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Earnestness

paulgraham.com

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Re: Earnestness

#201

Post by dcx »

Bresenham wrote: post #123

> 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 droppe…

Do you remember life before iPhones? Before Google and universal knowledge, YouTube guides on every subject under the sun, Microsoft Excel, personal computers, international video calls, remote work? (Plus the indirect benefits to you economically from every industry adopting the above)

The world has added 3.4 billion people since 1980. We're in a life-or-death struggle for carrying capacity, so daily life naturally gets worse over time. It's easy to pin that on the whipping boy of the day.

There's no question that the next generation of technology has come with deep, systemic issues. But on balance the existence of these companies has clearly made the entire world better and brighter.

One case study - the Spanish Flu killed 50 million people. A pessimistic estimate for total deaths from COVID-19 after the vaccine(s) are fully rolled out might be 10 million. There are 4.3x more people in the world today. Disinformation is absolutely killing people. But how many more lives might our industry be credited with saving?

Re: Earnestness

#202

Post by courtf »

> it may be possible to be completely cynical and still be very funny

I guess this depends on how hard you want to laugh, but would you say George Carlin or Dave Chappelle are not cynical? I don't think earnestness and cynicism are so dichotomous.

Re: Earnestness

#203

Post by psyc »

bob33212 wrote: post #21

It would be interesting to see YC to move to funding with less regard to business plan. I know they already do this but what if you totally threw out the market research and gut feeling about the usefulness of the product and gave people 500k based on their interest and ability only.

YC reportedly cares mainly about the traits of the founders, and expects that they might well pivot to a completely different plan.

Re: Earnestness

#204

Post by iWorshipFAANGS »

ummwhat wrote: post #179

Here'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.

How would you know there are no prodigies in Real estate? There are certainly children who display an early knack in resource allocation.

How would a child practice real estate anyway? There are no astronaut prodigies either, as far as I know.

Re: Earnestness

#205

Post by Alex3917 »

> 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.

To be fair a lot of startup origin stories are so ridiculously fake that they seem like they could have only been created as a mockery of earnestness. Like the founders know they're lying, they know everyone else knows they're lying, and they're just doing it anyway as a weird flex or whatever.

Say what you will about Bezos, but at least he was honest that he just put every CPG product into a spreadsheet and discovered that books had by far the best unit economics and flywheel potential, rather than making up some bullshit backstory story about childhood literacy or whatever.

Re: Earnestness

#206

Post by hodgesrm »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #126

I think this essay would be more effective if the author defined what they mean by “earnest”. I think based on the essay, they mean seriousness + sincerity. But there is also a sense that the author considers “correct” as part of the definition: >“when you call someone earnest, you’re making a statement about their motives. It means both that they’re doing something for the right reasons [my emphasis] and they’re try…

> Do we really believe it’s not possible for a politician to be addressing the problem of “improving people’s lives” via the intermediate aim of “gaining political power”?

In my limited understanding the writers of the US Constitution held exactly this belief: that the government would be run by imperfect and self-interested actors. They introduced mechanisms like separation of powers to play them off against each other to the benefit of the governed. It seems as we've moved from that focus on outcomes to judging people based on the purity of their motives.

Re: Earnestness

#207

Post by war1025 »

I think it's interesting that PG seems to so often focus on the whole "nerd" thing.

Maybe it was just a happy accident of my adolescence, but the whole "nerd" stereotype never seemed to apply to anyone or be used against them.

People were singled out for other reasons, but academics or interests along those lines was never one of them.

Re: Earnestness

#208

Post by dvt »

iWorshipFAANGS wrote: post #192

If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as "academic bogus," you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness." First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." I think…

I'm upvoting you because I think you make a fair and well-thought-out argument. With that said, there's certainly a hand-waviness to "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology (I took classes in both, just out of curiosity).

And no matter how much you think Derrida or Focault contributed to philosophy, I would argue it pales in comparison to their Analytic contemporaries (Godel, Lewis, Anscombe, Moore, etc.). I was extremely skeptical of philosophers like Nietzsche and after a couple of semesters, I definitely appreciated the Continentals a bit more -- but not enough to take him (and his ilk) as seriously as I take the aforementioned. The problem lies with falsifiability: it's too easy to claim one just doesn't "get" whiteness, or critical theory, or what-have-you.

PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in humanities is -- apologies -- bogus.

Re: Earnestness

#209

Post by darkhorse13 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #82

If 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.

Fully disagree. Making a living doing what I find truly interesting is perhaps one of the greatest blessings to me in life. One of the better ways to do that is to turn it into a business, or at least a nice self-employment gig.

Re: Earnestness

#210

Post by anubidiocane »

oblio wrote: post #139
romanoderoma wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Norway and Denmark (as well as France) were treated with kiddie gloves compared to what occupation in Eastern Europe meant.

Well, Norway collaborated with the nazis and sympathised for some of their ideas at the time, for example Norway had been experimenting with eugenics programs since the 20s when they started to sterilise mentally hill patients and made it legal in 1934.

But the king of Norway and members of the army escaped to London and directed the resistance from there.

Ask the Jews that owned the houses and nursing homes that were confiscated for the Lebensborn project and the kids that survived it (not many), what they think about it.

Others had it worse doesn't mean they escaped the war and its consequences.

If the eastern block is where you draw the line, you could argue that many parts of Europe escaped the war.

But it would be historically false.

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