221–230 of 874 posts
PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker: > Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I mean, taken outsi…
*than
PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker: > Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I mean, taken outsi…
> This essay is an object lesson in how this leads to profoundly conventional thinking. This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world. You've hit upon something that's always bothered me with this characterization of nerds. It's like if someone framed adult life by superimposing stereotypical high school nerd vs jock social dyn…
There are many things you can "think for yourself" about that wouldn't return much for the investment. For example, if I rejected english and made my own language that would probably be a long-shot. For a while, I wasn't interested in using math formulas until I could prove them, in hindsight maybe I'd say spend that energy getting better at people skills.
I think you'll find 90% of things are done the right way, and if you deviate you're probably doing worse for it. So it's worst being deliberate about. I don't think independent thought is an ends in itself.
A lot of attempts being independent-minded end up just being contrarian. It is after all much less of an investment. It gets really tiring to talk to such people after a while.
And of course there are different types: the theorist, and the skeptic. Skeptics generally have an extremely good hit rate on the truth. There are many beliefs held by the vast majority of educated people, that require fantastic improbabilities and incongruences with normal experience, whereas the extremely uncommon disbelief requires only storytellers. I can see how this would be quite boring company. Theorists are the opposite. They tell great stories with attempt to explain, or influence, or gain social acceptance by conforming their story to the emotional needs of the group. You wouldn’t think them tiresome at all if the story was catering to your emotional needs. Or perhaps not, because you may be a tiresome skeptic yourself.
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 peo…
Replace conventional and independent with another word pairing and have you have 95% of most modern writing.
He's talking about airbnb here, but what's the other company?
PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker: > Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I mean, taken outsi…
Then I arrived here in the comment section and discovered your refreshingly accurate comment; I knew, immediately, that I did not need to have my own “independent” thought, because you summarized my feelings perfectly.
I was put off by the essay so much; seeing your comment at the top gives me hope.
PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker: > Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I mean, taken outsi…
I don't want to veer too far into politics, but suffice to say, if the institutions of power in your society hold the same values as you, you aren't the "counterculture", no matter how much you claim to be.
PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker: > Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I mean, taken outsi…
> PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. If your first reaction reading this essay is "PG is trying to big himself up as an independent thinker", that tells me more about your attitude and mental state than about PG. Forgive the cliche, but "great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people" is a decent heuristic, with g…
> 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. He's talking about airbnb here, but what's the other company?