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Earnestness

paulgraham.com

241–250 of 478 posts

Re: Earnestness

#241
Earnestness is some mix of ethics and disclosure. Perhaps truth coupled with reasonable expectations (honesty meets humility) would be a better characterization, but most people don’t really know what truth, or rather alignment, really entail in a purely communication capacity.

The challenge with earnestness is not everybody can either attain or receive it. It is a gift that takes a certain level of intellectual capability and personality to appreciate otherwise it’s written off as unintelligible or an insult.

Re: Earnestness

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between post-hoc rationalization and learning from experience though? I don't see him making any claims of pre-ordained success or that luck isn't a factor, he's just pointing out a quality he's seen to be valuable in the context of startups and how it can be a contra-indicator to the type of BS artist that proliferate around any kind of profitable industry. Sure we can always question motivatio…

I think the original comment was directed at the seemingly pretentious nature of the essay. How do you quantify earnestness? Being sincere? I get the “we like demo over slides”, “2 founder over 1 founder” kinda thing, but talking about virtue and moral character seems like PG is struggling to find things to do after retirement. Philosophical musings are almost always due to too much time on hand and assumed profundit…

I think he lays it out pretty well: earnestness is more than sincerity, it's dedication to solving a problem for its own sake rather than as a means to an end. I'm not sure why you want that to be quantifiable, but I don't see that as being useful since Goodhart's law then kicks in.

I do agree that on a single continuum from roulette to race, entrepreneurship is closer to roulette, but it's a limited framing because entrepreneurship is neither a well-defined rote exercise like a marathon nor a discrete probabilistic event like flipping a coin. To the contrary, building a company is a continuous feedback loop involving thousands of decisions over which an entrepreneur has complete agency. The uncomfortable truth is twofold: founders' choices do affect outcomes, but those outcomes are not predictable and have no direct relationship to ones own perception of merit, hard work, fairness, or morals. Getting hung up on the luck aspect and whether or not some successful person is humble enough is a defense mechanism that ultimately gets in the way of maximizing your own success.

Re: Earnestness

#243

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…

Can you expand on the boringness? That conflicts with what I think because I believe that engaging hobbies are that vitality which manifests as “playful” and “fun”. Are you willing to try something new, and if you do, are you willing to learn to do it well enough to enjoy it. Engaging with a hobby tends to involve making it part of me - the hobbies I haven’t committed to actually liking and just performed have always…

It seems to me that the perception of boringness can come as a result of earnestness being very niche/focused. Your example is a great one! But if anybody who is not a fan or doesn't know Borges, they would probably find a person earnestly passionately about his writing quite boring -- as one can only have the time and mental energy to be truly earnest about so many things.

In contrast, GP's example of popular people are likely those who are good at faking that kind of deep interest in many things, tailored to their present company, so that they attract a few people from many different crowds. Of course, this is based on my own experience only; in certain circles I can feel quite loquacious and come off as extroverted -- usually because of an earnestly shared interest -- but in most cases I think I come across as boring or even introverted!

Re: Earnestness

#244

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…

In defense of Paul, I'm reminded of work highlighted by the twitter account Real Peer Review (once banned and now reincarnated). It highlights various bits of so-called scholarship that looks like political ideology dressed up in fancy words and financed by taxpayers. "Decolonizing math" and things like that. Some recent examples:

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/133532437242123879...

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/132655686041831424...

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/128234439739327284...

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/131274252267491738...

(NSFW) https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/128226118909190553...

(NSFW) https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/130979001821976166...

I wouldn't expect taxpayers to finance my church. I'm not sure why I'm on the hook to fund this particular non-falsifiable dogma that I vehemently disagree with.

Re: Earnestness

#245

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…

Does that mean they don’t have respect for say quantum computing research? Because I’m pretty confident most people in SV won’t understand, say, a paper on quantum error correction.

Re: Earnestness

#246
post #208

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.…

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Re: Earnestness

#247
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

To be fair there's a ton of hand-waviness on HN about the hot new web framework MongoDB xyz thing. It's not that different, IMHO : ). > 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. True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think t…

> True but with the Analytic / Continental divide in philosophy you still get a lot of folks on the Analytic side of things who think that anything not quantifiable in the way that they are used to is bunk.

I am glad you pointed that out. Anecdotally, I have found that "philosophy" to many in the tech industry when used perjoratively means Continental vs Analytic philosophy. Plus, even with analytic philosophy, when people recognize it as the sort of thing that Russell and his lineage worked on, they don't really get what these philosophers "cared about" - that it mattered to them if mathematical symbolism expressed truths about the Universe in a metaphysical sense. They weren't just manipulating symbols to prove consistency etc.

To me, Wittgenstein's concerns portray the bridge between the two major schools (well, naturally, he was a European who chose to go study under Russell, the Englishman) very well. He cared about the formalism, but he also cared that it made sense in terms of finding meaning in the world.

Somehow, it's the latter struggle that seems to pass by unnoticed when "techie people" (to generalize) think of the work of philosophers.

Re: Earnestness

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does that mean they don’t have respect for say quantum computing research? Because I’m pretty confident most people in SV won’t understand, say, a paper on quantum error correction.

Good point. I should add "non-technical" to my comment.

Re: Earnestness

#249
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.

The only thing I'm suggesting is that freedom doesn't spare you from mediocrity.

Real oppression, an experience the US professional middle class is largely spared of, the type experienced by the citizens of Venezuela or the people currently being held in Xinjiang re-education camps, is truly insurmountable and requires large macro shifts to institute change. To suggest individual bullying, harassment and isolation are counted as so insurmountable to a person's theoretical "potential" that the environment must change first to prompt it, is an illustration of the deep self-absorption very few people have the privilege to experience.

Nothing is right or just in this context.

Re: Earnestness

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever read a codebase that accomplishes very little, yet has a million layers of abstraction? With classes like `MainApplicationBeanInjectionFactoryBuilder`? I think the scathing point was that much can be written about nothing, and one way to obscure your content is to use language such as "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness".

But what is the layman term for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness"? And why a researcher should use it? Ironically PG founded Ycombinator, which is "an implementation of a fixed-point combinator in lambda calculus"

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