The Shape of the Essay Field

I actually really like this end of the essay spectrum.

Reading (and writing!) this kind of essay can tie together mental loose threads, finishing a nearly-complete bit of thinking, finally coalescing a bunch of static into a coherent signal. The essay can give the concept a name (e.g. maker's schedule, manager's schedule) or at minimum allow referring to the entire conceptual result with a single URL.

They can get people talking about a thought that they've all had but never shared. They can provide a new starting line for thinking, allowing it to advance a few millimeters further.

And then there is the "You're one of the 10,000" XKCD comic to counter this point.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

There is just too much to know, even important stuff, for even smart old people to have been exposed to it.

Sure, you'll have a higher chance of surprising young people, who have less experience. But you can still surprise old people too.

Smart old people still have a lot to learn.

PG has seemed to have a fixation on youth, since at least one essay before YC was started, and there's still hints of it in YC practices today.

And I sometimes wonder whether our field would have so much techbro ageism, and the irrationally large egos of many early-20s 'founders', had PG not influenced tech industry culture quite so much.

Traditionally, in our teens and early 20s, we'd be vapid hormonal know-it-alls. (That's OK, it's normal, I did it too; no criticism.)

And the most validation of that we'd get (outside our equally naive peers) would a condescending pat on the head, from people who'd gone through that enthusiastically naive developmental phase themselves.

About up until the time we had to get a real job, and then we were confronted with not being as good as the experienced people, and the real world wasn't putting congratulatory star stickers on our homework.

So we'd grow out of it, and buckle down for the real education of post-school life.

Until then -- unless we were a not-yet-injured athlete in a marketable spectator sport, or an aspiring star working our way up the Hollywood casting couches, or being lured into a cult -- not many people would tell us that we were the superior person to be pursuing something, better than the people with experience and wisdom.

Maybe that was a good thing. (Not the youth who got exploited, but that the rest of us weren't given stuffed heads when we needed to start learning with humility.)

But then we got survivor bias kids of the dotcom boom and early PG influence era, like Zuckerberg, who, once they won the lottery, very vocally promoted the ageism. Because, hey, it worked for them.

The current tech industry jobs bloodbath will disabuse a lot of people of the silliness, too late for them. But we'll still have founders/managers aspiring to be billionaires, taking astrology-based lottery number-picking advice from past lottery winners.