As someone who has been accused of earnestness I have
long maintained that Earnestness-ness-ness is the enemy.
Earnestness minus humor is the enemy of building a scalable community.
Churchill once defined a fanatic as someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject.
To move beyond the early adopters and get through to the late majority we need to work out not how to keep the conversation on track, but how to let our audience develop it and still be able to deliver our punchline.
Earnestness
151–160 of 478 posts
Re: Earnestness
#152"There's nothing morally wrong with starting a startup to make money." This shows how ignorant Paul Graham is on certain subjects.
Could you elaborate ?
Re: Earnestness
#153> 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…
This is what you see if you look at the Perceptions of Corruption Index. That only looks at the public sector (not private companies), but one could reasonably assume the two correlate:
https://jakubmarian.com/corruption-perceptions-index-of-euro...
Re: Earnestness
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
The vast majority of essays submitted to HN don’t reach the front page because the author isn’t famous. Whereas PG rockets to the top of the front page within an hour of submission. Even then, the average HN comments section is highly sceptical of any claims in any post. The top comment is usually critiquing the link for one reason or another. For some reason, that wasn’t the case with PG articles. You’re only remark…
I value PG's opinion more than a rando blogger because he's very successful, has observed a lot of data about what makes startups successful, seems unusually serious about being correct, and has written a lot of things I consider insightful in the past. He's a name I know and I click it when I see it on HN. There are a lot of other people with similar HN clout, patio11 for instance. I haven't noticed a trend for comm…
I mean it's at least technically quite possible that someone like PG would have a very good intuitive understanding for what works and what doesn't, without this meaning that he is able to systematise this implicit knowledge in such a way that it is empirically solid and/or can be usefully taught to others.
This is similar to the fact that experts are not always the best teachers, or that a rhetorically skilled speaker/writer is not necessarily a competent linguist or literary scientist, or how many great musicians know little about music theory.
Of course, you are correct that many, many other tech bloggers don't back up their claims either (most notoriously the "I did this thing once at company X, it worked ok, and now I'm preaching it as a new gospel (but it hasn't even been a year that we did this and we don't understand the long-term implications of it yet)" blog posts). I think this is in general a real shame because it leads to all the cargo culting madness that's so prevalent in the industry.
In PG's case, I find that most of his blog posts read like post hoc rationalisations based on sweeping generalisations (e.g. that you can be either "earnest" or jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a particularly false dichotomy). Which wouldn't nearly bother me as much if they weren't also often full of thinly veiled contempt for different kinds of people (e.g. people who are actually good at bringing people together). It sometimes reads to me as a sort of "I was bullied/excluded as a nerdy teenager and now I'm gonna show them how much better nerds are and why they will (or at least should) rule the world". In a world where we increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies making decisions that impact all of us, including people completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't think this is a very good position to take.
Re: Earnestness
#155Another ridiculous thing of this essay is the outstanding moral character granted to SV founders. For sure, a fraction of them is guided by objectives different than money in their pursuits but that fraction is dwarfed by people in other fields, like academy, social work and NGOs. There is nothing in the startup culture that makes me thing of nobler, more earnest, more enlightened people.
Re: Earnestness
#156The biggest display of naivete and arrogance to me is sincerely believing you can improve the world through capitalism.
How many failed shared economy experiments did we have that only made things worse?
Take AirBnb. An apparently great idea, it became popular because many needed an additional income to survive, to the point people accepted the idea of having strangers sleep in their houses for money as the norm.
Beside the incredible damage AirBnb did to the housing situation in many cities -in my city, 35% of the housing is now AirBnb only. Locals have been forced out of their own city-, did the "airbnbs" ever think that the problem they were trying to solve (people in need of more money just to survive) was caused exactly by capitalism, the same mechanism they thought they could use to make the world "a better place"?
Re: Earnestness
#157These essays are getting ridiculous. We get it, you have tons of experience funding companies so it helps you to do a competent job filtering the candidates.But after that it is pretty much a crap-shoot, and all this theorizing are just post-hoc rationalizations to satisfy your ego.
I won't go that far. But I will say that, contra his earlier writing, pg's recent stuff has a real "feedback in the bubble" feel. It's still treating SV culture as it was fifteen years ago and not really willing to engage with or even nod to the way the industry and its effects on society have evolved. So e.g. Airbnb is still a hero story about disruption even as it settles into an established power and its inconveni…
15 years ago SV was the same as now, there was never a nobler past. There has always been externalities than the tech companies are willing to sweep under the rug if it helps them to make money.
Re: Earnestness
#158> 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…
Believe it or not, Europe is actually a diverse place with numerous cultures, each with own social norms and behaviours.
Re: Earnestness
#159Though I agree with much of this article off earnestness can also be terrible in some circumistances. When people earnestly pursue something abhorrent or deluded.
> When people earnestly pursue something abhorrent or deluded.
Which is exactly what happens all the time. People like the "airbnbs" thinking they can make the world a better place and pursuing their delusion with earnestness, only to cause bigger problems in the end.
I wish capitalists could at least be honest and admit they found an inefficiency in the market to exploit and they just want to profit from it. At least there's no hypocrisy in that.
Re: Earnestness
#160I love PG, but some of his essays lately seem to make me sad, like he's out of touch. I know plenty of earnest (and, frankly, quite talented) people. What they lack is capital and guidance (and maybe some discipline and motivation, to be fair). But, they will read a PG essay and say, "Hey! That's me! Why can't PG invest in me?". To which case, they quickly realize, "Oh, cause I can't show that I can make any money fr…
Not much. The idea that through hard work you can get anywhere, no matter where you come from, is just a gigantic delusion and a lie we've been insistently taught to believe.
There's billions of people working daily harder than any CEO just to bring food to their families. They will never become rich.