Earnestness

Earnest is my favourite word for describing that beautiful part during a child's development where they haven't yet had a negative experience from expressing themselves earnestly. That window of time where if you ask if they know something they would proudly reply "no!" because they have no idea that there might be shame in not knowing something.

I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of fear of retribution/shame but I'm always a bit sad when I get in trouble because I was straight forward but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes.

> It's a bigger social error to seem naive in most European countries than it is in America, and this may be one of subtler reasons startups are less commmon there. Founder culture is completely at odds with sophisticated cynicism.

I have a high opinion of pg, but mocking an entire continent for non-earnestness because it doesn't make as much money as the US (because they have more startups because, supposedly, the Americans are less cynical than the Europeans) is borderline cynic (and I say that as a cynic myself).

Money, and judging almost everything through the prism of money, is one of the most cynical things we do have right now in our society, and as such I appreciate more a "Greed is good discourse" because it shows its cynicism in plain view and does not try to hide it behind a veil of good intentions, like texts as this one do.

Once in my 20s I hung out with some young teenagers at a summer camp for reasons. One night we were talking and one girl started asking questions and the rest of the group sneered at her "not knowing". She ignored them and kept asking because I was earnest and knowledgeable. Five minutes turned to an hour and I think everyone in that group learned (or at least heard) more about the origins of the universe, stellar evolution, evolution, chemistry, physics, etc, than they had learned in school up to that point.

I sometimes wonder what happened to those people. I suspect the girl who asked questions ended up way more knowledgeable than the other 10 combined.

> paulgraham.com

Oh. All I know to expect from seeing that is a weird kind of popularity, agreement and participation you don't see for other blogs posted on HN, sometimes with the other half-or-so of comments being annoyed with Paul Graham.

Does HN covertly promote all links to that blog or is there something more substantial to it?

My perception is that one drawback of earnestness is that it often comes off as just being boring. The most earnest people I know are not popular. The most popular people I know are more like twinkle-in-the-eye-kind-of-BS-but-not-pathological-liars.

I don't mean to say "grr, why aren't nerds more popular!". I mean more that this specific kind of earnestness seems to preclude the playing of certain conversational games that most people seem to enjoy. Earnestness, for example, is pretty far away from my conception of "playful" or "flirty" or even "fun".