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Life is Short

paulgraham.com

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Re: Life is Short

#201

Post by xiaoma »

giaour wrote: post #193
xiaoma wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent collecting or rent-seeking behavior has a special meaning in economics. It's different from investing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking A an example of rent collecting would be if he used his wealth to lobby for a law requiring all start-ups to have a license which an organization he controlled granted (and charged for).

Thanks; I edited my comment. The point remains, though, that PG is not "creating wealth" under the terms laid out in his essay.

He's providing incredible value/wealth to the startups he advises and invests in. I'd also argue that his essays are a great deal of wealth given to the world.

Re: Life is Short

#202

Post by [deleted] »

giaour wrote: post #193
xiaoma wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent collecting or rent-seeking behavior has a special meaning in economics. It's different from investing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking A an example of rent collecting would be if he used his wealth to lobby for a law requiring all start-ups to have a license which an organization he controlled granted (and charged for).

Thanks; I edited my comment. The point remains, though, that PG is not "creating wealth" under the terms laid out in his essay.

[deleted]

Re: Life is Short

#203

Post by darkmighty »

numlocked wrote: post #67

And for a completely different perspective, we have Kurt Vonnegut: [Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] “Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a…

But do you really need an excuse to dance around? If he bought the envelopes online he could choose when and how much to dance around.

Note: I always appreciate an explanation for a downvote. I love to defend the notion that automating tasks can always lead to more productivity/happiness if we assign the freed resources appropriately.

Re: Life is Short

#204

Post by ldd »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #31

Some practical ways that readers can implement this advice: 1. Don't work for a start-up, since they don't impart salary-winning experience to you, they don't pay you or provide reasonable benefits, and they also don't allow you the freedom to work on big ideas that they usually promise. The lines used to sell naive engineers on working in start-ups are as paramount to life's-too-short-bullshit as anything can be. 2.…

beggars can't be choosers. (Some of us would gladly take any of the above options)

Re: Life is Short

#205

Post by giaour »

mattmcknight wrote: post #196
giaour wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG strongly implies that wealth can be created by anyone with enough drive and determination. Put another way, if you are not creating and amassing wealth, it's because you don't want it hard enough. To quote from his essay: "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem p…

No, it doesn't imply that at all. It doesn't say anything about the people that aren't creating and amassing wealth. It simply says, of the people that are getting rich, most of them are driven. The thing you could get away with saying it implies is that you could have all of the other positive attributes and opportunities of those people, but not be driven and fail. It doesn't say anything the people without the opp…

PG points out that being driven is not a necessary condition for being rich: "there are a lot of people who get rich through rent-seeking of various forms, and a lot who get rich by playing games that though not crooked are zero-sum."

Since the skills necessary to succeed in finance are distinctly different from those necessary to succeed as a startup founder, I assumed that the essay was attributing success to the one attribute it specifically calls out: determination.

Re: Life is Short

#206

Post by cinquemb »

zappo2938 wrote: post #182
sjg007 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read them now. They may even guide your future.

They guide my present. "A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong." -- from Civil Disobedience by Henry Thoreau That something I have to do is learning to write shell scripts at the moment.

Listen to them while you write those scripts? Better than nothing?

Re: Life is Short

#207

Post by sirsar »

giaour wrote: post #179
sirsar wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then all PG is saying is that "the irreducible core of [economic inequality]" is having come into possession of wealth. Not quite. He's saying (in my reading) that even if you legislate away all the other sources of inequality (even to the point of wiping out all assets and giving each citizen an equal amount of cash to start anew), inequality would still arise due to differences in personal productivity / drive. S…

So then he's back to saying that inequality would arise because some people are "more driven" than others. Another way to phrase that would be to say that those with less money are simply less driven. Put in uncharitable terms, they would be poor because they were lazy. It really sounds like he believes this to be the cause of real world inequality, too: "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever th…

> [saying] inequality would arise because some people are "more driven" than others [=== saying] those with less money are simply less driven.

Slow down there. You can't just take the converse of any old statement.

PG is saying: IF ((starting equal) AND (differences in drive)) THEN (ending unequal).

You are saying that PG's statement is equivalent to: IF (now unequal) THEN ((earlier equal) AND (differences in drive)). Which translates to "Poor people are poor only because of laziness."

Furthermore, the quote you provide says: IF (rich now) THEN (probably driven earlier), which crucially says nothing at all about people who are not rich now.

That's as best as I can put it.

Re: Life is Short

#208

Post by xiaoma »

giaour wrote: post #148
natrius wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This blames poor people for being poor. No it doesn't. A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy. The portion you quoted makes this distinction clear: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources." If we found a way to give e…

> A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy. If it doesn't imply that poor people are lazy, then what does it imply? That the rich and poor are equally driven, and that something other than effort (luck, inherited wealth, etc) makes the rich rich and the poor poor?

All NBA centers are tall. This doesn't mean that all people who aren't NBA centers are short.

Re: Life is Short

#209

Post by dgudkov »

decafa5c11 wrote: post #108
numlocked wrote: post #67

And for a completely different perspective, we have Kurt Vonnegut: [Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] “Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a…

Another different perspective, from Brian Chesky: Repetition doesn’t create memories. New experiences do. Our perception of time is really driven by our perception of the unfamiliar, vivid and new. Of course, it turns out time slows down the most during life threatening experiences. [1] A safer way to slow down time is to travel. Travel is a new experience that can transport you out of your everyday routine to create…

That's interesting. Repetition doesn't create memories but it does create skills. Maybe that's why when we get older we tend to have fewer new experiences but more skills. Because of repetition - the more we live the more we repeat something.

Re: Life is Short

#210

Post by giaour »

xiaoma wrote: post #208
giaour wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy. If it doesn't imply that poor people are lazy, then what does it imply? That the rich and poor are equally driven, and that something other than effort (luck, inherited wealth, etc) makes the rich rich and the poor poor?

All NBA centers are tall. This doesn't mean that all people who aren't NBA centers are short.

PG claims that if all other avenues to wealth are shut off, then the driven and determined will "do well" at starting startups. That is not at all the same as saying that all successful startup founders are driven.
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