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Earnestness

paulgraham.com

71–80 of 478 posts

Re: Earnestness

#71
post #48

Denial of the existence of white supremacy is a fun easter egg embedded in the middle of the essay.

Obviously you’re going to get downvoted for this. But would you mind saying where the Easter egg is?

It's a link from the word "bogus."

I'm going to expand on this a bit, possibly against my better judgment. I believe Paul Graham has a point here, and it's a good one. In intellectual pursuits, there's a spectrum from dealing purely with nature and facts, to dealing with human perceptions. To pick what I hope is a reasonably neutral example, doing the science to get containment of a fusion reaction is on one end of the spectrum. Planning and engineering a project to do it is in the middle. And making the case that carbon-based energy production poses an existential threat to humanity and that we should be investing hundreds of billions into fusion energy is on the other. All these inform each other, and I (personally) don't make a value judgment on which is most virtuous or most important.

The salient thing is that Paul Graham did not choose a somewhat neutral example. Rather, he chose one that is perhaps at the very center of the culture wars, and has done so using a highly emotionally loaded word. Because he is someone who knows how to use words, I can fairly confidently conclude that he is effectively declaring his position on the issue.

Re: Earnestness

#72

> The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly this is also the region with the highest number of successful startups per capita. I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” or “The British are terrible cooks.” Absent any…

I think it’s a cultural thing. Take France. My anecdotal experience is that the bourgeoisie seem to place a certain social capital on having a degree from the right school. Entrepreneurialism is something to be studied, not attempted. Hard to take a risk with that kind of social expectation.

Re: Earnestness

#73

I earnestly think his writing has an overindulgent fandom here. Every single blog post rockets to the top and, in my opinion, they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or persuasion. He may write snappily, but is every single post worthy of Han's top slot?

I mean, you're using a site which self-selects for his target demographic. He's the founder of a VC company which created the site your visiting and apparently his blog gets 15 million page views per year. I think it's just a numbers game, not fandom.

I'm not defending what he writes, but this posts are generally fun to read and think about. Sometimes I don't agree with him or find holes in his arguments, but there's usually a nugget of truth you can take away. They're just blog posts, he doesn't need to be infallible.

The occasional self-promotion from the people running the site is a price I'm willing to pay to use the site.

Re: Earnestness

#74
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this funny. I'll bite. Paul Graham created Hacker News. And is a founder of Y Combinator.

Yes, and when we say ‘created’ hacker news, he coded it himself in a dialect of lisp which he also coded just for this purpose .

Is this a tongue in cheek reference to Ken Thompson’s trick in “reflections on trusting trust”? [1] if so, it wins the 2020 award for originality in HN conspiracy theories!

1 - https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html

Re: Earnestness

#75

> The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly this is also the region with the highest number of successful startups per capita. I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” or “The British are terrible cooks.” Absent any…

Scandinavian countries have very high trust societies, based on any survey that looked into this. Why that is is a difficult question and leads us very far. Is it money? Where did the money come from? Oil (but that's not there in all Nordic countries)? Lack of war? Did the lack of war come from their high trust? Or the geographic distance to warring nations and empires of Europe? Is it related to the cold environment…

Trust is something that is defined and measurable. And yes you’re right, it is complicated. But the complexity isn’t helped by introducing a random thing called “earnestness” without a way to measure that.

Re: Earnestness

#76
post #57
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It’s because of who he is. If I wrote this post, it would not have the same meaning as if he wrote it. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but the reason is that we know that PG has huge experience of and access to startup founders and seen their outcomes and has had a great deal of opportunity to formulate thoughts like like this on the basis of what he has seen. I have experience of startups too. I could have…

I think if your perspective has enabled you to know things you wouldn't have otherwise, _most_ of that should just come through from the writing. It should be possible for you to write in a way that's convincing independently of who you are. A different person might not have been able to produce the same essay, but if the essay is the same, who the author is shouldn't matter too much (for a good essay).

I simply can’t see how this can be right.

What we know about PG’s experience is a huge prior that shapes how we interpret what he writes.

I think this probably explains some of the polarization we see in the comments - people who don’t know who he is see this as just a dumb blog post that seems to be getting too much karma. People who do, see it as insight from someone who is in a position to actually know something.

Re: Earnestness

#77

I earnestly think his writing has an overindulgent fandom here. Every single blog post rockets to the top and, in my opinion, they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or persuasion. He may write snappily, but is every single post worthy of Han's top slot?

On average, his writings are definitely more worthy of discussion than the newest JS framework or somebody doing something with old or underpowered hardware. Perhaps most of the once-top posts aren't as exciting as one would believe?

I enjoy reading his posts, but I'm not really representative of the prototypical HN reader.

I do think they get more attention than ones written by others, but, hey; it's his baby, so it's not surprising that they go so well.

For myself, I have always practiced Honor, Integrity, Honesty and Earnestness. Has nothing to do with business. It's a personal philosophy.

It did me well, when I worked for a Japanese company, but tends to elicit scorn, when dealing with Americans.

Re: Earnestness

#78
post #61
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you assume bad faith? Having worked closely with folks from many parts of Europe as an early stage founder, folks from Scandinavia certainly seem to take “naive” or “earnest” efforts of founders more seriously than other parts of Europe (or even Asia for that matter).

GP didn’t assume bad faith. They just want some evidence for the assertion, or even an objective way to measure this quality.

PG says “the most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia [and therefore it has more successful startups]”. Afaict GP is saying PG doesn’t believe what he is saying and is disingenuously suggesting causality just to support his main thesis.

Re: Earnestness

#80

> The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly this is also the region with the highest number of successful startups per capita. I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” or “The British are terrible cooks.” Absent any…

Scandinavian countries have very high trust societies, based on any survey that looked into this. Why that is is a difficult question and leads us very far. Is it money? Where did the money come from? Oil (but that's not there in all Nordic countries)? Lack of war? Did the lack of war come from their high trust? Or the geographic distance to warring nations and empires of Europe? Is it related to the cold environment…

Scandinavian countries are not really countries. More like a family club. (This is starting to change though)

When everybody is just like you, it leads to high trust, no us vs them mentality. Same is true in eg. South Korea and Japan.

Contrast this with their similarily northern neighbour Russia, which is basically the America of eastern europe. A nation resulting from a melting pot of ethnicitiess, languages, cultures (most current Russians are really assimilated from smaller native cultures, their great grandparents didn't identify as Russian). And the end result? Corruption. Everybody just tries to milk public funds as much as they can, and so forth.

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