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The interviewer seems pretty clueless and confrontational, but PG handles it quite well and makes some great points. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/

The interviewer seems pretty clueless and confrontational, but PG handles it quite well and makes some great points. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2006/11/09/web-of-ideas-with-paul-graham-2/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2006/11/09/web-of-ideas-with-paul-graham-2/

extantproject 20y ago
Weinberg was confrontational. He seems only out to argue. Paul handled it well.
akkartik 20y ago
I disagree. It is true that: 1. Video is a slow way to process information in the internet era. 2. Weinberger doesn't come off well. The frequent interruptions at the start are irritating. What starts out seeming like a talk turns into a debate between two people, and the change in format is jarring for a bit. And it is hard to understand what Weinberger is getting at. This might have to do with our disparate vocabularies, and the wide disparity in the worlds he and I live in. In spite of these, W does have a point. It is non-trivial to separate the fashionable from the timeless in a thing of beauty. 'Space aliens' may require a human-like visual cortex to appreciate the Mona Lisa. Does that make it just a narrow fad as well, or is a visual cortex a protocol prerequisite to evaluating it? As I asked PG over email, where does fashion end and convention begin? A lot of the ancient philosophical arguments are between polar opposites like these. Should we find out about the world with reason or the senses? Is mind or matter supreme? Is it ok to abort foetuses or not? We know that one can exaggerate anything to make a point, and yet it is easy to fall into the trap of ending up with an extreme viewpoint because one can't decide where to draw the line. Eventually we (will) figure out for each of these issues that there can be richer answers than the obvious black-or-white. So beauty can be timeless, but also tightly bound to a context. It is not clear that all of the latter is bad. How to separate the two? Open question. Relativism is no worse than believing passionately in the wrong anwer. --- So much for the academic debate; PG's outlook is more utilitarian[1]. The problem of building beautiful things is a hard one, and it makes more sense for a builder to 'flow timeless' rather than to follow fashions. The alternative may work too, but there's less percentage in it. This is perfectly reasonable, it's just not the same question W is grappling with. Both of them are right, they're just asking slightly different questions. They don't ever figure this out in the video, IMO. BTW, I believe this conversation contributed to a PG essay: http://reddit.com/info/ufsk/comments/cugnx http://reddit.com/info/ufsk/comments/cugnx [1] A utilitarian philosophy of aesthetics, heh.

extantproject 20y ago

Weinberg was confrontational. He seems only out to argue. Paul handled it well.

akkartik 20y ago

I disagree. It is true that: 1. Video is a slow way to process information in the internet era. 2. Weinberger doesn't come off well. The frequent interruptions at the start are irritating. What starts out seeming like a talk turns into a debate between two people, and the change in format is jarring for a bit. And it is hard to understand what Weinberger is getting at. This might have to do with our disparate vocabularies, and the wide disparity in the worlds he and I live in. In spite of these, W does have a point. It is non-trivial to separate the fashionable from the timeless in a thing of beauty. 'Space aliens' may require a human-like visual cortex to appreciate the Mona Lisa. Does that make it just a narrow fad as well, or is a visual cortex a protocol prerequisite to evaluating it? As I asked PG over email, where does fashion end and convention begin? A lot of the ancient philosophical arguments are between polar opposites like these. Should we find out about the world with reason or the senses? Is mind or matter supreme? Is it ok to abort foetuses or not? We know that one can exaggerate anything to make a point, and yet it is easy to fall into the trap of ending up with an extreme viewpoint because one can't decide where to draw the line. Eventually we (will) figure out for each of these issues that there can be richer answers than the obvious black-or-white. So beauty can be timeless, but also tightly bound to a context. It is not clear that all of the latter is bad. How to separate the two? Open question. Relativism is no worse than believing passionately in the wrong anwer. --- So much for the academic debate; PG's outlook is more utilitarian[1]. The problem of building beautiful things is a hard one, and it makes more sense for a builder to 'flow timeless' rather than to follow fashions. The alternative may work too, but there's less percentage in it. This is perfectly reasonable, it's just not the same question W is grappling with. Both of them are right, they're just asking slightly different questions. They don't ever figure this out in the video, IMO. BTW, I believe this conversation contributed to a PG essay: http://reddit.com/info/ufsk/comments/cugnx http://reddit.com/info/ufsk/comments/cugnx [1] A utilitarian philosophy of aesthetics, heh.