341–350 of 874 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this may attest to the value of (apparent) novelty/innovation in PG's sphere. Seeming unconventional and disruptive has better ROI than spending years mining the history of human thought. He doesn't do science, he funds and markets products. He's competing to capture pieces of a finite pie, not creating knowledge. More broadly, he promotes a zeitgeist which has made him wealthy. I wonder if this has something…
Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game. At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer. Ditto for the carpenter making a table or mechanic fixing a car. PG addressed this long ago: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html Scientists turn money into knowledge. Entrepreneurs turn knowledge into mone…
> Fortunately you don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded people ...
Maybe it's the absurdity to divide people (and here obviously ALL people) simply into two groups and just by structuring them gain some meaning or knowledge. It's really easy and unprofessional: really you could divide society up by uncountable distinctions. But distinctions do not make dialectics or aren't anything but misleading if you're just asserting them.
Also the distinctions between conventional and independent are just blurry ones here, only derived by example; not by definition. There is no intellectual sharpness to the argument, right from the start of the "essay" – in that, that it appeals only to the intuition, not to the mind. There are no studies about "independent-minded" or "conventional-minded" people; not in hte sense he is using the term here. Quite the opposite: he is using the terms to appeal to a feeling. In no earnest science, or literature, someone talks so dull and undifferentiated about human beings.
Also I wouldn't ever think about a friend of mine, or someone close to me with such cold efficiency that derives from that really simplistic way of handling people and amateur psychology.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this may attest to the value of (apparent) novelty/innovation in PG's sphere. Seeming unconventional and disruptive has better ROI than spending years mining the history of human thought. He doesn't do science, he funds and markets products. He's competing to capture pieces of a finite pie, not creating knowledge. More broadly, he promotes a zeitgeist which has made him wealthy. I wonder if this has something…
Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game. At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer. Ditto for the carpenter making a table or mechanic fixing a car. PG addressed this long ago: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html Scientists turn money into knowledge. Entrepreneurs turn knowledge into mone…
I would also argue that many VC-backed startups are more about finding unexploited niches or catabolizing existing sectors of the economy than creating new material wealth.
> There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. As someone who once made their living as a scientist, I can tell you from firsthand experience that while this is technically correct, the conclusion PG wishes to draw from this: > One of the mos…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game. At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer. Ditto for the carpenter making a table or mechanic fixing a car. PG addressed this long ago: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html Scientists turn money into knowledge. Entrepreneurs turn knowledge into mone…
> Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game. It isn't either/or. Nearly all businesses do "create value". Nearly all businesses also compete for a limited supply of customers, because nearly all markets can produce more outputs than are needed. The ratio between the two matters a lot to the character of the company.
Even if they don't increase total consumer spending by offering better products and winning market share, they do increase consumer _wealth_. I'm glad I can buy a 65" 4k TV for as much as my parents paid for a 15" CRT 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation.
That's the median outcome. Then you get outliers like the sewing machine that greatly increased the productivity of vast amounts of workers, making those users much richer and society wealthier because clothes got cheaper.
I find it disingenuous to claim, as the OP did (perhaps unintentionally), that innovators are bad faith actors playing a zero sum game. Surely that's the exception, not the norm. Just as there are bad actors in academia and any other profession.
After seeing this, I thought to myself, Pi is dumb. A diameter is double the radius, so the radius is the fundamental. I tried telling this to a bunch of people, kids or adults who just looked at me funny.
I was so happy to much later learn that there's Tau. And very sad that alien races might hear the beeps of Tau/2 being sent to them by the clueless terrans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game. At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer. Ditto for the carpenter making a table or mechanic fixing a car. PG addressed this long ago: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html Scientists turn money into knowledge. Entrepreneurs turn knowledge into mone…
> Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game. It isn't either/or. Nearly all businesses do "create value". Nearly all businesses also compete for a limited supply of customers, because nearly all markets can produce more outputs than are needed. The ratio between the two matters a lot to the character of the company.
There are definitely some zero sum games, I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out a nuance. The market for eyeballs/attention is zero sum. Netflix famously thinks of its competition as everything outside of Netflix including "real life."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of one of the more embarrassing episodes of my life. My friends and I (pretty nerdy types) were at a bar with an amateur MMA fighter. Guy was like 6'10", covered in huge muscles and tattoos. One of the nicest guys I've ever met, but you definitely wouldn't want to get on his bad side. Anyway we didn't know the guy too well, lots of getting-to-know you type stuff. The MMA fighter after a few hours ment…
Yeah, stereotypes are a bitch. BUT - if one gets stereotyped enough, after a while s/he’s probably developed some coping mechanism to actually leverage it into an advantage (I know I do). So don’t feel too bad - it might well be that the guy uses that sort of conversation precisely to gauge his audience. (It makes a lot of sense that pro athletes are in gaming, btw: it’s competitive and it’s something that can be don…