Earnestness

Nope, I came to the same conclusion as your parent, when I wondered why every one of these threads for the last several years has been full of dismissal and criticism, and why the phrase "out of touch" gets flogged like a dead horse. I've been reading pg for 17 years, so I know who he is, what he's done, where he's coming from, his writing style... I can take his essays for what they are with all that context. Of course his opinions and perspective are what they are, because it's literally his life's work to identify potentially successful founders before they're successful.

Also, I don't suffer from that HN thing where nobody can simply consider an article, or do follow-up research themselves, without measurability, studies and citations, as if they're petrified they might become epistemically infected and be wrong about something that probably doesn't even impact their life in the slightest.

Future sadly needs more morality and honesty, the concept of monetary hyper-success created by SV has ruined the idea of balance between passionate craftsmanship and modest business enterprise. Today everyone wants to be big and powerful and we feel the impact of business size as users everyday. Success in life cannot be limited to "be a billionaire" just because. At this point in time I consider this trend as a dark religion and an evil cult.

Part of what I once said about why Def Leppard songs were meaningful to me:

A group of young men singing about love who also stood by their talented but now severely handicapped band member after he lost an arm is something that spoke to my soul. To me, these people had to know something more than pretty words. There had to be something deeper in their songs than just "sex, drugs and rock and roll."

https://genevievefiles.blogspot.com/2020/04/anger-management...

Words never stand completely on their own. What they mean to people is shaped by context, history and reputation.

Hacker News wasn't always a space with 5 million unique visitors per month who mostly barely know each other. When I originally joined in 2009, it had a sense of community.

I never got to be one of the "insiders" in that community. I was a visitor looking in from the outside.

But it did exist and many of those people still come here, though their presence isn't obvious. I don't think you can tell who pg's friends are by who says what on Hacker News.

I've always respected the man, though he and I were never friends. I respected him because of how he comported himself here when he was in my mind just a moderator for a forum that I participated on, before he was big time famous and big time wealthy, when his wealth was measured in words starting with M, not B.

I don't read every single thing he writes and I never have. But I certainly take his words seriously when I do sometimes read them.

He has a PhD and he suggested to his girlfriend that the two of them should start a company together. That company is, of course, YC.

I feel like it gets little press as a "pro diversity" company, but it's a big company with a woman founder and that's true because of Paul Graham. It was not Jessica Livingston who came up with the idea.

It's sort of a stealth diversity thing and I generally don't say too much about that because I think that's the best way to do diversity and I don't want to ruin it by calling a lot of attention to it.

But we've had a pandemic all year and the entire world is cranky as all hell -- me included -- and it's just rubbing me the wrong way that people are so desperate to find a dog to kick these days. So I feel a need to give a bit of pushback here lately.

> Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery. How can these founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible they sound?

I can't speak for someone like Kara Swisher, but attempting to channel her, I don't think she would think it is beyond belief that some hacker teenager who dropped out of a good college to work on X was earnest that they were trying to make the world better.

The mockery over naivete and implausibility comes from that those teenagers will walk into a VC office on Sand Hill Road, where they will sign over various rights for the future. They will then form a Delaware corporation. With plans to raise more VC, after that an IPO, and finally dividends. Which means what? What came from those who did this in the past?

- The Steve Jobs orchestrated formerly secret cabal, that included Eric Schmidt and others, to drive down engineer salaries in the Bay.

- Social networks amplifying traffic saying Covid is a hoax, and here we are with 3000 dying of Covid in the US on Wednesday.

- The widespread spying and surveillance of people that almost all these companies have a hand in - even Adobe has become a surveillance company.

It's the thinking that the corporations that will be the IBMs, Oracles and Microsofts of the future are there to "make the world better". It is risible.

tl;dr nerds are honest good and pure (aka earnest) and thus deserving when they achieve success and wealth.

Non-nerds are dishonest and impure and maybe even bad.