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Earnestness

paulgraham.com

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Re: Earnestness

#391

Post by eloff »

woodruffw wrote: post #383
eloff wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have a post factual philosophy. Just because some things are made up in history does not mean the whole field is without rigor, nor does it make it equivalent to the counter factual nonsense coming out of gender studies. That you can find examples to the contrary does not prove the rule or make everything somehow equal.

I'm sorry if it wasn't clear, but those weren't supposed to be examples to the contrary (it's a matter of historical fact that people believed those myths, and acted based on those beliefs), nor do I have a "post factual" personal philosophy (I'm actually a Rawlsian and a moral realist, which is about as stodgy and non-postmodern as you can get by moral philosophy standards). The point with that whole digression was…

Sorry, I didn't mean to go at you. It's just one of my buttons when people cherry pick something bad about Y and try to use that establish that X is therefore somehow equal or not worse. There are some people out there who even like to believe all humans are equal. As if they live in some alternate reality. I'm not implying anything about you by the way, just venting.

Someone else in the comments here had the gall to say there are bad physics papers therefore gender studies is no less legitimate. Which is totally nonsensical as an argument.

> they're interested in carving at the joints between phenomena that are taken for granted as conjoined

On the surface I have no issue with that. I just think the field of gender studies in general is so toxic and full of garbage that anyone doing actual serious work in that field would do well to distance themselves from it.

Re: Earnestness

#392

Post by CuriouslyC »

boh wrote: post #213
Quarrelsome wrote: post #2

Earnest is my favourite word for describing that beautiful part during a child's development where they haven't yet had a negative experience from expressing themselves earnestly. That window of time where if you ask if they know something they would proudly reply "no!" because they have no idea that there might be shame in not knowing something. I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of fear o…

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…

It isn't so much that people are incapable of doing anything but mimicking what already exists, as most people only notice and appreciate things that conform to what they already know. There's a large amount of art and music just waiting for blessing to get super popular, not because it's good, but because people need to be told what "good" is.

Re: Earnestness

#393

Post by TheDong »

lazydon wrote: post #388

It's funny how a team develops their own common vocab not only for the stuff they work on (Ubiquitous Language as in DDD) but also to describe people. When a few teammates and I interview folks, other than the usual official evaluations, the best we understand each other's feedback is through this common language. A language that got unconsciously developed while interviewing and working together for years and our ex…

> When a few teammates and I interview folks ... simply "good energy". The opposite of it would be "looks tired".

At our office, we have the more normal term of "easy to communicate" and "good culture fit" and so on.

"Culture fit" seems like a slightly more convenient term for applying ingrained racist and sexist biases, but I guess saying any applicants who don't match your racial or socioeconomic background seem "tired" works well too!

I think "looks tired" is also even more convenient for ageism than the usual "that old person didn't seem like a good culture fit".

I know this is a really negative interpretation of what you're saying, but in my experience those sorts of things really are used to filter out people who aren't like you. People of different races, people who have young kids and are thus naturally tired, people who have lazy eyes, people with minor speech impediments. All of those people coincidentally have higher rates of being bad culture fits and looking tired.

I wonder if pg would think those people are earnest or not.

Re: Earnestness

#394

Post by gbh444g »

selestify wrote: post #359
indymike wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earnestness is what happens when people "let the guard down" and just be themselves. That's a rare state for a lot of people, who have spent a lifetime trying to be anyone but who they really are.

> That's a rare state for a lot of people, who have spent a lifetime trying to be anyone but who they really are. If you do it enough, who you "really are" is someone who doesn't enjoy letting their guard down. Who's to say that's not your "authentic" self at that point?

To that buddhists would answer that there is no self.

Re: Earnestness

#395

Post by fabrica »

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.

I believe it's possible to be very interested in business and money and still end up with an ethically credible result.

The problem is that we(in the broader sense of the working world) don't treat those concepts as an "artistic medium" to which additional principles and ideas are needed to structure and shape the outcomes, rather, we just use them as scorekeeping for a nebulous measure of life success, which results in founders laboring hard over the business equivalent of a fart joke, because they're only aiming to min-max response for effort.

The measure of what's an "impactful" business is socially constructed within the arbitrage of what we could potentially strive for against what societal conditions currently allow. Entrepreneurs, as a group, are always testing the boundaries of that arbitrage. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but it's hard to find balance in the arrangement because they aren't able to do their study in private: part of the deal is that they demand access to significant resources to make it happen, and that occasional violations get overlooked in the name of progress. In a time like now when the population is mostly asking for relief measures, it looks indulgent, and sometimes it is.

Re: Earnestness

#396

Post by dang »

iWorshipFAANGS wrote: post #390
dang wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstand the genre of essay that pg practices. It's a form of thinking out loud, and intensely personal—a way of finding out how one understands oneself and the world by writing about it. This is actually the origin of the term 'essay', which means 'attempt' and is intrinsically informal. Citations would be out of place.

I'm going to post one more time, just because I think there's a bit of a misconception here. You're absolutely correct about the origin of the word "Essay." It comes from the French word "essais," meaning "test" or "attempt." The form as we know it was invented by Montaigne, whose essays are indeed informal and personal. They're also uniformly excellent, and I'd recommend them to anyone. https://en.wikisource.org/wik…

I'm glad you brought up Montaigne; I was going to, but then realized that people would accuse me of comparing pg to the classics and get mad about that too.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare informal quotes to "citations" in the modern sense. The point is that this is an informal, highly personal genre. There are people, as you probably know, who claim that Montaigne invented not only the essay, but the modern idea of a personal self by writing them. So to accuse pg of being too personal or self-referential in his essays is a misunderstanding. The way his writing gets under people's skin is certainly interesting though.

Re: Earnestness

#397

Post by mdlman »

alextheparrot wrote: post #22
croissants wrote: post #10

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…

What did you end up reading, if I may?

Re: Earnestness

#398

Post by nojvek »

At this point pg’s articles have a huge survival bias, it’s really hard to know.

The only way to know is YC valuing each company on demo day 1, 5 and 10 years in the future, publicly keeping a record of predicted valuations and their hypothesis for their model Waiting 10 years and regressing to see if their model made the correct predictions.

It could very well be that YC could just shoot money in dark and by the mere fact of being where talent and VCs are, companies turn into unicorns out of sheer luck and timing. We don’t know.

The YC process isn’t scientific, or at-least not open to scientific scrutiny.

Re: Earnestness

#399

Post by gbh444g »

ritchiea wrote: post #219
indymike wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earnestness is what happens when people "let the guard down" and just be themselves. That's a rare state for a lot of people, who have spent a lifetime trying to be anyone but who they really are.

Exactly, there’s nothing inherently boring about being earnest. You can be earnest and boring but you could also be earnest with a good sense of humor and an interest in film history or software engineering. I’m not going to go all in on pg’s earnestness essay but it’s a positive trait and if you have genuine interests, there’s a good chance being earnest makes you more interesting when discussing interests because y…

This made me think that there are two type of not-earnestness: "what's in in it for me?" and "what's in it for others?" The first type is what [office] politics is about. The second type is rare and an example of it is when a doctor could tell a patient point-blank that he has 2 months left, but instead strongly recommends to go on a 2 months round-the-world trip and even invents a plausible cause [such trips help so much that savings on meds are multiples of the trip's cost].

Re: Earnestness

#400

Post by dang »

woodruffw wrote: post #373
dang wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment breaks this site guideline egregiously: " Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html How anyone can claim to read someone else's mind like you do here is beyond me, or even claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad 30+ years ago or how he reacte…

I do think I broke the site's guidelines by not assuming good faith. So I apologize for that. > How you can claim to read someone else's mind like this is beyond me, or even for that matter claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad curriculum 30 years ago or how he reacted to it at the time. If I know pg, he would have reacted exactly the same way as now—but more likely he just avoided taking such courses…

Thanks for that!

I believe you and find that interesting but it seems to me you're talking about your education, not pg's. Those terms aren't universal and, as I'm sure you know, there's also a strain in analytical philosophy that takes pride in not knowing anything about that stuff. Besides that, skepticism about postmodernism generally was as widespread then as it is now, especially among technical people, and I'd be shocked if that hasn't always been his view. Certainly it was 10 or 15 years ago, whenever it was that I first read him refer to it.

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