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Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

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Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#601

Post by Keyframe »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #237

Remember how George Lucas made Star Wars and became the genius billionaire who could do no wrong. Then he got a divorce and made Howard the Duck (quite possibly the worst movie of all time). I think the same thing is happening here. As a startup founder you have guardrails, spouses, investors. You have Brian De Palma rewriting the opening trailer crawl, you have Marcia Lucas helping the edit, and you have your old pr…

OT, but that take on Lucas has to stop. Was he surrounded by many capable people that contributed to his works in great ways? Of course, that's what collaborative art of movie making is all about. Spielberg movies would probably suffer a lot without Kahn editing them, so would Scorsese's without Thelma Schoonmaker, etc.. Look at the other world-building things Lucas did to gain some perspective on him as an artist - from THX 1138 and Graffiti, over Star Wars OT to Indiana Jones, Willow, and ultimately the prequels - yes, the prequels; Compare their cultural presence and impact (even mentioning Jar Jar here) to what Disney Juggernaut with all of the talent and money couldn't bring to presence. Now, combine that with the gravity around him that brought in people that managed to pull technical wonders of digital video editing (AVID) and image manipulation (Photoshop), and many many other things (THX, Pixar, etc.) on top of all of the legendary businesses that spawned up from Lucas Film itself, to Lucas Arts, Skywalker Sound (THX), and ILM. That's not a coincidence, and not on his ex wife (alone) - that's a bunch of smart and hard-working talented people around guy that told them a story, people including Spielberg, and De Palma, and Coppola... Story which they all liked. Give the guy a break, number of successes around him, and not any of the mentioned individuals, is no coincidence. One Howard the Duck does not his legacy make.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#602

Post by dekhn »

jacquesm wrote: post #547
roland35 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but saying "he is a smart guy" is a bit ridiculous at this point. A "smart guy" certainly may not know everything about running a social network, but he _would_ listen to the advice from those around them. Being smart also means understanding what you don't know and not surround yourself with sycophants.

Smart and wise are related but somewhat orthogonal, Elon is quite smart but not very wise.

To expand on this: intelligence (smarts, IQ, etc) is the ability to come up with what appears to be the objectively best answer to a problem or action to take, often in a situation with only partial information.

Wisdom is the ability to evaluate many solutions to a problem or required action, and choosing the one which has the greatest utilitarian value, for some complex utility function that attempts to incorporate a far wider collection of evidence than intelligence does.

Somebody can be quite intelligent but lack wisdom. Intelligent people are also much better at self-delusion, and erection of reality distortion fields, than wise people. They are also prone to assuming that their intelligence transfers- for example between engineering and social media.

Hopefully, he'll shut down twitter sooner rather than later and then we won't have to listen to this ongoing blather.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#603

Post by jacquesm »

dragonwriter wrote: post #598
jacquesm wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. I don't think he will be able to salvage this and I've deleted my account to reduce the temptation to return. A reputation is not like a piece of software that you fix and then re-run as though it never broke in the first place. Elon has utterly wrecked his reputation over the last couple of months (and probably longer than that) and it is getting worse, not better. Edit: I guess Paul won't be going back…

> A reputation is not like a piece of software that you fix and then re-run as though it never broke in the first place In a way it is, but it differs from software in that fixing it involves more than reverting the action by which you broke it.

Any good examples?

'Reputation is like a crystal vase, you can drop it, and glue it back together again but it will never again be the same vase that it was before you dropped it'.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#604

Post by Kranar »

pavlov wrote: post #297
bluedino wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is her beauty line worth more than (top three classic beauty supply companies)?

Rihanna’s underwear company Savage X Fenty was estimated to be worth $3 billion earlier this year, which is roughly the same as the market cap of Victoria’s Secret. Probably that estimate would be lower now, given the market downturn. But clearly she’s well on her way to building up a competitor to the established brands.

Don't see any evidence that it's worth 3 billion dollars. All I see is a quote from Rihanna herself saying she thinks her company can raise that much by the time they IPO. Forbes estimates the value of her company at 1 billion on the high end.

And while it's true that VSCO's current market cap is 3 billion, at the time that Rihanna made her comment VSCO's market cap was 5-6 billion. It has dropped significantly in recent months.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#605

Post by bambax »

keepper wrote: post #572
pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

So your initial comments have aged poorly… From your own feed: “ People are rooting for him to fail because he's a rich white guy and a political moderate. “ https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1593206076983635968?s=46&t=... I really really really dislike this whole trend to feel “victimized” while being some of the most successful people in earth. People are “turning” on Elon after being hugely beloved, purely cause he…

"a political moderate"?? PG said this a month ago? (Nov. 17th) Wow. That tells us much more about PG's politics than I would ever have wanted to know.

Also, "rich white guy" adds a nice vibe of "all lives matter". It's a truth universally acknowledged that white people are victims. Esp. if they're male. And rich.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#606

Post by samtp »

pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

Well he did very publicly call the cave diver who saved 12 children a pedophile because he was jealous of him. He also called for a leading infectious disease expert to be jailed, further endangering someone who was already under armed protection from previous threats. And there was that one time that he shared an unfounded conspiracy theory about an elderly man who was attacked with a hammer in his own home. There was also the time when he tried to trade a horse for a handjob from one of his employees.

That's all pretty clearly in villain territory.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#607

Post by inglor_cz »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #600
inglor_cz wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bezos basically destroyed Blue Origin in 2017" This sort-of implies that BO was functional prior to that incident. BO was founded in 2000. By 2017, they had existed for 17 years without reaching the orbit. (Which SpaceX managed in 6 years, Astra managed in 17 years, RocketLab in 12 years). It seems to me that BO is just continuing to be an expensive failure, which, unlike all the other failed space startups, keeps d…

For the first part of its existence Blue Origin was basically a think tank. For a while its only employee was a science fiction author. Neal Stephenson is great, but he's not a rocket designer. As a think tank it was highly successful -- they successfully identified VTVL reusability as the future of space independently from SpaceX and similarly chose methalox. By 2017 Blue Origin was basically about a decade old as a…

Thank you for providing context that I wasn't aware of.

That said, they are backed by Bezos, one of the richest people on the planet, so I think it is fair to expect some real achievements from them.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#608

Post by wpietri »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #397
wpietri wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure. Given that Musk was fired from [deleted, see note 1] and PayPal, you'd think they might have had more questions. But people look at failure much more carefully than they look at success. I think the next wave of interesting questions is around the extent to which Musk contributed the apparent successes, SpaceX and Tesla. We won't know for a long time, as a lot of the people in the know have a strong incenti…

Musk is a victim of his own success. Even if he isn't solely responsible for the success of Tesla and Space X in his mind enough of it is him. The problem here is overconfidence / blind spots. Twitter is a different type of business. Musk looks to be doing a Mike Jordan or a Shaq. Basketball isn't baseball, nor is it rapping. Both of them recovered from those bad decisions. Will Musk? Time will tell.

Yeah, there's a phenomenon called "Acquired Situational Narcissism", where if somebody spends enough time in an environment that's all about them, they start thinking it's all about them.

There's some evidence Musk was like this all along, but it is a lot harder to learn humility when you're doing well.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#609

Post by SpeedilyDamage »

pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

Twitter just has to be predictable, that's it. That's all anyone wants, IMO, when you boil the controversies down to its essence. People will always complain, but the brands, the journalists, the users, they all just want something they can understand.

That might come in time. Surely it can't continue to be this chaotic forever, right? At least then we'll know what this site's future is.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#610

Post by _cenw »

speakfreely wrote: post #481
bombolo wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. You mean hiring engineers to work on cars and rockets?

Organizing the efforts of large teams of smart people is one of the most high value activities you can do in our society. Edit: not saying that's happening at Twitter, but it has demonstrably occurred at Tesla and SpaceX.

This wasn't an achievement for SpaceX. Lots of very talented people wanted to work on space based on passion alone. It just came down to providing funding at a time space privatization was an uncertain venture.

Compare to Neuralink mostly being a failure.

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