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Life is Short

paulgraham.com

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Re: Life is Short

#291

Post by fsloth »

jacobolus wrote: post #17
oskrim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure he's well aware of the critizism. I think this is mostly about the random hate one gets for doing original thought.

Graham’s essay that got dumped on was hardly an “original thought”. The whole “we rich people deserve to have 100x more than the poors because we’re pushing humanity forward” schtick is as old as civilization, and Graham’s version was a particularly lazy and poorly argued one.

I think PG highlighted pretty well the mechanisms which drove away wealth inequality in the last century. I think PG commented only on the upper end on the wealth distribution scale and was of the opinion it is not a problem. He did not comment it's ok for people to be poor. These issues are not completely linked. Economics are not a zero sum game. The wealth distribution curve can hypothetically have any shape. That it tails to ridiculous numbers in the larger end is not the problem. The problem is the price level in the society, and how the wealth distribution is spread in relation to this average level. I don't think he expressed any opinions on the shape of this distribution. And this has at least three things of concern, not one. The average price level , the shape of the wealth distribution and the total wealth in the society are all dynamic.

Anyway I read his argument as "please ignore the tailing and focus on other things". This is at least my interpretation and if it's correct I agree. Jealousy never hurt any one. Extreme poverty, on the other hand, is quite detrimental to an individuals life.

Re: Life is Short

#292

Post by somberi »

Blake's take on this:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

Re: Life is Short

#293

Post by ZoF »

ZoF wrote: post #268
jl wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eh, we've collectively read at least a few of pg's essays; I think it's fair to say that we know him better than you do :)

Judging by these downvotes you all actually think that pg's wife knows him better than psuedonymous hn posters? Ridiculous.

Re: Life is Short

#294

Post by simonswords82 »

zallarak wrote: post #47

Marriage definitely made me prune bullshit from my life. I can only imagine what children would do. I would include Anger as a subcategory of bullshit. It promotes irrationality and the after effects hamper you. In the renowned book "Emotional Intelligence" the author says that the best thing to do when angry is to focus on controlling it. The more it grows, the harder it is to escape.

I've been married and divorced. Now with a new partner who I've been with for nearly a decade and we've got a kid. I'd say the pruning of bullshit from marriage is about 10% of that for having children!

Re: Life is Short

#295

Post by resca79 »

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

Re: Life is Short

#296

Post by tluyben2 »

nulltype wrote: post #245
sigmaml wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't have time for bullshit. I don't build my own PCs, I buy Macs. It is sad - and disgusting - to see this degree of arrogance in bluntly categorising those who use (or build) PCs (and not Macs) as indulging in bullshit! I am happy that you have found a useful computer in Mac. At the same time, though, please realise that hundreds of millions of computer users choose otherwise too. And, please do not conclude t…

I'm pretty sure bullshit is relative. I think cooking and driving are both bullshit, but there are tons of people who love both of those.

You are missing out by not cooking.

Re: Life is Short

#297

Post by nthnclrk »

Rather than engage in the mindless and genuinely inconsequential debate regarding the previous essay, I'd like to bring some attention back to the fact this essay is a genuinely fantastic piece of very clear, appreciable thought.

Re: Life is Short

#298

Post by mbrock »

greggman wrote: post #111
jfaucett wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest thing is to start very small. Seriously, very very small. I had for years done more or less what you describe. So I finally just decided to start super baby simple and have one tiny little goal and accomplish it. For me it was hard to eliminate looking up my news sites when I had a free minute or two. Eventually, I just deleted my bookmarks and edited my /etc/hosts and that did the trick for me. B…

Does that fact that you're here on HN suggest that it's not quite working? I ask because HN is my biggest time sync. It's the thing I grab whenever there is a moment of free time and even when their isn't. I type it into my browser without even thinking about it. I banned it once with /etc/hosts and that lasted about 3 months or maybe it was 6. I'd still read on my phone but that wouldn't happen except out and about…

Virtue ethics could be a useful framework for thinking about it.

Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue talks about the concept of a tradition as forming a narrative backbone for a person's life and actions. Conversation is also crucial, and traditions can be seen as extended conversations. I suggest that Hacker News is a place where such a tradition is constructed and maintained. It gives rise to an "imagined community" [2] of this profession of startup development (which is tied into the tradition of open source hacking in interesting ways, sometimes conflicting).

In that sense browsing HN is not merely a bad habit. Maybe the negative tendency is to become a more passive participant, or just gossiping all day. Ideally the site would feed into a larger pattern of creative action, instead of only providing some click buzz relaxation. So we could think about how to use the conversation to give wind to our sails, so to speak—or just how to be more active in the actual tradition, not just the discussion surrounding it.

That's a big discussion and I've already spent an hour writing this comment, after deleting a long and boring explanation of the MacIntyre book's thesis... So I'll just say that Cal Newport's new book Deep Work was pretty inspiring for me, and it's a quick read.

I think you could formulate a dialectic where deep work and community conversation feed into each other. It's like how books are the deep artifacts that conversations can orient themselves around, and the books themselves are like concentrated results of sometimes decades-long conversations.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community

[3]: http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/

Re: Life is Short

#300

Post by jasonwen »

I never wanted to have kids, maybe I'm too young for that. By reading this it definitely made me a step closer to be open to have kids in the future. Thank you for that.
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