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How to Think for Yourself

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Think for Yourself

#501

Post by heracles »

typon wrote: post #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?

How do you know people believe him?

I can tell you why I love his essays: because of the way he argues. It is very transparent. I seldomly agree with his conclusion(s), but since he is so honest (he is not trying to deceive) in listing his arguments it is just a matter for me to find where he is wrong... or where I am wrong. I find this style so uncommon and stimulating that I hardly can stand the regular "opinion" held by most people. At least it is hard to be intrigued by arguments that doesn't even try to be precise.

When PG writes something I pay attention to the words, because I know they were chosen with some care. If I can force open a crack in his arguments I get wiser, and if I don't... the same thing happens.

I wish more people wrote like him, but preferably less about startups. They don't interest me as much as attempts at honest discourse.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#502

Post by jacques_chester »

RickHull wrote: post #214

For those railing against this essay, who feel that PG is fluffing himself up and patting himself on the back like a nerdy middleschooler -- you've missed the big point, badly. PG writes unapologetically, directly, and simply, and this may pattern match to a naive middleschooler, but you are letting your base instincts cover up the fact that PG is wise, has earned his stripes, and is sharing his wisdom, unapologetica…

> For those railing against this essay, who feel that PG is fluffing himself up and patting himself on the back like a nerdy middleschooler -- you've missed the big point, badly. PG writes unapologetically, directly, and simply, and this may pattern match to a naive middleschooler, but you are letting your base instincts cover up the fact that PG is wise, has earned his stripes, and is sharing his wisdom, unapologetically, directly, and simply

Being unapologetic, direct and simple doesn't make someone wise. Being wise makes someone wise.

PG's essays read more and more like cut-rate Plato. Somehow, no matter where things begin, the topic eventually turns to "only I and my buddies should run Athens".

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#503

Post by ska »

Kranar wrote: post #496
ska wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bought a house in 2009 when everyone said it was stupid I don't know who your "everyone" is, but to do this is extremely conventional financial advice...

Doing something that most people advise against is by definition unconventional but we can agree to disagree on this matter.

The point was that I think the conventional wisdom here is to do exactly what you did, not the other way around.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#504

Post by randomsearch »

Seems almost every PG essay is controversial now. I got downvoted for pointing out someone was insulting him rather than criticising the essay.

Which leads me to say - I don't think HN is particularly fanboish towards PG. His recent essays have been mixed in quality, and certainly not up to Hackers and Painters (which I just reread for the third time) and I do feel that HN has thoroughly called that out. There are nuggets of wisdom but also signs of how difficult it can be to write generally when your life paths constricts you somewhat.

I really don't see a groupthink towards hero worship. Ironically, it seems the entrepreneur and nerdish need to be contrarian is at work here - looking to push back against PG, and somewhat justifiably so. And I'm sure he'd be the first to appreciate the need for that.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#506

Post by anonytrary »

Thinking for yourself in Silicon Valley is nigh impossible these days without becoming a disliked outcast. If you even question the legitimacy or viability of a potentially flawed mission or irony in company values, experienced startups will manage you out silently and tactfully. In some of the worst places, you'll also get treated poorly and excluded so that you leave.

Company values really are just words on a wall in pretty much every company. I don't think you will find a single company where the values aren't silently broken by leadership and management. The best companies have ways of hiding this through shallow apologetic acts (e.g. self-washing on social media).

I've seen this happen to plenty of people who found out something they shouldn't have, at companies who would otherwise appear like great places to work.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#507

Post by ekabod »

RickHull wrote: post #281
judofyr wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's writing to and for people like him, trying to help them put words and clear thought to vague understandings and apprehensions they've been wrestling with. Ah, yes, he's writing an article about how to think for yourself to the people who already think like him. So if we don't think like him, but rather in an independent way, then it makes sense that we wouldn't agree with this article. Got it!

Ha, you jest, but you bring up a subtle point. There are degrees and dimensions of similarity. For example, two people who uphold a principle of freedom of speech may nonetheless completely disagree on any particular issue. But they are very similar in an important way. Do you value independent thinking? If so, what part of the article did you most disagree with?

>Do you value independent thinking?

is there somebody on earth that doesn't value independent thinking?

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#508

Post by PragmaticPulp »

Arubis wrote: post #421

Over the years, I've found PG's essays much less compelling. As some sibling comments here have noted, there's a level of self-assuredness that feels increasingly disconnected from reality, like PG's become a synecdoche of SF VC-fuelled startup culture as a whole. Whether that's him changing, or me, or the world, I'm not certain--but I still look forward to them simply because the ensuing discussions here on HN tend…

> there's a level of self-assuredness that feels increasingly disconnected from reality

There's a unique type of hubris that comes from operating in the startup/VC world for a long period of time. On a long enough timeline, investors and founders alike start to forget that selection bias has shaped their perspective of who is successful. The failed investments and bankrupt startups are quickly forgotten, almost as if they never existed. What's left is a few home run investments and headline startup founders that get to rewrite their history to make their success seem obvious from the start.

It's also a side effect of coaching early startup teams. Startups are hard and often spend more time looking like failures than successes in the early days. Advisers and investors get into a rhythm of praising their founders to rebuild confidence and energize the teams. It's common for investors to tell their companies that they are uniquely talented or exceptional as a way to short-circuit any doubts that their problem space is too hard for anyone to conquer. Spend enough time telling people that they are one in a million, exceptional, and not like the general population and eventually you'll start believing it too.

This essay feels a lot like the advice we received as an early stage startup: It's what we wanted to hear, maybe what we needed to hear to keep going, but it's not necessarily generally true advice that can be applied to all situations. If you're a startup foundering experiencing doubts, this type of writing can provide a kick in the pants that you need to keep going. If you're not in the startup world, it just feels out of touch.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#509

Post by crdrost »

rndmize wrote: post #486
Arubis wrote: post #421

Over the years, I've found PG's essays much less compelling. As some sibling comments here have noted, there's a level of self-assuredness that feels increasingly disconnected from reality, like PG's become a synecdoche of SF VC-fuelled startup culture as a whole. Whether that's him changing, or me, or the world, I'm not certain--but I still look forward to them simply because the ensuing discussions here on HN tend…

While I agree (and would describe the issue as a kind of insularity), I find that PG's essays still have a fair amount of value – if I had to put some kind of measure on it, I'd say that for his older ones I found value in 80-90% of a given essay, while the more recent ones like this, it's closer to 40-50%. Using this one as an example, I disagree with many of the assertions in the first section, some in the second,…

Yeah, there's nature-nurture stuff going on, but there is also a strange inability to grapple with context shifts. What is “conventional” is changing, and an idea which seemed “independent” is no longer.

This is why Alan Kay’s talks about the same are nicer. He is explicit about “you find yourself in a pink world surrounded by pink things and then you have a blue thought which could take you out of the plane of your existence... but you have been to school, to church, you have othe things to do today, and so you squash it—it becomes a ker-splat. But every once in a while you have an unguarded moment, maybe in a shower or waking up, where those things don’t kick in quite so fast and instead your idea gets to suddenly expand for a bit, it becomes a ker-pow. The scientific term for these is ho-lee-shiiit.” It’s not something that is unavailable to others, it is a common human experience.

Then he defines something similar to pg’s idea, but more grounded in two preferences: are you more interested operationally in getting your tasks for today done, or are you more interested in an idea for its own sake even if it doesn't have pragmatic function? And are you intimidated by the reactions of your peers (to whom the blue thought seems insanity?) or do you not care what anyone thinks?

Finally, our inability to invent the future is generally traced to our funding sources. These sources prize innovation, producing an amazing version of whatever is already out there and really perfecting it, rather than discovery or invention, heading out in a risky direction where you don't know what the tasks are, and you just have a vague dream but no idea what challenges you are going to face. He usually mentions NSF proposals, the ones that are successful say here is what I'm going to do and here is how I will do it.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#510

Post by klipt »

coolgod wrote: post #464
strofcon wrote: post #454

"To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet." Oof, first paragraph and he's entirely wrong. That's rough. One of the most worrisome aspects of the world's take on science lately is that reproduction of published results…

Depends on what your definition and metric of success. If all academia cares about is citation count then PG makes a good argument.

Both are true:

Gaming metrics is good for your career.

Having bad metrics is bad for society.

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