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Life is Short

paulgraham.com

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Re: Life is Short

#141

Post by geofft »

jl wrote: post #138
geofft wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm curious why this essay was written. A week after having finished spending (evidently) quite a while writing two essays about economic inequality and your personal role in increasing society-wide inequality, why the sudden change to caring about spending time with your kids? And why the need to say this out loud? This essay strongly feels like rationalizing to oneself an unwillingness to engage with reasoned…

No, there's no connection with this essay and the last one. He's been thinking about writing about this topic for a long time. In fact, one of the things Paul and I talk most about is that life is short and we need to savor time with our kids and do things that are meaningful to us. So trust me when I say that, as PG's wife, I believe you are mistaken.

All right, I can totally accept that. Thanks for the response!

Re: Life is Short

#142

Post by [deleted] »

n0us wrote: post #79
snarfy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is because your time is more valuable. I'm not sure I agree with a Mac having a lower total cost of ownership in either cost or time, but that's the idea. Don't do work Apple pays Chinese laborers to do.

N.B. I realize this experience is not typical of most users. I had an IBM laptop before I had a Mac. At least one major component had to be replaced every single year for the duration of the four years I had it. Keys broke. the screen was shite. Windows crashed constantly. I lost all my files multiple times. After having it for more than a year it ran as if someone had permanently applied the brakes and it was just g…

[deleted]

Re: Life is Short

#143

Post by aamar »

the_watcher wrote: post #7
anunumoose wrote: post #3

Mr Graham, I respect you and you've accomplished more that I will in my life, but I sincerely hope that this essay against "bullshit" and "arguing online" isn't you declaring that you'll be "bubbling" yourself after your last essay was met with wide disagreement. It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else…

I didn't read it as him suggesting that he'd stop writing, just that he'd make a conscious effort to stop defending himself from online attacks. I agree that it would be terrible if he quit writing his essays.

I think you're interpreting pg correctly. But isn't posting an essay "arguing online"?

An essay is partly a matter of working out one's thoughts on some matter. But _posting_ an essay advances some point of view with a supporting argument, attacking the beliefs of others (e.g. Sanders was not named by pg, but could have been). That seems to be _arguing_ just as much as the additional step of responding to one's critics.

I suppose what makes the latter wearying is that it's hard to hear attacks on you personally, and tedious to respond to attacks which are loud but bad. But it still seems that we should (and usually do) value those who engage with their high quality critics.

Re: Life is Short

#144

Post by ScottBurson »

drhayes9 wrote: post #68
vcarl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read some "rebuttals" to the previous essay, and while there were definitely some valid points brought up, a lot of them seemed to me to have misinterpreted a lot of what was said. PG tweeted about feeling like a lot of his side of the "debate" was pointing out that he hadn't said something. [1] [1]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/688044252744527875

From PG's essay "Economic Inequality": "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them... Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources." This feels like the heart of that particular essay and displays a r…

>> Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources.

> This blames poor people for being poor. How am I misreading this?

FWIW, I read it differently. I think Paul is saying that even if we had a world where everyone had a truly equal opportunity, in the sense of having similar (or at least adequate) childhood nutrition, intellectual stimulation, education, etc., there would still be variations in productivity between individuals that would result in different economic outcomes.

The second quote I read simply as saying that Paul doesn't think the tendency for wealth to concentrate can be stopped.

If you want to complain that Paul could have expressed himself better, I won't argue; I agree that was by far his worst written essay. And I suspect he is genuinely pained by the reaction it received. To whatever extent this new piece is specifically a response to that reaction, I think it's more hurt than callous.

Re: Life is Short

#145

Post by sjg007 »

xiaoma wrote: post #117
wfo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People got riled up because he touched an issue that effects people a lot in real life, is seriously effecting our society and democracy for the worse and got it really, really laughably wrong. And as one of the hyper-rich he has a bully pulpit with which to broadcast his thoughts. Also because most of his essays are very good, so this one was uncharacteristic and surprising.

He doesn't have a "bully pulpit" because he's hyper rich. He's been writing fantastic essays that have been widely shared for much longer than YC has existed (including one responsible for modern spam filters which made email usable again 16 years ago). Also, I think the last 2 essays pretty much nailed it. If you found them "laughably wrong", it was likely due to the assumptions you brought with you to reading them,…

The Bayesian spam thing was already known before the essay.

Essayists should expect critiques. His argument was that technology is the creator of inequality and it can't be stopped. That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect. This is the capitalist thesis. It's not quite Randian but it's close enough that it comes across as one dimensional. In his defense he said we should focus on other drivers of inequality. However the counter to the capitalist thesis and the most direct way to address inequality is taxation.

This is the basic political argument that defines society.

Re: Life is Short

#146

Post by p4wnc6 »

ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #140
p4wnc6 wrote: post #31

Some practical ways that readers can implement this advice: 1. Don't work for a start-up, since they don't impart salary-winning experience to you, they don't pay you or provide reasonable benefits, and they also don't allow you the freedom to work on big ideas that they usually promise. The lines used to sell naive engineers on working in start-ups are as paramount to life's-too-short-bullshit as anything can be. 2.…

I haven't done 1 but I have experienced 2 and 3 at tech companies. The scrum/agile and open plan office stuff is so bad for me that it's been all the confirmation I need to know that I need out as soon as possible into something else - life is definitely too short for that.

And only by insisting on this stuff, confidently and for very rational reasons, together as a community of engineers and developers, during employment negotiations, will we ever start achieving wider spread adoption of healthy, employee-affirming and humanity-affirming behaviors by organizations.

Re: Life is Short

#147

Post by geomark »

myle wrote: post #71
jfaucett wrote: post #35

This article resonated a lot with me. It verbalizes what I've been trying to do over the past year or so with my own life. For me a lot of the BS elimination on the first pass was just getting rid of distractions and interruptions, so I cut out the phone/email/chat, etc all during my working hours except for certain times, like 10 minutes after lunch and just before the end of the day. The noise was all driving me in…

I am following a similar strategy (almost identical) but it is not as rosy as described here. You may lose friends because they may think you don't care enough about them since you don't call them frequently anymore (and emails do not work for everyone). You are unreachable through the modern messengers because you refuse to waste time on a gazillion of them. Other people update their friends through Facebook. If you…

"our modern world makes money by distracting us"

I'm not getting involved in the overall discussion, just wanted to highlight this gem. This is so true.

In a conversation about Netflix's announcement of worldwide availability the other day I put it this way - so much of the economy is based on cultivating and indulging in mindlessness.

If you cultivate mindfulness you see how pointless and wasteful so much of people's activities are.

Re: Life is Short

#148

Post by giaour »

natrius wrote: post #121
drhayes9 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From PG's essay "Economic Inequality": "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them... Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources." This feels like the heart of that particular essay and displays a r…

> This blames poor people for being poor. No it doesn't. A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy. The portion you quoted makes this distinction clear: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources." If we found a way to give e…

> A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy.

If it doesn't imply that poor people are lazy, then what does it imply? That the rich and poor are equally driven, and that something other than effort (luck, inherited wealth, etc) makes the rich rich and the poor poor?

Re: Life is Short

#149

Post by arbre »

Quote from the dalai lama: Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

Re: Life is Short

#150

Post by gyardley »

Life is short when your life is good.

Make too many bad decisions (or have too much bad luck) and it turns out life is really, really long.

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