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How to Think for Yourself

paulgraham.com

201–210 of 874 posts

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a large socialist/anti-capitalist/woke movement on Twitter and a somewhat in the real world as well. I assume PG would like to call all those people out directly. But he cannot because in the current media and social climate the news summary will read: "Older White SV Billionaire living in England tells poor American minorities to stop complaining because their politics would lead to an economy with less inn…

What are those unintended consequences of progressive goals that he can't say out loud? I assume you're an independent thinker who can spell them out for us.

I don't claim to be an independent thinker. That sounds like a false dichotomy to me. The consequence would be that the Twitter mobs would go after YC and YC companies asking them to cut ties with PG

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#202
Why would you want to talk about how each individual is multi-faceted, complex, and full of contradictory beliefs when you can conveniently categorize them into conventional and independent? Ah, I know the answer: because hackers come in only one flavor: independent; and everyone else who doesn't fit the description is a conventional thinker.

The level of (apparent) profundity(?) in these essays and the amount of people in SV that revere his words just boggles my mind. Maybe I am a conventional thinker :/.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#203
PG had lots of terms, e.g., independent minded, and lots of proposed connections among them.

Okay, for some approaches to science, the next step is to define numerical measures of the terms and then to state the proposed connections mathematically. Then gather a lot of data and test the connections.

E.g., not from PG, but as people rise in organizations, do they become more conservative, e.g., in PG's terminology, more conventional minded? Pursuing just that one question scientifically was my wife's Ph.D. dissertation.

Point: Addressing scientifically all of PG's proposed connections would be a lot of work! And my guess is that many of the connections, including ones seemingly nearly obviously true -- would be very tough to settle scientifically.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#204

Like many of pg's essays there's an unqualified glorification of being independent. For example the suggestion that hiring conformist people is something that just happens. It seems more likely that companies more or less consciously hire such people, because a company where everyone thinks independently would be one where everyone wants to do something different, and nothing would get done, no one could agree on any…

I also often notice a self-serving conclusion that you should quit your comfy corporate job (and perhaps create a startup?). In this particular essay, it's close to the bottom: "Is there a way to cultivate curiosity? To start with, you want to avoid situations that suppress it. How much does the work you're currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is "not much," maybe you should change something."

> you should quit your comfy corporate job (and perhaps create a startup

That's not what he's saying. That's just one possible interpretation of it. You could also keep the job and pick up an interesting hobby, or just change jobs. It's not like it's bad advice only given out to serve his own interests. It's actually obvious sounding advice.

If you notice this often, maybe it's because in an essay that long, there will likely be some passage that can be interpreted as "quit your job and start a startup", especially considering PGs usual topics.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#205
I find reading this article a very uncomfortable experience. It's just assertion after assertion without evidence to back them up. Do people believe this guy because he's rich?

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many of PG’s essays about psychology or society, the problem is that this essay is basically an aphorism or a self-help book: there’s no logic here, no citations, no connection to facts. It’s just a bunch of feel-good BS for libertarian-minded tech workers. I get the impression that the length is (at least unconsciously) making up for the absence of rigor. A few paragraphs of “stuff that has no real argument but…

I’ve been pretty critical of PG’s essays recently but I thought this one hit the spot. Go into twitter right more and search for “great reset” for a perfect mirror of this paragraph for example: > Without this fastidiousness about truth, you can't be truly independent-minded. It's not enough just to have resistance to being told what to think. Those kind of people reject conventional ideas only to replace them with t…

To truly appreciate the beauty of such mirrors, one should take care to examine both sides...observe thousands of the conversations of not just the "excessively" open-minded who obsess over topics like The Great Reset and similar, but also of those who are the ideological opponents of these types. Observe how they talk about their opponents. See if any patterns (in talking, and thinking) emerge, and whether some of the patterns are the same in both communities.

From TFA:

> You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud.

Or, sometimes, do say it out loud, and watch hilarity (to the unconventional, at least) ensue.

> Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones. So this game should be an exciting quest for novelty, not a boring protocol for intellectual hygiene. And you'll be surprised, when you start asking "Is this true?", how often the answer is not an immediate yes. If you have any imagination, you're more likely to have too many leads to follow than too few.

> More generally your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined, and things don't always enter your head in the form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit. How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how other people get their ideas.

> When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see ideas spreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious are in fashion: you notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt, and then more and more, until half the people around you are wearing the same shirt. You may not care much what you wear, but there are intellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participate in those. Not just because you want sovereignty over your own thoughts, but because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#208
I'd like the opposite essay, how to be more conventional-minded. It's exhausting feeling continually unable to accept conventional wisdom and go with the flow.

Questioning everything is absolutely not all upside; there isn't time or energy available to do it, so you've gotta either tune a huge chunk of the world out, or cynically reject it, both of which are alienating and unpleasant.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#209
"You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't — like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers' floors."

Probably true more often than not, but Google and Facebook both started off doing something that everyone already thought was a good idea, they just did it much better.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#210

Is it helpful to differentiate Discovery vs. Invention? When a scientist discovers a physical behavior, or a oceanographer a new species, it's a discovery that others could make. The phenomena exists, they happened to find it first. When a composer invents, they are likely creating music that no other human would have created. If they hadn't composed it, it would never have existed. Both of these activities seem to r…

Is rearranging existing chords into a new sequence "Invention" or "Discovery"?

If you reference it to the world and its inherent chaos it is an invention. If you reference it to a structure with labels and a finite number of alterations it is a discovery of a part of that structure
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