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Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

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Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#61

Post by thwayhn7 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #42
tptacek wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

vapid: offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging. I'm failing to see this generate meaty discussion here. I am currently seeing mostly lots of flagged to death or grayed out comments, likely because it's basically gossip and mud slinging and not really anything more than "Some guy has a bee in his bonnet about Paul Graham for some reason." PS there's only one L in my name, not two.

> I am currently seeing mostly lots of flagged to death or grayed out comments,

A lot of those grayed out comments are against your posts.

> likely because it's basically gossip and mud slinging

I'm surprised you came to that conclusion. Especially for someone who keeps bringing up the leaderboard statistics, every chance you get[1] and who thinks they know about all the matters that are there to be known (even the "truth" about Albert Einstein's wife!), I would have expected you to know better that downvotes against a comment has nothing to do with the quality of the article being discussed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965785

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#62

Post by lkrubner »

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’m worried that I will either overestimate or underestimate how much you’ve followed the conversation regarding brevity and programming. If I’m saying something you already know, please disregard my comment.

In other essays, Zach Tellman has made the point that Clojure is unique in that it’s syntax allows it’s written to form to almost exactly represent its AST tree. The comparison then is between Arc and Clojure and between Paul Graham and Rich Hickey. Both men wrote essays about programming which seemed to promise new ideas but Hickey delivered real innovations whereas we can now see that Graham was unable to deliver. And Graham’s failure is in part traceable to his inability to make explicit what he actually knows, or why he believes the things that he asserts.

The debate over how to make tacit knowledge explicit is important. The debate over what constitutes good programming is important to the whole tech industry. I’m astonished that you would think this essay was merely a matter of gossip.

It’s possible that Tellman should have repeated some of his earlier essays, to give more context to his remarks, but this is the Web, so he embedded hyperlinks to some of the previous discussions.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#63

Post by tptacek »

username90 wrote: post #59

> 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…

I think Paul Graham is very probably right about Lisp relative to Java; with Arc (and Bel) he set out to do something more ambitious than evangelizing Lisp. The bit about Java in this post wasn't the strongest argument. (I thought it was solid overall, though).

I'm not sold on either Arc or Bel! But if nerding out on programming languages was the only limb Graham ever climbed out on, nobody would read a post like this.

For what it's worth, in the field of Critical Paul Graham Theory, I don't know that anyone's done better than "It Turns Out". https://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#64

Post by lkrubner »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #48
billy_beef wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree here. The article is criticizing his work, his history of participation in a field, and his current commentary on politics. Yes, it discusses him as a subject, but not as a piece of gossip and strung-together ad hominem's. It is definitely critical of him, but mostly in his capacity as a commentor and his history of being incorrect. It's not second-rate tabloid stuff because of what dimension of hi…

Racism, sexism, personal attacks in intellectual circles -- such things all tend to work more or less the same way. Attack them in a way that has plausible deniability and is socially acceptable for some reason. But if you look at the overall pattern of behavior, the real point is to attack or exclude a particular person or particular group of people. Among other things I've had a college class in Social Psychology.…

Your comments are drawing my attention because you’ve previously written a great deal on Hacker News that I agreed with and so I’m surprised that you have such a negative view of such an excellent essay.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#65

Post by lkrubner »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #35
billy_beef wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Suppose a professor has a Very Great reputation, and another professor has an Ordinary Great reputation.

You take a class with each.

From the Very Great professor you get several maxims that don’t seem to actually help you, nor can you figure out how to apply them to your work.

From the Ordinary Great professor you get a bunch of advice that you can easily apply to your own work, and you feel that you’ve immediately improved in the subject.

Is it jealousy to then say the Very Great professor seems to have a reputation that exceeds his actual skill?

That’s how I read the comparison of Graham to Hickey.

It’s an important issue, especially if Very Great has a prominent position in the industry and is using that prominence in harmful ways.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#66

Post by lkrubner »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #52
tptacek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m engaging with the article itself on Twitter. On Hacker News I’m only engaging with you, again, because I like what you’ve written in the past and I’m surprised you’re so critical of this essay.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#67

Post by lkrubner »

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…

“The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets.”

Anything that Zach Tellman writes is going to get attention simply because Tellman has a following that takes him seriously.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#68

Post by DoreenMichele »

lkrubner wrote: post #64
DoreenMichele wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racism, sexism, personal attacks in intellectual circles -- such things all tend to work more or less the same way. Attack them in a way that has plausible deniability and is socially acceptable for some reason. But if you look at the overall pattern of behavior, the real point is to attack or exclude a particular person or particular group of people. Among other things I've had a college class in Social Psychology.…

Your comments are drawing my attention because you’ve previously written a great deal on Hacker News that I agreed with and so I’m surprised that you have such a negative view of such an excellent essay.

It's not the essay I dislike. It's the level of conversation here on HN. It's mostly drama and my personal opinion is that the reason for that is primarily because of the style of the writing.

I've proposed a remedy: That someone -- anyone -- more knowledgeable than me about programming should leave a top level comment engaging with the actual meat of the article. There's no reason it can't be you.

Engaging further with my comments is not a remedy for what I feel the issue is. And engaging with my comments specifically because they are mine is just adding to the problem.

I commented on the matter because I've studied social phenomenon and I see a negative social pattern here and because I value HN for its high quality discussion. This article is mostly failing to foster good quality discussion. The primary focus has been on Paul Graham and not on something more substantive, like his writing, his ideas or his work.

After I left my remarks, people began leaving remarks that deny that this is an ad hominem attack on Paul Graham. That's problematic because it means the focus remains on Paul Graham. In discussing whether or not it is an ad hominem, the focus remains on pg, not on something more substantive.

It's a little like when I used to argue with someone and say "All you do is talk about you and I am not even a part of this discussion" and the reply was "I'm sorry. I'm a dirt bag. I'm a terrible person. I'm a lousy excuse for a human being." Like, I wasn't asking the person to attack themselves. I was asking them to include me in the discussion. Going from "Me. Me. Me." to "Negative things about me, me, me." doesn't fundamentally change the fact the topic is still "me."

It really shouldn't matter to you too much that it's me saying this -- unless it helps you figure out what my point really is. If you look at my comments and think to yourself "She has studied social phenomenon a lot more than she has studied programming and her observation is about quality of discussion here and I can see that" -- cool. Other than using what you know about me to help you understand my point, it shouldn't matter that I'm the author of the comment.

If you think that the substance of the article should be discussed, then go discuss it. If you think it's basically an ad hominem on Paul Graham, the best thing to do is ignore it.

I'm trying to step away from this discussion. Me being here is only deepening the issue that I dislike. It's not remedying it.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#69

Post by tom_mellior »

username90 wrote: post #59

> 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…

> However the only thing separating someone at the top of the field from an average expert is intuition.

Intuition based on knowledge and experience. Paul Graham seems to have no programming design experience besides Arc, no apparent knowledge acquired from study, and thus no basis for his intuitions. Which is why, as you write, "his intuition for programming language design isn't as good".

There are plenty of people with a similar level of knowledge and experience who disagree that brevity is everything. And for that matter, insisting that brevity should be measured in "AST size" rather than lines or characters seems objective and technical, but different implementations of the same language can use different AST formats, so this isn't the meaningful measure it's made out to be.

Re: Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

#70

Post by wellpast »

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…

To the ‘ad hominem fallacy’ people: the opening paragraph states its entire motivation and thesis: Pg’s recent ‘reactionary’ political views and then purports to figure this out.

Then it mentions nothing more about said views instead - yes - launching into an ornate argument about PG’s technical ideas from a decade ago to conclude that PG is an ‘unserious intellectual’, with the hope that its original thesis has been settled.

That’s ad hominem - don’t be fooled by the bloated, foot-noted middle.

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