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How to Think for Yourself

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Think for Yourself

#511

Post by closeparen »

darkerside wrote: post #124
peterlk wrote: post #8

Excellent article > When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" This is one of my favorite things to do, though the list of people who will talk to me again after I do it is very short. (Edit: To be extra clear... While this is a bitter pill - I do not like it when others do it to me - I do find it to be very effective for reinforcing good faith in close, trusting relationships. I also…

While this activity can be useful, I think it is simultaneously at the root of many of our social problems today. You cannot ask this question about literally everything. Well, you can, but you'll end up questioning things that are universally accepted (Which way is North? Is gasoline flammable?). So naturally you dial it back, and you ask questions only about things that seem wrong, or that you particularly care abo…

What’s happening in our culture seems more like a case of several competing conventions, split on tribal lines, rather than individuals thinking their way to unique positions.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#512

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Empirical testing is the only way to think about anything.

Epidemiology is the way to pluck randomised trials from peoples lived lifestyles

As such all the decisions we make in life have been made by billions of others before us - more than enough to tease out the "best" outcomes.

This is Inthink truly the golden egg of the age of surveillance - you can think for yourself, but back test against a million exactly the same decisions made by a million others - and decide if their outcomes are what we want

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#513

Post by cuspycode »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #273

It's really hard to read this kind of discussion of paul graham's work, because I feel there is a lot of reaction to who he is rather than just the ideas being presented. I'd love to see him do a [Richard Bachman]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman ) i.e. start writing essays with no obvious connection to his actual identity and see what response it gets.

I agree, it's very irritating that so many people respond to who the messenger is, rather than to what the message is. You don't really have to anonymize the author's identity in order to focus on the message rather than the messenger. You just have to let go of identity politics and any similar goofiness.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#514

Post by nicholast »

Arubis wrote: post #421

Over the years, I've found PG's essays much less compelling. As some sibling comments here have noted, there's a level of self-assuredness that feels increasingly disconnected from reality, like PG's become a synecdoche of SF VC-fuelled startup culture as a whole. Whether that's him changing, or me, or the world, I'm not certain--but I still look forward to them simply because the ensuing discussions here on HN tend…

Over time there has been a shift in theme from essays on startups to essays on parenting. I believe this example strongly falls in the latter.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#515

Post by Kranar »

ska wrote: post #503
Kranar wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing something that most people advise against is by definition unconventional but we can agree to disagree on this matter.

The point was that I think the conventional wisdom here is to do exactly what you did, not the other way around.

Maybe that's conventional wisdom, but I simply disagree then.

Just because everyone tells you not to buy a house doesn't mean you should buy one. I didn't buy my house because everyone told me not to, that would be incredibly stupid. In fact I would even go further and say that doing the opposite of what everyone tells you to do for the sake of being contrarian is worse than just going with the flow.

You can listen to people's reasons and try to appreciate where they are coming from and you can definitely learn from that, but making a decision on the basis of what everyone else is saying to do, one way or another, is bad advice.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#516

Post by bransonf »

pembrook wrote: post #495
Arubis wrote: post #421

Over the years, I've found PG's essays much less compelling. As some sibling comments here have noted, there's a level of self-assuredness that feels increasingly disconnected from reality, like PG's become a synecdoche of SF VC-fuelled startup culture as a whole. Whether that's him changing, or me, or the world, I'm not certain--but I still look forward to them simply because the ensuing discussions here on HN tend…

Your view of PG and SV culture is following the standard sentiment curve. Just like the culture at large. 20 years ago we were the innovative pioneers shaking up the all-powerful old guard, and everybody loves to root for the underdog. Now we’re the new seemingly all-powerful incumbents (look at the top 5 S&P 500 companies right now). Underdogs no longer. You can see this very clearly in media coverage of Silicon Val…

I think you make a very good point, especially with the Google answer.

But I don’t know if that shift in sentiment is unwarranted. The Google of 2005 was nothing like the Google of 2020.

When Google was just a search company, they were purely innovators. Google indexed the internet better than anyone else.

But Google now is pretty bloated. Chrome, Android, Gmail, Docs/Drive, YouTube. The thing is, your gripes with one product affect your perception of all Google products. If you don’t like Chrome, your YouTube experience might be degraded, and you might resent Google’s increasing influence on web standards.

I’m not saying it’s bad that Google has made a lot of useful things work. But Google has lost its magic.

The same can be said of Facebook. Young people flocked to it a decade ago. It was new, it was magic. Now it’s bloated too (Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus), and has its own set of unique issues.

It’s like how some people prefer bands that haven’t become mainstream yet. I prefer small companies because they are still on their toes trying to make better products. Google and Facebook don’t care about you as a user anymore, they’re too big to care.

Apple, Amazon, Microsoft... they too have lost that magic with age and size.

They’ve become boring. Boring is a recipe for disruption.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#517

Post by gorbachev »

One of the things I've started actively disliking more and more are the "independent thinkers" in the tech oligarchy who seem to do it simply because they enjoy being contrarians.

They post pseudo-intellectual babble about going against the grain justified by single sentence "observations" about some anecdotal evidence they then stretch and generalize into a larger point and continue beating up until the horse is dead.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#518

Post by sbilstein »

But schools generally ignore independent-mindedness, except to the extent they try to suppress it.

Why do so many folks buy this bullshit about American schooling? Sure, we've got SATs and standardized tests but schools also have jazz bands, rock ensembles, student written plays and musicals.

Hell my failing public high school had plenty of room for self-expression, it wasn't the sort of conformist prison PG thinks to seem schools are, it just wasn't a very good school. No one was going to punish you for writing an essay or starting a club or anything else.

My university, one likely to be accused of 'credentialism' also had the gamut of clubs: campus crusade for christ down to groups for divesting from Israel to Zionist groups, to LGBT groups, etc, etc, etc.

Its just bullshit.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#520

Post by nazgulnarsil »

I think this is an appealing sounding false dichotomy. Bryan Caplan consistently wins bets by betting trends. Robin Hanson has noted that merely taking all the basic facts of a domain as actually true will often get you to contrarian status.
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