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PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually b

• auggierose 6y ago
  Well, PG very probably is an independent thinker. I enjoy his examinations what makes people like him different from other people, and while this essay may sound like a rehash of his other essays, it isn't. It was genuinely surprising to me (and also obvious in hindsight) that people separate into independently-minded and conventionally-minded and that this determines what work they should be looking for. I mean, this is advice that is about as actionable as advice will ever get. Beware that there are strong forces that will tempt you to act against this advice, and make you doubt yourself.
• Agreed99 6y ago
  Agreed. He obfuscates his point behind emotionally pompous British semantics. His orthodox of privilege was obviously a public lovers quarrel with Thiel (who was, around the same time, also ranting like a god-headed buffoon in essays to the tune of “the rubes need masters! villainous cackle” on blogs around the web). They have little information advantage, except in the form of ephemeral financial capital. Human tradition states “rich person = extra special” so we rubberneck at them. Beneath the pretentious veneer it’s contemporary businessmen. Let’s see them resolve longstanding issues in society and science. Wagging business success in the face of people who weren’t born yet isn’t terribly novel and their real output isn’t that useful to the future.
• enraged_camel 6y ago
  Agreed. For someone who once wrote an essay titled "Keep Your Identity Small", PG sure has fully embraced an identity of "independent thinker".
• unityByFreedom 6y ago
  Seems more like reposts than beating around the bush to me. He maintained a significant following through essays and probably feels it still works.
• edw519 6y ago
  Disagree. This sounds a bit harsh, nitpicking at one instance of a class. Go back and read all his essays. You'll learn more than if you got your MBA. (I know. I've done both.) Believe me, I'm not PG fan boy, but he doesn't have to do this and I hope he never stops.
  • fractionalhare 6y ago
    I don't have an MBA but I think you're vastly overestimating the information density of these essays. Or maybe MBAs are really just that vacuous, I don't know. PG has wrote some really great essays (the Submarine Article, anyone?). I've read all of them, some of them many times. But if I'm being completely honest, lately it feels like he's writing to write instead of writing because he has something genuinely new and insightful to say. PG does have a good, prescriptive insight here: you should constantly question what the truth is in a manner of detached concern. You could more concisely call it dispassionate skepticism. But take away all the dressing about conventionality and thinking in ways others don't, and drill down into that one idea. That would be a great essay.
    • alisonkisk 6y ago
      > MBAs are really just that vacuous You got it. There's some technical information for, you know, administering business, like doing CFO and COO, stuff but the main purpose for "famous" MBAs is to make friends you can do deals with.
      • pmoriarty 6y ago
        "the main purpose for "famous" MBAs is to make friends you can do deals with" Well, that and most companies are willing to pay you much more and put you much higher up on the totem pole if you've got an MBA.
    • skybrian 6y ago
      Somewhat more charitably, I think he’s writing about very basic things, which a different skill than writing about new and exciting things. Such essays are more useful to some people than others.
• fractionalhare 6y ago
  > This essay is an object lesson in how this leads to profoundly conventional thinking. This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world. You've hit upon something that's always bothered me with this characterization of nerds. It's like if someone framed adult life by superimposing stereotypical high school nerd vs jock social dynamics onto it, and then went on to portray nerds as heroes. In real life "nerds" are part of the same system. They are utterly conventional. You don't get to call yourself unconventional just because you deride sportsball and like computers. This essay reminds me of an xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/610/ https://xkcd.com/610/. I think it would be too harsh to call him self-aggrandizing, but he does seem to dress up otherwise good insights about how to think critically with celebration of how unconventional this is. It's like when Peter Thiel expanded one good insight about critically finding ideas from uncommon beliefs into an entire book.
  • lukeramsden 6y ago
    There really is an XKCD for every discussion. That's one I've somehow not seen before.
    • neogodless 6y ago
      This thread kind of illustrates the point it was making. The readers of Hacker News are a part of "nerd culture." The author of XKCD is part of "nerd culture" and makes comics out of themes that are common in "nerd culture." Popular themes are often a part of a post that becomes popular on Hacker News. Unsurprisingly, this theme was captured at some point by the nerd of XKCD, and now it is shared here. It's like... we're all thinking alike (while reveling in how unique we are!)
      • panarky 6y ago
        <a href="keanu.gif">Whoa</a>
  • Retric 6y ago
    I think it’s a direct result of failing to understand other people. A lot of nerd culture is about instant gratification at the expense of everything else. That’s objectively poor decision making, but also makes other people’s actions seem dumb by comparison.
• bob33212 6y ago
  There is a large socialist/anti-capitalist/woke movement on Twitter and a somewhat in the real world as well. I assume PG would like to call all those people out directly. But he cannot because in the current media and social climate the news summary will read: "Older White SV Billionaire living in England tells poor American minorities to stop complaining because their politics would lead to an economy with less innovation." I don't think he is wrong. Some of these very progressive goals can have unintended consequence, but he isn't in a position where he can say those things due to his professional and personal expectations which he has to conform to.
  • eat_veggies 6y ago
    What are those unintended consequences of progressive goals that he can't say out loud? I assume you're an independent thinker who can spell them out for us.
    • bob33212 6y ago
      I don't claim to be an independent thinker. That sounds like a false dichotomy to me. The consequence would be that the Twitter mobs would go after YC and YC companies asking them to cut ties with PG
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      AB 5 in California is the best example I can think of. It would have been a disaster for workers in most if not all affected businesses; it had to start with dozens of exemptions, and AB 2257 a few months ago added a dozen more. But because AB 5 was written towards the well-meaning progressive goal of good pay and benefits for workers, it's most likely going to stay there, and "lobby the legislature for an AB 5 exemption" will just become part of the cost for building a new industry sector in California.
  • JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
    If it only exists on Twitter, but not in the real world, then why is it worth addressing or expending emotional energy or essays on?
• fanzhang 6y ago
  I don't see the point of the essay as how brilliant of an independent thinker he is, or even that being an independent thinker makes you a better person. The essay is useful because has specific tactical points on how to think better: questioning whether a statement you hear is true, or watching how other people find their beliefs. What do you think people should be doing more in the world? Or mental habits people should have?
  • davidivadavid 6y ago
    Are people seriously discovering with this essay that they should ask themselves if something is true?
• sundarurfriend 6y ago
  > PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. If your first reaction reading this essay is "PG is trying to big himself up as an independent thinker", that tells me more about your attitude and mental state than about PG. Forgive the cliche, but "great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people" is a decent heuristic, with good reason. Once you start seeing attempts to communicate as status contests automatically, you're not in a useful frame of mind for rational discourse any more.
  • iaml 6y ago
    "great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people" is a quote that discusses people
    • fractionalhare 6y ago
      I don't really agree with the OP, but that's not true. It's a quote which discusses people as a category in the abstract, which is to say it discusses the idea of people and their behavior. As much as I'd like to dunk on the quote like this, it is consistent :) My interpretation of the quote has always been that discussing people means something along the lines of gossip, i.e. specific people. That being said I think there's a clear difference between simple gossip and critical discussion of others, which can be very intellectually elevated.
  • escape_goat 6y ago
    If you initiate a public dialogue with someone specifically for the purpose of making a show of rejecting the possibility of engaging in any dialogue with them, forgiveness of clichés is IMO a big ask.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • fractionalhare 6y ago
    The problem with a comment like this is that there's no detailed rebuttal. What you've given here is more of an aloof dismissal which is implicitly judgmental. If you're willing to bucket peoples' minds into greatness or smallness based on a single observation of their message board activity, how is your response substantively different from the thing it's criticizing? This is to say that I reject the premise; your comment would put a chilling effect on frankly discussing other people, as though the only way to do so is through irrationality and gossip. People can critically discuss other people in an intelligent way without having "small minds", and you shouldn't attempt to infer a person's overall "mental state" from this kind of commentary, in my opinion.
• commandlinefan 6y ago
  > clever then the world *than
• gonational 6y ago
  I knew how I felt when I read this essay, but I couldn’t quite put it into words, even in my mind. Then I arrived here in the comment section and discovered your refreshingly accurate comment; I knew, immediately, that I did not need to have my own “independent” thought, because you summarized my feelings perfectly. I was put off by the essay so much; seeing your comment at the top gives me hope.
• ceilingcorner 6y ago
  It's a clever cultural move. Instead of actually being "the independent thinkers", you simply brand yourselves as such. You get to feel unique and wise without all that fuss of actually being unique or having wisdom. I don't want to veer too far into politics, but suffice to say, if the institutions of power in your society hold the same values as you, you aren't the "counterculture", no matter how much you claim to be.
• tchaffee 6y ago
  > PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. The feeling I get essay after essay is that he's struggling to stay relevant. It's kind of sad to watch tbh.
  • alisonkisk 6y ago
    The same old stuff just plays differently now that he's semi retired and not building his VC brand by recruiting nerds to sell him stakes in their companies.
  • fractionalhare 6y ago
    I disagree, I don't think PG has to struggle to stay relevant. He remains a towering figure in venture capital across the country, and in essentially all of private equity on the West coast in particular.
    • tchaffee 6y ago
      Yeah, you're right he is still relevant to that specific but small crowd. A crowd that might be described as having similar flaws to PG. Maybe it would have been more accurate for me to say "culturally relevant". He is increasingly seen by younger people, even engineering types, as out of touch and tone deaf. And too many of his recent essays feel like they are a reaction to that. So much patting himself on the back about how the crowds are wrong and he as such an independent thinker has got it right - and so little vulnerability. My gut tells me that he is trying a little too hard to convince himself and others. He'd be a far better essayist if he were more like Johnny Cash at the end of his life and less like Liam Gallagher.
      • whimsicalism 6y ago
        > much patting himself on the back about how the crowds are wrong and he as such an independent thinker has got it right - and so little vulnerability I think that "great man" theories of success are sort of dying out among newer generations. Perhaps I've met enough "great men" to realize how large of a factor luck is after a certain threshold point.
• zeroxfe 6y ago
  I think PG writes well, thinks clearly, and occasionally has some very good essays. But I do get the sense that he's trying really hard to show how deep a thinker he is. (I'm not sure if this has always been the case, or it's a new thing.) His tweets are particularly cringey, but I still follow him because of the occasional nugget.
• dgb23 6y ago
  IMO Voltairine de Cleyre[0] phrased this notion much better in this essay about Anarchism[1] in the first few paragraphs. She starts with describing two essential spirits, one being conservative and steady, the other one being progressive and unpredictable. It becomes clear these spirits both inhabit everyone in some way or another and society reflects that as a whole as well. On a personal level, it gets complicated really fast. People as I know them usually cannot be categorized as easily into one or the other. Some people appear as unconventional and free thinkers, but are set in their ways in many areas, and vice versa. And then it also depends very much on the situation, the atmosphere and so on. Someone who appears timid at first, sometimes just needs a nudge to open up and go bonkers. So I feel like the notion that you can divide people into these categories is very reductionist. What I find useful however is balancing the creative/progressive aspect (or spirit) with the conservative/steady one, and not just balancing but letting them guide oneself them deliberately, dependent on context. John Cleese did a inspirational and funny talk[2] about this subject, that I found quite useful, because he suggests a practical framework to nurture the creative side deliberately. Similarly, there is this talk[3] from Rich Hickey that describes the notion of giving oneself enough time to think deeply about problems. It relates to the above in the sense that he also acknowledges passive/subconscious mechanisms of our mind. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltairine_de_Cleyre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltairine_de_Cleyre [1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/voltairine-de-cleyre-anarchism https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/voltairine-de-cleyre... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
  • personlurking 6y ago
    >She starts with describing two essential spirits, one being conservative and steady, the other one being progressive and unpredictable. It becomes clear these spirits both inhabit everyone in some way or another and society reflects that as a whole as well. Reminds me a bit of the Catalonian characteristics of Seny (wisdom or sensibleness) and Rauxa (sudden determination or action): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seny
  • citruscomputing 6y ago
• spdionis 6y ago
  While the rest of your post sounds reasonable: > Right now Silicon Valley VC thinking is the dominant ideology Are you sure? Are you talking about the US? And even then it's probably true for only ~half of the states? Are you talking about the business world? The whole of EU seems to strongly disagree with SV VC thinking. Edit: Why doesn't the EU replicate the success of US startups? You think EU policy makers don't understand what is needed for that? Or that there's not enough "talent"? I doubt it. I think it's a more or less conscious decision to avoid the US startup culture. It's a cultural thing.
  • Apocryphon 6y ago
    If SV VC thinking wasn’t dominant, how come they’re so rich?
    • spdionis 6y ago
      Using money as a proxy for "dominant thinking" is a good example of SV VC thinking.
      • Apocryphon 6y ago
        I’m riffing off of the adage, “if you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?”
        • onecommentman 6y ago
          The conventional retort to that gambit has been “if you are so rich, why aren’t you smart”? Which is why you don’t hear that adage very much anymore.
  • whimsicalism 6y ago
    > Are you talking about the business world? The whole of EU seems to strongly disagree with SV VC thinking. The US is dominant in the Western business world, things that become popular business practices here get ported over to the EU. I think it's pretty clear that if it is not dominant, it is sharply ascendant in the past 5 years. HN commentators and certain segments of Twitter basically worship at the feet of successful VCs.
• wpietri 6y ago
  I thought you were being too harsh, and then I read the essay. Sheesh. One of the conventions he really adopts here is binary thinking. He's created an enormous false dichotomy, and then decided he and his in-group are 100% on the correct side of it. Another convention is the commanding, voice-of-God essay that has now finally answered an important question. As if things like this ever have one answer. And as you suggest, at this point he's promoting a "nerds >> normies" ideology that may have been novel in the mid-80s, but now seems hopelessly stale to this nerd. And I think that leads him to write what is just a poor essay on the topic. These days good a chunk of the independence in my thinking comes from things like humility, self-awareness, and empathy. Maybe at 18 the best strategy for independent thinking is to ignore others. But somebody not much younger than Graham, the biggest threat to my clarity of thought is getting high on my own bullshit. It's getting locked into ideas and beliefs that are comfortable or convenient. It's that thinking myself independent of others is the only kind of independence needed. Of course, I'm lucky in that since I'm not nearly as successful as Graham, I don't have the same kind of incentive to justify my success in terms of me being a unique, superior genius.
• whatever_dude 6y ago
  You managed to put into words something I always felt about PG. Thanks.
• okareaman 6y ago
  You put your finger on why I felt compelled to unfollow PG on Twitter. I kept waiting for him to hit me with valuable insights that rarely showed up. I took the time to learn Lisp because of PG and was underwhelmed. I bet Lisp was amazing 40 years ago; now it just seemed like a fetish for parenthesis to me. Lispy and functional ideas have moved into the brace block languages I've been using the last 20 years.
• skybrian 6y ago
  It seems to me that claiming you’re independent-minded is sort of like claiming you’re a genius. You’re not supposed to make this claim yourself. Graham doesn’t make this claim explicitly, but by writing about this subject he makes it implicitly. How do you avoid making this claim? I think it’s to remember the the trap of fundamental attribution error. People are not always independent-minded or always conformist. They may think independently about some subjects and conform to conventional wisdom for others. This provides more room for modesty - maybe I was able to think independently about some subject, that one time, or a few times, but certainly not consistently on all subjects. Having some experience might make it reasonable to write about it, with suitable caveats. So, essays often start out with some kind of explanation of the author’s qualifications, sometimes written as a sort of half-apology to the reader for presuming to write as an expert when you are still learning. We might also remember the lesson of counter-cultures, which is that rejecting mainstream beliefs more easily happens with the help of other people who believe differently. This makes it more difficult to tell where you stand, since everyone feels like they are being non-conformist in some way. When people are divided then it’s inevitable that you will disagree with some. (Nerd culture is a counter-culture that has become mainstream in some ways, though there are less popular aspects of it.) Conventional wisdom is also relative to which culture you are talking about. That’s what culture is, an agglomeration of ideas about the best way to do thousands of different things. When you move to a different place, it’s quite possible to get caught between cultures inadvertently and not have any community that thinks quite like you do.
  • whimsicalism 6y ago
    > It seems to me that claiming you’re independent-minded is sort of like claiming you’re a genius. You’re not supposed to make this claim yourself. Graham doesn’t make this claim explicitly, but by writing about this subject he makes it implicitly. I think that is one reason to react against the essay, but not really. My problem is fundamentally that it seems like, with the rise of VC worship (I really don't know what else to call it), people now take the pseudo-sociological observations of their VC heroes as fact or at least very close to fact. Given that we're pretty incredibly shitty at social sciences, even when trying to do it rigorously, I don't understand why I would start giving strong weight to someone who is just pondering in a wall of text about sociological phenomenons/models that I have no reason to believe are how the world actually works.
• chenpengcheng 6y ago
  well said.
• TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  >PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. In recent years conformists have gotten louder and louder, and more and more insistent that everyone should conform. His recent essays are his reaction to that. It would be a strategically bad response for someone of lesser stature, but in his place he can afford to weather the storm and it's valuable for the tiny, narrow target audience of this essay to hear.
  • whimsicalism 6y ago
    > In recent years conformists have gotten louder and louder, and more and more insistent that everyone should conform. You grew up in America and think that? Let me guess, you think that pushing for something like trans access to bathrooms is the "conformist" position. Based on the values my parents told me to conform to, there's been a massive collapse of conformity in the last two decades.
    • jbay808 6y ago
      If one pictures the changing of norms as a process that behaves like the shifting of domain boundaries within a magnet, then you could both be right!
      • whimsicalism 6y ago
        Why would I have any reason to picture it in that way?
        • jbay808 6y ago
          Well, as a toy model to compare to reality to see if it improves your insight into how societal changes happen, I guess. And if it doesn't, you can discard it. But if you entertain it, it suggests that sudden shifts in culture (acceptance of gay marriage, for example) proceed along the boundaries of social groups, where people are influenced by both their closest friends and family and the prevailing external "field", until they "flip their poles" and align with the neighbouring domain, at which point it becomes more likely that their other friends and family will do the same, and so on.
• randomsearch 6y ago
  > This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world. This point really undermines your argument. I see this kind of response a lot, particularly on the left to people like PG (who I have mixed opinions of) when they have the audacity to write about something they don't have qualifications in (such as economics), or when you just don't like what he's saying on an emotional level. "Oh he thinks he's so clever" is just a childish insult, you're not refuting his central point. You're also second guessing him. > pretending to be a deep thinker: This is just an insult. PG clearly reads more than most and is a thoughtful writer.
• conanbatt 6y ago
  > G sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. For me it is absolutely surprising how conventional-minded he is on politics while giving this spiel.
• Cyberthal 6y ago
  How to complain about PC thought police without getting lynched — verbose timidity from the mildly conservative libertarian with too much to lose. By Paul Thiel.
• vincentmarle 6y ago
  > This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world. That honor is already claimed by Sam Altman's blog.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• hodgesrm 6y ago
  > PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. For somebody praising non-conformity the idea of the superiority of the "independent thinker" is a pretty conventional idea. It dates in written form at least back to Plato's philosopher king [1]. You can guess the idea is a lot older than that. There does not seem to be a lot of evidence it leads to better overall outcomes than other, more inclusive approaches. Big successes in human affairs tend to involve getting a lot of people aligned around specific goals. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher_king https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher_king