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Disagreeing with Paul Graham
- davidw 19y agoNice ideas (voted it up), but I'm of a mind that the "weren't meant to have a boss" thing is kind of played out.
- nonrecursive 19y agoEven if it is played out, it's great to see a counter argument that's as logical as this and entertaining at the same time.
- imgabe 19y ago>Maybe the correct conclusion to draw from them is "People who work for an asshole look less alive," or "People who work on boring projects look less alive." It seems like both of these possible explanations are endemic to large organizations, and would be impossible if you were a startup founder. If you start your own company and your boss is an asshole and your project is boring, you only have yourself to blame. You also have the authority to fix it immediately.
- nonrecursive 19y agoI think you're missing the larger point, which is that there are many possible conclusions you could draw from this very limited sample.
- Husafan 19y ago> and would be impossible if you were a startup founder Only if you're bootstrapping. A lot of start-ups are not so lucky as to get funding and help from a company like Y-Combinator. End up with a bad VC, and you can easily find yourself feeling 'caged' again.
- mynameishere 19y agoIf you see a job posting that says something like, "Come work with us--we're fun, with employee empowerment, etc etc" you don't bother to argue with it because you know the angle it's coming from. Likewise if someone tells you to drop out and tune in because that's how they did it coming up from the muck, well, you have to remember that his writing has motivations closer to a job posting than a research paper.
- asdflkj 19y agoThis is wrong, but being a civil argument, at least there are concrete things to refute. One problem with direct observation is that it's hard to get a representative sample. It can be done, but you have to make it a deliberate project and put some time and thought into it, rather than just stumbling on a bunch of programmers in a café. False dichotomy. PG's sample is neither a deliberate project, nor the people in the cafe. It's the programmers he has known and observed over his life. There's no reason to doubt representativeness of his sample. a case where an ad hominem argument is relevant and valid. There's never a case where ad hominem is valid. If it's valid, it's not ad hominem, by definition. A logical fallacy can't be valid. But I'm nitpicking here. His point is: The fact that this observation confirms his preexisting belief in the worthiness of startups makes it less credible than if the same observation were made by someone who had no particular interest in startups. Occam's Razor suggests that PG works with startups because he thinks they're better, not that he thinks they're better because he works with them. He is rich enough to work on whatever he wants. A creature that's perpetually dissatisfied, always striving for advantage, wins out over a creature that's happy. Then why does happiness exist? Why hasn't it been eradicated millions of years ago? Answer: because it serves a purpose. It's how evolution tells the organism, "keep doing what you're doing". Not everything that mentions nature is an appeal to nature.
- smopburrito 19y ago>Then why does happiness exist? Why hasn't it been eradicated millions of years ago? Answer: because it serves a purpose. It's how evolution tells the organism, "keep doing what you're doing". like the purpose of leadership/management/social groups it can be taken to a detrimental level. example: addiction. "keep doing what you're doing at all costs, care about nothing else, even if it kills you or otherwise destroys your life." >A creature that's perpetually dissatisfied, always striving for advantage, wins out over a creature that's happy. I, too, thought this statement was conspicuously unsupported by any evidence (which is part of what i thought the author disagreed with). moreover, it is in direct contradiction to the parenthetical that it preceeds (are we to take it that monks "override... unhappiness" in order to lose out?)
- aggieben 19y agoOccam's Razor suggests that PG works with startups because he thinks they're better, not that he thinks they're better because he works with them. He is rich enough to work on whatever he wants. Huh? I think you'd have to know pg pretty darn well before being able to apply Occam's Razor to the logic of his preferences. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to think that pg works with startups because he thinks they'd be better because he works with them. It also seems to me that might be a distinction between work and play: you work on the things you work on to make them better, you play with the things you play with because they are better. Lastly, if you think startups are better, and that you can make them better by working with them, then it seems like the perfect combination of work and play (read: passion), and Occam's Razor isn't needed.
- aggieben 19y agoBest point was at the end: One difficulty with disagreeing with people is that you have to present their argument and your argument, and so your essay ends up being longer than theirs.
- edw519 19y agoThe way this thing is going, we are asymptotically approaching the infinitely long essay.
- marcus 19y agoYes we're getting dangerously close Steve Yegge length posts
- Retric 19y agoyou have to present their argument No, you only need to include the aspect you disagree with so your rebuttal can be shorter.
- Prrometheus 19y agoThis is why I gave up on a Philosophy Degree: I was jaded by the intense over-analyzing and language-parsing. Perhaps the blogosphere will ponder whether or not we were meant to have a boss for as long as we’ve pondered whether or not we have Free Will.
- hobbs 19y agobut what does it mean to "have" a "boss"? ;)
- Prrometheus 19y agoHow many perfect founders could dance on the head of a pin?
- omouse 19y ago3. But only if each is wearing a top hat and wielding a cane.
- sah 19y agoI find it kind of upsetting that none of the various disagreements with pg's essay that I've read have been in reaction to what I felt was the core of the essay. As far as I'm concerned, the centerpiece of the essay is this interesting observation about organizational hierarchies, and why they might necessarily place limitations on individual freedoms. He also makes some guesses about the effects of those limitations on the happiness of employees in companies of different sizes, which I think he marks off pretty clearly as being drawn from observation. What's so incendiary about those, anyway? Regardless of whether it's true or not, isn't the stereotype of the creatively stifled employee of a large company a cultural cliche? I'm ready to stop hearing about this now.
- stcredzero 19y ago>When you break it down, Graham's argument from evolution goes like this: our ancestors worked in groups of eight or so, therefore humans evolved to work in groups of eight or so, therefore contemporary humans will be more alive and fulfilled working in groups of eight or so. >In a general sense, this is the logical fallacy known as the "appeal to nature" -- the idea that what's natural is ipso facto good or right. There is no reason to believe this: plenty of natural things are neither good nor right. Paul is not saying that working in groups of about 8 is not "good or right." He's saying that it's satisfying and functional. It's perfectly reasonable to say that something we were evolved to do is something we do well, and something we were not evolved to do, we have trouble with.
- serhei 19y agoSatisfying and functional is good and right. Are you prepared to argue otherwise?
- stcredzero 19y agoSatisfying and functional is often good and right, but in my personal system, it is sometimes not. I could start cheating on my girlfriend pretty easily, but that would not be "good and right" to me, though it would arguably be satisfying and functional for me. Sometimes it seems satisfying and functional for me to punch people in the face. The problem with "satisfying and functional" = "good and right" is that both sides of that equation are highly complex, contextual, and subjective.
- serhei 19y agoSurely that doesn't mean that in your earlier comment being a startup founder is satisfying and functional in a way that is not good and right.
- stcredzero 19y agoNope. It's neutral.
- johnrob 19y agoI don't think we were actually meant to have chairs :)
- mechanical_fish 19y agoThis reads like Mister Spock's review of a punk rock concert. "I don't understand why the audience was asked if it was 'ready to rock', as they clearly did not have instruments. Also, it was illogical to ask them to 'fight the power', since power is an abstract physical quantity that cannot meaningfully be 'fought'." And did PG's monumental catalogue of rhetorical errors mention the rule about "not arguing with straw men"? Because I don't think the real PG actually believes that literally everyone "wasn't meant to have a boss", nor would the real PG ever endorse the concept that "you weren't meant to have a chair, because our ancestors didn't evolve to sit in chairs."
- derefr 19y agoA tangent, however inappropriate: You weren't meant to have a bed. The better a bed "feels" to most people, the worse it is for the health of your back, and vice versa. Most non-serious back pain can be corrected by sleeping on a dirt floor, or a hay bale. You also weren't meant to have shoes. Orthopedics today are mostly needed because of the shoes we wear when we're young; your feet are meant to rest flat against the ground, to be able to curve around things like rocks and tree branches, and to mush up into wet dirt or sand. I personally get back-aches whenever I wear anything other than flat-soled ("skate") shoes, approximating the natural terrain below them. From these two things, I can guess that chairs really aren't a good idea either, but I've never looked into them specifically.
- mstoehr 19y agoI somewhat agree with sah in that Roth's essay did not fully address the central point of Graham's essay: the effect that large hierarchical structures have on people. The discussion of ad hominem arguments aside, I would point out that you could phrase Roth's argumentative method as, "you've argued for x given method y, and I can use method y to also prove z, you don't believe z, therefore you can't prove x". A rough sketch might look like this: y --> x y --> z therefore z <--> x (this step is hard to sketch out because it's unclear) ~z therefore ~x. The difficulty with this argument is a fallacy about implication. Roth states that the "evolutionary argument" supports pg's view, but that he can then use that same "evolutionary argument" to prove an absurd point of view. Then he holds that he has disagreed with pg's central viewpoint. This method of argumentation is fundamentally flawed because pg's view might be supported by a multitude of arguments, the truth or usefulness of the "evolutionary argument" is not a necessary condition for the truth of pg's view of organizations, bosses, and human nature. Hence, Roth has merely attacked pg's method of proof while leaving the central claim untouched. I have other criticisms of Roth's argument, but even if I am wrong in such criticism the argument would fail to disagree with pg.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- zoltz 19y agoRefuting the proof of a central point rather than the central point itself must be considered DH6 in Paul Graham's hierarchy. Roth probably took that for granted. I certainly would. Otherwise I hereby claim P = NP and preemptively accuse anyone not accepting this of deliberate dishonesty and bad spirit and categorise their disagreement as "formally possibly up to DH5 but effectively DH1 at most".
- pg 19y agoThe first half is an argument with a strawman: It can be done, but you have to make it a deliberate project and put some time and thought into it, rather than just stumbling on a bunch of programmers in a cafe. The story about the programmers in the cafe was not evidence for any claim. It was just an explanation of what set me thinking about the problem. It's not a pillar holding up anything, so attacking it proves nothing. (Incidentally, a moment's thought would have made it clear that I have in fact "put some time and thought into it." I've spent 24 years as a professional programmer, during which I've observed thousands of programmers working for all sizes of companies. Plus I've seen first hand the transformation undergone by roughly 200 YC-funded founders so far.) The second half is fallacy: But rather than pointing out fallacies, a better way to refute Graham's evolutionary argument is by reductio ad absurdum. ... Our ancestors lived in a world that was shrouded in darkness half the day, therefore we would be happier without electric lights. This supposed refutation can itself be disproven by reductio ad absurdum, because it could be applied to any explanation of our inclinations based on how we evolved. (Bad example, incidentally. There do seem to be conflicts between electric lights and human biology: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/19/AR2008021902398.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02...) Neither of these arguments even attempts to refute the central point of the essay. In case anyone wants to try it, the central point is that in an organization organized as a tree structure, structural forces tend to give each person freedom in inverse proportion to the size of the whole tree. That we work better in groups of 10 than 100 I feel is obvious enough not to need justification. The argument from evolution is just an attempt to explain why groups that size work. Though on the whole my reaction is "I want my 20 minutes back," there was one encouraging thing about this experience. Even these dishonest DH5s are more civil than Atwood DH2ing about my choice of metaphors.
- Spyckie 19y agoI'm not sure if I'm disagreeing, but what I perceive from the essay is slightly different than your central point. For instance, if you titled the essay 'the inverse relationship between personal freedom and organization size', I don't think it would elicit such an outcry (or any attention whatsoever). Instead, you state that the loss of freedom makes going into large organizations a bad choice for certain groups of people (namely, programmers, because programming is about freedom). The programming community is made up of many people with different backgrounds, mindsets, and interests. While I myself may program for the freedom to create things, I know other people who program for the fun of it, and others who program because its what they know how to do. All of these types of programmers exist in the startup community, because a startup can mean much more than just programming freedom to them (it can mean money, prestige, adventure, a challenge, etc). If I am disagreeing at all, I would only do so concerning the scope of people that 'programming freedom' applies to. I think only a small subset of the startup community really thinks this point is meaningful - the rest do not give it much weight. I think the main point of the essay is to convince people to startup early in their careers, even out of college. (If 'you weren't meant to have a boss', what are you meant to do?) You back it up by saying that corporate culture, from your experience, does more harm than good from a startup's perspective (especially in the matter of programming), and you explore that line until you come up with a good model that explains why corporate culture is harmful in its essence. In contrast, many people don't think that programming freedom is a powerful incentive to starting up early, and are disagreeing because that is the only evidence that you provide to back up your claim that 'you weren't meant to have a boss'.
- pius 19y agotl;dr