Earnestness • Hacker News Board

Re: Earnestness

#401

Post by dang » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

cambalache wrote: post #344

dang wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's so little to be charitable about. But in any case the GP was a snarky, shallow dismissal, which is not what we want here, regardless of who the target is. From a moderation point of view your comment is totally different and I don't have a problem with it. Btw, pg has been talking about earnestness for years—same with the topics of his other recent essays—and he has always written in this style.…

> But in any case the GP was a snarky, shallow dismissal, which is not what we want here, regardless of who the target is. So no plausible charitable interpretation this time? A little bit hypocritical dont you think? I think you are confusing your role of moderator with one of mindless cheerleader. But who knows? Maybe that's part of the job so no judgment there.

I don't see a plausible interpretation of "all this theorizing are just post-hoc rationalizations to satisfy your ego" that isn't a snarky, shallow dismissal (of someone's work, btw, as the site guidelines ask you specifically not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and a personal attack to boot.

I've posted so many moderation comments over the years that I'm comfortable saying "regardless of who the target is". If anyone bothered to look through that backlog (not that anyone would or should), they'd find me responding that way across a pretty full spectrum of positions and views [1], depending on whoever or whatever the commenter breaking the guidelines was going after. I don't see why threads about pg essays should be excluded from bog-standard moderation.

(It's true that I've also been posting some of my personal views in this thread and the last pg essay thread, but those are different from moderation replies. You can tell them apart by whether or not they say "please" and link to the HN guidelines.)

Btw also, please don't copy/paste comments, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400058. It strictly lowers signal/noise ratio.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Re: Earnestness

#402

Post by zepto » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 4:19 AM UTC

pseudalopex wrote: post #370

zepto wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok. So your view of what was wrong with it is that the search terms might change. And it seems like he has removed the word ‘whiteness’. Is he still ‘denying the existence of white supremacy’?

No. My view is probably he didn't read any of those papers. He has to know most of his audience won't. He has to know the search results could change too. So he was just sneering at the words. Changing the search terms is just more evidence he wasn't pointing to any particular research.

It clear he wasn’t pointing at a particular paper. He was pointing at a general area. I think we agree on that.

And ‘sneering’ doesn’t seem unrealistic, given that he used the word bogus.

But the thread we are having this discussion on is about him ‘Denying the existence of white supremacy’.

I don’t think anyone has said anything which justifies such a charge.

I think one can easily accuse him of is intellectually immature behavior or narrow-mindedness. But not a lot more.

Re: Earnestness

#403

Post by iWorshipFAANGS » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 4:46 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #396

iWorshipFAANGS wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mode…

Alright, well said. Although I still don't agree that it'd be out of place to include citations in a personal essay, what you've said is fair too.

Re: Earnestness

#404

Post by claudeganon » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 4:49 AM UTC

boh wrote: post #249

nitrogen wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

By your thesis, there shouldn’t then be people who, having achieved greatness, fall from it because of a negative experience. But of course every field is littered with these examples, great people crippled by the loss of someone they love, an injury, or simply being unable to cope with some awful thing that happened to them in childhood. It’s practically a cliche.

Really, your argument is a fairly irrelevant appeal - because worse circumstances exist in the world (something so inevitably true as to be pointless to state), there is nothing to complain about. While it’s good to have perspective about where one is more fortunate than others, people deal with their own circumstances and not those of others, so it’s functionally meaningless to raise this point. Someone being abused by their spouse or grieving over the loss of a child can maybe take intellectual comfort in the fact that their lot is better than someone in a prison camp, but this kind of diversion does absolutely nothing to alleviate their circumstances.

Re: Earnestness

#405

Post by spoonjim » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 4:51 AM UTC

It's only in Silicon Valley that earnestness, or the appearance or earnestness, is important. Here, you need to say "we're transforming patient outcomes and helping people achieve their best health." It's just not a requirement anywhere else I've worked. There are more billionaires outside of Silicon Valley than inside it, and very few of them have had to put up such pretense. They just say "we're starting a health insurance company to outcompete incumbents through better operational efficiency, delivering best-in-industry margins and double digit revenue growth."

Re: Earnestness

#406

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 5:06 AM UTC

wombatmobile wrote: post #389

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, I guess, "politics" is just a word which can be defined however we want. So I can't tell you that you're wrong or the definition you're using is untrue. It's not obvious to me that a definition of "politics" which groups together party politics, funding startups, and screaming kids coming home from soccer practice provides much useful insight into the world. At best, it's an imprecise statement of the sam…

Your analogy to physics is useful. "Everything is physics" might be true, but as you say, it isn't very useful because it is too broad a brush. That's why we talk about atomic physics, astrophysics, dynamics, optics, nuclear physics, quantum physics, and for that matter, chemistry, and inorganic chemistry. Each of these is a discipline with its own nomenclature and epistemology that enable practitioners to home in on…

Sure! I don't mean to deny the importance of the insight; a lot of people do have seriously mistaken beliefs about how social and economic facts come to be, and learning a bit of political science is a critical part of correcting those mistakes.

The problem is that electoral politics, at least as practiced recently in the US, rarely has much to do with this. I'm on a few donor lists, so I got a lot of political fundraising emails over the past year, and out of the candidates I can remember only one was focused on society and how we can make it better. The other candidates talked primarily, if not exclusively, about how terrible their Congressional opponents are and how useful my help would be to defeat their villainous ways. Whatever term you use to refer to this category of activity, I don't think someone with an earnest interest in improving the world would choose to regularly participate in it.

Re: Earnestness

#407

Post by wolverine876 » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 5:09 AM UTC

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…

> We'd all like to think there's something special in all of us and that the world will benefit from the light of our creativity if it was set free. Truth be told, very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists. ...

> No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs.

There's a premise here that unless you are Picasso or Steve Jobs, you have nothing to contribute - and that if you aren't changing the world in a significant way, you are mediocre. People change themselves, their families, their communities, their friends and neighbors lives - most of what we get from the world is in those micro, personal interactions. Friends have done infinitely more for me than Jobs or Picasso.

There's also an assumption that "very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists", which doesn't at all match my experience of people.

I find that almost everyone has much to offer, but you need to give them space and confidence to be earnest. You need to listen, and each one has so much to tell - perspectives that open up new worlds. If your attitude is the one you describe, it's self-fulfilling.

So this should be good news to you. Why is it important to you to advocate for bad news?

Re: Earnestness

#408

Post by ummwhat » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 5:19 AM UTC

iWorshipFAANGS wrote: post #204

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.

There are no child prodigy realtors because very few people are willing to take a child seriously enough to buy a house off them. The learnable part of realty (as measured on the realtors exam) is far outweighed by the bullshit part of looking the part.

Astronauts per se no. But there are pilots as young as 16.

Re: Earnestness

#409

Post by adamsea » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 6:21 AM UTC

eloff wrote: post #357

I don't understand why Paul Graham puts himself out there in the public sphere like this. To read all the haters and cynicism here that he gets in response - a lesser man like myself would just say screw it and walk away. Like his critics here are terribly accomplished people. Paul Graham is a expert with a proven track record and some multiple of billions of "market votes" behind him. But the armchair critics on HN…

He’s a great man indeed.

Re: Earnestness

#410

Post by disown » Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 6:32 AM UTC

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #93

rst wrote: post #49

Odd to see a stress on interest in a problem for its own sake from pg, who has elsewhere written that the startup economy would be crippled by raising taxes on people who had already gotten fabulously rich. If being in it for the money is "the wrong motive" to do a startup, downgrading the potential financial gains from set-for-dynasty to merely set-for-life would seem to be a way of ditching the poseurs...

"People's motives are as mixed in Silicon Valley as anywhere else. Even the founders motivated mostly by money tend to be at least somewhat interested in the problem they're solving, and even the founders most interested in the problem they're solving also like the idea of getting rich."

Sure, interested in how the problem they're solving may get them a pot of gold.

Founders aren't motivated by the problem no more than athletes are motivated by the love of the game. Children are motivated in that manner. But not adults.

Startups, like sports, are a business. The only concern is money. That is the ends. The startup, problem, etc are just the means to that end.

Every founder is motivated by money. It just sounds tacky and cheap to say you did it for money, so everyone builds up some silly story - "to help people", "to solve a problem", "cause it was a passion", "to create jobs for the community", "create value for others", etc. Nope. It was all for money. No need to be embarrassed about it.