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Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

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Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#31

Post by zemo »

wellpast wrote: post #3

I haven't followed PG much either of late but it was recently brought to my attention by a coworker that he is now on the side of the 'bad guys'. I'm all for substantial criticism and discussion, and am always desperately looking for it, but this (unequivocally political) essay unfortunately has all of the distinct hallmarks of the simplistic contemporary political discourse. It takes a great many words to offer no s…

> Who is a serious intellectual? What does that even mean?

a serious intellectual is one that poses falsifiable arguments that other intellectuals attempt, and fail, to falsify. PG does no such thing.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#32

Post by neurotech1 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #30

This is a vapid personal attack on one person. This amounts to little more than gossip and mud-slinging and if the target were anyone but Paul Graham, it likely would have been flagged to death long ago. The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets. HN Guidelines say: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idioti…

It's very telling that pg or other admins haven't flagged or removed this submission.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#33

Post by billy_beef »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #30

This is a vapid personal attack on one person. This amounts to little more than gossip and mud-slinging and if the target were anyone but Paul Graham, it likely would have been flagged to death long ago. The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets. HN Guidelines say: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idioti…

I fail to see how one article being posted signals the decline of this website into a gossip column

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#34

Post by chordalkeyboard »

wellpast wrote: post #22
o_class_star wrote: post #16

[flagged]

> When it comes to politics, his opinions are poorly-thought-out, self-serving, and generally worthless. As are 99.999% of everybody's. Except what you're saying (ie your judgement about PG's 'poor' political thinking) is self-referentially meaningless unless you consider yourself a "native expert" in political thinking. Why are we not to take and measure and discuss ideas a la carte? What value is there in group-cla…

> What value is there in group-classifying the 'wrongthinkers', except to save people the exhaustion and torture of learning new and diverse ideas and for thinking for themselves?

The pleasant feeling of superiority and relief from the obligation of considering anything the labeled person says on its own merits.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#35

Post by DoreenMichele »

billy_beef wrote: post #33
DoreenMichele wrote: post #30

This is a vapid personal attack on one person. This amounts to little more than gossip and mud-slinging and if the target were anyone but Paul Graham, it likely would have been flagged to death long ago. The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets. HN Guidelines say: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idioti…

I fail to see how one article being posted signals the decline of this website into a gossip column

Of course, that assertion is hyperbole. The point being I don't think this really belongs here.

I'm someone who finds social stuff very interesting. I mostly don't like gossip rags and a lot of psychological studies are essentially useless garbage.

What value does this article really provide? Does it tell us where you can look out for Paul Graham's personal biases in order to get more value out of his writing? Does it propose better answers to anything in particular?

This amounts to jealousy or something and it reminds me of an old comic strip where the punch line was to the effect of "After 12 straight hours online this woman is going You People Need To Get A Life!"

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#36

Post by [deleted] »

santoshalper wrote: post #24
BenGosub wrote: post #2

The author starts with a few political comments and then goes into another direction - programming languages. I was expecting a conclusion on the political comments, without finding it. But, even if Paul Graham has been wrong about language design, it doesn't mean he's been wrong about current affairs or the importance of startups in the coming future. If anything, his bets have been largely successful and by openly…

Well, it's good to know that Brian Armstrong seems like a good guy. Clearly nothing to see here.

[deleted]

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#37

Post by wellpast »

lilactown wrote: post #21
wellpast wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the motivation for categorizing someone like PG as a un/serious intellectual. Are we to ‘believe’ all ‘serious intellectuals’ and disregard the ‘unserious’ ones. There’s a clear attempt at this weird kind of classification here—at best it’s a weird kind of paternalized way of thinking about people with ideas; at worst, its a poor rhetoric for classifying PG into the category of ‘wrongthinker’.

It feels like you're the one trying classify what the essay's saying in a weird way. Someone can critique a person without condemning them. One can say that PG's opinions shouldn't be taken seriously without saying that he's a 'wrongthinker.' The internet gives a mouthpiece to many, many people; not everyone's opinion should be considered with equal weight. The essay's author uses the example, "EARTH HAS 4 CORNER SIM…

I'd be more inclined to take your point if the lede wasn't PG's current political essays, and the meat wasn't an extensive berate of his naive ideas about programming from 20 years ago.

Anyone that needs to be 'told' that EARTH HAS 4 CORNERS is silly thinking isn't going to hear you - so that's a terrible analogy right there.

When it comes to politics and essays like this that so indirectly (by 20 years! and subject matters miles apart!) try to make their case against a whole person's intellectual status - we are in weird territory.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#38

Post by billy_beef »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #34
wellpast wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When it comes to politics, his opinions are poorly-thought-out, self-serving, and generally worthless. As are 99.999% of everybody's. Except what you're saying (ie your judgement about PG's 'poor' political thinking) is self-referentially meaningless unless you consider yourself a "native expert" in political thinking. Why are we not to take and measure and discuss ideas a la carte? What value is there in group-cla…

> What value is there in group-classifying the 'wrongthinkers', except to save people the exhaustion and torture of learning new and diverse ideas and for thinking for themselves? The pleasant feeling of superiority and relief from the obligation of considering anything the labeled person says on its own merits.

Credibility and authority is incredibly important. How much time can anyone devote to dissecting the words of each living person in case they contain a potentially great idea? I'm happy to examine arguments on merit, but perhaps we should spend more time examining other arguments and not use so much time on his.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#39

Post by tptacek »

neurotech1 wrote: post #32
DoreenMichele wrote: post #30

This is a vapid personal attack on one person. This amounts to little more than gossip and mud-slinging and if the target were anyone but Paul Graham, it likely would have been flagged to death long ago. The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets. HN Guidelines say: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idioti…

It's very telling that pg or other admins haven't flagged or removed this submission.

pg has nothing to do with HN anymore, and hasn't for many years. Dan doesn't kill things that are critical of pg or YC.

(And DoreenMichele is quite wrong about this post; right or wrong, one thing it clearly is not is "vapid").

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#40

Post by billy_beef »

captain_price7 wrote: post #13

The summary of this essay appears to be that Paul Graham relies too much on his own intuition, but intuition can lead people astray- a lengthy discussion on the failure of PG's own Arc language is used to support this argument. And apparently his recent political/social commentary fails for the same reason. The author went as far as to call him "profoundly unserious public intellectual". I'm not convinced that role o…

> The actual thrust of the argument seems so broad (i.e. reliance on intuition), this could be used to label almost anybody outside pol-sci academic circles a "profoundly unserious public intellectual" for commenting on politics.

You're pretty much spot on with this line. Most people are terrible public intellectuals, and of the people who identify as such, many are profoundly unserious and completely useless. This article is asserting that Paul Graham does not belong in the vanishingly small set of people one should consider as a serious public intellectual.

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