Everything's Blub All Over Again

Just a random observation, but the recent founders vs. employees kvetch-storm reminds me strongly of the response to Paul's original Blub Languages article.

"Blub's a great language! And there are lots of jobs programming Blub! Why would I be happier using that weird language? Not everybody wants to take risks using an unpopular language. And how dare you say I'm inferior for not using something else!"

I'm not passing value on the essay or its critics, but I just think it's interesting how much the two essays and their responses have in common.

I'm just sick of hearing about it. This is like the OJ Simpson trial of hacker news.

Or I should say Reddit. The responses here were fairly normal until someone pointed out that reddit-ers were freaking out about it. I really hate to beat the old 'reddit is teh dumb' dead horse, but it kind of seems like it sometimes.

I think someone read into that essay what he wanted in a search for controversy, and then a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon in order to grind an axe with PG or YC, or to appear politically correct, or any number of other reasons.

It's just like when the whole world had a cow over the (lack of) unicode support in Arc0.

I am currently a caged lion, and I feel like one. I dream of nothing else but the open savanna and a tasty gazelle. How is that for taking a metaphor too far? I understood the whole thing as "startups are liberating to hackers" ... not "hackers that aren't doing startups suck" as others have suggested. I think his points about giant organizations not being natural make sense, and I really don't see why everyone took it personally.

Sure, people can enjoy their big company jobs. But you have to wonder... I have yet to meet an (ex)entrepreneur that hated running his own business. Just because you happen to like your company job doesn't mean you wouldn't get more done and feel more free in a startup. And just because you would get more done and feel more free in a startup doesn't mean you should quit a company job you are happy at either. It's up to the individual. It's not like we are arguing over religion here.

Or are we? It sure sounds like it lately.

I've always held that the person that is the most angry is the one that is least sure of his position.

It's not useful as the only predictor, because people's emotional involvement in ideas can vary, but I find it to be useful meta-information.

Enough already. I don't see why we should waste our time on arguing with a large group of people who don't get it. No matter what you say, if it is not obvious and carries any insight at all, people are going to be insulted. This is their problem, not ours. It only takes 10% of the readers to turn a good story into a flamefest. Personally, I found this essay as insightful and interesting as any of PG's essays, and I'm sure that most of the other people who read it feel the same.

All this no-restraint bashing of an interesting article ("you shouldn't have used the 'lions in cages' metaphor! Now I feel terrible! Bghwaaa-waaa-waaa") is really getting on my nerves. Sometimes someone says something that insults you. Get over it. Paul Graham isn't out to get you, and he has explained at length that he didn't actually imply that cubicle workers are losers.

With that in mind: people complaining on this scale about "mere" words is usually a sign that there is an unpleasant truth being uncovered. I think everyone who had their feelings hurt should stop and think about that for a while.

This is a good hypothetical. I like it. The "easy" win in such a procedure is to decide which debater is self-consistent. Unfortunately a consistent argument based on faulty premises yields false conclusions. However, since we're allowed to look at past debates for context, I think we can sidestep that issue. We need to determine which past debate-winning arguments led to objectively advantageous actions. This is a non-trivial problem. Let's additionally sidestep it by allowing the human being to weight outcomes based on past arguments.

Aside: Are we defining a 'settled' debate as one where the resultant action came from one side of the debate over the other, or are we additionally taking into account whether we consider the outcome of said action is positive or negative?

I think that it would be simple to identify logical arguments (well, fallacies anyway) which imply that the position being asserted is actually untenable. Identifying arguments which satisfy the inverse - that is, that the style of argument correlates with an advantageous action as a result, falls back into the trap where false premises lead to false conclusions.

Aside: I wonder if there are arguments where objectively false conclusions still lead to advantageous actions? Now there's an interesting question.

I suppose that if you could semantically dissect an argument and then correlate its structure against weighted outcomes of previous arguments this system could yield intriguing results. I would very much like to see what logical constructions correlate with poor outcomes. Perhaps it would reveal self-defeating human tendencies, or arguments which push aside rational behavior?

Then again, the strength of the Bayesian filter approach is that it is dumb. It doesn't have to do a semantic analysis. So we avoid going down the path of strong-ai or special-cased rules when using it. Does the purely textual content of a debate correlate strongly enough with the semantic content to distinguish between good arguments and bogus ones? I think the only way to tell would be to try.

I suspect that many of the most vigorous debates would end up revealing that the relative advantagion or bogosity of a given argument correlate most strongly with what your individual desired outcome is. Then we've just led ourselves to the question of which outcome is superior to the other.

Thanks for an interesting few moments of introspection!