240 comments so far (mostly debates amongst strangers) on an essay recommending never to debate online with strangers....
Life is Short
271–280 of 452 posts
Re: Life is Short
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I might have agreed with you but the way you're presenting your argument makes me want to dismiss you outright. There's a lot of ad hominen and strawman in your post, maybe you want to rethink how you're making your point?
If I thought that pg was capable of hearing my argument, I'd make it far more carefully. I think that it is 100% useless to attempt to persuade him away from his rediscovery of social darwinism. The man thinks that those concerned with income inequality want communist style income equality. He's detached from reality. There aren't words that will fix that sort of broken. This has become a situation where you can't re…
> The man thinks that those concerned with income inequality want communist style income equality.
pg's essay did not say that. I think you've misunderstood what he said, and are attributing views to him that are quite far away from reality. My best guess is that you've read his words with emotion and projected false beliefs onto his writing.
If you genuinely care about this issue, then I advise you to go back and read the essay again with a critical, logical mind. Read the words he wrote, and consider simply those words, not what you imagine or extrapolate might be the views of the person who wrote them. Consider the actual words. PG's words do not characterize the opposition argument in this debate as being in favor of communism and "100% social equality", whatever that means.
If you were to read the essay again, and attempt to connect the views you're claiming PG holds with actual words in the essay, you'd fail. PG does not characterize the opposition view as anything like how you describe.
If he characterizes the opposition, it's simply as people who argue that "social inequality is bad" without stopping to think about it in more detail, and without realizing that some inequality is fair because some people are more productive than others. The other observation in his essay is that technology amplifies this difference in productivity.
Re: Life is Short
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unpacking the whole context and philosophical debate (e.g. between libertarians and Marxists) requires a book-length argument. (But to briefly answer your question, no. “People ought to be entitled to what they create” is not a universally accepted principle.) So folks responding to Graham are mostly not going to do the topic justice. (Side note: In a similar but less defensible way, Paul Graham’s summary of Joseph S…
The way this comment devolves into personal attack is as revealing as it is distasteful. Please have the discipline not to do that on this site. Also, please don't put things in quotation marks when they're not a quote, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609 . It may seem a minor point, but it's an important one for intellectual honesty.
If extremely wealthy venture capitalists don’t want to have their motives questioned when they write essays full of unsupported and self-serving arguments and demonstrating a severe lack of empathy/social understanding, then they shouldn’t post them on the internet.
Dan: I’m sure Paul Graham and this site will both be fine whether or not you you tell his critics to keep their opinions to themselves.
(Side note: literally nobody is going to confuse my idiomatic use of quotation marks to offset a sarcastic summary of an argument which I claim is as old as civilization for a direct quotation from any particular person.)
In the general genre of PG criticism, my comments are treating him with kid gloves. For a more vigorous and amusing analysis of his essays’ analytical rigor, Maciej Cegłowski provides a gem, as expected, still just as relevant ten years later: http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Re: Life is Short
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not accept that reality is different for different people? It's different for all different people, not just rich vs. poor. It's your call whether someone else's reality is at all relevant to your own experience. But that doesn't stop it from being reality for them . You don't like it when someone invalidates your own lived experience. Why then turn around and invalidate theirs?
>Why not accept that reality is different for different people? There is a consistent physical reality that exists outside the human experience. When people communicate in almost any language, they are referring to this external reality. This is why people constantly choose to "invalidate" someone else's experience. They are essentially saying "Your description of the shared fabric of reality in which humanity dwells…
Yes, and whenever people talk about human concepts like inequality, wealth, economics, power, or other social constructs, they are not referring to this physical reality. You can't talk about any of these without injecting values, desires, emotions, and other subjective experiences. These exist only in peoples' heads.
The objective, physical description of a scene at work might be something like "The person called 'Andrew' sat down at a table with the person called 'Bob'. They talked. Bob stood up and left the room. Andrew rested his elbow on the table and cradled his forehead in his hand. He stared at the table for a couple minutes, and then he got up, left the room, went back to his desk, and started typing quickly."
The subjective description from Bob's POV might be: "I'm a manager for a critical feature team. We had a really challenging feature request that may bring in millions of new business. Andrew is my best engineer. Knowing that he has always delivered high-quality code, I called him in to a quick meeting and explained the customer's request. He didn't say anything, but I could see the wheels turning in his head. He was already grappling with the challenge. I left to go to my next meeting, confident that the project will be done in time."
The subjective POV from Andrew's head might be: "I work hard on my code. Sometimes I wish my boss would acknowledge that. Today, he called me in to a meeting, unscheduled, and dumped a huge new project on me. I'd planned on taking my wife on a vacation to celebrate our anniversary, but now I might have to cancel if I can't get this done in time. Grr. Anyway, better get back to work so I can crank out this code."
See the difference? What happened, objectively, is only the physical actions in the real world. Moving body parts. Manipulating tools. Being physically present in the same place. But there's a whole layer of subjective experience underneath that which people take for granted, but which may be completely different between different people.
Many, many arguments come from misapplying the tools meant to deal with objective reality to subjective reality. Both PG (in several of his essays) and many of the commenters here make that mistake. I've made it myself, frequently, in the past. But in general, whenever you're talking about wants, desires, values, or reasons, you can't say "This is the way the world is" without adding the implicit qualifier "for me" or "based on this evidence".
Re: Life is Short
#275> dealing with other people's mistakes
I stopped right there :( If you're not willing to deal with other people's mistake throughout life, you're probably so self-centered and full of your own certainty that what can be argued after is probably not worth reading. bye now :)
Re: Life is Short
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way this comment devolves into personal attack is as revealing as it is distasteful. Please have the discipline not to do that on this site. Also, please don't put things in quotation marks when they're not a quote, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609 . It may seem a minor point, but it's an important one for intellectual honesty.
If extremely wealthy venture capitalists don’t want to have their motives questioned when they write essays full of unsupported and self-serving arguments and demonstrating a severe lack of empathy/social understanding, then they shouldn’t post them on the internet. Dan: I’m sure Paul Graham and this site will both be fine whether or not you you tell his critics to keep their opinions to themselves. (Side note: liter…
"I think Hannah Arendt said that one of the great achievements of Stalinism was to replace all discussion involving arguments and evidence with the question of motive. If someone were to say, for example, that there are many people in the Soviet Union who don't have enough to eat, it might make sense for them to respond, "It's not our fault, it was the weather, a bad harvest or something." Instead it's always, "Why is this person saying this, and why are they saying it in such and such a magazine? It must be that this is part of a plan."" - Christopher Hitchens
Re: Life is Short
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
If extremely wealthy venture capitalists don’t want to have their motives questioned when they write essays full of unsupported and self-serving arguments and demonstrating a severe lack of empathy/social understanding, then they shouldn’t post them on the internet. Dan: I’m sure Paul Graham and this site will both be fine whether or not you you tell his critics to keep their opinions to themselves. (Side note: liter…
"I think Hannah Arendt said that one of the great achievements of Stalinism was to replace all discussion involving arguments and evidence with the question of motive. If someone were to say, for example, that there are many people in the Soviet Union who don't have enough to eat, it might make sense for them to respond, "It's not our fault, it was the weather, a bad harvest or something." Instead it's always, "Why i…
[deleted]
Re: Life is Short
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wide disagreement? Sure, the people who disagreed wrote essays, but people who agree are usually invisible (how do you write an essay about agreeing with some other essay? and why would you bother?). I think the reason some people got so riled up was that there was so much uncomfortable truth in those essays. Just as people usually don't bother to post when they agree with something, they usually don't bother to post…
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.
> People got riled up because he touched an issue that effects people a lot in real life, is seriously effecting [sic] our society and democracy for the worse and got it really, really laughably wrong.
What did he get wrong, specifically?
The gist of PG's essay was that inequality consists of some bad components ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential") and some good ones (e.g., people producing things of incredible value); that it's a complex phenomenon made up of multiple parts; that inequality is at least partially due to individual differences in drive and productivity; that technology amplifies these differences in productivity.
He is concerned that people do not recognize this, and believes they need to recognize this if they are going to fight the bad drivers of inequality effectively. He is concerned that people oversimplify the issue and assume that inequality is all bad, or intrinsically bad.
Re: Life is Short
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way this comment devolves into personal attack is as revealing as it is distasteful. Please have the discipline not to do that on this site. Also, please don't put things in quotation marks when they're not a quote, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609 . It may seem a minor point, but it's an important one for intellectual honesty.
If extremely wealthy venture capitalists don’t want to have their motives questioned when they write essays full of unsupported and self-serving arguments and demonstrating a severe lack of empathy/social understanding, then they shouldn’t post them on the internet. Dan: I’m sure Paul Graham and this site will both be fine whether or not you you tell his critics to keep their opinions to themselves. (Side note: liter…
None of that addresses what I said.
Re: Life is Short
#280Earlier 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…
Indeed, there's a clear inference that the poor are lazy which is demonstrably untrue as a rule.