PG's Rarely Asked Questions • Hacker News Board

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#151

Post by sb » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 5:23 AM UTC

jackfoxy wrote: post #112

mdiep wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see a full list of all the books you read and the order in which you read them. I recently started reading The Story of Civilization and augmenting it with other works seems like a wonderful idea.

I've meant to compile this list, so you just inspired me. I wish the Durants had had the stamina for one more volume. I don't know much about the European revolutions of 1848 and would have like to read about that time from them. I already had read a lot of ancient Greek literature in translation as well as The Pentateuch , all the historical books of the Old Testament and the Gospels . Western Civilization springs f…

If you don't mind reading German then you might be interested in the the four volume series "Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte" by Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Friends from Germany keep telling me that this is the reference about Germany's society. Parts II and III should cover 1848 and I figure there are similar texts for other European countries.

(Since you've read Faust and the intial post mentions Gibbon's Rise and Fall, you might be interested in Theodor Mommsen's "History of Rome" as well.)

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#152

Post by philwelch » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 5:24 AM UTC

siglesias wrote: post #131

pg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sort of question is certainly important. I worry though that like most of ethics this is one of those cases where philosophers don't get any better answers than your grandmother.

Paul, I don't think my grandmother could give me a very good justification for why she eats meat. I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. Same goes for whether profiting from closed source software is ethical. Same goes for whether homosexuality is evil. These are all cases in which it would be possible to show, sy…

Funny, then, that I, armed with the same arguments, just had a delicious steak for dinner. I imagine many a philosopher has considered Singer's arguments and had a delicious steak nonetheless; mathematicians and scientists don't have this problem.

The problem with ethics is that you can't show systematically that meat, closed source software, homosexuality, infanticide, government, self-defense, or torture are justified or unjustified. You have to have some type of basis for logic, and even if you come up with some sort of foundational principle, there's nothing special about foundational principles that makes one any more or less likely to reject them than the conclusions you reach from them. The history of ethics is a history of people working out logically consistent ethical systems only to discover that they justified things like kidnapping strangers and killing them for their organs, and based on the "moral intuition" that it's wrong to kidnap strangers and kill them for their organs, the logically consistent ethical system was amended. The history of philosophy is filled with this kind of thing, but let's think about what we're doing here! What do we need ethics for if all we're going to do is change them when they end up having unintuitive results?

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#153

Post by Volpe » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 5:26 AM UTC

Willwhatley wrote: post #142

jackfoxy wrote: post #36

What should I read to learn more about history? I used to consider my knowledge of history better than at least 95% of the population, but while reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire I realized how sketchy my view of history really was. So at the ripe old age of 35 I set off on a course of study centered on two series of books, The Story of Civilization , by Will and Ariel Durant, and Timeframe , a Time-Li…

I've wondered about variants on democracy. The parliamentary and constitutional forms seem to me to incentivize (for those who want power) going along to get along. Sophists, flatterers, demagogues; there is no good incentive to vote, only the strong disincentive of some other party's bums overseeing you rather than ones you know. There's a Twain short story about folks who get more than the initial vote, in proporti…

There are democratic countries where it is compulsory to vote .

This of course brings it's own set of problems...

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#154

Post by wnight » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 5:34 AM UTC

gbog wrote: post #27

_delirium wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact the usual advice is that you shouldn't be doing something technically virtuosic in a startup. If your startup's critical path includes writing something as technically impressive as the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, you might have trouble... Though there are a few people around here who've built software businesses around things that are also nontrivial technical advances; cperciva comes to mind.

It seems all or most pg's articles just say the opposite: a startup should climb the highest hills, and can do so faster the big corporations because they are light-weight. If I'm not mistaking, "climbing" here do not mean find a genius idea or a disrupting design for a search field, it means developping something hard in software. The conclusion should be that a startups that is not doing something technically hard…

What I think, for what you may think it's worth, is that you should climb the highest hills, that you'll have to climb, right away. Best to know you can do it before wasting time.

But, that you should look for the easiest way to success. It'll take months for a large company to have the meetings to acknowledge your niche, let alone try to serve it. The only thing you have to fear is another startup and you're at the advantage is that situation.

Building huge walls or picking a niche with a large cost to serve, is like wasting time on DRM for your game, instead of working on marketing and having someone actually buy it.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#155

Post by Volpe » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 5:38 AM UTC

siglesias wrote: post #136

Goladus wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I, however, armed with Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation could show that eating meat needs to be justified and that I can't justify it. The amount of philosophy needed is not too significant. One needs to know enough logic to show that inability to find a justification doesn't mean a justification doesn't exist. So if someone is using Singer's arguments from Animal Liberation to persecute meat eaters and yo…

I glossed over some of the subtleties. To show that eating animals needs to be justified requires extending our ethical framework to animals beyond humans. Nobody feels the need to justify eating vegetables, for example, nor have compelling arguments been presented that this is unwarranted. Also: most disciplines require "general skill at persuasion," philosophy being no exception.

I think it's important to distinguish Philsophy from Critical thinking here.

The practical skill Philsophy teaches is critical thinking and logical reasoning. But you don't need philosophy to learn either of those.

"general skill at persuasion" sounds more like sophistry/rhetoric...

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#156

Post by pg » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 5:39 AM UTC

PakG1 wrote: post #137

pg wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even omissions should cause sentences in the essay to be false though. Is there really not one sentence you believe is false? (Also, would you mind being civil? I'm doing it; you can too.)

Hmm, I know I'll get downvoted for this, but I don't think he's being uncivil, pg. He made an accusation against you, but he didn't do it in an uncivil manner. Asking him to be civil strikes me as weird, and possibly that you're being too defensive?

The civil version (at least tolerably so) would be the first 17 words. The remaining 10 could be affixed to any criticism of any essay by anyone.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#157

Post by imjk » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 5:57 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #74

crgt wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been inspired by Gladwell's more general answer from the book Outliers: "Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book) At an average of 50 hrs/week this means it would take you close to 4 years to achieve mastery. pg i…

Like most of Gladwell's ideas, it falls apart under the least examination. Consider a neurosurgeon. Perhaps after ten thousand hours of surgery she was an expert in surgery. But perhaps only a quarter of that time was spent performing neurosurgery. Does that mean she's not an expert neurosurgeon? Perhaps, then, after ten thousand hours of neurosurgery she has become an expert neurosurgeon. But maybe only 5% of that t…

Is it unreasonable to think that if someone has put in ten thousand hours into a general field such as programming (across various languages, as opposed to just focus on one language) that there are enough general principles to extrapolate for them to be considered an expert programmer? Is your argument against Gladwell's idea (not really even his idea) that the professions he site has too many sub-components that under such a definition no one could achieve ten thousand hours of mastery? Perhaps I'm not understanding your argument.

Regardless, it's interesting that you bring up the example of the neurosurgeon because Gladwell's specifically written about the mastery of expert surgeons including the example of Charlie Wilson, a highly regarded neurosurgeon. Included in his telling of the 2987 transsphenoidal resections of pituitary tumors that Wilson performed, Galdwell highlights the seemingly thousands of hours Wilson practiced surgical procedures on rats early in his career. You can read the article here: http://gladwell.com/1999/1999_08_02_a_genius.htm

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#158

Post by AmericanOP » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 6:12 AM UTC

forensic wrote: post #106

onan_barbarian wrote: post #105

The tendentious answer on philosophy is an invitation for what would be another "Dabblers and Blowhards" drive-by shooting. It's not enormously surprising that this question is 'rarely asked'. One would learn a lot more about philosophy ("what questions are these guys asking?" "what are some of the answers they've come to?") from even a mediocre introductory text or a chat with a TA/tutor, than by assuming that this…

What kind of people does pg draw in? Its mainly naive young programmers (socially stunted nerds) who believe they are smarter than everyone and have everything figured out. I believe nerd hubris comes from a fundamental lack of empathy; an inability to put themselves in the shoes of people who are different. People who lack perspective are easy pickings for silver tongued writers who make emotionally-potent audience-…

I don't understand why this crowd is more likely to hit the verbal 'dislike' button than average. Why do people think it's so important to share that they resist the attraction of something? The name-calling and prodding is especially disturbing.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#159

Post by ehsanu1 » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 6:13 AM UTC

NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #133

philwelch wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making things unnecessarily difficult for yourself, and I don't know if it's because you're ignorant of other options, because you lack the ability to figure out better solutions to your problems, or because you have an irrational compulsion for unproductive busywork. I've never heard of anyone actually documenting every click it takes to configure Outlook. I don't even know what you're talking about when you…

You are uninformed, have some problems with reading comprehension, have too little knowledge of computing, or are just trying to criticize for no good reason. Everything I said is well informed and well justified. While you were not clear on just what you did on a Mac, for your "Here's how I solved the backup problem: I bought an external hard drive, connected it to my Mac, and clicked "yes" when my Mac asked if I wa…

Hey mods, please hellban this guy. I keep a short list of users I see who've been hellbanned, but have generally nice comments, because it always bothered me a bit, but sometimes it's warranted.

Re: PG's Rarely Asked Questions

#160

Post by pg » Mon, Sep 19, 2011, 6:14 AM UTC

YuriNiyazov wrote: post #138

pg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to get that deep in a couple paragraphs. But there is a longer version here: http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

Do you believe that most of the stuff covered under philosophy of mind (Dennett, Searle, Block, Chalmers, Jackson, etc.) is not worth studying? Edit: reduce strength of statement.

I don't think this field escapes the problems of philosophy in general.