Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What I Didn't Say

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 601 posts

Re: What I Didn't Say

#341

Post by nbouscal »

oskarth wrote: post #285

This piece should have to be written. I think the same goes for the essay Foreign Accents. I'm not a woman, but I am a "foreigner", and it's completely obvious in both cases what pg actually said. That is, unless you have a thing for being Offended or you are looking for excuses. It's sad that pg feels he has to waste time doing these type of clarifications. Especially since he's not even holding any controversial op…

> This piece should have to be written.

I'm guessing you meant "shouldn't" there?

Re: What I Didn't Say

#342

Post by mjburgess »

tvladeck wrote: post #338
mjburgess wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. I granted him "entrepreneur" status. He can have "compu-sci" intellectual too. You can see my comment here on his pseud-osity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 to save repeating myself.

I read the linked comment, and some of your other comments on the topic on this thread. You took this into meta meta (yea, 2x) territory. Not the actual issues, not the person who wrote the linked essay (pg), but the people discussing the person discussing the issues. Why would you do that? And furthermore, how can you possibly feel you survive your own critique of "pseudo-intellectuals"? This is you [0] spouting ama…

It's "amateur social science" in the sense that it's an "off-hand comment". I could write a 5k word essay on this very small point and make it respectable, I didnt because HN comment boxes are not vehicles of long essays. If pg's observations were confined to small discussion threads on HN i wouldnt have much issue. But he presented the article I mentioned at Defcon. And his "Essays" section are presented as essays, not "off-hand comments".

> Why would you do that?

I'm responding to the questions raised in the most convenient way. I'm not going to give a serious critique of the many essays which require it to make a small point about his blase approach to serious academic topics. Far too much effort to spend on a crowd whose faith in pg's intellectual status is based on his money-making ability.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#343

Post by jswinghammer »

mjburgess wrote: post #324
mattmanser wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg, a pseudo-intellectual? I'm frankly surprised you've been here for 2 years and never realised. You see the ycombinator in news.ycombinator.com? In this website? That's pg's company. Do you know what ycombinator is? That he started the seed funding movement? That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups? Before lean startup existed? That he's written his own…

None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. I granted him "entrepreneur" status. He can have "compu-sci" intellectual too. You can see my comment here on his pseud-osity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 to save repeating myself.

Nothing he said is out of line with what a lot of classical liberals were saying throughout the 19th century and they were refining ideas that basically go back to Aristotle. If echoing their thoughts qualifies one to be a pseudo-intellectual then I'm going to guess in horror at what you consider to be genuine intellectual thought.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#344

Post by coldtea »

mjburgess wrote: post #307
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like the cult-like reverence for the pseudo-intellectual issues commentary on Twitter and Medium? The people who have less than a decade in the industry but are experts on compensation, ocracies, power dynamics, and psychology? The ones who work at Silicon Valley startups and lecture the entire industry about how things work, then surround themselves with like-minded people to have strength in numbers? You a…

> If you're under 40, I'm largely uninterested in your take on the world. pg isnt peddling his "take on the world". He talks about serious academic topics in a chronically under and misinformed way. My 50 year old plumber knows jack about Metaphysics, Quantum Field Theory or Abstract Expressionism despite - as in a Louis CK bit - his seeing a dead body "one time". If you want to have a fire-side chat with him - be my…

>My 50 year old plumber knows jack about Metaphysics, Quantum Field Theory or Abstract Expressionism despite - as in a Louis CK bit - his seeing a dead body "one time".

Well, most of the stuff guys "under 40" think they know about "Metaphysics, Quantum Field Theory or Abstract Expressionism" are a half-understood mismash too (I'm not talking about someone with a PhD in Physics here).

And, as some they will find out later in life, not only knowledge of those "serious academic topics" doesn't matter as much as they thought, but also most of them are inherently bullshit too.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#345

Post by coldtea »

theorique wrote: post #312
mjburgess wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, he was mischaracterized and he replied. But jesus, > pg's response is actually priceless: it is like a soft-spoken witness upending a bullying lawyer who had just viciously attacked him, leaving the attacker reeling for all to see. What's with the almost cult-like reverence for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur?

What's with the almost cult-like relevance for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur? - Founded a successful web apps company back in the 1990s when that wasn't common, and sold it to Yahoo - Founded Y Combinator to advise and invest in startups - Smart investor with substantial success and track record (Dropbox, AirBnB, etc) In other words, he's earned a reputation for doing some very smart things, and docum…

And was quite prominent in the Lisp community, back in the day too.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#346

Post by Crito »

xs_kid wrote: post #228
yawn wrote: post #26

Jakob Kaplan Moss owes PG a public apology for his behavior. The witch hunt tweets that were coming out of him without getting the facts straight are downright disheartening.

You don't have idea about what is a "witch hunt" and using that metaphor to describe some tweets is very insensitive and softens the absolute horror of people killed in real witch hunting. Do you know that witch hunt still being a thing in some countries of the world?: http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/medellin/ARTICULO-WEB-NEW_N... (title translated: Woman accused of being a witch in a town in Antioquia was burned) T…

I cannot tell if you are being serious or sarcastic, but in either case, and with all due respect^, fuck off with this bullshit.

Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, a play about a literal witch hunt, as an allegory for McCarthyism. Do you think that he thought that blacklisting actors was literally as bad as crushing somebody to death with stones over several days?

Of course he didn't. It was fucking allegorical. Do you really not understand the basic premise of a metaphor? I think you do. I think you are trolling.

^ little is due.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#347

Post by mjburgess »

coldtea wrote: post #344
mjburgess wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're under 40, I'm largely uninterested in your take on the world. pg isnt peddling his "take on the world". He talks about serious academic topics in a chronically under and misinformed way. My 50 year old plumber knows jack about Metaphysics, Quantum Field Theory or Abstract Expressionism despite - as in a Louis CK bit - his seeing a dead body "one time". If you want to have a fire-side chat with him - be my…

> My 50 year old plumber knows jack about Metaphysics, Quantum Field Theory or Abstract Expressionism despite - as in a Louis CK bit - his seeing a dead body "one time". Well, most of the stuff guys "under 40" think they know about "Metaphysics, Quantum Field Theory or Abstract Expressionism" are a half-understood mismash too (I'm not talking about someone with a PhD in Physics here). And, as some they will find out…

I agree that a lot of the time intellectual pursuits are misdirected ways of solving life's problems (though the worst culprit here is wealth acquisition, doubling the critique of pg here).

There is a kind of wisdom that arises through knowledge of oneself and other people that comes with age. A kind of knowledge which helps you predict what is going to be worthwhile, etc.

However we shouldnt fall into the trap of saying "academic persuits might leave you unsatisfied therefore you can be blase about them whilst discussing them". You cant dispense with the particulars of physics when discussing gravity because your interest in "the universe" owes to a unfulfilled religious need.

"age" is a different category of knowledge and doesnt excuse or justify glorified amateurism in another.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#348

Post by mwilcox »

theorique wrote: post #312
mjburgess wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, he was mischaracterized and he replied. But jesus, > pg's response is actually priceless: it is like a soft-spoken witness upending a bullying lawyer who had just viciously attacked him, leaving the attacker reeling for all to see. What's with the almost cult-like reverence for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur?

What's with the almost cult-like relevance for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur? - Founded a successful web apps company back in the 1990s when that wasn't common, and sold it to Yahoo - Founded Y Combinator to advise and invest in startups - Smart investor with substantial success and track record (Dropbox, AirBnB, etc) In other words, he's earned a reputation for doing some very smart things, and docum…

Not to mention his academic qualifications: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programme...

Re: What I Didn't Say

#349

Post by coldtea »

mjburgess wrote: post #324
mattmanser wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg, a pseudo-intellectual? I'm frankly surprised you've been here for 2 years and never realised. You see the ycombinator in news.ycombinator.com? In this website? That's pg's company. Do you know what ycombinator is? That he started the seed funding movement? That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups? Before lean startup existed? That he's written his own…

None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. I granted him "entrepreneur" status. He can have "compu-sci" intellectual too. You can see my comment here on his pseud-osity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 to save repeating myself.

>None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on.

You don't get insights into these by getting a degree from some university on the subject. You get insights into those things by studying them, practical experience, and more importantly thinking.

If anything, the most clueless people in those areas I know are tenured professors.

And REAL thinkers, the kind that leave a mark in history, from Socrates to Sartre and from Kierkegaard to Popper and Wittgenstein to leave it to philosophy, are full of scorn for academia in general and professors in particular, and even if they sometimes happen to be working as such themselves, they are greatly atypical to their "churn papers" colleagues.

Not that pg is on that level, but critisizing him because "none of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on" is bullshit.

Your a priori abstract attack that he lacks insights has no meat at all behind it. You could just as well have said that "he has tons of insight into what he writes" -- and it would be exactly the same.

If you want to provide something worthwhile, do a SPECIFIC critique of what he wrote somewhere, and tell us what is wrong with it by providing counter-arguments and rebuttals.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#350

Post by mjburgess »

jswinghammer wrote: post #343
mjburgess wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. I granted him "entrepreneur" status. He can have "compu-sci" intellectual too. You can see my comment here on his pseud-osity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 to save repeating myself.

Nothing he said is out of line with what a lot of classical liberals were saying throughout the 19th century and they were refining ideas that basically go back to Aristotle. If echoing their thoughts qualifies one to be a pseudo-intellectual then I'm going to guess in horror at what you consider to be genuine intellectual thought.

He isnt "echoing their thoughts" any one who has read Adam Smith systematically would know that the very first few lines of this are explicitly rejected by him.

They're childish research-lite versions of a 50s-style classical liberalism. It is much the same as Ayn Rand another amateur philosopher who knew very little on the topics she was writing about.

I dislike the "talking head" approach to serious topics. I dont think "giving your opinion" excuses a lack of serious research. Half-baked, under-informed opinion isnt truth or even the attempt to reach it; regardless of whether it is phrased with feigned objectivity. I wouldnt be too annoyed if he wasnt glorified by other $-eye'd idiots.

Post reply on HN