Several comments here make me want to reply with Steve Jobs email to Gawker reporter:
“By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?”
Earnestness
171–180 of 478 posts
Re: Earnestness
#172I 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…
I don't think the essay argues that being earnest is sufficient to get very rich.
Re: Earnestness
#173Retrospectively ascribing success to character traits that we favour is subjective to the point of meaninglessness. Earnestness, like any other trait or 'virtue' is not innate or absolute. Everyone has the capacity to exhibit this trait or be seen to exhibit it, when refracted through the non-objective lens of someone else's bias and perception. For example, a politician for partyX is seen to be an earnest 'straight…
Well, here is an article by a Nobel prize winner, reviewing a large amount of empirical evidence that personality traits predict success. See particularly section 4.
https://www.dphu.org/uploads/attachements/books/books_4871_0...
Re: Earnestness
#174These 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.
> But after that it is pretty much a crap-shoot, and all this theorizing are just post-hoc rationalizations to satisfy your ego.
On the other hand, all these baby boomers with money seeking to reinvent themselves as trend-predicting geniuses... at least they write checks.
Whom are you going to get money from instead, mom and dad? Someone has to take risks.
Re: Earnestness
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
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 co…
I have read PG essays for the last 4-5 something years. YC was never under my radar before that. The first time I saw ‘PG essays’, I was excited because I thought they meant PG Wodehouse who is my favourite author ever and I was excited that YC reads Wodehouse together.
Alas..that wasn’t the case. But I don’t regret the PG essays and have come to appreciate them over the years. I think it’s because I didn’t have any expectation about this person’s writing or prior knowledge about PG. But not knowing who Paul Graham was and reading them for the first time, I couldn’t figure out the enthusiasm around it. Maybe it was my disappointment that they weren’t by my PG. But over time, I have come to appreciate it.
These are what I call ‘through my lens’ writings. The words derive weight from the cult of personality. And the lens they see the world through..
Re: Earnestness
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In 2005 we didn't have the cloud, which lets you start a startup for next to nothing. We didn't have Lean Startup type books, podcasts and social media post from insiders which let us self educate on how business and startups worked. And we didn't have hundreds of VCs and billions of dollars chasing the next kid with a hot startup. It would be interesting to see a essay from PG on why YC is still necessary.
AWS launched in 2006. The cloud was very much a part of and a driver of the earlier boom. It's not something that's arrived since. The cloud, too, is old news.
I'm not taking a position on whether or not YC is "necessary". I'm saying that fifteen years ago it was clear to most of us that YC was making society better. Now? It's really not clear.
Re: Earnestness
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
[EDIT: Every statement here is a basic fact, easily verifiable and backed by reputable scholarship and reaearch. Controversy comes from peoples dislike of the implication of these facts, not the truthfulness of the statements themselves. TBH I think downvoters should be ashamed of themselves. Or, better educate themselves.] What? No. White supremacy is literally a cop murdering a man by pressing his knee on the guys…
> White supremacy is literally a cop murdering a man by pressing his knee on the guys neck until he dies, with the cops buddies standing by and watching That is not white supremacy until you prove he did it because the victim was black and not because other reasons (like him being a bully cop). So under that criteria any white person killed by a black person was victim of black supremacy. A better example of white su…
[EDIT: tl;dr is if a bully cop targets someone black because they know they can get away with it because the person is black, not white, that's still an example of white supremacy / systemic racism in action.]
No. Fuck off, seriously.
Do you actually believe that about the murder of George Floyd? Do you actually think that cop would have behaved that way if George Floyd was white?
What you said only makes any sense in a fantasy world where you simply ignore the facts of police violence over the last several decades.
Or maybe you’re ignorant, i.e. uneducated, in which case I would encourage you to read more and better material on the subject.
Re: Earnestness
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Did you look at the references at the other end of that link? It seems like you are equating rejecting papers like that, with denying white supremacy. Would it be possible for someone to think that particular kind of academic work is of low value, and yet still think white supremacy is real?
I looked at the references on the other end of the link. I expected it to be a particular article with all four of those words in the title. It was not; it was just a search for those four words.
The top result is an article about the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (d. 1968), who was among other things one of the leaders of the theological opposition to the Third Reich and its subversion of Christian belief in service of white-supremacist ideology. The article says that Barth's interpretation of Romans 2 provides us a way today to avoid commingling Christian identity and whiteness.
It's certainly possible for someone who believes white supremacy exists (and is worth opposing) to think that academic work that reads Barth today to counter racial superiority disguised as Christianity is of low value. I'd say it's pretty unlikely.
To be fair, this is not the most charitable interpretation. The most charitable interpretation is that the author of the essay has never seriously read any academic work involving the words "hermeneutic," "dialectic," "hegemonic," or "whiteness" and they're just four words that he thinks mean nothing, and that he didn't actually read the results in the Google Scholar search before a middlebrow dismissal (to use his own term) of the results. That would make him like the vast majority of the folks who deny the existence of white supremacy - dismissing serious opposition to it as silly instead of specifically disbelieving it.
Re: Earnestness
#179Here's an easy way to figure out where earnestness matters vs where it's just bullshitting all the way down. Are there any prodigies? Mathematics: yes. Music: yes. Real estate: no.
Re: Earnestness
#180If you're interested in X for its own sake, you are very unlikely to want to turn that into a business. Unless you're also interested in business and money for their own sakes - both of which should trigger very justified cynicism, because there are far more effective ways to make the world a better place than by getting extremely rich after an IPO.
I do a lot of things simply to do the thing for its own sake and I've gotten a lot of feedback that people "value" the wonderful things I do out of the goodness of my heart. And I was homeless for years and hearing that shit about how much everyone "appreciated" how much I "cared" and all this shit while mostly not giving me money for it.
The assumption that people should do things for free is an assumption that they have vast resources to spend on benefiting others with no expectation of getting any of that back. Or that they should serve as slave labor out of "virtue."
Having done the latter, let me tell you it sucks. In the extreme.
If you want the world to be healthy, you need to find ways to do good works that pay your bills and you need to find ways to engage in symbiotic relationships where benefiting others comes back to you. The word for that is generally business.
I would like to keep working on the same things I've worked on for years but turn it into an actual business that pays my bills. There is nothing I want more desperately than to do X for its own sake and somehow also live in comfort because I do good things in this shitty world full of shitty people who all want something for free and are happy to take freebies literally from a homeless woman if they can get away with it.