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Earnestness

paulgraham.com

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Re: Earnestness

#111

Post by DoreenMichele »

croissants wrote: post #10

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 game…

Earnest but interesting is sometimes a recipe for drama. Nothing worse than being well-meaning, right about something and saying something no one really wants to hear.

If you have any sense whatsoever, you intentionally shoot for "boring" while being publicly earnest.

Remember: "May you live in interesting times" is a Chinese curse. There's a downside to being interesting.

Re: Earnestness

#112

Post by bonoboTP »

jhawk28 wrote: post #45
pjc50 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways, this entire site exists to promote him.

It used to. If you look at the recent discussions, they have been very negative responses.

I think his earlier posts were more insightful. Or I was just younger.

Re: Earnestness

#113

Post by zepto »

ajju wrote: post #100
zepto wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It’s just historical context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)

Got it. I am aware of the history. I was reading too much into your comment. I thought you were joking that PG may have used the Thompson trick to juice scores for his posts on HN.

Hah. No. I don’t think he’d need to go that far. If he wanted to juice them he’d just have his own upvotes count 1000x or something like that.

Re: Earnestness

#114

Post by romanoderoma »

kabirgoel wrote: post #42

> 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 find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously.

They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest, it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises.

Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers have Portuguese nationality.

I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia.

I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the facts are definitely not there.

If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with a very different idea of what being earnest means.

Re: Earnestness

#115

Post by romanoderoma »

bonoboTP wrote: post #110
pjc50 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone forgets the Swedish empire. And the man whose name is a synonym for traitor, Vikrund Quisling. Scandinavia has hardly escaped war. If I wanted a glib answer I'd attribute it to a combination of less feudalism and more Lutheranism, plus a bit of Hanseatic trading.

I meant they escaped the world wars and the rest of the turmoils of the 20th century. Largely because they didn't have deep historic conflicts with the rest of the big empires. I mean, sure, not completely, they definitely had some of their population deported by Nazis, but it wasn't such a major impact as elsewhere in Europe.

They definitely did not escape any recent war.

The WWII in Scandinavia was particularly bad, including the occupation of Norway and Denmark.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Weserübung

They did escape the contemporary ones the same way any other country in Europe did anyway.

Re: Earnestness

#116

Post by sjg007 »

voidhorse wrote: post #28
paganel wrote: post #4

> 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 A…

Yes, you’re seeing two very different value systems run up against each other. Paul Graham obviously has a bias toward thinking the “founder culture” value system is better...but this stance ignores the fact that the European, more traditional culture leads to greater balance —stricter/better regulations around tech and privacy, ownership, and in most places labor. In America you can make pretty much anything happen…

It’s seems weird because the UK and Europe had the original founders! I guess the Vikings might have been the first but they typically plundered as an enterprise. Focusing on character traits as a societal descriptor kind of comes off like saying that the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur!

So I imagine reality is different than these tropes.

But it is interesting to ask why does Scandinavia have more startups per capita than other countries?

Like structural racism are there structural components that drive startups?

Re: Earnestness

#117

Post by essayist »

brighton36 wrote: post #68
throwaway2245 wrote: post #36

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

Unfortunately, the problem with seeing white supremacy is that in doing so, we create white supremacy.

I can choose to see (or not) that the prisoner being walked down the street is shackled. And maybe there are some good reasons for choosing not to see.

But it seems the beginning of sanity for that prisoner, herself, to see her chains.

Re: Earnestness

#118

Post by ckastner »

zepto wrote: post #94
ckastner wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what you are describing is just an appeal to authority. It's quite possible that putting the assertions of the text in the context of this particular authority does give it more credibility, but I've also heard that same authority make some very poor assertions. Just look at the objective criticism that some of the posts gather. Sometimes, there are really major, easily contradicted flaws in these texts.

You’re going to need to explain how you conclude that I am making an appeal to authority. I didn’t say anything about the validity of his argument. Only that it means something different and more interesting given his experience, than it would coming from someone else. Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us than when a random blogger is wrong.

> You’re going to need to explain how you conclude that I am making an appeal to authority.

Because of your phrasing: "Yes. It’s because of who he is."

> Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us than when a random blogger is wrong.

Relative to each other, perhaps.

However, is something wrong by PG more interesting than literally every other topic being discussed on HN, so that it "rockets to the top", to quote the comment you initially replied to.

Re: Earnestness

#119

Post by rrdharan »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #87
danhak wrote: post #70

In my view, there is a uniquely American fiction that there exists for everyone some pursuit that both (a) will satisfy their passion and (b) be highly remunerative. Your job is to find that pursuit. And if you fail, I guess it's because you weren't earnest enough. I don't doubt that successful founders are highly motivated by the challenges of their work. But the suggestion that the point isn't to build a business a…

Not speaking for all Americans, but I've never believed that (a) and (b) are both out there if I can simultaneously solve them. I chose to give one preference and then did the best to support the other. It's an optimization activity that may or may not achieve satisfaction on either one. It's the outliers who become wealthy doing what they love. No illusions there. The other 'responsibility' we take collectively is t…

I agree and don’t believe in the fiction either, but just because many or even most Americans do (or do not) believe in the fiction does not preclude it from being fair to describe it as “uniquely American” - in my mind OP was pointing out the origin of this worldview and the source of most of its advocacy and propagation, and I think they’re right?

Re: Earnestness

#120

Post by burntoutfire »

qwerty1234599 wrote: post #80
bonoboTP wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, cultur…

Poland is very uniform in term of cultural background and origins (and everyone is white), and yet has very low trust levels.
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