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Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

paulgraham.com

161–170 of 176 posts

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#161
post #136
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do, and some will absolutely do (to some it is important to "assess" language) - it really depends on what you mean with "people" (of course I meant a subset). What happened there is, in the succession of editings I left that 'people' there in a way that happened to be ambiguous. I made a composition error out of inattention.

The subset you're talking about is the union of extremely non-native English speakers and native English speakers over 120 years old.

No. It is not a matter of being «native». It may be your mothertongue of not: it is an approach transversal to all (this class of) languages.

It is the set of those people who intend to speak English, though surely not the language in use among the English. "Currently typical" English does not mean "good" English.

Edit:

On the contrary, «native English speakers» are the one who will follow that: they are the ones supposed to have absorbed more English (and relevant) literature.

I have just checked and I see the terms employed correctly in Joyce, in Wilde, in Chandler, in Hammett, in Paul Johnson, in Niall Ferguson, in Woody Allen, in Spike Milligan.

As absolutely expected: there is the gathering of the Assessors.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#162

conjecture - The more things in life people adopt as their identity, the greater the surface area for one to be triggered? I still find it funny to meet friends who are hardcore football or cricket fans and watch them lose their mind if I said a single not-very-positive word about their favourite teams.

> The more things in life people adopt as their identity, the greater the surface area for one to be triggered?

I find the opposite to be true.

The more things you adopt as part of your identity, the less you're affected when one of those things gets criticized. For example, if you're mostly a gamer, and someone says gaming is stupid, then you're automatically very hurt, since 90% of who you are was just insulted.

However, if gaming is only 10% of what you are, then you're not as affected. The myriad facets of your identity diffuse any incoming attacks. In my opinion, we should be striving to grow our identities, not shrink them.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#163
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? Graham isn't talking about all that other stuff! He's just talking about "things people make a part of their identity" (for whatever reason, whether that's by choice or through a failure to resist outside pressure), and what the possible negative effects can be. I frankly don't care that Graham is rich and influential and maybe has an easier time of controlling what he thinks of himself than other people do.…

To me, the core of what I am pointing out as "very Paul Graham" is in these two quotes: > I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. and If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity[...] To view discussions where people get upset as "useless" reflects a certain hierarchy of the purposes of discussion and the goals of inquiry. The…

> if you feel the same way and value this kind of high minded dispassionate discussion.

Shouldn't we all value that type of discussion? After all, it's most likely to lead to the objectively correct answers to questions about facts, and optimal answers to questions about policies.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always tried to go with (or steer toward) something like "a problem solver". I just like to solve problems. Sometimes it's builds and deploys, sometimes it's the network, and sometimes it's the car in the driveway. Give me a few, I'll figure something out.

"Problem solver" is so vague as to be meaningless. I'm pretty sure literally all human action could be characterized as problem solving.

Actually, "problem solver" is a specific occupation known to anyone who ever watched any criminal TV show.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Problem solver" is so vague as to be meaningless. I'm pretty sure literally all human action could be characterized as problem solving.

Actually, "problem solver" is a specific occupation known to anyone who ever watched any criminal TV show.

You know? When I say "problem solver", it might be more like that than I realized.

Nothing criminal, of course, but in the sense that I'll get the job done whatever it takes.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always tried to go with (or steer toward) something like "a problem solver". I just like to solve problems. Sometimes it's builds and deploys, sometimes it's the network, and sometimes it's the car in the driveway. Give me a few, I'll figure something out.

"Problem solver" is so vague as to be meaningless. I'm pretty sure literally all human action could be characterized as problem solving.

Maybe I'm keeping the wrong people around, but no, not everybody is solving problems.

Many seem to be unable or unwilling to figure out anything that is outside of their happy path through the day.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the core of what I am pointing out as "very Paul Graham" is in these two quotes: > I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. and If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity[...] To view discussions where people get upset as "useless" reflects a certain hierarchy of the purposes of discussion and the goals of inquiry. The…

> if you feel the same way and value this kind of high minded dispassionate discussion. Shouldn't we all value that type of discussion? After all, it's most likely to lead to the objectively correct answers to questions about facts, and optimal answers to questions about policies.

Follow-up: I'm going to attempt a dispassionate discussion about something that, for better or worse, is a big part of who I am.

I'm visually impaired, to the point of being legally blind. Due to some kind of flaw in my development, my optic nerves didn't fully develop (optic nerve hypoplasia), so my visual acuity is far enough below normal that, for example, I can't drive a car, I can only read print up close unless it's huge, and I use a white cane (and often, let's be honest, a sighted guide) to get around in unfamiliar environments.

Should people like me exist? I think if it had been feasible in 1980 to detect the flaw in my development and abort me before my family could develop any emotional attachment to me, it would have been morally acceptable, and perhaps even optimal, to do so. Of course, that wasn't feasible back then, but if our technological development continues, it will be someday, and we, including people like me, will need to consider the moral question rationally, even dispassionately.

Of course, disabled people like me can live full, happy lives, and many do. But it's not guaranteed that we all will. Though my own circumstances are pretty good (in some ways, very fortunate), there are aspects of me, beyond the original impairment, that could objectively be considered suboptimal. There are totally blind people who are much better at navigating unfamiliar environments and living independently than I am. For whatever reasons, attempts to teach me those skills in my childhood and adolescence didn't work very well. To some extent it might even be my own fault. If I hadn't had the natural aptitude and curiosity for programming, and the privileged circumstances to be able to develop that skill (e.g. a family computer when I was 8 years old and ample leisure time for playing with it), I might be far worse off now. Considering how high unemployment is among working-age blind people, I got very lucky. Many of us, even in developed countries, are not so lucky.

In some ways I'm a walking stereotype. I'm musically talented, though I don't make my living from that. I do make my living from being a programmer working on accessibility for people like me. When I read Eric Raymond's "Why I Hate Identity Politics", I wish that my blindness were as incidental to my identity as his cerebral palsy is to his identity. Attempts in my childhood and adolescence to make me well-adjusted and well-rounded, i.e. "normal", weren't very successful. Of course, that could just mean I'm a nerd, but in some contexts, that could be considered an additional handicap.

Even those of us who have mastered all the right skills are often thwarted by gaps in accessibility. The assumption that everyone can see is everywhere. Correcting that assumption, and doing the hard work to make a UI accessible to disabled people, is a never-ending job. That may be job security for a few of us, as long as someone is willing or compelled to pay for it. But in the meantime, people fail to get a job, or even lose a job that they already had, due to an inaccessible application, or even a whole category of such applications. On a smaller scale, people are frequently frustrated while trying to accomplish simple tasks due to gaps in accessibility.

So, to get back to the loaded moral question I raised above, I think it stands to reason that, to modify a popular saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of training and accommodation.

Of course, for those of us that already exist, the latter is still necessary. How much accommodation we should require is another question, though. I'm willing to consider that, beyond a certain point, it's simply unreasonable to expect the whole rest of the world to accommodate a minority like the one that I belong to. I don't know where that cutoff point is, but I lean toward the view that our tools, such as screen readers, should do everything they can to adapt to the world as it is, rather than requiring everyone else to change the way they do things just for us.

Re: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)

#170
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> accept you have Bad framing. More like, "be aware that you may have unchecked sides". There is a difference.

I don't understand the point you're making here. Please could you elaborate.

First of all, your interpretation of "identity" is structural, "the current state of the WeltAufbau" - f(x,P)=y where P you call 'identity', but others would call more a "personality" (philosophically) or simply, rephrasing the above, "the current state of your Belief Theory" (in technical logical terms).

An "identity", in this context, is structurally more like a "loop" into a "role-playing referencing". It is not just that "such is the inner form of the function", but that the "function took extra assumptions intentionally".

Intellectual care is a basic intellectual duty, it works in the said "current state" framework, and if leaning into checking the risks of "identity" can be formulated as «"be aware that you may have unchecked sides"». That does not mean that "anyone would have an attachment to a perspective" - they may just have a de facto, flexible perspective, without the cageing attachment.

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