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Earnestness

paulgraham.com

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Re: Earnestness

#231

Post by mikewarot »

walleeee wrote: post #200
dash2 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. There are many problems that can only be solved by a self-funding organization which sells its solutions to consumers - aka a business. Suppose I would like to build entertaining, educational toys for children. Should I do it as a hobbyist? No. If I seriously want many children to benefit, I will have to get the toys to them, and producing them will take money. Should I get a grant from a charity? No: onl…

> The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback. Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism. True, but many of the markets we have are neither free nor fair. And even if they were, we should exercise caution before concluding that what is discovered is a need . Markets are equally capable of exploiting wants, socially conditioned propensi…

I want to sell the world on the idea of Capabilities Based Security... which means no product, nothing to profit from, which means no help from Silicon Valley at all. 8(

No matter how earnest, or driven... if there's no profit in it, nobody there cares.

How do you suggest I market this idea?

Re: Earnestness

#232

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

dvt wrote: post #208
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.…

There is, but I've moved away from characterizing it as hand-waviness. In something concrete like math, I think using hand-waviness is appropriate to describe someone skipping over something they could explain in detail.

In other fields, the frameworks present don't allow for the same degree of analysis, and that's just the way it is. It's kind of like comparing logic programming to an ML model. The model can be very accurate, but we likely cannot dissect it and understand what it does in the way that we can with logic programming.

To put it another way, a math professor whose blog I followed said something along the lines of math is hard because it's easy, and other fields are easy because they're hard.

Re: Earnestness

#233

Post by mikewarot »

All the earnestness in the world can't help when all you want to do is share a good idea, and make sure people know what's really possible.

It drives me nuts that we still have computer virii, and a whole field of "computer security professionals", when it could all be solved, and was, but Unix short-circuited history, and we've got this mess instead.

Re: Earnestness

#234

Post by legel »

nitrogen wrote: post #228
boh wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have too much optimism regarding the value of people's earnest expressions. Children are children and so their earnestness is cute and endearing (in most instances)--adults are far less charming and far more petty, self-indulgent, spineless, fickle, fearful. Social media is a cesspool largely due to all this earnestness. Fear of retribution and shame is helpful in mitigating the self-absorption embedded i…

No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs. We know because if that's who you were, that's who you'd be. This statement cannot be allowed to stand uncontested. It suggests that everyone is exactly where they ought to be, that all bullying and harassment and isolation that keeps people from reaching their potential is right and just.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear

Re: Earnestness

#235

Post by iWorshipFAANGS »

dvt wrote: post #208
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.…

Thanks for responding politely. I'll respond to both points.

1.

I don't want to say there's not a lot of hand-waviness in "soft" fields. Actually, I don't really know much about that, I've never participated in any "professional" humanities research. I do read papers from the humanities, though, but only about things that interest me. So I'm a true amateur.

I have, however, participated in academic research in what I think you call a "hard" field, in computer vision and image processing. I promise you, there's a great deal of obfuscation in that field too :-).

I think PG would say that whereas what I'm describing are instances of bad faith in fields that do have earnestness, people who publish papers that contain the words "whiteness" and "dialectics" are just standard actors in fields where earnestness is not even possible. I think he doesn't know what he's talking about.

2.

I don't want to argue about who has or hasn't contributed more(whatever that means) to philosophy. But fortunately I live in a world where I can read both Godel and Foucault, and I'm happy for that. I don't even have to pick a side, because the two wrote about wildly different domains.

But I don't think having falsifiability encompasses the end all be all of what we can explore in writing. Isn't that more the goal of proper experimental set-up? Even Wittgenstein, who I believe apprehended better than anyone the world in its logical constituency and relation, recognized the limitation of the logical method[1].

[1]. http://www.kfs.org/jonathan/witt/t654en.html

Re: Earnestness

#236

Post by keiferski »

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…

There is a weird expectation among some professions (Silicon Valley tech, especially, but I think it's probably endemic to any well-paid, well-respected class) that all other fields should be immediately understandable to the layman, and if they aren't, there's clearly charlatanry afoot.

As you pointed out correctly, these are all fairly standard terms in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. The ironic thing is that if one were to string together a bunch of technical terms, they sound exactly as obscurantist to the outsider. Subnet Masks, Hyper-Text Markup Language, BIOS, JavaScript ("What do you mean it has nothing to do with Java?") and so on.

Re: Earnestness

#239

Post by throwawayback »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #36

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

How could someone deny white supremacy? White supremacy is everywhere. It is watching us right now. It is reading along with you as you read this. This morning, I had white supremacy on my toast.

Wait a minute.... my toast is made of.... white bread.

Re: Earnestness

#240

Post by dcx »

randomsearch wrote: post #222
dcx wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totes agree with the “yeah but actually tech companies have done amazing things” argument but do you ever wonder why so many examples are now quite old? I mean I was raving about Google in 2001 and here we are near 20 years later saying how great their impact on search is...

Looking at release dates might not be the best way to frame this. It took decades before the full impact of the automobile was felt, and there were huge leaps in tech during that period too. We're in a different world today from when the first iPhone came out.

But also, I have a feeling like we're in the process of building up the activation energy for the next major wave of tangibly world-changing tech (AI, robotics, quantum computing?). I suspect the change in pace is related to the slowing of Moore's Law.

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