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I have come to intensely dislike most of PG's essays, for many reasons, but the two main ones are that 1/ he plays fast and loose with the facts, reduces the w

by bambax 6y ago

I have come to intensely dislike most of PG's essays, for many reasons, but the two main ones are that 1/ he plays fast and loose with the facts, reduces the whole history of (the various peoples of) humanity to a single arrow, and confuses demonstration with affirmation and, more importantly 2/ he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom. The people on top are the ones that make the world move in the right direction, and the ones at the bottom are dragging us all down. (Of course, he always ends up in the best category himself.) But innovation isn't good per se. If you invent novel ways of torturing people (or animals, cf. the whole meat industry), that's not progress. If you come up with clever ways of escaping the law for your own benefit while everyone else suffers (the whole "gig economy"), that's not a net gain for society, and society is legitimate in fighting you.

oldsklgdfth 6y ago
> But innovation isn't good per se. Innovation isn't anything in moral terms. All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I’m struggling to see how antibiotics harmed others.
  - blueflow 6y ago
    Use of antibiotics bred resistant strains, which are becoming a increasing danger for hospital inpatients.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      Yes, infections are a danger for patients....................
  - arethuza 6y ago
    You could perhaps argue that antibiotics have allowed farming practises that might not be otherwise be economical that produce more suffering for the animals. NB I don't know if this is true or not, but it certainly seems possible.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    There is an argument that the black plague was one of the driving forced behind the rise of British democracy causing a labour shortage that added fuel to the rise of the middle class. Now I've got no idea if that is a convincing argument, but it is plausible enough to say that a counterfactual world without antibiotics might have turned out better.
    - hkt 6y ago
      Not quite. It was during feudalism, and what it established was the power of the guilds and a large rise in wages. To use the Marxist term, there was no "reserve army of the unemployed" so workers found it much easier to negotiate wages. British democracy generally came much later, as a divide and rule proposition. The divide was between the feudalism descended aristocrats on one hand, and the merchant capitalists on the other. The franchise was extended to property owners, then poorer property owners, then all men and property owning women, then all women, then they removed multiple votes in the 60s and limited the number of hereditary peers in the 90s. The start of the process was the 19th century, whereas the plague was the 14th and then 15th.
- rjknight 6y ago
  We can distinguish between pure and applied innovation, though. Coming up with a new algorithm which can be applied to facial recognition is a pure innovation, deploying that algorithm to monitor political dissidents is applied innovation. I would not agree that the latter example "isn't anything in moral terms", even though the former is.
  - oldsklgdfth 6y ago
    I would argue that you cannot parse out the "good" technology from the "bad" technology as that would require full knowledge of downstream consequences. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. As soon as we build tiny cameras and software that could interpret pixel values and classify it, there was going to be facial recognition used against people. P.S. I don't think it should, but I don't see how you can stop that. My personal feeling is that access to knowledge and technology is what prevents power imbalance.
    - rjknight 6y ago
      This feels like having it both ways. "Innovation is morally neutral" and "harmful uses are the inevitable consequences of innovation" can't both be true. I would prefer to say that the act of creating a possibility is different from the act of exercising that possibility in a particular way. But you seem to be saying that merely creating the possibility makes the use inevitable, and so the person who invents the tiny cameras or the image-recognition software is inescapably responsible for the use of that technology to target political dissidents. I agree that once the invention has been made, it becomes harder to stop someone from using the invention in bad ways. But the moral responsibility is clearly with the person who makes bad use of technology, not with the person who invented it (assuming that the technology was not invented specifically for that purpose).
      - 6y ago
- Misdicorl 6y ago
  This is silly. The world isn't balanced like that. Many improvements have no disadvantage. More efficient photovoltaic cells, not needing hfcfs in pressurized spray cans, discovering that you can add a bit of carbon to iron, ...
  - oldsklgdfth 6y ago
    If that is your position I would refer you to the myth of thamus[0] and the writings of Neil Postman. [0]https://bearskindigital.com/2015/01/20/the-myth-of-thamus-and-theuth/ https://bearskindigital.com/2015/01/20/the-myth-of-thamus-an...
    - theelous3 6y ago
      That was pretty unconvincing. Some people think writing makes your memory lazy? Well even more think it can serve as a tool in learning and as a tool for memorisation. Now what?
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Many improvements have no disadvantage Every improvement has, at the very least, its Luddite cost. It forces some people to change, and some of those people won’t like that.
    - dantheman 6y ago
      What was the disadvantage introduced by having doctors wash their hands or the invention of antibiotics?
      - oldsklgdfth 6y ago
        I can only speculate. I would say an overall weakened immune system. Is your point that there are technologies with only benefits?
      - Ygg2 6y ago
        Washing hands for doctors? Probably not much. Invention of antibiotics, its use and abuse increased bacterial resistance to them.
- seneca 6y ago
  > All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. This, to me, reads as one of those statements that sounds wise and correct but doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Going from digging with your hands to using a shovel doesn't have a negative trade off. Going from carrying things on your back to using a wheeled cart doesn't have a corresponding disadvantage. You can find very myopic cases where they're not improvements (e.g. digging for fragile objects is better done with hands), but that doesn't disprove the general improvement, and it is far from a corresponding disadvantage equal to the new advantage.
  - tome 6y ago
    > Going from carrying things on your back to using a wheeled cart doesn't have a corresponding disadvantage. Doesn't it? What if those "things" are weapons that you are carrying to battle?
    - seneca 6y ago
      > Doesn't it? What if those "things" are weapons that you are carrying to battle? I'm not sure what your point is. Are you suggesting that some things are better kept close at hand and not on a cart? The invention of the cart does not remove the ability to carry things. Do you mean to make an appeal to the evils of war? If so, the morality of a use case doesn't have much to do with the efficacy of a technology, though I think you have a point of discussion there. War is hardly always evil, but maybe you could argue that adding efficiency to the ability to wage unjust war is a disadvantage. But, again, you have to get very abstract to make that argument.
      - tome 6y ago
        > I'm not sure what your point is. You denied a claim that "every new technology benefits some and harms others" by doubting that invention of a cart could cause harm. I'm suggesting a way that it could. > the morality of a use case doesn't have much to do with the efficacy of a technology I agree, but I believe it was morality that was under discussion, not efficacy.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  > For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. If that was true, society as a whole would never improve. But in reality, the last 300 years have seen an unimaginable improvement of human life in every dimension.
  - vinceguidry 6y ago
    You can push that all the way back to the Middle Ages. Serfdom was quite an improvement over Roman-era slavery, being tied to the land was far more stable and secure than being tied directly to a master. It wasn't quite a middle class, but better nonetheless. Transportation and naval technology steadily improved, and more and more goods and services became broadly available during this time period. The downside is that war got really bad from 1800-1950.
  - oldsklgdfth 6y ago
    > If that was true, society as a whole would never improve. Not sure that's the conclusion to draw. The car made traveling large distances possible. Now things are built on car scale distances, making walking difficult and requiring a car. > unimaginable improvement of human life in every dimension I would argue mainly materialistically. And yet we have to spend most of our lives working to pay for these comforts.
motorcycleman9 6y ago
I think there are obvious cases where passive moral conformists (which you would argue are at the bottom of PG's rankings) are a net good in the world. PG doesn't spend any time highlighting this because it is not the focus of the essay. Classifying people by their expressed personality is the best way to do it. If you refuse to judge a person by the content of their character you are blinding yourself.
blunderkid 6y ago
Haha, take your point about the tendency to "classify". There is good reason for that however: he is a VC. One of the big things that keeps VCs busy is classifying/stereotyping teams and looking for patterns of success. Yes, he should probably keep some of these "frameworks" to himself. There isn't enough since in there to be taken seriously in a peer reviewed paper. But hey, he is PG! And there are weaklings, probably not members of his favored quadrant, who swear by his views :).
atoav 6y ago
> But innovation isn't good per se. This is a thing that is known to most people since the end of WWII, with it's genocides – in fact what you describe is a very modernist view of the world: societies are continuously progressing into the direction of the light, with technology making things better all the time. In this world view the arrow of time has a clear direction and it is forward, while the roles of the protagonists is equally clear cut. Many people don't really get what the postmodernists wanted: they were sick of precisely that lie. In their eyes things are not always getting better and more rational while knowledge and wisdom increases. Things get forgotten and vanish, good things get replaced by cheap things, confusion happens, intelligent people make immoral decisions while dumb people become heros etc. It is this "dirt of reality" where things aren't as clear cut as many thinkers like them to be. This is not a problem per se, unless they try to make the reality match their ideas instead of the other way around.
nwienert 6y ago
Agree. in this case he entirely misses that the aggressively conventional are serving a purpose that’s incredible important. This is classic stuff going back to the Tower of Babel, and theories about conservatives vs liberals functions in society (ie disruptives and preservationists). After reading The Righteous Mind (best book of the decade, IMO) and generally gaining an appreciation for how blind we are to how good we have it (the aggressively independent types moreso, they are chronically unsatisfied and in a way pessimistic about progress, blind to the incredible luxury we live in now), I find myself really understanding the role and purpose of the conventionistas in society and I’m glad for them! They are the buffer between the woke mobs, they fight to keep the system from moving around too wildly. They are wrong of course (heresy is a good example), but so are the unsatisfied independents as well. Not that these map perfectly. There are many conservative independents and vice versa, but your main thrust on pg generally: 1. Defining things so they create categories for people, usually framing it for some self-serving purpose 2. Putting himself in the good category and spending very little time thinking over why the “bad” one may not be so bad. Really hits home. Side note: I found his last essay on Orthodoxy Privilege to be a real stinker. That he felt the need to write about “privilege” of which he is gluttonous, and use it as a chance to redefine privilege to his ends, was an impressive level of dissonance.
- ckemere 6y ago
  As a scientist, the idea that "To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong." Struck me as ludicrous, and scientists that I know that think like this usually seem more concerned with self aggrandization than discovery. I wonder if your point #2 is actually really profound. Maybe the important axis is not "conformity", but empathy? Kids that lack aggressively the ability or patience to understand rules break them, scientists that agressively understand other people's ideas are able to build on them or move beyond them, etc...
amelius 6y ago
He should really come out of his ivory tower and put a comment section on his blog.
- nvr219 6y ago
  Comment sections on blogs are so bad that there are competing browser extensions to block them. Better to have dedicated sites for comments. Like hn, reddit, etc
- awkward 6y ago
  What else is this site for?
- langitbiru 6y ago
  People can comment on Paul's Twitter or this thread.
  - gammarator 6y ago
    He will block you if you argue with him.
pixelrevision 6y ago
His writing on lisp and the life of his startup were much better reads. He may have some valid points but it is hard to read a really rich person (who got rich really young) handwave away large swaths of society.
- dencodev 6y ago
  Baskets of deplorables.
rclayton 6y ago
He had a habit of always making the hero of his narrative the “brave startup founder”.
- oldsklgdfth 6y ago
  It would be interesting to come up with the "tech" archetypes. The coder with a thousand faces, a modern day adaptation of Joseph Campbell[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Unfortunately I actually LOLd when I got to that point in the essay. It was not a surprise. If being an SV founder or VC requires nonconformism, it's a very mainstream kind of nonconformism which has been part of the culture since the 1940s. (By some accounts, even earlier.) IMO you cannot seriously claim to be a nonconformist if you unquestioningly accept and promote the framing of a game and a set of rules which have been in place for decades now. Real nonconformists will be asking why the Internet seems to have been turned into the plaything of a handful of gigantic stagnant bureaucracies, why the VC system seems determined to generate more of these bureaucracies, and whether maybe there are more creative and performant options.
  - FeteCommuniste 6y ago
    > Real nonconformists will be asking why the Internet seems to have been turned into the plaything of a handful of gigantic stagnant bureaucracies, why the VC system seems determined to generate more of these bureaucracies, and whether maybe there are more creative and performant options. Jaron Lanier comes to mind.
  - dencodev 6y ago
    I'm of the opinion that the non-conformists these days are the people that think capitalism shouldn't exist at all and choose to minimize their role in it as far as they can without starving and going homeless.
- 6y ago
Funes- 6y ago
>he plays fast and loose with the facts I don't expect essays to be scientific papers. The term comes from the French verb essayer 'to attempt, to try'. It's a genre widely known for being exactly that: a (mostly) brief rundown of ideas, without an exhaustive empirical demonstration being necessary nor expected. On top of that, it's a ~1500-word blog post on his own website. Get real.
- ziddoap 6y ago
  I don't think scientific papers are the only place that should be expected to, when purporting something as fact, be well... factual. Funny enough, all throughout my many years in academia I had to provide sources for anything I stated as a fact in an essay (including opinion pieces). I should of just let my professors know that I wasn't providing them a scientific paper -- I was just attempting/trying to provide a brief rundown of ideas and they were wrong to expect empirical evidence of anything I claimed as fact.
  - Funes- 6y ago
    >Funny enough, all throughout my many years in academia I had to provide sources for anything I stated as a fact in an essay (including opinion pieces). That requirement obeyed that academic institution's criteria, not the genre's traditional nature. You either were being tested by them or published something with their name attached to it, so it's only normal that they established the empirical validity of your writings. It makes sense that an academic institution, of all places, would want only rigorous content linked to it. Paul Graham, on the other hand, is just publishing a simple essay on his very own website; of course I don't expect an exhaustive empirical demonstration on his part, though any kind of factual data can be welcome. >I should of I hope your "many years in academia" weren't spent in anything even remotely related to linguistics. And that your editors there corrected your grammar, as well.
    - ziddoap 6y ago
      Oh boy you sure got me by calling out my grammar. I'm writhing in embarrassment. Good to know that outside of academia that things stated as fact have no requirement or expectation of being factual. I will temper my expectations in the future.
awkward 6y ago
Right. The big error in this one is that it's completely blind to where rules come from, only personal psychological relationship to them. By the limited model in the essay, you can imagine an "Aggressive Nonconformist" put in a place where they are highly influential on rule creation. The model doesn't really give wiggle room for anything but simply creating rules that bind others and ignoring them oneself.
auggierose 6y ago
Sounds like you are conventionally-minded. ;-)
- bambax 6y ago
  Disagreeing with PG on HN is rather contrarian... ;-) That said, going against the flow as a matter of habit or policy is just as predictable as being conformist. Yet he doesn't appear to see that, or at least doesn't address it and places in the 4th quadrant those who are always breaking the rules "because they're there"...
  - auggierose 6y ago
    I guess it is not about being predictable or not. It is about being conformist or not.
ta1234567890 6y ago
> he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom I remember coming to an event at the YC headquarters a few years ago and that's exactly the way PG acted in person as well. He was surrounded by people wanting to talk to him the whole time, whenever someone would say hi and introduce themselves he would immediately ask for their HN username, then either strike a conversation or just say something along the lines of "doesn't ring a bell" and pass on to the next person. Many of the people that have gone through YC feel like the program has inherited that same quality. There are a few darlings in each batch that the partners really focus on and put their biggest efforts towards, while the rest feel almost inadequate for not being as awesome as the top ones.
- wincent 6y ago
  pg: What's your HN username? ta1234567890: ta1234567890 pg: Hm, doesn't ring a bell... [looks awkwardly into cocktail glass]
  - ta1234567890 6y ago
    You described pretty much exactly what happened to me. And I felt like crap. Nevertheless I still applied to YC afterwards. It sucks how people in power sometimes are assholes and we put up with them, probably just because of their power.
- andjd 6y ago
  I think if I were asked this question, I would say that I have better things to do with my time than post on HN ... mostly true ;-)
- vikramkr 6y ago
  I wonder how that behavior is reconciled with the idealistic basis of YC's application process where its open to everyone without needing warm intros and all. Pretty hypocritical to decide the only people worth your time are the people who found and had the time to engage with an internet forum that occasionally seems less like a forum and more like a recruiting and marketing tool for YC startups.
PaulHoule 6y ago
"Four quadrants" are frequently a bad smell. They often are structurally wrong, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn%27s_taxonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn%27s_taxonomy which has three real entities in it (a triangle) and one non-entity. The Nolan chart gets into trouble in a different way: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nolan_chart https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nolan_chart That demonstrates a libertarian position that some people like to talk about but does not get traction when you try to implement it in politics. Like the green party you get maybe 2% of the vote if that. There is a very strong force that comes from the axioms of social choice theory that pushes politics into one dimension and you cannot wish it away by drawing a square. Then there is that Gartner Magic Quadrant where they are just getting high on their own supply.
- BenoitEssiambre 6y ago
  I tend to be a big fan of pg's posts even his more controversial ones, but I must admit the use of four quadrant categorization turned me off here. It's not a problem with the idea he's trying to convey. It is valid, at least in some contexts. The issue here is more about lazy communication, sloppy emphasis, too coarse thinking. Shoehorning concepts into quadrants is information theoretically very suboptimal, and usually has bad Bayesian fit from concept to reality. It's a visual trick often used in superficial business presentations that to be frank, is a bit of an insult to readers. It assumes they haven't already thought of the two simplest dimensions of the problem. It's probably a fine tool for early intros on simple subjects to newbies, but it's a bit condescending when used on more complex concepts with more sophisticated audiences. It ignores millennia of knowledge of the subtlety of language, taxonomies and ontologies that go way back at least to Aristotle's Categories. Yet people jump to it really quickly. I had smart people pitch to me on two separate occasions, startup ideas that were specialized domain search engines where "get this, we would have two sliders that would allow people to get more results from one of these four quadrants". They thought they had found the best dimensions to categorize their domain's data and could beat much more flexible and expressive combinations of natural language keywords to zone in on things relevant to users' inquiries. It's a weird reflex.
holmesworcester 6y ago
Why don't we engage with the argument a bit more. How are people who are aggressively conformist valuable in ways that Paul Graham is ignoring? One answer is, they're valuable in war, where you have large numbers of people who are in a position to weaken the war effort and you want to make sure none of them do or even think about it. The Trump campaign signalling early on that it was at war with certain large chunks of the U.S. population helped kick a lot of people into this war mentality, I think, which might be in their interest or all of our interests in some ways, and that seems to be one of the trends that provoked this essay. Passively independent-minded people are really valuable too, because they gum up the works of conformism by refusing to go along with it, without giving the aggressive conformists targets for outrage. I've also seen a separate axis of how into change and new ideas people are. Some people are into new ideas in an aggressive conformist way. Some people are really resistant to new ideas in the same way.
doctor_eval 6y ago
Agreed. This whole article just left me quite cold. I mean, as far as I can tell, all these people running around claiming that Covid19 is a hoax are (apparently) very aggressively independent! We, the passive conformist sheeple, are bound by the pesky laws of physics and math - but not these aggressively independent thinkers! Nosir. They question all the rules. > So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite. So those CV19 hoaxers are a group and therefore not independent. My bad! But one of them must be the leader, right? One of them must be the aggressive independent CEO-type, right? Because how else did they get these ideas? Someone must have formed them into a band; by definition, they couldn’t have done it on their own. You just need to find that aggressive independent thinker and BAM - we have another CEO of Theranos. Yay! > all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so “There have been no successful conventional [real estate/retail/food/import/trade/bookshop] startups in the last 50 years”. Oh wait, only SV tech startup disrupters are real CEOs. > the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities Universities? Really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- designium 6y ago
  Let's play this out for mask wearing: Top Left: Top doctors asking people to wear masks Bottom Left: People who are wearing masks Bottom Right: People who occasionally use masks, or alternatives, bandanas, etc. Top Right: People who don't want to use masks because of freedom.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
biophysboy 6y ago
I agree. It was an essay on two of the big 5 personality traits: conscientiousness (conventional) and agreeableness (passivity). His thesis is that disagreeable conscientious people are responsible for "a disproportionate amount of trouble". There's a couple problems with this though. First, these traits are sort of immutable - humans can't really change their personalities. Second, as you said, independent-mindedness can cause huge problems as well.
designium 6y ago
Well put. There is a huge simplification and again, very North American centric. I beg you, HN readers, apply what he wrote to other societies. I read on the top comments of people getting worried about the US becoming like former Soviet States in regards about thought control and lack of freedom. That's a whole different issue. PG mixes multiple different problems and oversimplify them.
classified 6y ago
> If you come up with clever ways of escaping the law for your own benefit... ... then PG will call you "smart".

by bambax 6y ago

oldsklgdfth 6y ago

> But innovation isn't good per se. Innovation isn't anything in moral terms. All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population. This means that every new technology benefits some and harms others.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I’m struggling to see how antibiotics harmed others.
- blueflow 6y ago
  Use of antibiotics bred resistant strains, which are becoming a increasing danger for hospital inpatients.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    Yes, infections are a danger for patients....................
- arethuza 6y ago
  You could perhaps argue that antibiotics have allowed farming practises that might not be otherwise be economical that produce more suffering for the animals. NB I don't know if this is true or not, but it certainly seems possible.
- roenxi 6y ago
  There is an argument that the black plague was one of the driving forced behind the rise of British democracy causing a labour shortage that added fuel to the rise of the middle class. Now I've got no idea if that is a convincing argument, but it is plausible enough to say that a counterfactual world without antibiotics might have turned out better.
  - hkt 6y ago
    Not quite. It was during feudalism, and what it established was the power of the guilds and a large rise in wages. To use the Marxist term, there was no "reserve army of the unemployed" so workers found it much easier to negotiate wages. British democracy generally came much later, as a divide and rule proposition. The divide was between the feudalism descended aristocrats on one hand, and the merchant capitalists on the other. The franchise was extended to property owners, then poorer property owners, then all men and property owning women, then all women, then they removed multiple votes in the 60s and limited the number of hereditary peers in the 90s. The start of the process was the 19th century, whereas the plague was the 14th and then 15th.
rjknight 6y ago
We can distinguish between pure and applied innovation, though. Coming up with a new algorithm which can be applied to facial recognition is a pure innovation, deploying that algorithm to monitor political dissidents is applied innovation. I would not agree that the latter example "isn't anything in moral terms", even though the former is.
- oldsklgdfth 6y ago
  I would argue that you cannot parse out the "good" technology from the "bad" technology as that would require full knowledge of downstream consequences. Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards. As soon as we build tiny cameras and software that could interpret pixel values and classify it, there was going to be facial recognition used against people. P.S. I don't think it should, but I don't see how you can stop that. My personal feeling is that access to knowledge and technology is what prevents power imbalance.
  - rjknight 6y ago
    This feels like having it both ways. "Innovation is morally neutral" and "harmful uses are the inevitable consequences of innovation" can't both be true. I would prefer to say that the act of creating a possibility is different from the act of exercising that possibility in a particular way. But you seem to be saying that merely creating the possibility makes the use inevitable, and so the person who invents the tiny cameras or the image-recognition software is inescapably responsible for the use of that technology to target political dissidents. I agree that once the invention has been made, it becomes harder to stop someone from using the invention in bad ways. But the moral responsibility is clearly with the person who makes bad use of technology, not with the person who invented it (assuming that the technology was not invented specifically for that purpose).
    - 6y ago
Misdicorl 6y ago
This is silly. The world isn't balanced like that. Many improvements have no disadvantage. More efficient photovoltaic cells, not needing hfcfs in pressurized spray cans, discovering that you can add a bit of carbon to iron, ...
- oldsklgdfth 6y ago
  If that is your position I would refer you to the myth of thamus[0] and the writings of Neil Postman. [0]https://bearskindigital.com/2015/01/20/the-myth-of-thamus-and-theuth/ https://bearskindigital.com/2015/01/20/the-myth-of-thamus-an...
  - theelous3 6y ago
    That was pretty unconvincing. Some people think writing makes your memory lazy? Well even more think it can serve as a tool in learning and as a tool for memorisation. Now what?
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > Many improvements have no disadvantage Every improvement has, at the very least, its Luddite cost. It forces some people to change, and some of those people won’t like that.
  - dantheman 6y ago
    What was the disadvantage introduced by having doctors wash their hands or the invention of antibiotics?
    - oldsklgdfth 6y ago
      I can only speculate. I would say an overall weakened immune system. Is your point that there are technologies with only benefits?
    - Ygg2 6y ago
      Washing hands for doctors? Probably not much. Invention of antibiotics, its use and abuse increased bacterial resistance to them.
seneca 6y ago
> All technological change is a trade-off. For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. This, to me, reads as one of those statements that sounds wise and correct but doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Going from digging with your hands to using a shovel doesn't have a negative trade off. Going from carrying things on your back to using a wheeled cart doesn't have a corresponding disadvantage. You can find very myopic cases where they're not improvements (e.g. digging for fragile objects is better done with hands), but that doesn't disprove the general improvement, and it is far from a corresponding disadvantage equal to the new advantage.
- tome 6y ago
  > Going from carrying things on your back to using a wheeled cart doesn't have a corresponding disadvantage. Doesn't it? What if those "things" are weapons that you are carrying to battle?
  - seneca 6y ago
    > Doesn't it? What if those "things" are weapons that you are carrying to battle? I'm not sure what your point is. Are you suggesting that some things are better kept close at hand and not on a cart? The invention of the cart does not remove the ability to carry things. Do you mean to make an appeal to the evils of war? If so, the morality of a use case doesn't have much to do with the efficacy of a technology, though I think you have a point of discussion there. War is hardly always evil, but maybe you could argue that adding efficiency to the ability to wage unjust war is a disadvantage. But, again, you have to get very abstract to make that argument.
    - tome 6y ago
      > I'm not sure what your point is. You denied a claim that "every new technology benefits some and harms others" by doubting that invention of a cart could cause harm. I'm suggesting a way that it could. > the morality of a use case doesn't have much to do with the efficacy of a technology I agree, but I believe it was morality that was under discussion, not efficacy.
BurningFrog 6y ago
> For every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. If that was true, society as a whole would never improve. But in reality, the last 300 years have seen an unimaginable improvement of human life in every dimension.
- vinceguidry 6y ago
  You can push that all the way back to the Middle Ages. Serfdom was quite an improvement over Roman-era slavery, being tied to the land was far more stable and secure than being tied directly to a master. It wasn't quite a middle class, but better nonetheless. Transportation and naval technology steadily improved, and more and more goods and services became broadly available during this time period. The downside is that war got really bad from 1800-1950.
- oldsklgdfth 6y ago
  > If that was true, society as a whole would never improve. Not sure that's the conclusion to draw. The car made traveling large distances possible. Now things are built on car scale distances, making walking difficult and requiring a car. > unimaginable improvement of human life in every dimension I would argue mainly materialistically. And yet we have to spend most of our lives working to pay for these comforts.

motorcycleman9 6y ago

I think there are obvious cases where passive moral conformists (which you would argue are at the bottom of PG's rankings) are a net good in the world. PG doesn't spend any time highlighting this because it is not the focus of the essay. Classifying people by their expressed personality is the best way to do it. If you refuse to judge a person by the content of their character you are blinding yourself.

blunderkid 6y ago

Haha, take your point about the tendency to "classify". There is good reason for that however: he is a VC. One of the big things that keeps VCs busy is classifying/stereotyping teams and looking for patterns of success. Yes, he should probably keep some of these "frameworks" to himself. There isn't enough since in there to be taken seriously in a peer reviewed paper. But hey, he is PG! And there are weaklings, probably not members of his favored quadrant, who swear by his views :).

atoav 6y ago

> But innovation isn't good per se. This is a thing that is known to most people since the end of WWII, with it's genocides – in fact what you describe is a very modernist view of the world: societies are continuously progressing into the direction of the light, with technology making things better all the time. In this world view the arrow of time has a clear direction and it is forward, while the roles of the protagonists is equally clear cut. Many people don't really get what the postmodernists wanted: they were sick of precisely that lie. In their eyes things are not always getting better and more rational while knowledge and wisdom increases. Things get forgotten and vanish, good things get replaced by cheap things, confusion happens, intelligent people make immoral decisions while dumb people become heros etc. It is this "dirt of reality" where things aren't as clear cut as many thinkers like them to be. This is not a problem per se, unless they try to make the reality match their ideas instead of the other way around.

nwienert 6y ago

Agree. in this case he entirely misses that the aggressively conventional are serving a purpose that’s incredible important. This is classic stuff going back to the Tower of Babel, and theories about conservatives vs liberals functions in society (ie disruptives and preservationists). After reading The Righteous Mind (best book of the decade, IMO) and generally gaining an appreciation for how blind we are to how good we have it (the aggressively independent types moreso, they are chronically unsatisfied and in a way pessimistic about progress, blind to the incredible luxury we live in now), I find myself really understanding the role and purpose of the conventionistas in society and I’m glad for them! They are the buffer between the woke mobs, they fight to keep the system from moving around too wildly. They are wrong of course (heresy is a good example), but so are the unsatisfied independents as well. Not that these map perfectly. There are many conservative independents and vice versa, but your main thrust on pg generally: 1. Defining things so they create categories for people, usually framing it for some self-serving purpose 2. Putting himself in the good category and spending very little time thinking over why the “bad” one may not be so bad. Really hits home. Side note: I found his last essay on Orthodoxy Privilege to be a real stinker. That he felt the need to write about “privilege” of which he is gluttonous, and use it as a chance to redefine privilege to his ends, was an impressive level of dissonance.

ckemere 6y ago
As a scientist, the idea that "To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong." Struck me as ludicrous, and scientists that I know that think like this usually seem more concerned with self aggrandization than discovery. I wonder if your point #2 is actually really profound. Maybe the important axis is not "conformity", but empathy? Kids that lack aggressively the ability or patience to understand rules break them, scientists that agressively understand other people's ideas are able to build on them or move beyond them, etc...

amelius 6y ago

He should really come out of his ivory tower and put a comment section on his blog.

nvr219 6y ago
Comment sections on blogs are so bad that there are competing browser extensions to block them. Better to have dedicated sites for comments. Like hn, reddit, etc
awkward 6y ago
What else is this site for?
langitbiru 6y ago
People can comment on Paul's Twitter or this thread.
- gammarator 6y ago
  He will block you if you argue with him.

pixelrevision 6y ago

His writing on lisp and the life of his startup were much better reads. He may have some valid points but it is hard to read a really rich person (who got rich really young) handwave away large swaths of society.

dencodev 6y ago
Baskets of deplorables.

rclayton 6y ago

He had a habit of always making the hero of his narrative the “brave startup founder”.

oldsklgdfth 6y ago
It would be interesting to come up with the "tech" archetypes. The coder with a thousand faces, a modern day adaptation of Joseph Campbell[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Unfortunately I actually LOLd when I got to that point in the essay. It was not a surprise. If being an SV founder or VC requires nonconformism, it's a very mainstream kind of nonconformism which has been part of the culture since the 1940s. (By some accounts, even earlier.) IMO you cannot seriously claim to be a nonconformist if you unquestioningly accept and promote the framing of a game and a set of rules which have been in place for decades now. Real nonconformists will be asking why the Internet seems to have been turned into the plaything of a handful of gigantic stagnant bureaucracies, why the VC system seems determined to generate more of these bureaucracies, and whether maybe there are more creative and performant options.
- FeteCommuniste 6y ago
  > Real nonconformists will be asking why the Internet seems to have been turned into the plaything of a handful of gigantic stagnant bureaucracies, why the VC system seems determined to generate more of these bureaucracies, and whether maybe there are more creative and performant options. Jaron Lanier comes to mind.
- dencodev 6y ago
  I'm of the opinion that the non-conformists these days are the people that think capitalism shouldn't exist at all and choose to minimize their role in it as far as they can without starving and going homeless.
6y ago

Funes- 6y ago

>he plays fast and loose with the facts I don't expect essays to be scientific papers. The term comes from the French verb essayer 'to attempt, to try'. It's a genre widely known for being exactly that: a (mostly) brief rundown of ideas, without an exhaustive empirical demonstration being necessary nor expected. On top of that, it's a ~1500-word blog post on his own website. Get real.

ziddoap 6y ago
I don't think scientific papers are the only place that should be expected to, when purporting something as fact, be well... factual. Funny enough, all throughout my many years in academia I had to provide sources for anything I stated as a fact in an essay (including opinion pieces). I should of just let my professors know that I wasn't providing them a scientific paper -- I was just attempting/trying to provide a brief rundown of ideas and they were wrong to expect empirical evidence of anything I claimed as fact.
- Funes- 6y ago
  >Funny enough, all throughout my many years in academia I had to provide sources for anything I stated as a fact in an essay (including opinion pieces). That requirement obeyed that academic institution's criteria, not the genre's traditional nature. You either were being tested by them or published something with their name attached to it, so it's only normal that they established the empirical validity of your writings. It makes sense that an academic institution, of all places, would want only rigorous content linked to it. Paul Graham, on the other hand, is just publishing a simple essay on his very own website; of course I don't expect an exhaustive empirical demonstration on his part, though any kind of factual data can be welcome. >I should of I hope your "many years in academia" weren't spent in anything even remotely related to linguistics. And that your editors there corrected your grammar, as well.
  - ziddoap 6y ago
    Oh boy you sure got me by calling out my grammar. I'm writhing in embarrassment. Good to know that outside of academia that things stated as fact have no requirement or expectation of being factual. I will temper my expectations in the future.

awkward 6y ago

Right. The big error in this one is that it's completely blind to where rules come from, only personal psychological relationship to them. By the limited model in the essay, you can imagine an "Aggressive Nonconformist" put in a place where they are highly influential on rule creation. The model doesn't really give wiggle room for anything but simply creating rules that bind others and ignoring them oneself.

auggierose 6y ago

Sounds like you are conventionally-minded. ;-)

bambax 6y ago
Disagreeing with PG on HN is rather contrarian... ;-) That said, going against the flow as a matter of habit or policy is just as predictable as being conformist. Yet he doesn't appear to see that, or at least doesn't address it and places in the 4th quadrant those who are always breaking the rules "because they're there"...
- auggierose 6y ago
  I guess it is not about being predictable or not. It is about being conformist or not.

ta1234567890 6y ago

> he has an unhealthy obsession with "classifying" people, by which he actually means ranking them, from top to bottom I remember coming to an event at the YC headquarters a few years ago and that's exactly the way PG acted in person as well. He was surrounded by people wanting to talk to him the whole time, whenever someone would say hi and introduce themselves he would immediately ask for their HN username, then either strike a conversation or just say something along the lines of "doesn't ring a bell" and pass on to the next person. Many of the people that have gone through YC feel like the program has inherited that same quality. There are a few darlings in each batch that the partners really focus on and put their biggest efforts towards, while the rest feel almost inadequate for not being as awesome as the top ones.

wincent 6y ago
pg: What's your HN username? ta1234567890: ta1234567890 pg: Hm, doesn't ring a bell... [looks awkwardly into cocktail glass]
- ta1234567890 6y ago
  You described pretty much exactly what happened to me. And I felt like crap. Nevertheless I still applied to YC afterwards. It sucks how people in power sometimes are assholes and we put up with them, probably just because of their power.
andjd 6y ago
I think if I were asked this question, I would say that I have better things to do with my time than post on HN ... mostly true ;-)
vikramkr 6y ago
I wonder how that behavior is reconciled with the idealistic basis of YC's application process where its open to everyone without needing warm intros and all. Pretty hypocritical to decide the only people worth your time are the people who found and had the time to engage with an internet forum that occasionally seems less like a forum and more like a recruiting and marketing tool for YC startups.

PaulHoule 6y ago

"Four quadrants" are frequently a bad smell. They often are structurally wrong, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn%27s_taxonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn%27s_taxonomy which has three real entities in it (a triangle) and one non-entity. The Nolan chart gets into trouble in a different way: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nolan_chart https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nolan_chart That demonstrates a libertarian position that some people like to talk about but does not get traction when you try to implement it in politics. Like the green party you get maybe 2% of the vote if that. There is a very strong force that comes from the axioms of social choice theory that pushes politics into one dimension and you cannot wish it away by drawing a square. Then there is that Gartner Magic Quadrant where they are just getting high on their own supply.

BenoitEssiambre 6y ago
I tend to be a big fan of pg's posts even his more controversial ones, but I must admit the use of four quadrant categorization turned me off here. It's not a problem with the idea he's trying to convey. It is valid, at least in some contexts. The issue here is more about lazy communication, sloppy emphasis, too coarse thinking. Shoehorning concepts into quadrants is information theoretically very suboptimal, and usually has bad Bayesian fit from concept to reality. It's a visual trick often used in superficial business presentations that to be frank, is a bit of an insult to readers. It assumes they haven't already thought of the two simplest dimensions of the problem. It's probably a fine tool for early intros on simple subjects to newbies, but it's a bit condescending when used on more complex concepts with more sophisticated audiences. It ignores millennia of knowledge of the subtlety of language, taxonomies and ontologies that go way back at least to Aristotle's Categories. Yet people jump to it really quickly. I had smart people pitch to me on two separate occasions, startup ideas that were specialized domain search engines where "get this, we would have two sliders that would allow people to get more results from one of these four quadrants". They thought they had found the best dimensions to categorize their domain's data and could beat much more flexible and expressive combinations of natural language keywords to zone in on things relevant to users' inquiries. It's a weird reflex.

holmesworcester 6y ago

Why don't we engage with the argument a bit more. How are people who are aggressively conformist valuable in ways that Paul Graham is ignoring? One answer is, they're valuable in war, where you have large numbers of people who are in a position to weaken the war effort and you want to make sure none of them do or even think about it. The Trump campaign signalling early on that it was at war with certain large chunks of the U.S. population helped kick a lot of people into this war mentality, I think, which might be in their interest or all of our interests in some ways, and that seems to be one of the trends that provoked this essay. Passively independent-minded people are really valuable too, because they gum up the works of conformism by refusing to go along with it, without giving the aggressive conformists targets for outrage. I've also seen a separate axis of how into change and new ideas people are. Some people are into new ideas in an aggressive conformist way. Some people are really resistant to new ideas in the same way.

doctor_eval 6y ago

Agreed. This whole article just left me quite cold. I mean, as far as I can tell, all these people running around claiming that Covid19 is a hoax are (apparently) very aggressively independent! We, the passive conformist sheeple, are bound by the pesky laws of physics and math - but not these aggressively independent thinkers! Nosir. They question all the rules. > So a pack of teenagers who all flout school rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite. So those CV19 hoaxers are a group and therefore not independent. My bad! But one of them must be the leader, right? One of them must be the aggressive independent CEO-type, right? Because how else did they get these ideas? Someone must have formed them into a band; by definition, they couldn’t have done it on their own. You just need to find that aggressive independent thinker and BAM - we have another CEO of Theranos. Yay! > all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so “There have been no successful conventional [real estate/retail/food/import/trade/bookshop] startups in the last 50 years”. Oh wait, only SV tech startup disrupters are real CEOs. > the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities Universities? Really? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

designium 6y ago
Let's play this out for mask wearing: Top Left: Top doctors asking people to wear masks Bottom Left: People who are wearing masks Bottom Right: People who occasionally use masks, or alternatives, bandanas, etc. Top Right: People who don't want to use masks because of freedom.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

biophysboy 6y ago

I agree. It was an essay on two of the big 5 personality traits: conscientiousness (conventional) and agreeableness (passivity). His thesis is that disagreeable conscientious people are responsible for "a disproportionate amount of trouble". There's a couple problems with this though. First, these traits are sort of immutable - humans can't really change their personalities. Second, as you said, independent-mindedness can cause huge problems as well.

designium 6y ago

Well put. There is a huge simplification and again, very North American centric. I beg you, HN readers, apply what he wrote to other societies. I read on the top comments of people getting worried about the US becoming like former Soviet States in regards about thought control and lack of freedom. That's a whole different issue. PG mixes multiple different problems and oversimplify them.

classified 6y ago

> If you come up with clever ways of escaping the law for your own benefit... ... then PG will call you "smart".