Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

>A more serious analysis of brevity might define it as “the entropy of a parse tree recursively inlined/macroexpanded down to language primitives.” This suggests our focus ought to be on two questions: how compressible are our primitives, and how can we enable users to achieve something close to optimal compression? Since the first question has a relative measure (what’s the compression ratio for our expanded parse tree?), we could productively iterate on both better primitives and better tools for abstracting over them.

But Graham’s analysis of brevity, and indeed of all language design, was fundamentally unserious. He wasn’t interested in a rigorous definition of brevity, because the ultimate measure of a language’s quality was still his hacker’s radar. All of his essays, and Arc itself, were just spokes around that central hub. If his essays sometimes disagreed, or if Arc didn’t reflect his essays, it’s hardly surprising; their only connection was they all, in the moment, seemed right and true to Paul Graham[..]

I dont understand what the author means by 'brevity'. Is that the same as what one might call 'elegant code'? I prefer to use the term elegant. From the article, it seems to me that PG's prefers elegant code that is modular and neat. It is reflected in his essays and how he approaches subjects.

Code can be elegant and modular. People are complex. You can hack them, but you cant debug people.

This blog post reads like the author decided to dig up some epic dirt but went too hard in the spot where they found the first lukewarm morsel (Paul being wrong about Java) hoping to find more proglang failures instead of continuing the hunt.

Because it seems like a strikingly ho-hum collection of samples.

Paul certainly didn't pull a Hammock-Time Hickey with Arc. Arc was a low mileage side project that fizzled out. Like any engineer, he dicked around and built a mediocre forum on it but lost interest when it came to polish. He made some comments about libraries and brevity. Used bytestrings and not immutable maps. He wrote blog posts, some about Arc.

It's not like Paul is revered as a proglang designer, yet it reads like Zach is trying to build up a damning contradiction from sideshow scraps.

And 80% through the post is when Zach finally charges Paul with spinning the silk of YCombinator from perhaps overvalued essay clout. I mean, didn't those early investors know that bytestrings couldn't possibly have been the best way to future proof Paul's hobbylang for 100 years?

(Isn't the flag to plant here simply that Zach's tour of his least favorite Paul Graham blogs could be leaving out the things that did make Paul ascendent in the tech/biz space? That perhaps something even like Viaweb could make up for blogging a tech prediction that didn't pan out?)

Then the blog post ends a few paragraphs later but not before Zach decides to crank the aggro up from mouse's hiss to puppy's roar by drawing a just-so line between white supremacy and the blog post where Paul bemoans anti-intellectual conformity going on in uni campuses.

In other words, Zach dedicates paragraphs of his post to drive home a scandal as big as Paul's one-praise-too-many endorsement of brevity in 2002, yet Zach leaves the connection between white replacement theory and anything else he's uttered on the page as an exercise for the reader.

I get the feeling that Zach gives his true feelings and motivation away in one of his opening paragraphs:

> Recently, however, his writing has taken a reactionary turn which is hard to ignore. He’s written about the need to defend “moderates” from bullies on the “extreme left”, asserted that “the truth is to the right of the median” because “the left is culturally dominant,” and justified Coinbase’s policy to ban discussion of anything deemed “political” by saying that it “will push away some talent, yes, but not very talented talent.”

And then Zach spends the rest of the blog procrastinating ever getting around to it, something that could finally be taken seriously as a real disagreement.

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Something feels very withheld about Zach's message which is surprising because I think Zach is such a good communicator on technical subjects (e.g. Elements of Clojure).

I'm not even sure what Zach wants the reader to think Zach feels about Paul. The whole comment above is me trying to meander a guess. Where does Zach actually put Paul on a scale from outright intellectual fraudster to just someone Zach avoids on Twitter? It's hard to interpret the blog post without even knowing that much.

How much is Zach provoked by obvious political disagreement? What really is his point about Hickey and Clojure? Just a passing comment that Hickey did the build-your-own-lisp better, or is it that Arc's failure should have pilfered every bit of credibility from Paul?

If Zach ever read this, I would encourage him to introduce the same honest ("what I think" -> "why I think it") clarity that makes his technical work so easy to read.

we as in his potential audience, the public, his readers etc. I don't feel like sharing the specific motivations, that is what the piece you're commenting on is doing.

I'm not taking someone's assessment at face value, I read it, considered the sources, considered pg, and am using it to build an understanding of his work.

> Anyone that needs to be 'told' that EARTH HAS 4 CORNERS is silly thinking isn't going to hear you - so that's a terrible analogy right there.

Maybe you just didn't understand the analogy?

The point was that valuing being "aggressively independent-minded" above trying to be right can lead you to being a crank. One should value a process and rigor that leads you in the right direction, rather than valuing thinking different for the sake of thinking different.

> we as in his potential audience, the public, his readers etc.

we all have different perspectives and priorities, I'm not sure how you or I could decide for someone else that PG was not worth listening to and if I decide that for myself then I don't listen to him. If I want to persuade others that they should also ignore him then I make my case on the merits.

> I'm not taking someone's assessment at face value, I read it, considered the sources, considered pg, and am using it to build an understanding of his work.

Can you share the basis of that understanding rather than expecting that we would take your assessment at face value?