable to suggest non-earnestness.
|
| (This is orthogonal to whether it is interesting and important
| --it may very well be--the point is only whether earnestness is
| considered a value.)
|
| --------
|
| Edit: The short version of this post is that no physicist or
| mathematician or engineer accused of being unclear will ever
| have a section in their biographical entry justifying their
| "opaque writing style", nor have it said that in _their_ world
| it 's better to be "wild" than correct. This IMO is a genuine
| value difference between the fields.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _you 'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic
| dialectic hegemonic whiteness."
|
| First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article
| returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a
| chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic
| research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern
| bogus."_ <
|
| That represents philosophy in general about as well as say
| Theranos represents startups in general.
|
| And that's maybe part of the point, that when interest in the
| work for its own sake (how fine details of things preserve and
| amplify culture on the one hand, or medical testing on the
| other hand) take a backseat to interest in what you can get
| from it (fill in the blanks here ^-^ ) things don't go so well.
| keiferski wrote:
| There is a weird expectation among some professions (Silicon
| Valley tech, especially, but I think it's probably endemic to
| any well-paid, well-respected class) that all other fields
| should be immediately understandable to the layman, and if they
| aren't, there's clearly charlatanry afoot.
|
| As you pointed out correctly, these are all fairly standard
| terms in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. The
| ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of
| technical terms, they sound _exactly_ as obscurantist to the
| outsider. Subnet Masks, Hyper-Text Markup Language, BIOS,
| JavaScript ( "What do you mean it has nothing to do with
| Java?") and so on.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Does that mean they don't have respect for say quantum
| computing research? Because I'm pretty confident most people
| in SV won't understand, say, a paper on quantum error
| correction.
| keiferski wrote:
| Good point. I should add "non-technical" to my comment.
| pbourke wrote:
| > The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a
| bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist
| to the outsider.
|
| In other fields the obscurity is a side effect. In the
| humanities it's the point, to try to make the sky-castle
| ideas sound more Important and Scientific than they actually
| are. A big part of postmodern theory is the notion that there
| basically is no truth, just texts with varying degrees of
| authority. The field unironically describes itself.
| keiferski wrote:
| > In the humanities it's the point,
|
| No, it really isn't, and virtually no one who _earnestly_
| engages with the thinkers in question would come away
| thinking that.
| haberman wrote:
| I think the classic essay "How to Deconstruct Almost
| Anything" from 1993 is a counterexample:
| https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
| pbourke wrote:
| > virtually no one who earnestly engages with the
| thinkers in question would come away thinking that.
|
| I "earnestly engaged" with it by doing a humanities
| degree 20 years ago when this stuff was taking root.
|
| The only field that seems resistant to being overwhelmed
| by it is history, possibly because the scholarship must
| be grounded in original sources.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| What have you read in the humanities recently?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| If you want to try to read something from the humanities
| that doesn't use any specialised words, you could try
| Plato. But note that it will be very hard to understand and
| talk about and Plato himself was likely limited by the lack
| of suitable language to express his ideas.
|
| It seems pretty contemptuous to suggest that people in the
| fields you don't really know about are trying to obscure
| some secret bad opinion so that it can become accepted.
| Maybe these people are actually trying to express something
| complex and nuanced?
|
| I think there are a lot of issues with academic writing
| being obscure but I don't think these are unique to the
| humanities. Indeed I think you'll probably find many people
| in humanities fields are better writers than those in the
| academic areas you may be more familiar with.
| zemo wrote:
| no that's ... really not true. Those terms all have precise
| meanings and express new concepts more succinctly. In
| programming, we call this abstraction.
|
| Yes, there are obviously people in academia that are full
| of crap: other people in academia -also- think they are
| full of crap. The problem for outsiders is that they're
| largely incapable of discerning between the earnest deep
| thinkers and the self-promoting charlatans. Charlatans are
| always louder, so without stopping to understand the topic
| at hand, you're almost certainly giving the most of your
| attention to those who least deserve it.
| eloff wrote:
| I'm going to say bogus is too kind a word many times. There was
| a famous academic troll[1] that revealed some of these
| humanities for the make believe they are. These people
| basically made up garbage papers that sounded like these
| feminist, gender studies, and critical race disciplines and
| published them in peer reviewed journals. Even the people in
| these disciplines can't tell satire from seriousness - and
| that's damning. They even published a rewrite of mein kampf.
| Why should my tax dollars go towards that? These people should
| get a real job and contribute to society. Bogus is being too
| charitable.
|
| It made for one of my all time favorite episodes of Joe Rogan
| though. Worth a listen.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/9l1lzs/three_acad...
| literallycancer wrote:
| Why should any tax dollars go towards academic research?
|
| >These people should get a real job and contribute to society
|
| Careful with this reasoning. Commies said the same thing when
| they sent people they didn't like to uranium mine labor
| camps.
| eloff wrote:
| > Why should any tax dollars go towards academic research?
|
| Research is a process through which we unlock various
| technological orchards to harvest for the betterment of all
| mankind. The problem we have today is we're running low on
| new orchards. It's a crying shame how little we spend on
| research - compared to e.g. weapons.
|
| > Careful with this reasoning. Commies said the same thing
| when they sent people they didn't like to uranium mine
| labor camps.
|
| Do I dignify that with a reply? That's got nothing to do
| with what I said.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > Why should my tax dollars go towards that?
|
| Why should your tax dollars go towards CS research, when
| nearly half of all sampled papers (circa 2015) can't be
| reproduced [1]?
|
| As a society, we delegate funding based on perceptions of
| expertise: someone who knows _more than you or I_ about these
| specific fields decided that they deserved _some_ amount of
| funding (probably significantly less than you think).
| Sometimes that means that junk and fraud[2] gets through;
| that 's the cost of doing business in _every_ field.
|
| These kinds of embarrassing mistakes should be read as an
| indictment of academic culture and the failures of the peer
| review system _as a whole_ , not a "gotcha" against a field
| that you or I aren't qualified to evaluate. Which, again, is
| why nobody asked for my opinion or yours about which things
| to fund.
|
| [1]: http://reproducibility.cs.arizona.edu/
|
| [2]: https://medium.com/@tnvijayk/potential-organized-fraud-
| in-ac...
| eloff wrote:
| I have no problem with funding CS research. It's at least
| somewhat productive to society. Not hugely, but that's
| academia for you. Even batting 50% is great compared to 0%.
|
| These kinds of woke gender studies, socialist, racist,
| fields etc are a joke. I don't accept your implication that
| only someone inside the nut house are credentialed to
| evaluate it - if anything those seem like the people least
| likely to be able to make a clear judgment. These kinds of
| people are dangerous - they advocate for tearing down the
| system we have that works pretty well - with no coherent
| idea of what to replace it with. If they ever got into
| power we'd all be screwed.
|
| It's my opinion that these fields are a net negative to
| society as a whole, having nothing to do with science or
| any kind of semi-scientific discipline, and should not
| receive public funding. They are merely thinly disguised
| political ideologies. It's sad what academia has come to.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > having nothing to do with science or any kind of semi-
| scientific discipline, and should not receive public
| funding.
|
| It's the humanities. It's not supposed to be
| "scientific," with whatever weight you decide to place on
| that adjective.
|
| Our government (and every government) funds thousands of
| things, academic and not, that aren't themselves
| scientific: parks, libraries, public arts, aesthetic
| programs intended to motivate the public towards some
| policy goal[1]. Most people think these things should
| receive _some_ amount of funding, and recognize that
| _they themselves_ are not immediately qualified to
| distinguish worthy endeavours from un-worthy ones.
|
| [1]: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2009/
| spring/d...
| eloff wrote:
| Let's not compare gender studies to a park. That's a bit
| apples and oranges.
|
| Humanities are meant to have some redeeming value and
| some rigorousness even when you can't apply the
| scientific method.
|
| History, literature, philosophy, and anthropology are all
| good examples of valuable humanities where there is some
| grounding in logic and facts. Gender studies on the other
| hand is just an ideology with very little basis in
| reality, and little grounding of any kind in facts and
| logic. You could call it a religion of sorts, but it
| would be insulting to religions which at least have a
| richness of tradition and culture and philosophy behind
| them.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That's pretty much just opinion? Of course they include
| politics, as does history, anthropology, literature. That
| means nothing.
|
| Strawman PC gender studies you have encountered may have
| poisoned it for you. That doesn't mean its worthless, or
| even wrong.
| eloff wrote:
| No, but that is my opinion. I think it's a net negative
| to society until I see evidence to the contrary. Links
| welcome.
| rst wrote:
| Odd to see a stress on interest in a problem for its own sake
| from pg, who has elsewhere written that the startup economy would
| be crippled by raising taxes on people who had already gotten
| fabulously rich. If being in it for the money is "the wrong
| motive" to do a startup, downgrading the potential financial
| gains from set-for-dynasty to merely set-for-life would seem to
| be a way of ditching the poseurs...
| didibus wrote:
| > downgrading the potential financial gains from set-for-
| dynasty to merely set-for-life would seem to be a way of
| ditching the poseurs
|
| I've really started to think that inheritance is one of the
| biggest problem we have. Each one has the right to their own
| worth and riches acquired through their own effort, but if you
| pass those on afterwards then you create a dynasty that defeats
| the point of meritocracy and equality of opportunity. The
| incentives then become tribal, to your family, to your friends,
| and not simply a realization of your earnest passion.
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| "People's motives are as mixed in Silicon Valley as anywhere
| else. Even the founders motivated mostly by money tend to be at
| least somewhat interested in the problem they're solving, and
| even the founders most interested in the problem they're
| solving also like the idea of getting rich."
| nthj wrote:
| It seems to me the subtle miscommunication between billionaires
| and the rest of us is the rest of us are asking "what ever will
| you do with a dynasty" and many billionaires, I think, have a
| mental model of "I have proven I can employ this wealth more
| effectively than bureaucrats, and I like to solve big problems,
| and wealth makes it easier to solve big problems."
|
| This is a huge generalization we could easily find counter-
| examples and counter-arguments for, but we could also probably
| find fair arguments FOR this view, like Bill Gates.
|
| Anyway, I think it's probably a fair summary of how someone
| like PG could simultaneously hold the two ideas "don't start a
| startup for money" and "higher taxes are a bad idea" at the
| same time. Which is not to say that he's right, but I don't
| think he's incongruent.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| PG is on an Aristotelian roll lately, talking about virtues and
| politicians... might as well read Nicomachean Ethics
| maram wrote:
| Several comments here make me want to reply with Steve Jobs email
| to Gawker reporter:
|
| "By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create
| anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their
| motivations?"
| [deleted]
| dash2 wrote:
| "The one vital thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've
| got it made."
| dang wrote:
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/05/fake-honesty/
| sidlls wrote:
| Yet another PG essay in which he defines as positive
| characteristics those which he thinks he has, and in broad
| strokes completely dismisses the value of anything else.
| coldtea wrote:
| And yet the most succesful founders are closer to scum than
| earnest...
| paganel wrote:
| > It's a bigger social error to seem naive in most European
| countries than it is in America, and this may be one of subtler
| reasons startups are less commmon there. Founder culture is
| completely at odds with sophisticated cynicism.
|
| I have a high opinion of pg, but mocking an entire continent for
| non-earnestness because it doesn't make as much money as the US
| (because they have more startups because, supposedly, the
| Americans are less cynical than the Europeans) is borderline
| cynic (and I say that as a cynic myself).
|
| Money, and judging almost everything through the prism of money,
| is one of the most cynical things we do have right now in our
| society, and as such I appreciate more a "Greed is good
| discourse" because it shows its cynicism in plain view and does
| not try to hide it behind a veil of good intentions, like texts
| as this one do.
| jasode wrote:
| _> non-earnestness because it doesn't make as much money as the
| US (because they have more startups [...] , and judging almost
| everything through the prism of money,_
|
| You're interpreting the blog essay unfairly. PG isn't looking
| at _everything_ (such as "earnestness") only through the prism
| of money. It's a blog post with deliberately _limited scope_.
|
| His first sentence sets the _context_ for the rest of the
| essay: _" Jessica and I have certain words that have special
| significance when we're talking about _startups_."_
|
| Yes, we all know there can be _other activities_ to also
| express earnestness such as creating art paintings, music,
| parenting, volunteering, teaching, etc. but he omits those and
| discusses it in relation to _startups_ because... startups is
| what he often specializes in writing about. It doesn 't look
| like mocking Europe to me.
|
| I understand you want a more universal essay (measures of
| earnestness beyond startups) but that's not necessary for PG's
| blog audience.
| darkerside wrote:
| I hear what you're saying and there might be some truth to it.
| I didn't read that "sophisticated cynicism" as very mocking.
| You could even say he's calling them cooler than us, in a very
| earnest kind of a way.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Well, except that it flies in the face of American culture
| being considered "the coolest" in the world. Heck, the modern
| meaning even comes from (African) Americans !
|
| https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/10/cool-the-
| etymology-...
| darkerside wrote:
| Just because we invented doesn't mean we have the monopoly.
| Many American inventions have been perfected overseas.
|
| Besides, I would not put that opinion on him. pg isn't what
| I'd call a mainstream thinker.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Yes, you're seeing two very different value systems run up
| against each other. Paul Graham obviously has a bias toward
| thinking the "founder culture" value system is better...but
| this stance ignores the fact that the European, more
| traditional culture leads to greater balance --stricter/better
| regulations around tech and privacy, ownership, and in most
| places labor.
|
| In America you can make pretty much anything happen but at the
| cost of living in a society which is lax in terms of
| regulation, the consequences of which we're seeing quite
| palpably this year (workplace discrimination, horrible
| environmental damage, etc.). While I won't knock anyone for
| admitting they don't know something, not every ignorant person
| looks for answers once those answers directly go against their
| agenda. This is what snobbishness, to a certain extent, helps
| regulate.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It's seems weird because the UK and Europe had the original
| founders! I guess the Vikings might have been the first but
| they typically plundered as an enterprise. Focusing on
| character traits as a societal descriptor kind of comes off
| like saying that the French don't have a word for
| entrepreneur!
|
| So I imagine reality is different than these tropes.
|
| But it is interesting to ask why does Scandinavia have more
| startups per capita than other countries?
|
| Like structural racism are there structural components that
| drive startups?
| cambalache wrote:
| Not only that , in many parts of the world (LATAM for example)
| American institutions are not considered earnest at all, you
| know they all have underhanded motives.
| boxed wrote:
| Comparing the US to Sweden it seems to other way around to me.
| Americans assume that all of government and all companies are
| evil. If that isn't absolute cynicism I don't know what is.
| (Plus it enables evil since it is expected so there is little
| anger.)
|
| Plus the whole thing with Americans being hopelessly naive
| against religion, the one area they should absolutely be
| cynical and/or uninterested like Swedes.
| ddevine wrote:
| Retrospectively ascribing success to character traits that we
| favour is subjective to the point of meaninglessness.
|
| Earnestness, like any other trait or 'virtue' is not innate or
| absolute. Everyone has the capacity to exhibit this trait or be
| seen to exhibit it, when refracted through the non-objective lens
| of someone else's bias and perception. For example, a politician
| for partyX is seen to be an earnest 'straight man' who cares
| deeply by his supporters, while supporters of partyY view him as
| a reckless oaf.
|
| To promote the use of personality traits as a predictor of
| success is naive at best.
| dash2 wrote:
| Well, here is an article by a Nobel prize winner, reviewing a
| large amount of empirical evidence that personality traits
| predict success. See particularly section 4.
|
| https://www.dphu.org/uploads/attachements/books/books_4871_0...
| timdaub wrote:
| Blaaaa blaaa. How come earnestness is such a great virtue in that
| $100 billion company you had lots of shares in, but still Y
| Combinator's strategy is to invest as diversely as possible in as
| many good teams a possible since they know that > 90% of them
| will ultimately fail.
| [deleted]
| lawwantsin17 wrote:
| PG hardly ever writes worthy stuff anymore. Move over your Rich A
| Hole.
| [deleted]
| escape_goat wrote:
| What Graham is attempting to prescribe here is an unmediated
| engagement with a problem. In truth, "making the world better" is
| no less ulterior a motive in engaging with that problem than
| "making piles of money."
| Razengan wrote:
| > _paulgraham.com_
|
| Oh. All I know to expect from seeing that is a weird kind of
| popularity, agreement and participation you don't see for other
| blogs posted on HN, sometimes with the other half-or-so of
| comments being annoyed with Paul Graham.
|
| Does HN covertly promote all links to that blog or is there
| something more substantial to it?
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| I find this funny. I'll bite. Paul Graham created Hacker News.
| And is a founder of Y Combinator.
| wincy wrote:
| I didn't know this, and I've been using HN for years now,
| thanks for the information. I just thought Paul Graham was
| some super popular vaguely tech person.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| I should have recalled this sooner, but it happened to me
| once, too.
|
| I was doing a product demo of a remotely operated device
| with a guy from AT&T. We were supposed to be able to
| communicate through the device but it wasn't working well.
| They'd just rolled out a new network and it was spotty. I
| suggested at one point that we use text messages as a back
| up for communicating and I actually asked him if he was ok
| with that.
|
| He says, 'Yeah, no problem. My name's on the patent.'
| 'huh?', 'I'm on the SMS patent.'
| zepto wrote:
| Yes, and when we say 'created' hacker news, he coded it
| himself in a _dialect of lisp which he also coded just for
| this purpose_.
| ajju wrote:
| Is this a tongue in cheek reference to Ken Thompson's trick
| in "reflections on trusting trust"? [1] if so, it wins the
| 2020 award for originality in HN conspiracy theories!
|
| 1 -
| https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
| zepto wrote:
| No. It's just historical context:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
| ajju wrote:
| Got it. I am aware of the history. I was reading too much
| into your comment. I thought you were joking that PG may
| have used the Thompson trick to juice scores for his
| posts on HN.
| zepto wrote:
| Hah. No. I don't think he'd need to go that far. If he
| wanted to juice them he'd just have his own upvotes count
| 1000x or something like that.
| boxed wrote:
| He writes well and is part of the in group. Of course he is
| super wrong about certain crucial details often which can be
| frustrating.
| ANarrativeApe wrote:
| As someone who has been accused of earnestness I have long
| maintained that Earnestness-ness-ness is the enemy. Earnestness
| minus humor is the enemy of building a scalable community.
| Churchill once defined a fanatic as someone who can't change
| their mind and won't change the subject. To move beyond the early
| adopters and get through to the late majority we need to work out
| not how to keep the conversation on track, but how to let our
| audience develop it and still be able to deliver our punchline.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > Starting a successful startup makes you rich and famous. So a
| lot of the people trying to start them are doing it for those
| reasons. Instead of what? Instead of interest in the problem for
| its own sake. That is the root of earnestness. [2]
|
| I think he got the definition of "earnest" wrong. It is not about
| genuine interest. "Earnest" simply means something like "honestly
| revealing your motivations", no? What if you earnestly want to
| become rich and famous? What's wrong with that?
| croissants wrote:
| My perception is that one drawback of earnestness is that it
| often comes off as just being boring. The most earnest people I
| know are not popular. The most popular people I know are more
| like twinkle-in-the-eye-kind-of-BS-but-not-pathological-liars.
|
| I don't mean to say "grr, why aren't nerds more popular!". I mean
| more that this specific kind of earnestness seems to preclude the
| playing of certain conversational games that most people seem to
| enjoy. Earnestness, for example, is pretty far away from my
| conception of "playful" or "flirty" or even "fun".
| boxed wrote:
| I've met some people like that. But only because they are
| earnest and also have a boring interest or just one or two
| interests. Not very common in my experience.
| indymike wrote:
| Earnestness is what happens when people "let the guard down"
| and just be themselves. That's a rare state for a lot of
| people, who have spent a lifetime trying to be anyone but who
| they really are.
| ritchiea wrote:
| Exactly, there's nothing inherently boring about being
| earnest. You can be earnest and boring but you could also be
| earnest with a good sense of humor and an interest in film
| history or software engineering. I'm not going to go all in
| on pg's earnestness essay but it's a positive trait and if
| you have genuine interests, there's a good chance being
| earnest makes you more interesting when discussing interests
| because you are less likely to be invested in impressing
| other people with your interest. If you're earnest your
| interests tend to scratch your itches of curiosity. But if
| you are earnest and uncurious then yes you may be boring.
| alextheparrot wrote:
| Can you expand on the boringness? That conflicts with what I
| think because I believe that engaging hobbies are that vitality
| which manifests as "playful" and "fun". Are you willing to try
| something new, and if you do, are you willing to learn to do it
| well enough to enjoy it.
|
| Engaging with a hobby tends to involve making it part of me -
| the hobbies I haven't committed to actually liking and just
| performed have always been the ones that get lost in the
| shuffle of things. Even more so, being so committed to a hobby
| pushes me to do more heavy lifting when it comes to doing it
| socially.
|
| (Edit) After a bit more thought I decided an example would be
| good:
|
| I love Jorge Luis Borges, so when my book club finally decided
| to read him I took the time to rate many of the stories, trying
| to collect an essence of his magical, gaucho, and mystical
| stories to help focus our discussion. That is what I mean ---
| to love something so much that effort becomes effortless
| because you're bursting at the seems hoping to share. In this
| way we didn't just read "Library of Babel", but some of the
| little mysteries that show a different touch of his craft.
| jtanderson wrote:
| It seems to me that the perception of boringness can come as
| a result of earnestness being very niche/focused. Your
| example is a great one! But if anybody who is not a fan or
| doesn't know Borges, they would probably find a person
| earnestly passionately about his writing quite boring -- as
| one can only have the time and mental energy to be truly
| earnest about so many things.
|
| In contrast, GP's example of popular people are likely those
| who are good at faking that kind of deep interest in many
| things, tailored to their present company, so that they
| attract a few people from many different crowds. Of course,
| this is based on my own experience only; in certain circles I
| can feel quite loquacious and come off as extroverted --
| usually because of an earnestly shared interest -- but in
| most cases I think I come across as boring or even
| introverted!
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| Re your example, Borges is one of my fav authors too. Would
| love to see that list.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Earnest but interesting is sometimes a recipe for drama.
| Nothing worse than being well-meaning, right about something
| and saying something no one really wants to hear.
|
| If you have any sense whatsoever, you intentionally shoot for
| "boring" while being publicly earnest.
|
| Remember: "May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese
| _curse_. There 's a downside to being _interesting._
| andi999 wrote:
| That proverb is wrongfully attributed to the chinese.(me
| beeing the party pooper here)
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I initially wrote it without the word _Chinese_ and felt
| like the sentence didn 't convey "This is intended to wish
| you ill." I felt it sounded more like "This is a swear
| word."
|
| _Can 't win for losing._ ;)
| [deleted]
| ajju wrote:
| As someone who is most likely on the more boring end of the
| spectrum, I agree with many parts of your comment :)
|
| Still, I have learned that being earnest and being fun are not
| opposites. Sometimes earnest people are spending most of their
| time focused on work (and if they are good natured, its fun to
| work with them!). But one can get better at being fun if you
| value and prioritize having fun with other people for its own
| sake.
|
| I have also found that folks (including me) particularly enjoy
| friends who are earnest about their work / side projects. I
| especially enjoy spending time with friends who are earnestly
| interested in areas I know little about. Their energy and
| enthusiasm are infectious and talking to them about their area
| opens these clear windows into new worlds that are otherwise
| hard to find.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _Earnestness, for example, is pretty far away from my
| conception of "playful" or "flirty" or even "fun"._
|
| Cliff Stoll is the most earnest person I have talked to in the
| past year, and also one of the most playful and fun. See e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU
|
| I think you have a non-standard personal definition of
| "earnest". As I understand the words, earnestness and
| playfulness are completely orthogonal/unrelated attributes.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| I appreciate these essays. Cannot believe all of the negativity
| and cynicism in the comments.
| ummwhat wrote:
| Here's an easy way to figure out where earnestness matters vs
| where it's just bullshitting all the way down. Are there any
| prodigies? Mathematics: yes. Music: yes. Real estate: no.
| puranjay wrote:
| You'll find earnestness in fields where the "system" is known,
| transparent, learnable, and verifiable. Musicians and
| mathematicians can't bullshit because other practitioners will
| catch on easily.
|
| In real estates and startups, the "system" is usually esoteric,
| highly network dependent, and non-verifiable. You can't tell if
| a startup founder is truly a genius, or just lucked out (or had
| access to his dad's millions as seed funding).
|
| Any field where knowledge remains locked away in closed
| networks essentially becomes the domain of bullshit.
|
| Open knowledge breeds earnestness.
|
| If everyone knew _exactly_ how every real estate deal in the
| world was structured, there would be no bullshit real estate
| investors.
| anubidiocane wrote:
| > Real estate: no
|
| What about Graham Stephan?
| iWorshipFAANGS wrote:
| How would you know there are no prodigies in Real estate? There
| are certainly children who display an early knack in resource
| allocation.
|
| How would a child practice real estate anyway? There are no
| astronaut prodigies either, as far as I know.
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| Denial of the existence of white supremacy is a fun easter egg
| embedded in the middle of the essay.
| brighton36 wrote:
| Unfortunately, the problem with seeing white supremacy is that
| in doing so, we create white supremacy.
| essayist wrote:
| I can choose to see (or not) that the prisoner being walked
| down the street is shackled. And maybe there are some good
| reasons for choosing not to see.
|
| But it seems the beginning of sanity for that prisoner,
| herself, to see her chains.
| adamsea wrote:
| [EDIT: Every statement here is a basic fact, easily
| verifiable and backed by reputable scholarship and reaearch.
| Controversy comes from peoples dislike of the implication of
| these facts, not the truthfulness of the statements
| themselves. TBH I think downvoters should be ashamed of
| themselves. Or, better educate themselves.]
|
| What? No.
|
| White supremacy is literally a cop murdering a man by
| pressing his knee on the guys neck until he dies, with the
| cops buddies standing by and watching.
|
| White supremacy is Ahmad Arbery being murdered while jogging
| because he was black:
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-
| news/202...
|
| White supremacy is the crack epidemic being treated primarily
| like a criminal issue in the 80s, and the opioid epidemic
| today being treated primarily like a health issue. Why?
| Because the crack epidemic primarily effected black people,
| and the opioid epidemic white people.
|
| White supremacy is racist housing policies where Black people
| can't get loans:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/chicago.
| ..
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-
| rac...
|
| I understand the discomfort, confusion, and frustration that
| can arise when talking about racism and white supremacy, and
| there certainly are plenty of people who don't express
| themselves in the most palatable way about it or who also
| believe things that may not be true.
|
| But white supremacy is a real thing and if you take fifteen
| minutes online and look at wikipedia, and the articles I
| shared (in particular The Atlantic ones), then you'll see
| that it's real, it's a thing.
|
| And at that point it's then not a question of what anybody
| sees, but rather what you yourself choose to accept.
| cambalache wrote:
| > White supremacy is literally a cop murdering a man by
| pressing his knee on the guys neck until he dies, with the
| cops buddies standing by and watching
|
| That is not white supremacy until you prove he did it
| because the victim was black and not because other reasons
| (like him being a bully cop). So under that criteria any
| white person killed by a black person was victim of black
| supremacy.
|
| A better example of white supremacy is white people in
| liberal cities taking over the BLM movement and making all
| about themselves.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| > A better example of white supremacy is white people in
| liberal cities taking over the BLM movement and making
| all about themselves.
|
| Sounds like Earnestness
| adamsea wrote:
| [EDIT: tl;dr is if a bully cop targets someone black
| because they know they can get away with it because the
| person is black, not white, that's still an example of
| white supremacy / systemic racism in action.]
|
| No. Fuck off, seriously.
|
| Do you actually believe that about the murder of George
| Floyd? Do you actually think that cop would have behaved
| that way if George Floyd was white?
|
| What you said only makes any sense in a fantasy world
| where you simply ignore the facts of police violence over
| the last several decades.
|
| Or maybe you're ignorant, i.e. uneducated, in which case
| I would encourage you to read more and better material on
| the subject.
| disruptalot wrote:
| The existence of white supremacy and bogus academia is not
| mutually exclusive. Of course it depends how you want to define
| it.
| voidhorse wrote:
| Pretty sure there's one of these tucked away in almost every
| social commentary Graham essay.
| zepto wrote:
| Obviously you're going to get downvoted for this. But would you
| mind saying where the Easter egg is?
| raphlinus wrote:
| It's a link from the word "bogus."
|
| I'm going to expand on this a bit, possibly against my better
| judgment. I believe Paul Graham has a point here, and it's a
| good one. In intellectual pursuits, there's a spectrum from
| dealing purely with nature and facts, to dealing with human
| perceptions. To pick what I hope is a reasonably neutral
| example, doing the science to get containment of a fusion
| reaction is on one end of the spectrum. Planning and
| engineering a project to do it is in the middle. And making
| the case that carbon-based energy production poses an
| existential threat to humanity and that we should be
| investing hundreds of billions into fusion energy is on the
| other. All these inform each other, and I (personally) don't
| make a value judgment on which is most virtuous or most
| important.
|
| The salient thing is that Paul Graham did _not_ choose a
| somewhat neutral example. Rather, he chose one that is
| perhaps at the very center of the culture wars, and has done
| so using a highly emotionally loaded word. Because he is
| someone who knows how to use words, I can fairly confidently
| conclude that he is effectively declaring his position on the
| issue.
| zepto wrote:
| Did you look at the references at the other end of that
| link?
|
| It seems like you are equating rejecting papers like that,
| with denying white supremacy.
|
| Would it be possible for someone to think that particular
| kind of academic work is of low value, and yet still think
| white supremacy is real?
| throwaway2245 wrote:
| The informative question is the converse:
|
| Would your hypothetical someone append the word
| 'whiteness' to their primary example search illustrating
| bogus research?
| zepto wrote:
| If some particular research they thought was bogus was
| about the concept of whiteness, why wouldn't they?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Because they could cite the particular research instead.
| zepto wrote:
| That doesn't explain what's wrong with using the search
| as an example if a person thinks there is a problem with
| the research which shows up for that search.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The search returns thousands of results. Tomorrow's top
| results could be entirely different. I've only seen 2
| people say they read today's top result. They don't see
| what's wrong with it.[1][2]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400495
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400289
| geofft wrote:
| I looked at the references on the other end of the link.
| I expected it to be a particular article with all four of
| those words in the title. It was not; it was just a
| search for those four words.
|
| The top result is an article about the Swiss theologian
| Karl Barth (d. 1968), who was among other things one of
| the leaders of the theological opposition to the Third
| Reich and its subversion of Christian belief in service
| of white-supremacist ideology. The article says that
| Barth's interpretation of Romans 2 provides us a way
| today to avoid commingling Christian identity and
| whiteness.
|
| It's certainly _possible_ for someone who believes white
| supremacy exists (and is worth opposing) to think that
| academic work that reads Barth today to counter racial
| superiority disguised as Christianity is of low value. I
| 'd say it's pretty unlikely.
|
| To be fair, this is not the most charitable
| interpretation. The most charitable interpretation is
| that the author of the essay has never seriously read any
| academic work involving the words "hermeneutic,"
| "dialectic," "hegemonic," or "whiteness" and they're just
| four words that he thinks mean nothing, and that he
| didn't actually read the results in the Google Scholar
| search before a middlebrow dismissal (to use his own
| term) of the results. That would make him like the vast
| majority of the folks who deny the existence of white
| supremacy - dismissing serious opposition to it as
| _silly_ instead of specifically disbelieving it.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| It's worth mentioning Paul Graham has a degree in
| philosophy. He should know what hermeneutic and dialectic
| mean.
| nonce42 wrote:
| I read the linked paper out of curiosity. It's a
| theological paper arguing against forms of Christianity
| that are based on the world-view of whiteness; instead
| Christianity should move toward a "decolonial option". The
| paper's arguments are based on the famous theologian Karl
| Barth and his commentary on Romans 2, so it's not easy
| reading.
|
| Is this bogus? If you consider theology bogus, then yes.
| But the paper is highly relevant to current US politics
| with the influence of evangelical churches and their
| embrace of a white-centered model of the world. (Although
| it doesn't explicitly get into politics.)
|
| One irony of linking to this paper is that religion is
| highly marked by earnestness, and this paper even more so.
| The paper's author is clearly genuinely interested in this
| subject as a "theology nerd". She is writing not for
| personal gain but to make the world a better place.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I think PG is engaging in a very common form of fallacy,
| the assumption that _everyone agrees with his judgement
| on an issue_ (in this case the uselessness of certain
| avenues of research and endeavor) and thus that their
| intentions must be viewed by interpreting their actions
| in light of that ascribed belief, so if they are engaging
| in the endeavors he finds useless, they must also be
| doing so through a lack of earnestness.
|
| This is a common way of converting a difference in
| judgement about the value of particular activities into a
| characterization of dishonesty and fraudulent activity;
| when done accidentally it is a sign of lack of ability to
| recognize differences in viewpoints, when done
| intentionally it's technique of avoiding debate on the
| issue on which agreement is assumed through the
| distraction of casting moral aspersions at those who
| disagree.
| [deleted]
| throwawayback wrote:
| How could someone deny white supremacy? White supremacy is
| everywhere. It is watching us right now. It is reading along
| with you as you read this. This morning, I had white supremacy
| on my toast.
|
| Wait a minute.... my toast is made of.... _white_ bread.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| I earnestly think his writing has an overindulgent fandom here.
| Every single blog post rockets to the top and, in my opinion,
| they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or
| persuasion. He may write snappily, but is every single post
| worthy of Han's top slot?
| fbelzile wrote:
| I mean, you're using a site which self-selects for his target
| demographic. He's the founder of a VC company which created the
| site your visiting and apparently his blog gets 15 million page
| views per year. I think it's just a numbers game, not fandom.
|
| I'm not defending what he writes, but this posts are generally
| fun to read and think about. Sometimes I don't agree with him
| or find holes in his arguments, but there's usually a nugget of
| truth you can take away. They're just blog posts, he doesn't
| need to be infallible.
|
| The occasional self-promotion from the people running the site
| is a price I'm willing to pay to use the site.
| pjc50 wrote:
| In some ways, this entire site exists to promote him.
| jhawk28 wrote:
| It used to. If you look at the recent discussions, they have
| been very negative responses.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I think his earlier posts were more insightful. Or I was
| just younger.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Part of what I once said about why Def Leppard songs were
| meaningful to me:
|
| _A group of young men singing about love who also stood by
| their talented but now severely handicapped band member after
| he lost an arm is something that spoke to my soul. To me, these
| people had to know something more than pretty words. There had
| to be something deeper in their songs than just "sex, drugs and
| rock and roll."_
|
| https://genevievefiles.blogspot.com/2020/04/anger-management...
|
| Words never stand completely on their own. What they mean to
| people is shaped by context, history and reputation.
|
| Hacker News wasn't always a space with 5 million unique
| visitors per month who mostly barely know each other. When I
| originally joined in 2009, it had a sense of community.
|
| I never got to be one of the "insiders" in that community. I
| was a visitor looking in from the outside.
|
| But it did exist and many of those people still come here,
| though their presence isn't obvious. I don't think you can tell
| who pg's friends are by who says what on Hacker News.
|
| I've always respected the man, though he and I were never
| friends. I respected him because of how he comported himself
| here when he was in my mind just a moderator for a forum that I
| participated on, before he was big time famous and big time
| wealthy, when his wealth was measured in words starting with M,
| not B.
|
| I don't read every single thing he writes and I never have. But
| I certainly take his words seriously when I do sometimes read
| them.
|
| He has a PhD and he suggested to his girlfriend that the two of
| them should start a company together. That company is, of
| course, YC.
|
| I feel like it gets little press as a "pro diversity" company,
| but it's a big company with a woman founder and that's true
| because of Paul Graham. It was not Jessica Livingston who came
| up with the idea.
|
| It's sort of a stealth diversity thing and I generally don't
| say too much about that because I think that's the best way to
| do diversity and I don't want to ruin it by calling a lot of
| attention to it.
|
| But we've had a pandemic all year and the entire world is
| cranky as all hell -- me included -- and it's just rubbing me
| the wrong way that people are so desperate to find a dog to
| kick these days. So I feel a need to give a bit of pushback
| here lately.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "people are so desperate to find a dog to kick these days"
|
| Thank you for a perfect description of the situation.
| zepto wrote:
| Yes. It's because of who he is. If I wrote this post, it would
| not have the same meaning as if he wrote it.
|
| I know that sounds counterintuitive, but the reason is that we
| know that PG has huge experience of and access to startup
| founders and seen their outcomes and has had a great deal of
| opportunity to formulate thoughts like like this on the basis
| of what he has seen.
|
| I have experience of startups too. I could have written
| something like this, but it genuinely wouldn't have been as
| meaningful coming from me, because I don't have the same
| perspective as he does.
| throwaway284534 wrote:
| I beg someone out there, please run an experiment that
| reposts PG's articles on Medium.com with a different author's
| name. All things equal, I wouldn't doubt that HN would start
| giving these posts a proper vote count.
|
| But then again, some people are more equal than others.
| _shrug_
| zepto wrote:
| Some people have more experience than others.
| alecbz wrote:
| I think if your perspective has enabled you to know things
| you wouldn't have otherwise, _most_ of that should just come
| through from the writing. It should be possible for you to
| write in a way that's convincing independently of who you
| are.
|
| A different person might not have been able to produce the
| same essay, but if the essay is the same, who the author is
| shouldn't matter too much (for a good essay).
| psyc wrote:
| Nope, I came to the same conclusion as your parent, when I
| wondered why every one of these threads for the last
| several years has been full of dismissal and criticism, and
| why the phrase "out of touch" gets flogged like a dead
| horse. I've been reading pg for 17 years, so I know who he
| is, what he's done, where he's coming from, his writing
| style... I can take his essays for what they are _with all
| that context_. Of _course_ his opinions and perspective are
| what they are, because it 's literally his life's work to
| identify potentially successful founders before they're
| successful.
|
| Also, I don't suffer from that HN thing where nobody can
| simply consider an article, or do follow-up research
| themselves, without measurability, studies and citations,
| as if they're petrified they might become epistemically
| infected and be wrong about something that probably doesn't
| even impact their life in the slightest.
| jelliclesfarm wrote:
| I have read PG essays for the last 4-5 something years.
| YC was never under my radar before that. The first time I
| saw 'PG essays', I was excited because I thought they
| meant PG Wodehouse who is my favourite author ever and I
| was excited that YC reads Wodehouse together.
|
| Alas..that wasn't the case. But I don't regret the PG
| essays and have come to appreciate them over the years. I
| think it's because I didn't have any expectation about
| this person's writing or prior knowledge about PG. But
| not knowing who Paul Graham was and reading them for the
| first time, I couldn't figure out the enthusiasm around
| it. Maybe it was my disappointment that they weren't by
| my PG. But over time, I have come to appreciate it.
|
| These are what I call 'through my lens' writings. The
| words derive weight from the cult of personality. And the
| lens they see the world through..
| zepto wrote:
| I simply can't see how this can be right.
|
| What we know about PG's experience is a _huge_ prior that
| shapes how we interpret what he writes.
|
| I think this probably explains some of the polarization we
| see in the comments - people who don't know who he is see
| this as just a dumb blog post that seems to be getting too
| much karma. People who do, see it as insight from someone
| who is in a position to actually know something.
| ckastner wrote:
| But what you are describing is just an appeal to authority.
|
| It's quite possible that putting the assertions of the text
| in the context of this particular authority does give it more
| credibility, but I've also heard that same authority make
| some very poor assertions.
|
| Just look at the objective criticism that some of the posts
| gather. Sometimes, there are really major, easily
| contradicted flaws in these texts.
| zepto wrote:
| You're going to need to explain how you conclude that I am
| making an appeal to authority.
|
| I didn't say anything about the validity of his argument.
| Only that it means something different and more interesting
| given his experience, than it would coming from someone
| else.
|
| Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us than
| when a random blogger is wrong.
| ckastner wrote:
| > _You're going to need to explain how you conclude that
| I am making an appeal to authority._
|
| Because of your phrasing: "Yes. It's because of who he
| is."
|
| > _Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us
| than when a random blogger is wrong._
|
| Relative to each other, perhaps.
|
| However, is something wrong by PG more interesting than
| literally every other topic being discussed on HN, so
| that it "rockets to the top", to quote the comment you
| initially replied to.
| zepto wrote:
| In that phrase, "Yes. It's because of who he is.", I am
| not referring to the validity of his argument. I am
| explaining the fact that his posts receive a lot of
| attention.
|
| There is simply no appeal to authority being made.
|
| The rest of your comment isn't clear, are you saying
| there is something wrong with people finding PG's pieces
| interesting?
| qPM9l3XJrF wrote:
| An "overindulgent fandom" which seems to reflexively write
| critical comments of anything PG/YC related.
| [deleted]
| lazyjones wrote:
| On average, his writings are definitely more worthy of
| discussion than the newest JS framework or somebody doing
| something with old or underpowered hardware. Perhaps most of
| the once-top posts aren't as exciting as one would believe?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I enjoy reading his posts, but I'm not really representative
| of the prototypical HN reader.
|
| I do think they get more attention than ones written by
| others, but, hey; it's his baby, so it's not surprising that
| they go so well.
|
| For myself, I have _always_ practiced Honor, Integrity,
| Honesty and Earnestness. Has nothing to do with business. It
| 's a personal philosophy.
|
| It did me well, when I worked for a Japanese company, but
| tends to elicit scorn, when dealing with Americans.
| [deleted]
| longerthoughts wrote:
| >they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or
| persuasion
|
| He's not writing research papers. He's just a thoughtful guy
| with a lot of experience sharing his ideas as concisely as
| possible. Part of the reason the posts are so interesting is
| because of the discussions they prompt - I wouldn't mistake the
| level of interest on HN for everybody treating these as gospel.
| afpx wrote:
| I love PG, but some of his essays lately seem to make me sad,
| like he's out of touch. I know plenty of earnest (and, frankly,
| quite talented) people. What they lack is capital and guidance
| (and maybe some discipline and motivation, to be fair). But, they
| will read a PG essay and say, "Hey! That's me! Why can't PG
| invest in me?". To which case, they quickly realize, "Oh, cause I
| can't show that I can make any money from my idea. Or, because
| I'm not savvy at manipulating people or presenting my ideas
| well." Or something like that.
|
| So, what are those types of people to do?
| pietrovismara wrote:
| Not much. The idea that through hard work you can get anywhere,
| no matter where you come from, is just a gigantic delusion and
| a lie we've been insistently taught to believe.
|
| There's billions of people working daily harder than any CEO
| just to bring food to their families. They will never become
| rich.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I think the point of the essay is not that being earnest is
| enough to get funded, but rather than being earnest is NOT a
| disadvantage. There's a goodly chunk of the populace, even
| within tech, who might believe that it is, and I think the
| point of the essay is to demonstrate that it is not, and in
| fact it is even an advantage.
| dash2 wrote:
| I don't think the essay argues that being earnest is sufficient
| to get very rich.
| zemo wrote:
| he poses the idea of being earnest about something in a way that
| is disingenuous.
|
| > Why can't there be people interested in self-driving cars or
| social networks for their own sake?
|
| If you are interested in self-driving cars, but you are not
| interested in the effects that self-driving cars have on society,
| you are not actually interested in self-driving cars: you are
| interested in yourself. To be interested only in the problem-
| solving aspect of a domain is, first and foremost, to be
| interested in your own mastery. I am not saying that it is bad to
| be motivated by mastery: I am personally very motivated by
| mastery. It's what has kept my interest after a decade of
| programming professionally. I relate to being interested in a
| problem because it's an interesting puzzle.
|
| But we should not pretend that being interested in the aspect of
| solving a problem is the most genuine manner of interacting with
| that problem (or the opposite: that caring about the side-effects
| of your work more than you care about the work itself is somehow
| lacking in earnesty). It is not. What you are building does not
| stop at the problem-solving phase. How the things you build
| affect the world is what you have done. If we set our ethical
| standard at "so long as I am interested in doing the building, I
| am being earnest", our efforts will forever be deployed by
| others, perhaps with effects that do not align with our values.
| stevofolife wrote:
| I think you misunderstood what earnest is. And more importantly
| the core of PG's argument.
|
| A genuine fixation or being earnest != interest. Earnest is way
| more than that. Showing interest is merely a step towards being
| earnest.
|
| It's easy to be interested in everything but it's hard to be
| earnest about something.
| fractionalhare wrote:
| _> If you are interested in self-driving cars, but you are not
| interested in the effects that self-driving cars have on
| society, you are not actually interested in self-driving cars:
| you are interested in yourself. To be interested only in the
| problem-solving aspect of a domain is, first and foremost, to
| be interested in your own mastery._
|
| This distinction seems completely semantic and vacuous. What do
| you call it if I'm interested in my own mastery, but only for
| some subset of all things I can have mastery in? Then we're
| right back where we started.
| zemo wrote:
| > What do you call it if I'm interested in my own mastery,
| but only for some subset of all things I can have mastery in?
|
| specialization. I don't know why you thought this question
| was some sort of gotcha. I'm not rejecting the idea that
| someone can specialize or be a domain expert. I'm rejecting
| PG's argument that "being earnest" means "ignoring
| externalities".
| [deleted]
| tbrownaw wrote:
| If I'm interested in A but not how A affects B, then I'm
| actually just interested in C rather than A? That makes even
| less sense than saying that altruism doesn't really exist
| because altruists enjoy being altruistic.
|
| > _If we set our ethical standard at "so long as I am
| interested in doing the building, I am being earnest", our
| efforts will forever be deployed by others, perhaps with
| effects that do not align with our values._
|
| Firstly, "earnest" here seems to be about "less likely to get
| distracted (and so fail to make money)" and has nothing
| whatsoever to do with what's ultimately to the most social
| good.
|
| Secondly, demanding control of everything downstream of you is
| a great way to get nothing done.
|
| You seem to be advocating that innovation should follow an
| ethic of "do not call up what you cannot put down", when "fail
| forward" has a history of working rather better.
| zemo wrote:
| hmm, I think the way I worded that sentence is getting in the
| way of what I'm trying to say. Perhaps this is more clear:
|
| If you're interested in how something works (e.g. self-
| driving cars), but not what it does, you're not interested in
| the thing itself: what you are actually interested in is your
| own sense of mastery.
|
| > You seem to be advocating that innovation should follow an
| ethic of "do not call up what you cannot put down"
|
| Um, I've never heard this quote before but it looks like it's
| a Lovecraft quote? Was that ... said by one character to
| another character after they had summoned some sort of
| monster or other infernal being? Is ... is your argument that
| the monster is good if the monster pays you money?
|
| > "fail forward" has a history of working rather better.
|
| uh, define "working better". Better for whom? Along what
| dimension? Again, this really seems to be arguing that if
| your idea makes you rich, it is good.
| 11thEarlOfMar wrote:
| What are the some of the tells that someone is not earnest? Or in
| particular, feigning it?
| Bresenham wrote:
| > Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles
| of money say that they started their companies to make the world
| better. The situation seems made for mockery. How can these
| founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible they
| sound?
|
| I can't speak for someone like Kara Swisher, but attempting to
| channel her, I don't think she would think it is beyond belief
| that some hacker teenager who dropped out of a good college to
| work on X was earnest that they were trying to make the world
| better.
|
| The mockery over naivete and implausibility comes from that those
| teenagers will walk into a VC office on Sand Hill Road, where
| they will sign over various rights for the future. They will then
| form a Delaware corporation. With plans to raise more VC, after
| that an IPO, and finally dividends. Which means what? What came
| from those who did this in the past?
|
| - The Steve Jobs orchestrated formerly secret cabal, that
| included Eric Schmidt and others, to drive down engineer salaries
| in the Bay.
|
| - Social networks amplifying traffic saying Covid is a hoax, and
| here we are with 3000 dying of Covid in the US on Wednesday.
|
| - The widespread spying and surveillance of people that almost
| all these companies have a hand in - even Adobe has become a
| surveillance company.
|
| It's the thinking that the corporations that will be the IBMs,
| Oracles and Microsofts of the future are there to "make the world
| better". It is risible.
| dcx wrote:
| Do you remember life before iPhones? Before Google and
| universal knowledge, YouTube guides on every subject under the
| sun, Microsoft Excel, personal computers, international video
| calls, remote work? (Plus the indirect benefits to you
| economically from every industry adopting the above)
|
| The world has added 3.4 billion people since 1980. We're in a
| life-or-death struggle for carrying capacity, so daily life
| naturally gets worse over time. It's easy to pin that on the
| whipping boy of the day.
|
| There's no question that the next generation of technology has
| come with deep, systemic issues. But on balance the existence
| of these companies has clearly made the entire world better and
| brighter.
|
| One case study - the Spanish Flu killed 50 million people. A
| pessimistic estimate for total deaths from COVID-19 after the
| vaccine(s) are fully rolled out might be 10 million. There are
| 4.3x more people in the world today. Disinformation is
| absolutely killing people. But how many more lives might our
| industry be credited with saving?
| randomsearch wrote:
| Totes agree with the "yeah but actually tech companies have
| done amazing things" argument but do you ever wonder why so
| many examples are now quite old? I mean I was raving about
| Google in 2001 and here we are near 20 years later saying how
| great their impact on search is...
| dcx wrote:
| Looking at release dates might not be the best way to frame
| this. It took decades before the full impact of the
| automobile was felt, and there were huge leaps in tech
| during that period too. We're in a different world today
| from when the first iPhone came out.
|
| But also, I have a feeling like we're in the process of
| building up the activation energy for the next major wave
| of tangibly world-changing tech (AI, robotics, quantum
| computing?). I suspect the change in pace is related to the
| slowing of Moore's Law.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| > What came from those who did this in the past?
|
| You're only listing the bad things that came from people who
| did this in the past.
|
| An intellectually honest approach would be to look at the net
| effect instead, which has been overwhelmingly positive.
| walleeee wrote:
| > An intellectually honest approach would be to look at the
| net effect instead, which has been overwhelmingly positive.
|
| Care to elaborate your analysis?
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| >The Steve Jobs orchestrated formerly secret cabal, that
| included Eric Schmidt and others, to drive down engineer
| salaries in the Bay.
|
| Can you elaborate/provide links on this one? I'm unfamiliar.
| fullshark wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-
| sergey-b...
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-
| paper...
| graeme wrote:
| Your argument jumps around. By the time Steve Jobs returned to
| Apple he had near total control: yet a central point of your
| argument was that idealistic founders have trouble when they
| sign away rights.
|
| And Job, though he did many wonderful things, had sociopathic
| tendencies from even before he founded Apple.
|
| As for Facebook, Zuckerberg has maintained a very large amount
| of control. How does this square with your thesis that the
| trouble comes from VC's?
| Bresenham wrote:
| My thesis is that for the earnest young founders mentioned in
| the essay who want to make the world a better place and to
| work on X, the trouble starts when they sign a deal with VCs,
| super seeds etc.
|
| If they are not earnest, but sociopathic, then the thesis
| does not apply to them. The essay was about earnestness.
|
| Tangentially - if you read the emails, texts etc. found in
| discovery for Brin, Schmidt etc., they are secretly entering
| a cartel the DOJ would break up to forbid direct recruitment
| _of their own workers_. Even the people who are doing all of
| the work to supposedly "make the world a better place" are
| being screwed by the effort, never mind people outside the
| company and the externalities on the way to that greater
| profit.
| graeme wrote:
| Yes but you specifically cited Jobs and Zuckerberg's
| Facebook in support of your thesis.
| cambalache wrote:
| Another ridiculous thing of this essay is the outstanding moral
| character granted to SV founders. For sure, a fraction of them is
| guided by objectives different than money in their pursuits but
| that fraction is dwarfed by people in other fields, like academy,
| social work and NGOs. There is nothing in the startup culture
| that makes me thing of nobler, more earnest, more enlightened
| people.
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