4 ms·

This seems like an almost deliberate misreading of what I've said: 1. A couple quotes from the essay in which he claims I said efficiency doesn't matter (http:

by pg 16y ago

This seems like an almost deliberate misreading of what I've said: 1. A couple quotes from the essay in which he claims I said efficiency doesn't matter (http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html): "And yet some applications will still demand speed." "Efficiency is important, but I don't think that's the right way to get it." 2/3. He claims I said x, then at the end concedes I actually said -x. This latter I "grudgingly conceded?" It was arguably the single biggest theme of that talk, that the super-angels might have a winning model without getting big hits. 4. I said assholes are an instance of people who invest late, not that the two are identical. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809670 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809670) 5. I agree note-taking has benefits other than recording things. In fact I've written about the phenomenon before. I just meant that people didn't have to take notes to record what I said.

lisper 16y ago
Couple of things for the record: 1. I may well have misunderstood or misrepresented what you've said. But it was not deliberate. 2. I concede that point #5 was unfair. It occurred to me as I was writing and watching the video, and I decided to add it on the spur of the moment. I should have thought about it more carefully. I've added an update to that effect.
- Retric 16y ago
  I'd much rather have a 10x return in one year than a 100x return in three (or five or ten, which are more typical numbers). The above is a stupid exaggeration. It only approximates the truth if your average return is more than 3x per year. (Ok, the 10 year example works if your expected safe ROI is 30% per year over 9 years also works, but good luck with that.)
  - Retric 16y ago
    The article was written by someone that has seen a net loss by investing in start ups. Overall this is fairly common for the industry. It's vary easy to see some 10x returns and think you know what you are doing even if you are not really making any money but that's just conformation bias. So while I apologies for using stupid, he is really giving poor advice.
    - lisper 16y ago
      I never claimed to know what I was doing, and I'm not giving any advice. I was just making a statement about my personal preferences.
jseliger 16y ago
This seems like an almost deliberate misreading of what I've said: This seems like a very common problem on the Internet, perhaps even more so than in the rest of life. Most of the HN comments I disagreed with on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729501 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729501 regarding "How Universities Work," an essay I wrote, concern misreadings. The same thing happened regarding an essay about the movie Avatar. In fact, it was so common that I wrote another essay examining the reaction to the first: http://jseliger.com/2009/12/30/trolls-comments-and-slashdot-thoughts-on-the-response-to-avatar/ http://jseliger.com/2009/12/30/trolls-comments-and-slashdot-... . I think one reason pg says things like, "I don't mean..." in his essays is avoid this kind of thing as much as possible. I'm a grad student in English and assign a couple of his essays to freshmen; the most common disagreements they have are with things not actually said in the essay. A favorite question I ask in class or on their journal entries: "Where do you see that?" The usual answer turns out to be, "nowhere."
- jamesaguilar 16y ago
  We want to be looked upon as smart and as having thoughts worth saying. One of the fast ways to do this is to beat another smart person in a rhetorical fight. But smart people are hard to beat in such fights because, being smart, they tend to think correct thoughts. Therefore we have a subconscious motivation to misread them and fight against what they did not say. This is the only way someone without extraordinarily high amounts of expertise and insight can "win" against Paul Graham in his primary domain of thought. There's a real social pressure for people who comment on other people's thoughts to create straw-man lookalikes of the thoughts rather than to address the thoughts themselves.
- pg 16y ago
  A useful technique to head off such misunderstandings is to ask the person who disagrees to pick out a particular sentence or passage they believe is false.
  - lisper 16y ago
    "But one thing that may save them to some extent is the uneven distribution of startup outcomes: practically all the returns are concentrated in a few big successes. The expected value of a startup is the percentage chance it's Google." [It is your inclusion of this sentence that caused me to characterize your change of heart about it as "grudging."] "Most data structures exist because of speed. For example, many languages today have both strings and lists. Semantically, strings are more or less a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. So why do you need a separate data type? You don't, really. Strings only exist for efficiency. But it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language with hacks to make programs run faster. Having strings in a language seems to be a case of premature optimization." [Processing strings is a huge part of today's computing landscape. There are premature optimizations to be sure, but efficient string processing isn't one of them IMHO.] "But it was mysterious to me that the super-angels would quibble about valuations. Did they not understand that the big returns come from a few big successes, and that it therefore mattered far more which startups you picked than how much you paid for them?" [The implication here is that because picking the right companies matters more, then it doesn't make sense to "quibble" over valuations. But this is a false dichotomy. Picking the right companies matters, of course. But valuation matters as well, and questioning a ~10M valuation for a company that has no revenue is not "quibbling."] "... jerks who give you lines like "come back to me to fill out the round." [I have no problem with advising founders to avoid wasting time on reluctant investors. I do have a problem with impugning their motives and character.] If you really want to engage in a debate about this I will hold up my end. But to be perfectly honest, I'd just as soon see this bruhaha fade into obscurity. It has already gotten much more attention that it deserves IMHO.
netcan 16y ago
I know this point is moot anyway, but what would bother me more is the less obvious misreading like "Valuations don't matter.. Would you invest in a YC company at a ten billion dollar valuation?" If you are under the impression that you a writing for an audience that want to understand what you mean, you can safely assume that you are talking about the realm of common scenarios. If you start feeling like you are writing for critics of this sort, you start to spell things out in a way that is, I think, worse writing.

by pg 16y ago

lisper 16y ago

Couple of things for the record: 1. I may well have misunderstood or misrepresented what you've said. But it was not deliberate. 2. I concede that point #5 was unfair. It occurred to me as I was writing and watching the video, and I decided to add it on the spur of the moment. I should have thought about it more carefully. I've added an update to that effect.

Retric 16y ago
I'd much rather have a 10x return in one year than a 100x return in three (or five or ten, which are more typical numbers). The above is a stupid exaggeration. It only approximates the truth if your average return is more than 3x per year. (Ok, the 10 year example works if your expected safe ROI is 30% per year over 9 years also works, but good luck with that.)
- Retric 16y ago
  The article was written by someone that has seen a net loss by investing in start ups. Overall this is fairly common for the industry. It's vary easy to see some 10x returns and think you know what you are doing even if you are not really making any money but that's just conformation bias. So while I apologies for using stupid, he is really giving poor advice.
  - lisper 16y ago
    I never claimed to know what I was doing, and I'm not giving any advice. I was just making a statement about my personal preferences.

jseliger 16y ago

This seems like an almost deliberate misreading of what I've said: This seems like a very common problem on the Internet, perhaps even more so than in the rest of life. Most of the HN comments I disagreed with on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729501 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729501 regarding "How Universities Work," an essay I wrote, concern misreadings. The same thing happened regarding an essay about the movie Avatar. In fact, it was so common that I wrote another essay examining the reaction to the first: http://jseliger.com/2009/12/30/trolls-comments-and-slashdot-thoughts-on-the-response-to-avatar/ http://jseliger.com/2009/12/30/trolls-comments-and-slashdot-... . I think one reason pg says things like, "I don't mean..." in his essays is avoid this kind of thing as much as possible. I'm a grad student in English and assign a couple of his essays to freshmen; the most common disagreements they have are with things not actually said in the essay. A favorite question I ask in class or on their journal entries: "Where do you see that?" The usual answer turns out to be, "nowhere."

jamesaguilar 16y ago
We want to be looked upon as smart and as having thoughts worth saying. One of the fast ways to do this is to beat another smart person in a rhetorical fight. But smart people are hard to beat in such fights because, being smart, they tend to think correct thoughts. Therefore we have a subconscious motivation to misread them and fight against what they did not say. This is the only way someone without extraordinarily high amounts of expertise and insight can "win" against Paul Graham in his primary domain of thought. There's a real social pressure for people who comment on other people's thoughts to create straw-man lookalikes of the thoughts rather than to address the thoughts themselves.
pg 16y ago
A useful technique to head off such misunderstandings is to ask the person who disagrees to pick out a particular sentence or passage they believe is false.
- lisper 16y ago
  "But one thing that may save them to some extent is the uneven distribution of startup outcomes: practically all the returns are concentrated in a few big successes. The expected value of a startup is the percentage chance it's Google." [It is your inclusion of this sentence that caused me to characterize your change of heart about it as "grudging."] "Most data structures exist because of speed. For example, many languages today have both strings and lists. Semantically, strings are more or less a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. So why do you need a separate data type? You don't, really. Strings only exist for efficiency. But it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language with hacks to make programs run faster. Having strings in a language seems to be a case of premature optimization." [Processing strings is a huge part of today's computing landscape. There are premature optimizations to be sure, but efficient string processing isn't one of them IMHO.] "But it was mysterious to me that the super-angels would quibble about valuations. Did they not understand that the big returns come from a few big successes, and that it therefore mattered far more which startups you picked than how much you paid for them?" [The implication here is that because picking the right companies matters more, then it doesn't make sense to "quibble" over valuations. But this is a false dichotomy. Picking the right companies matters, of course. But valuation matters as well, and questioning a ~10M valuation for a company that has no revenue is not "quibbling."] "... jerks who give you lines like "come back to me to fill out the round." [I have no problem with advising founders to avoid wasting time on reluctant investors. I do have a problem with impugning their motives and character.] If you really want to engage in a debate about this I will hold up my end. But to be perfectly honest, I'd just as soon see this bruhaha fade into obscurity. It has already gotten much more attention that it deserves IMHO.

netcan 16y ago

I know this point is moot anyway, but what would bother me more is the less obvious misreading like "Valuations don't matter.. Would you invest in a YC company at a ten billion dollar valuation?" If you are under the impression that you a writing for an audience that want to understand what you mean, you can safely assume that you are talking about the realm of common scenarios. If you start feeling like you are writing for critics of this sort, you start to spell things out in a way that is, I think, worse writing.