Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers • Hacker News Board

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#51

Post by tptacek » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 3:52 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #47

tptacek wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get "I am basically jealous of this man" from the article, like, at all.

You have already made it abundantly clear that you disagree with me. Restating that you disagree with me adds nothing to this discussion. We already know you disagree with me. Your personal opinion and my personal opinion differing here is of no real importance to me. What does bother me is that this article is generating so many grayed out and downvoted comments because of the manner in which it was written. If you…

I don't think the way the article is written has nearly as much to do with the comments on this thread as the subject itself, which tends to bring out the worst in the site. I think the article itself is quite well written.

I also think we tend to fall into a trap here of assuming that an article's impact on HN is indicative of its quality. Most people don't write "for" HN, and lots of good stuff doesn't play well here.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#52

Post by DoreenMichele » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 4:00 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #51

DoreenMichele wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have already made it abundantly clear that you disagree with me. Restating that you disagree with me adds nothing to this discussion. We already know you disagree with me. Your personal opinion and my personal opinion differing here is of no real importance to me. What does bother me is that this article is generating so many grayed out and downvoted comments because of the manner in which it was written. If you…

I don't think the way the article is written has nearly as much to do with the comments on this thread as the subject itself, which tends to bring out the worst in the site. I think the article itself is quite well written. I also think we tend to fall into a trap here of assuming that an article's impact on HN is indicative of its quality. Most people don't write "for" HN, and lots of good stuff doesn't play well he…

I think the article itself is quite well written.

And yet there isn't a single comment by you engaging directly with the article itself. Only engaging with your opinion that my opinion of it is wrong.

To me this fact only lends further support to my view of what is going on here.

But I don't intend to argue it further. This isn't remedying the problem at all. It isn't somehow leading to better discussion here.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#53

Post by MikeOfAu » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 4:05 AM UTC

This essay smells like referred pain.

If the author has a good case, he should just debate PG directly on his Coinbase stance. Because it sure feels to me that that's the real issue here. All the rest of the snarkiness is motivated by a disagreement on THAT issue.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#54

Post by chordalkeyboard » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 4:38 AM UTC

billy_beef wrote: post #38

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

> we

I'm not sure this is even well-formed statement, you're certainly free to devote your time to issues that you consider important and ignore those that you perceive to be a waste of time. However if you want to persuade others to adopt those same economies of time then to would be helpful to share the specific motivations.

> 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?

How error-prone would it be to take someone else's assessment of an individual at face value and conclude that they had nothing further to offer and so to ignore everything they had written?

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#55

Post by ardy42 » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 4:43 AM UTC

zemo wrote: post #31

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.

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

Not really, a serious intellectual is one that does their research and does it competently, and from that foundation skillfully tries to articulate the truth. It's not a requirement that they do that within a Popper-approved framework.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#56

Post by jdlshore » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

TT3351 wrote: post #29

wellpast wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of votes, but little ‘attention’, as in: little discussion. Why? Not because of “monarchy” but because there’s little intellectual material in this hit piece. It’s pure ad hominem.

I fail to see how this is an ad hominem, can you please explain?

It’s the “ad hominem fallacy fallacy”—in a nutshell, thinking that abuse (or mere criticism, in this case) is an ad hominem attack.

I love this article on the subject: https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html

Ironically, the GP is ad hominem; as the above link says, “while he pretends to deal with A's argument, in using the term "ad hominem" incorrectly, B is in fact trying to dismiss the argument by imputing that A is resorting to personal attacks.”

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#57

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:16 AM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #47

tptacek wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get "I am basically jealous of this man" from the article, like, at all.

You have already made it abundantly clear that you disagree with me. Restating that you disagree with me adds nothing to this discussion. We already know you disagree with me. Your personal opinion and my personal opinion differing here is of no real importance to me. What does bother me is that this article is generating so many grayed out and downvoted comments because of the manner in which it was written. If you…

[deleted]

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#58

Post by jdlshore » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:20 AM UTC

pierrebai wrote: post #50

I wish I'd find it curious the extreme negativity toward the essay, but unfortunately it fits with my world view of people in general: they'll approve of things that concord with their own opinions and interpret everything through the prism of what they already believe. The essay is labelled ad-hominem by many, even though it provides a cogent argument and multiple supporting facts. Of course, to take an example, the…

I’m going to hijack this comment to repost a link to “The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy,” a favorite essay of mine. Anybody who thinks this article is an ad hominem should read it. It’s short and fun.

https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#59

Post by username90 » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:46 AM UTC

> to be at the top of your field, explicit knowledge is almost always required.

This is technically true. However the only thing separating someone at the top of the field from an average expert is intuition. Both has access to exactly the same explicit knowledge and any expert with years of experience will know most of it already.

For example, what is "good code"? Nobody has written a program that programmers agree can tell if your code is good or not. Yet "good code" is extremely important, making things composable and scaling up means we can make larger and less bug prone programs. It is one of the key things of a top programmer, yet the only way we can identify it is ask experts whether a piece of code is good or not, and they wont even agree. We know for a fact that different programmers writes code of vastly different quality, we just can't pinpoint what that quality is.

The problem with Paul Graham isn't that he rely too much on his intuition, the problem is that his intuition for programming language design isn't as good as his intuition for making programs or startups. Lisp isn't as great as he claims, Java is much greater than he thinks, he just has created a mental blocker keeping him from seeing this and therefore ensuring that he will never be great at designing languages, since that blocker keeps his intuition from doing its job.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#60

Post by SoylentOrange » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:53 AM UTC

pierrebai wrote: post #50

I wish I'd find it curious the extreme negativity toward the essay, but unfortunately it fits with my world view of people in general: they'll approve of things that concord with their own opinions and interpret everything through the prism of what they already believe. The essay is labelled ad-hominem by many, even though it provides a cogent argument and multiple supporting facts. Of course, to take an example, the…

I would like to add for the folks saying this is an ad-hominem that using Paul Graham’s own “hierarchy of disagreement” pyramid [1], this is at least at the level of Refutation, putting it 4 solid rungs above Ad-Hominem.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#/medi...