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Persuade xor Discover

paulgraham.com

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Re: Persuade xor Discover

#11

Post by buugs »

tsally wrote: post #4

I've never met Arrington, so whether he's nice or not doesn't really apply to me. I also don't own a startup, so there's no conflict there. My personal beef is that TechCrunch is a 'serious journalistic entity' when they get documents leaked to them, but the second people start trying to hold them to the standard of real journalism suddenly it a blog. It's difficult to pinpoint, but there's something two-faced about…

I get a very similar feeling with techcrunch, it is as if techcrunch is the tabloid of the upcoming web culture. Rather than real journalism it is often lacking in value but techcrunch thinks it can make up for that by being first without verifying sources or even thinking about the content they are producing.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#12

Post by mrshoe »

I think a lot of hackers, myself included, have a hard time with persuasion. I've found that my first instinct is often to respond to a coworker's proposal with something like, "Here are 10 reasons why that's a horrible idea." That ends up being counter-productive, so I'm trying to learn how to suppress that instinct.

Unfortunately, people's egos get hurt easily. You can't tell them what you think. You can't disagree with them blatantly. You have to slowly and carefully guide them from a place where they're 100% correct to a new place where they're still 100% correct even though they now think completely differently about the problem. It's not easy, and the hacker in me always considers it a huge waste of time and effort. Why can't people just accept that their first idea was wrong and move on?

One method I've found effective is to just link to a few articles on the subject. The hope is that 1) the author of the articles is better at persuasion than I am, and 2) my peer's ego is more open to taking advice from an expert than from me.

If you're Steve Jobs (or Mike Arrington or pg), then you are fortunate enough to have little need for this persuasive cruft in your life. If the rest of us want any chance of influencing people higher in the pecking order, however, we need to cradle their fragile egos.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#13

Post by alex_c »

I could write that way if I had to [...] It makes the same point [...] But written this way it seems like a defense of present-day union organizers rather than an attack on early ones. [...] If I believe everything I said in the second version, why didn't I write it that way? Why offend people needlessly?

I disagree that it makes the same point. I'm sure it's intended to make the same point, but it doesn't - "written this way it seems like" == "it makes a different point", as far as I'm concerned.

The code example isn't a perfect parallel: you can cut down code but still have it perform the exact same functionality - it either follows a certain execution path or it doesn't. That's not so easy to do with writing, since there is no "hypothetical perfectly unbiased reader".

I don't think it's about offending people or not, it's about whether or not the reader walks away with the point you're actually trying to make. It should usually be possible to avoid both "offensive" and "fawning", and settle on "neutral".

Of course, the problem is that "neutral" is often the most boring to read.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#14

Post by heuristix »

This is a strawman defence. PG is defending Arrington's curtness when you meet him in person and accepting the facts as presented (since I have no personal knowledge), the defense sounds reasonable.

However, as many others mention below, most people dislike Arrington because Techcrunch has no journalistic scruples. The way they attacked Last.fm without even bothering to properly check into facts was yet another example of this.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#15

Post by rms »

shimon wrote: post #2

An exercise from the essay: ...And present union leaders probably would rise to the occasion if necessary. People tend to; I'm skeptical about the idea of "the greatest generation." [2] Footnote: [2] Oops, offended another constituency. Exercise for the reader: rephrase that thought to please the same people the first version would offend. Please submit your solutions below.

A first step to this exercise is the expand the statement to make sure that your rephrasing is expressing all the original ideas.

Idea #1: skepticism about the idea that one generation is inherently better or worse than another generation, specifically with regards to the WW2 generation

Idea #2: People have a tendency to rise to meet external challenges as it becomes necessary. So if Generation Y had a challenge as great as WW2, we would rise to meet it, and if the present day union leaders had a challenge as great as the historical labor movement, they would rise to meet it.

What else?

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#16

Post by ErrantX »

buugs wrote: post #11
tsally wrote: post #4

I've never met Arrington, so whether he's nice or not doesn't really apply to me. I also don't own a startup, so there's no conflict there. My personal beef is that TechCrunch is a 'serious journalistic entity' when they get documents leaked to them, but the second people start trying to hold them to the standard of real journalism suddenly it a blog. It's difficult to pinpoint, but there's something two-faced about…

I get a very similar feeling with techcrunch, it is as if techcrunch is the tabloid of the upcoming web culture. Rather than real journalism it is often lacking in value but techcrunch thinks it can make up for that by being first without verifying sources or even thinking about the content they are producing.

without verifying sources or even thinking about the content they are producing.

That's why I dislike Arrington. Because he heads a culture where cramming the news out the door is more important than taking reasonable steps [1] to ensure it is accurate.

There is a reason print media doesn't do that much any more! Because eventually you print a lie that does someone (or a company) serious untold damage.

In my mind the Last.fm debacle was a prime example of TC coming very close to crossing that line.

[1] that's important, no one would ever get a scoop if we needed verification signed in triplicate and investigated by a neutral third party :D

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#17

Post by ewjordan »

sachinag wrote: post #3
shimon wrote: post #2

An exercise from the essay: ...And present union leaders probably would rise to the occasion if necessary. People tend to; I'm skeptical about the idea of "the greatest generation." [2] Footnote: [2] Oops, offended another constituency. Exercise for the reader: rephrase that thought to please the same people the first version would offend. Please submit your solutions below.

I'm skeptical that some groups of people are inherently braver, smarter, or harder working than others.

Too imprecise. The claim was that a segmentation by birth year would not be expected to correlate with bravery, smarts, or hard work, not that there's no segmentation that correlates with any of those qualities.

Your proposed version is quite PC, to be sure, and I'm sure most humanities majors would defend it tooth and nail (cheap dig, I know :) ), but that in itself suggests to me that it's not what pg had in mind...

For one, I'd expect a lot of people here, including pg, to believe that startup founders excel in all of those categories, even if it's simply selection bias that causes it.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#18

Post by paul »

This is a very interesting observation. It might be amusing if PG rewrote some of his more controversial essays in the second style, then made both versions available. Think of it as "skinning". Since the discovery version was written before the persuasive version, the persuasion needn't interfere with the discovery.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#19

Post by auston »

I've met Michael Arrington once & talked to him on several occasions. He was never short or rude, only seemingly, endlessly occupied.

In fact, all of the staff @ TechCrunch seem to be nice, people of the few I've met.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#20

Post by ivankirigin »

Do you think there might be another category of writing, that fits in an essay: story telling?

Some of the most compelling talks I've been to are stories winding through a narrative. Conciseness doesn't really fit it, and it is certainly designed for discovery more than persuasion. But it's a bit of both, characterized perhaps by discovery of the audience - though not necessarily of an intended idea, which would make it persuasion.

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