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Earnestness

paulgraham.com

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Re: Earnestness

#371

Post by dang »

woodruffw wrote: post #259
iWorshipFAANGS wrote: post #192

If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as "academic bogus," you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness." First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." I think…

It's also worth noting that Paul Graham has an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He knows (at least) the first three words, and he knows that they aren't nonsense. What he also knows is that he's whistling to a specific audience, and that that audience either doesn't know those words or thinks that any sort of academic terms of art in the humanities are already nonsense. In sum: for an essay titled "Earnestness," i…

This comment breaks this site guideline egregiously:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

How anyone can claim to read someone else's mind like you do here is beyond me, or even claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad 30+ years ago or how he reacted to it at the time. If I know pg, he would have reacted exactly the same way as now—but more likely he just avoided taking such courses in the first place.

Making these obviously bogus claims so you can attack someone else for, of all things, dishonesty, is pretty shocking even for this thread. I'm not saying that out of disrespect for philosophy, or postmodernism for that matter [1]. What you wrote is just such a breach of basic fairness and exactly what that site guideline asks to avoid.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: Earnestness

#372

Post by anubidiocane »

bonoboTP wrote: post #63
kabirgoel wrote: post #42

> The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly this is also the region with the highest number of successful startups per capita. I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” or “The British are terrible cooks.” Absent any…

Scandinavian countries have very high trust societies, based on any survey that looked into this. Why that is is a difficult question and leads us very far. Is it money? Where did the money come from? Oil (but that's not there in all Nordic countries)? Lack of war? Did the lack of war come from their high trust? Or the geographic distance to warring nations and empires of Europe? Is it related to the cold environment…

Not to disagree but I believe that the nature of their government, the social democracy, that empowers people and their needs, built up the trust they have in each other and their representatives.

It's also the reason why they accept very high rates of taxation in exchange for public services that actually work and benefit the population.

Depicting Scandinavia as an uniform land where a genetically homogeneous spawn lives is also misleading.

For example in Denmark 86% of the population is Danish descent, same goes for Norway, in Sweden 18% of the population was born in another country.

In Italy, which is not particularly famous for its genetic uniformity, 90% of the population was born in Italy from Italian parents.

What seems uniform in Europe, except for Scandinavia, is the distrust

European countries shows that average trust in the police tends to be higher than trust in the political and the legal systems. And trust in the political system is particularly low – in fact much lower than interpersonal trust for all countries except Switzerland. On the other hand, trust in the police is notably high, and in the majority of European countries people trust the police more than they trust each other

Italy has the highest level of trust in the Mediterranean area, around 30%, while France, Spain and Greece are below 20%.

Netherlands have the same level of Scandinavia (>60%), Germany is around 50%.

My personal belief is that the society trust is directly proportional to the level of social conflict.

Not surprisingly France, where social conflict is quite high (which I don't think is bad per sé) has the lower level of trust in Europe (~18%), except for Romania.

Re: Earnestness

#373

Post by woodruffw »

dang wrote: post #371
woodruffw wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth noting that Paul Graham has an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He knows (at least) the first three words, and he knows that they aren't nonsense. What he also knows is that he's whistling to a specific audience, and that that audience either doesn't know those words or thinks that any sort of academic terms of art in the humanities are already nonsense. In sum: for an essay titled "Earnestness," i…

This comment breaks this site guideline egregiously: " Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html How anyone can claim to read someone else's mind like you do here is beyond me, or even claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad 30+ years ago or how he reacte…

I do think I broke the site's guidelines by not assuming good faith. So I apologize for that.

> How you can claim to read someone else's mind like this is beyond me, or even for that matter claim to know what was taught in someone's undergrad curriculum 30 years ago or how he reacted to it at the time. If I know pg, he would have reacted exactly the same way as now—but more likely he just avoided taking such courses in the first place.

I studied analytical philosophy in college, like he did. I didn't take a single class on postmodernism. I bring that up because these terms are universal and not tied specifically to PoMo (or even continental) philosophy. That's where my doubt comes from: someone who studied philosophy should know these terms, and should know that popular awareness of them is limited to the spooky PoMo stuff.

Re: Earnestness

#374

Post by dang »

zemo wrote: post #278
iWorshipFAANGS wrote: post #192

If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as "academic bogus," you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness." First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." I think…

one of the surest signs that someone is full of it is that they have a long history of essays with no citations. PG's essays almost never cite anyone else's work or act as continuations onto a line of thinking started by another person. PG wants to discredit the entire concept of academia because he knows that his work does not actually stand up to scrutiny. hehe, curious (perhaps deliberate?) examples. This is maybe…

I think you misunderstand the genre of essay that pg practices. It's a form of thinking out loud, and intensely personal—a way of finding out how one understands oneself and the world by writing about it. This is actually the origin of the term 'essay', which means 'attempt' and is intrinsically informal. Citations would be out of place.

Re: Earnestness

#375

Post by retsibsi »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #102
kabirgoel wrote: post #42

> The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly this is also the region with the highest number of successful startups per capita. I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” or “The British are terrible cooks.” Absent any…

I can't speak for Sweden or Denmark but here in Norway great store is set on straightforwardness, plain speaking, and trust. Generally you are assumed to be telling the truth and if you say that you will do something then people will assume that you mean it and possess the necessary skill. This sort of atmosphere means that there is less bureaucracy involved in getting things done, paperwork is on the whole simpler t…

> The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge of it.

Is this a downside, or has the rest of the word devalued its academic qualifications by lowering its standards, failing to seriously tackle cheating, and (relevant to postgraduate degrees and academic titles) prioritising novelty and sensation at the expense of rigour?

I've never seen the inside of a top UK or US university, so I can't be sure that they're churning out meaningless undergrad degrees, but they certainly seem to be complicit in these trends at the level of publishing and hiring/promotion/tenure.

Re: Earnestness

#376

Post by eloff »

foxes wrote: post #356
slashdev wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual point of the article is to really just drop the -- quote -- "bogus" -- dogwhistle so all the other racists can identify them. Wow. That's beyond being uncharitable. Also, as I mentioned elsewhere down below at length, I think bogus is too kind a word for that kind of crap masquerading as an academic discipline. But to get back to the actual content, I think he's got a point. There is no substitute for ge…

There are plenty of people who have genuine passion and interest yet don't succeed. Sounds like survivor bias. Funny that you also appeal to authority -- PG cant possibly be wrong because he is rich and successful :). Also studying society/people is an academic discipline. There is plenty of hard science which is equally "bogus". What about bad neural network papers, or bad physics papers? Regardless, these things ar…

Remember if you took logic in college, appeal to authority is only a fallacy when the authority is not a domain expert. In this case it's quite valid.

> What about bad neural network papers, or bad physics papers?

That is a logical fallacy. It's called false equivalence. Just because there are some bad hard science papers does not mean gender studies is on the same level.

If anyone needs to be called out here on their behavior it is the humanities in academia and the insanity they are harboring and encouraging. I find no fault with PGs reference.

Re: Earnestness

#377

Post by [deleted] »

nonce42 wrote: post #194
raphlinus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a link from the word "bogus." I'm going to expand on this a bit, possibly against my better judgment. I believe Paul Graham has a point here, and it's a good one. In intellectual pursuits, there's a spectrum from dealing purely with nature and facts, to dealing with human perceptions. To pick what I hope is a reasonably neutral example, doing the science to get containment of a fusion reaction is on one end of t…

I read the linked paper out of curiosity. It's a theological paper arguing against forms of Christianity that are based on the world-view of whiteness; instead Christianity should move toward a "decolonial option". The paper's arguments are based on the famous theologian Karl Barth and his commentary on Romans 2, so it's not easy reading. Is this bogus? If you consider theology bogus, then yes. But the paper is highl…

[deleted]

Re: Earnestness

#378

Post by eloff »

woodruffw wrote: post #349
eloff wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sorry, but this is a profound misapprehension of the humanities: one of the first things you do in the study of history is learn that history is a human project, subject to human flaws. We don't take Thucydides and Herodotus at their words; we expect the "facts" of history to be distorted. Sure, but there's still a basis in facts where can corroborate accounts from different authors, even different sides in a w…

> Sure, but there's still a basis in facts where can corroborate accounts from different authors, even different sides in a war. yes it's subject to interpretation, and there's no one right answer. But you also can't just make stuff up and get people to take you seriously. There's some rigour to making and presenting your arguments. Very different to gender studies. Except that a lot of it is just made up! Both the G…

You seem to have a post factual philosophy. Just because some things are made up in history does not mean the whole field is without rigor, nor does it make it equivalent to the counter factual nonsense coming out of gender studies.

That you can find examples to the contrary does not prove the rule or make everything somehow equal.

Re: Earnestness

#379

Post by eloff »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #332
slashdev wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem with funding CS research. It's at least somewhat productive to society. Not hugely, but that's academia for you. Even batting 50% is great compared to 0%. These kinds of woke gender studies, socialist, racist, fields etc are a joke. I don't accept your implication that only someone inside the nut house are credentialed to evaluate it - if anything those seem like the people least likely to be able t…

That's pretty much just opinion? Of course they include politics, as does history, anthropology, literature. That means nothing. Strawman PC gender studies you have encountered may have poisoned it for you. That doesn't mean its worthless, or even wrong.

Also, that's not how you use the term strawman in an argument.

Re: Earnestness

#380

Post by freshhawk »

Alex3917 wrote: post #205

> Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery. To be fair a lot of startup origin stories are so ridiculously fake that they seem like they could have only been created as a mockery of earnestness. Like the founders know they're lying, they know everyone else knows they're lying, and they'…

I don't see how you expect to sell that particular story to a group of people who have likely sat in the meetings where those BS stories were crafted.

And most of whom have had more than one "oh damn, i thought we were ironically riffing but now I can't tell if they are very funny and very dry or if this person is very new and drank the kool aid and is completely earnest" moments.

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