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Earnestness

paulgraham.com

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Re: Earnestness

#411

Post by vinay_ys »

jtanderson wrote: post #243
alextheparrot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The founders I have worked with (who became billionaires) are quite boring.

In pretty much every social gathering with them, they were silent (brooding) and didn't have interesting things to say about things and didn't seem interested to hold a conversation on their own. They seemed to be content listening to others talk.

But in work related meetings, when it came to making crazy bets they were extremely passionate about their belief and commitment and made those decisions like a boss. (They had personality flaws (they could be perceived as rude, unpolished etc in those situations) and they made mistakes when they became insecure while making high-stakes decisions as stakes became bigger.)

In most other cases (in not so crazy decisions that needed to be made everyday), they showed great amount of trust in others. They also showed genuine humility - they didn't assume expertise they didn't have and didn't try to assert that they are the boss.

I have come to believe that the founders mindset and behavior is crucial in attracting and retaining the right kind of talented next 10 employees. After that crucial bit, it is those 10 employees who determine the success probability of the company to a great extent. That founding/forming team is a bigger determinant of success rather than just the founders or just those initial employees by themselves.

Re: Earnestness

#412

Post by adamsea »

telesilla wrote: post #260
enriquto wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology I don't know anything about gender studies, but regarding ethnomusicology, you can be assured that it is a bona-fide, hard subject, even involving and motivating non-elementary math. The study of timbre and harmony in western music is rather dry, since it is overwhelmingly dominated by wind and string instruments that have one-dimensional, harmonic spectra. Even…

I agree with you on the depth and seriousness of the subject. Some fascinating studies include: Saga’s Sorrow: Femininities of Despair in the Music of Radical White Nationalism https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.3.04... Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265829427_Transnati... Is Birdsong Music? Outback Encounters wit…

I can’t tell if you are being serious or sarcastic.

FWIW I think all of those things sound interesting and cool.

Here’s the abstract from the ‘Saga’s Sorrow’ paper:

“This article examines the construction of gender roles in contemporary white nationalist music. Grounded in extensive and ethnographic fieldwork, the article traces the rise of leading Swedish singer Saga and argues that her music frames women as besieged embodiments of racial and national essence dependent on men for deliverance. The discussion of Saga’s music draws from a review of recent social and ideological shifts in radical white nationalism, insider interviews, performance observations, and structural and textual analyses.”

For some reason I’m reminded of the Zack Snyder film ‘300’.

Re: Earnestness

#413

Post by lambdatronics »

swyx wrote: post #52
ignoramous wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of fear of retribution/shame but I'm always a bit sad when I get in trouble because I was straight forward but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes. You might enjoy reading these two posts and discussions: "The power of ignorance" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23041281 "Asking questions" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22729028

I've also written about this effect, called Lampshading: https://www.swyx.io/lampshading/ asking the "stupid question" is a strength when done in taste.

Thanks for introducing me to that term! Right up there with 'bikeshedding' as my top new word this year.

I lampshade frequently. My typical use-case: senior dev says something I think is mistaken, but nobody else questions it. How do I know whether they're just humoring him, or if they are all mentally translating between what he said & what he meant? (Btw, people do this translation often -- nobody wants to be a pedant.) Lampshading is a great way of getting people to "pop the 'why' stack" as well. https://mikebroberts.com/2003/07/29/popping-the-why-stack/

Re: Earnestness

#414

Post by lambdatronics »

wombatmobile wrote: post #44
darkerside wrote: post #27

> Interestingly, just as the word "nerd" implies earnestness even when used as a metaphor, the word "politics" implies the opposite. It's not only in actual politics that earnestness seems to be a handicap, but also in office politics and academic politics. I don't think this is always the case. I've found that no matter the size of the business, they are made up of people, and people have bullshit detectors. When yo…

PG seems to have a cynical conception of what "politics" is, since he seems to be saying that practising it is anathema to earnestness. I understand what he means if by "politics" he means self-interest and hoodwinking voters. And that may be his experience of politicians, but it doesn't define the field any more than Mulligans define golf. Champion golfers don't take Mulligans, don't kick their ball closer to the ho…

My understanding of 'politics' is: when power is transacted via social influence instead of money. This is why you get corporate politics. The financial incentives within the company (such as bonuses & raises) aren't strong enough to transmit the required forces. Soft power steps in to fill the vacuum.

Re: Earnestness

#415

Post by lambdatronics »

TheDong wrote: post #393
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 "t…

>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".

See, this is why I don't think AI will catch on for making hiring decisions... not because it's going to be biased, but because it can be audited for bias & then corrected for it.

Re: Earnestness

#416

Post by lambdatronics »

spoonjim wrote: post #405

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 i…

Agreed. It's sort dystopian if you ask me. It's like toxic positivity, or LinkedIn 24/7... I'm struggling to define it, but it's easy enough to evoke.

Edit: OTOH, I have nothing against earnestness itself. It's just that Goodhart’s Law[0] kicks in, and then all you have is fake earnestness.

[0]"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Re: Earnestness

#417

Post by unabst »

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…

No. Narcissists are the popular ones because they can't stop hoarding attention, including yours.

Someone earnest can have an incredible sense of humor and a sharp intellectual mind. They can be kind, well-meaning, and respectful. And, they'll leave you alone. So you might have to poke them with a stick a couple of times.

Social media is populated with narcissists competing for virality on every platform. Highly entertaining, yes. A waste of all of our time including theirs? Probably.

Re: Earnestness

#418

Post by samatman »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #38

I earnestly think his writing has an overindulgent fandom here. Every single blog post rockets to the top and, in my opinion, they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or persuasion. He may write snappily, but is every single post worthy of Han's top slot?

He's the founder of the site.

That's all it takes.

Re: Earnestness

#419

Post by lambdatronics »

> When the problems get harder than the fake ones you're given in high school, caring about them starts to matter.

I wonder how much damage we're doing by forcing kids to work fake useless problems? Granted, it's tough to come up with problems that have never been solved before (nobody's expecting a PhD-level solution from a grade-school kid). However, what if we at least asked kids questions where the answer wasn't literally a list of letters for a multiple choice exam?

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