10 ms·

Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers

256 points by michael_fine 6y ago

BenGosub 6y ago
The author starts with a few political comments and then goes into another direction - programming languages. I was expecting a conclusion on the political comments, without finding it. But, even if Paul Graham has been wrong about language design, it doesn't mean he's been wrong about current affairs or the importance of startups in the coming future. If anything, his bets have been largely successful and by openly sharing his thoughts he attracts some criticism from the different minded folks, like the author of this essay, who's clearly a smart fellow. I saw that piece from the NY Times about Coinbase and I feel that it's reactionary to the announcement from Coinbase about not mingling into politics, which I support btw, I don't like the politization of every aspect of our lives. I've also heard a podcast with Brian Amrstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, and it's not hard to get to the conclusion that he's a great human being. I may be wrong, but I distrust most of what the NY Times has been publishings in the past few years, particularly because of their focus on politization. I even feel repugnant by it. It feels like a stance that somebody that doesn't believe in progress would take. Somebody that blames others for his problems and thinks that humans are inherently evil. Usually nihilistic.
- santoshalper 6y ago
  Well, it's good to know that Brian Armstrong seems like a good guy. Clearly nothing to see here.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
wellpast 6y ago
I haven't followed PG much either of late but it was recently brought to my attention by a coworker that he is now on the side of the 'bad guys'. I'm all for substantial criticism and discussion, and am always desperately looking for it, but this (unequivocally political) essay unfortunately has all of the distinct hallmarks of the simplistic contemporary political discourse. It takes a great many words to offer no substantial criticism of any of PG's recent thinking but rather hopes to indict his whole person (as an "unserious intellectual") based on a protracted and exhausting discussion of his naive ideas about programming from 20 years ago. Who is a serious intellectual? What does that even mean? One thing I know is that serious thinking involves going through many ideas, many of them at risk of being naive or flawed, to sort out how to think about the world. If an "unserious intellectual" is one that puts substantive ideas out into the aether, however flawed, however self-aggrandizing and, well, human, the messenger might be, then I'll take that over whatever you would call this essay. Everybody is wrong about everything, in part. I propose a heuristic: if you're reading (or writing) anything whose thesis is "X is a bad person" (or "X is a ____", for that matter), perhaps you're participating in a religious game rather than a thinking game. There's no dialectic available after an essay like this, no opportunity for growth. There is just a like or upvote button -- with only the thought that if you press it you might just be on the right side of 'good'.
- lilactown 6y ago
  I don't see any point in the article where the author says that PG is a _bad person_. Just that perhaps we shouldn't take him seriously as an intellectual, which is perfectly okay. You can be a good person and but "unserious" w.r.t. being an intellectual - I mostly am! The only way this is can be seen as a personal attack is if PG (and his followers) identify with being a "serious intellectual." At that point it makes sense that it would seem like an attack to point out that no, he is not a "serious intellectual." Someone's character is only tarred if they insist that they are while being demonstrably not.
  - wellpast 6y ago
    I don’t understand the motivation for categorizing someone like PG as a un/serious intellectual. Are we to ‘believe’ all ‘serious intellectuals’ and disregard the ‘unserious’ ones. There’s a clear attempt at this weird kind of classification here—at best it’s a weird kind of paternalized way of thinking about people with ideas; at worst, its a poor rhetoric for classifying PG into the category of ‘wrongthinker’.
    - lilactown 6y ago
      It feels like you're the one trying classify what the essay's saying in a weird way. Someone can critique a person without condemning them. One can say that PG's opinions shouldn't be taken seriously without saying that he's a 'wrongthinker.' The internet gives a mouthpiece to many, many people; not everyone's opinion should be considered with equal weight. The essay's author uses the example, "EARTH HAS 4 CORNER SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE." It is content that someone put a lot of time and effort into. How should I use the ideas and world view found in the timecube website to forge my own? Probably not much. That's what I equivalate with "taking seriously," and a "serious public intellectual" is someone whose opinions I would probably consider when forming my own. I don't think the author is tearing PG down to try and oust him from his material wealth; just saying, maybe what he writes in his essays shouldn't be taken as seriously as some of us thought.
      - 6y ago
troughway 6y ago
Well I guess it was only a matter of time before people started making posts proclaiming that pg’s lack of conformism is problematic.
paperdropper 6y ago
Not surprising to see that a thoughtful critique of HN's monarch garners such little attention, compared to when the cult leader himself drops some verbal turds for his acolytes to polish.
- wellpast 6y ago
  Lots of votes, but little ‘attention’, as in: little discussion. Why? Not because of “monarchy” but because there’s little intellectual material in this hit piece. It’s pure ad hominem.
  - paperdropper 6y ago
    Kind of ironic to invoke a dead language in criticizing this essay, given its content.
  - TT3351 6y ago
    I fail to see how this is an ad hominem, can you please explain?
    - jdlshore 6y ago
      It’s the “ad hominem fallacy fallacy”—in a nutshell, thinking that abuse (or mere criticism, in this case) is an ad hominem attack. I love this article on the subject: https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html Ironically, the GP is ad hominem; as the above link says, “while he pretends to deal with A's argument, in using the term "ad hominem" incorrectly, B is in fact trying to dismiss the argument by imputing that A is resorting to personal attacks.”
loxias 6y ago
Wow, "Dabblers and Blowhards" (essay) sure has aged well.
- santoshalper 6y ago
  Of all the various internet pundits who are totally full of shit, MC is definitely my favorite. At least he has the decency to be funny.
vehemenz 6y ago
I've had the same feeling for a long time. To be a Jaron Lanier-type public intellectual, you need to have some humility and curiousity. PG seems to think he's figured everything out already.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  I would say of Jaron Lanier that he also believed had figured everything out already, he just turned out to be wrong, which can be a bit of an experience to deal with. Why anyone would elevate either of these two to "public intellectual" is beyond my grasp.
o_class_star 6y ago
Who is a serious intellectual? What does that even mean? One thing I know is that serious thinking involves going through many ideas, many of them at risk of being naive or flawed, to sort out how to think about the world. I could name one person but not only is he banned but I would probably be too if I mentioned him.
- wellpast 6y ago
  Winston Smith?
o_class_star 6y ago
Paul Graham had good intentions, I think, but he indirectly contributed to something that ruined a lot of people's lives. I was there in the mid-2000s. I used to read everything he wrote. I loved his Lisp books. I totally bought into what he was selling. I really admired the guy. He made greed morally acceptable and I was a confused kid. He said that in "the real world" all the petty drama that makes nerds unpopular would go away. (It ain't true. Unless you're in tech in the 1990s, the corporate world is worse than high school.) I considered applying for YC. Looking back, I'm glad I didn't. I know too many people who flew too close to a garbage fire in the Mountain View sky they thought was the sun and are still recovering, 5–10+ years later. The fact is, I don't dislike Paul Graham. I think he got out of his depth. Y Combinator, though, is a sleazy institution with a record of ageism, atrocious founder quality— the number of YC-backed people who've turned out to be spousal abusers is shockingly high— and marketing-sans-substance. I actually think that most of YC's atrociousness happened in spite of PG's influence and probably set in after he was a major factor.
captain_price7 6y ago
The summary of this essay appears to be that Paul Graham relies too much on his own intuition, but intuition can lead people astray- a lengthy discussion on the failure of PG's own Arc language is used to support this argument. And apparently his recent political/social commentary fails for the same reason. The author went as far as to call him "profoundly unserious public intellectual". I'm not convinced that role of intuition is exactly similar in something as subjective as political commentary as in designing a programming language. Even more frustrating is that the author doesn't clarify what characteristics someone needs to have to become a "serious public intellectual". He clarifies what PG should have done for Arc (read a scientific paper), but there isn't any such specific criticism directed against PG's political essays. The actual thrust of the argument seems so broad (i.e. reliance on intuition), this could be used to label almost anybody outside pol-sci academic circles a "profoundly unserious public intellectual" for commenting on politics.
- santoshalper 6y ago
  I think his real assertion is that PG is a bullshit artist, which seems essentially accurate to me. The world is full of people who, having achieved success (and more critically fame and money) become intellectually lazy and convinced that their own intuition (or other relevant natural ability) is infallible. I feel like I'm in the same boat as the author. PG used to be one of my favorite writers on the web, and now he just seems full of it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- lilactown 6y ago
  > The actual thrust of the argument seems so broad (i.e. reliance on intuition), this could be used to label almost anybody outside pol-sci academic circles a "profoundly unserious public intellectual" for commenting on politics That seems like a fair assessment IMHO. Most of us are not "serious public intellectuals," especially w.r.t. politics. This isn't a moral failing; politics is hard. I don't think the thrust of the author's point necessitates him to rigorously define what a "serious public intellectual" is, although perhaps he'd be a better "serious public intellectual" by doing so. Rather, it's building on the already numerous critiques of PG's political essays, and saying, "He's been like this all along. It's not that he got worse; he's always been like this." PG's brand relies on us taking him seriously, and this essay's main thesis is that PG - despite his monetary success - has not earned that right, whether through his essays about programming language design or politics. > I'm not convinced that role of intuition is exactly similar in something as subjective as political commentary as in designing a programming language. I don't know if one is more or less subjective, but I also don't think that clarifies to me how much success in one or the other has to do with intuition. The essay uses chicken sexing as an example, which is pretty damn objective; yet success is only obtained through trained intuition.
o_class_star 6y ago
Getting to Paul Graham levels of wealth and influence is, in fact, very simple: 1. Be white and well-enough off that you know how to talk to rich people. 2. Be in technology on a US coast (West is better, East also works) during the late 1990s— an anomalous time and place with a level of opportunity that appears about once in 250 years. 3. Get really good at programming and use a "10x" programming language like Lisp. #3 is actually optional, but it's the one people can control so it's the one you get the most fans if you talk about.
- samatman 6y ago
  Well that certainly explains Kanye West!
o_class_star 6y ago
The author went as far as to call him "profoundly unserious public intellectual". IQ-wise, Paul Graham is probably above 140— possibly well above 140— but that's not the same thing as being intellectual. No one who follows him will say that he's not intelligent. Paul Graham is no Noam Chomsky. I think we can all agree on that. He's not even in the same category as "He Who Must Not Be Named" (whom I should probably shut up about, lest I risk being banned or accused of being him). PG has nerd credibility because he got rich in technology and may or may not have had something to do with the Morris Worm. He's charismatic by nerd standards because he probably would break 165 on a GRE-V and because he's learned enough about how rich people talk and think to bridge the otherwise impassible chasm between money people and makers. He made a shit-ton of money by coming of age in the year we all wish we had come of age in; he made that an even bigger shit-ton of money (YC) by monetizing the reputation he earned by writing half-decent essays and knowing the right people. Paul Graham is like Jordan Peterson. In his native field of expertise, he knows a few things and he can present them very well. When it comes to politics, his opinions are poorly-thought-out, self-serving, and generally worthless.
- wellpast 6y ago
  > When it comes to politics, his opinions are poorly-thought-out, self-serving, and generally worthless. As are 99.999% of everybody's. Except what you're saying (ie your judgement about PG's 'poor' political thinking) is self-referentially meaningless unless you consider yourself a "native expert" in political thinking. Why are we not to take and measure and discuss ideas a la carte? What value is there in group-classifying the 'wrongthinkers', except to save people the exhaustion and torture of learning new and diverse ideas and for thinking for themselves?
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > What value is there in group-classifying the 'wrongthinkers', except to save people the exhaustion and torture of learning new and diverse ideas and for thinking for themselves? The pleasant feeling of superiority and relief from the obligation of considering anything the labeled person says on its own merits.
o_class_star 6y ago
The problem with Paul Graham isn't that he's "not intellectual". It's that he pretends to be something he's not. He's a business guy. He rolled a Natural 20 (or few) on the "where and when to be born" check... which is kind of 95% of what it takes to make money in capitalism (unless you're born rich). He's a decent technical writer. I tend to find his opinions on PL out-of-date and pedestrian— but I imagine mine are, too, because I'm a middle-aged ex-techie who left the industry in disgust. For a contrast: Joe Rogan, whatever you think of him, doesn't pretend to be an intellectual or a brilliant guy. His schtick is that he's an average-ish guy with a lot of curiosity— not that he's a genius who has conversations with God on the regular. Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, embarrasses himself with shit takes well outside of his expertise. (His claim to fame is interpreting a reasonable Canadian law in an extremely unreasonable way.) Peterson's experiences as a therapist aren't to be discounted, but his opinions on politics and society and economics are utterly worthless. Paul Graham's original Lisp books were very good. His "Billionaires are a Gift From God" schtick is a massive embarrassment. That's self-serving polemic, not intellectual discourse. Chomsky, he ain't.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
This is a vapid personal attack on one person. This amounts to little more than gossip and mud-slinging and if the target were anyone but Paul Graham, it likely would have been flagged to death long ago. The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets. HN Guidelines say: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." I guess if you choose your target carefully, you can get around that rule by writing an entire blog post that fails to make any kind of real and substantive argument with anything in particular and merely calls him an "idiot" at length. HN is no longer "turning into Reddit." Now it's turning into "People" magazine as long as the people you gossip about are tech people. If you think Paul Graham is "out of touch," maybe you can work on an app that helps rich people solve the problem of finding themselves surrounded by a sea of either yes men sucking up to them or haters. I imagine that sucks the oxygen out of their intellectual life for quite a lot of successful people.
- neurotech1 6y ago
  It's very telling that pg or other admins haven't flagged or removed this submission.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    pg has nothing to do with HN anymore, and hasn't for many years. Dan doesn't kill things that are critical of pg or YC. (And DoreenMichele is quite wrong about this post; right or wrong, one thing it clearly is not is "vapid").
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      vapid: offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging. I'm failing to see this generate meaty discussion here. I am currently seeing mostly lots of flagged to death or grayed out comments, likely because it's basically gossip and mud slinging and not really anything more than "Some guy has a bee in his bonnet about Paul Graham for some reason." PS there's only one L in my name, not two.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pierrebai 6y ago
I wish I'd find it curious the extreme negativity toward the essay, but unfortunately it fits with my world view of people in general: they'll approve of things that concord with their own opinions and interpret everything through the prism of what they already believe. The essay is labelled ad-hominem by many, even though it provides a cogent argument and multiple supporting facts. Of course, to take an example, the question of the enterpreneur as a luminary and an exploiter depends greatly on what you already believe. I happen to already think that Facebook, Google and co are exerting bad influence, holding and using information they collect about everyone to their own advantage. Others, like Uber, are easy to be thought as direct exploiters. The attacks on Arc and Bel and succinctness are also argued with factual arguments. (Arguments that I happen to agree with; bias, bias...). In the end, the essay posits a simple thing: that behind all the pseudo-theoretical posturing underlying PG essays, they are mere opinions pieces.
- jdlshore 6y ago
  I’m going to hijack this comment to repost a link to “The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy,” a favorite essay of mine. Anybody who thinks this article is an ad hominem should read it. It’s short and fun. https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html
- SoylentOrange 6y ago
  I would like to add for the folks saying this is an ad-hominem that using Paul Graham’s own “hierarchy of disagreement” pyramid [1], this is at least at the level of Refutation, putting it 4 solid rungs above Ad-Hominem. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#/media/File:Graham's_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement-en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#/medi...
- wellpast 6y ago
  To the ‘ad hominem fallacy’ people: the opening paragraph states its entire motivation and thesis: Pg’s recent ‘reactionary’ political views and then purports to figure this out. Then it mentions nothing more about said views instead - yes - launching into an ornate argument about PG’s technical ideas from a decade ago to conclude that PG is an ‘unserious intellectual’, with the hope that its original thesis has been settled. That’s ad hominem - don’t be fooled by the bloated, foot-noted middle.
MikeOfAu 6y ago
This essay smells like referred pain. If the author has a good case, he should just debate PG directly on his Coinbase stance. Because it sure feels to me that that's the real issue here. All the rest of the snarkiness is motivated by a disagreement on THAT issue.
username90 6y ago
> to be at the top of your field, explicit knowledge is almost always required. This is technically true. However the only thing separating someone at the top of the field from an average expert is intuition. Both has access to exactly the same explicit knowledge and any expert with years of experience will know most of it already. For example, what is "good code"? Nobody has written a program that programmers agree can tell if your code is good or not. Yet "good code" is extremely important, making things composable and scaling up means we can make larger and less bug prone programs. It is one of the key things of a top programmer, yet the only way we can identify it is ask experts whether a piece of code is good or not, and they wont even agree. We know for a fact that different programmers writes code of vastly different quality, we just can't pinpoint what that quality is. The problem with Paul Graham isn't that he rely too much on his intuition, the problem is that his intuition for programming language design isn't as good as his intuition for making programs or startups. Lisp isn't as great as he claims, Java is much greater than he thinks, he just has created a mental blocker keeping him from seeing this and therefore ensuring that he will never be great at designing languages, since that blocker keeps his intuition from doing its job.
- tptacek 6y ago
  I think Paul Graham is very probably right about Lisp relative to Java; with Arc (and Bel) he set out to do something more ambitious than evangelizing Lisp. The bit about Java in this post wasn't the strongest argument. (I thought it was solid overall, though). I'm not sold on either Arc or Bel! But if nerding out on programming languages was the only limb Graham ever climbed out on, nobody would read a post like this. For what it's worth, in the field of Critical Paul Graham Theory, I don't know that anyone's done better than "It Turns Out". https://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out https://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  > However the only thing separating someone at the top of the field from an average expert is intuition. Intuition based on knowledge and experience. Paul Graham seems to have no programming design experience besides Arc, no apparent knowledge acquired from study, and thus no basis for his intuitions. Which is why, as you write, "his intuition for programming language design isn't as good". There are plenty of people with a similar level of knowledge and experience who disagree that brevity is everything. And for that matter, insisting that brevity should be measured in "AST size" rather than lines or characters seems objective and technical, but different implementations of the same language can use different AST formats, so this isn't the meaningful measure it's made out to be.
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
>A more serious analysis of brevity might define it as “the entropy of a parse tree recursively inlined/macroexpanded down to language primitives.” This suggests our focus ought to be on two questions: how compressible are our primitives, and how can we enable users to achieve something close to optimal compression? Since the first question has a relative measure (what’s the compression ratio for our expanded parse tree?), we could productively iterate on both better primitives and better tools for abstracting over them. But Graham’s analysis of brevity, and indeed of all language design, was fundamentally unserious. He wasn’t interested in a rigorous definition of brevity, because the ultimate measure of a language’s quality was still his hacker’s radar. All of his essays, and Arc itself, were just spokes around that central hub. If his essays sometimes disagreed, or if Arc didn’t reflect his essays, it’s hardly surprising; their only connection was they all, in the moment, seemed right and true to Paul Graham[..] I dont understand what the author means by 'brevity'. Is that the same as what one might call 'elegant code'? I prefer to use the term elegant. From the article, it seems to me that PG's prefers elegant code that is modular and neat. It is reflected in his essays and how he approaches subjects. Code can be elegant and modular. People are complex. You can hack them, but you cant debug people.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  It is quite explicit in the article that "brevity" is measured in literal characters. From a PG quote in the article: > It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he’ll have to type.
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    i know what brevity means. i choose to call it 'elegant' for the purposes of comparing it to his essays as the article mentions. his essays can sometimes be more rambling before it gets to the point. albeit precise. imo.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
hombre_fatal 6y ago
This blog post reads like the author decided to dig up some epic dirt but went too hard in the spot where they found the first lukewarm morsel (Paul being wrong about Java) hoping to find more proglang failures instead of continuing the hunt. Because it seems like a strikingly ho-hum collection of samples. Paul certainly didn't pull a Hammock-Time Hickey with Arc. Arc was a low mileage side project that fizzled out. Like any engineer, he dicked around and built a mediocre forum on it but lost interest when it came to polish. He made some comments about libraries and brevity. Used bytestrings and not immutable maps. He wrote blog posts, some about Arc. It's not like Paul is revered as a proglang designer, yet it reads like Zach is trying to build up a damning contradiction from sideshow scraps. And 80% through the post is when Zach finally charges Paul with spinning the silk of YCombinator from perhaps overvalued essay clout. I mean, didn't those early investors know that bytestrings couldn't possibly have been the best way to future proof Paul's hobbylang for 100 years? (Isn't the flag to plant here simply that Zach's tour of his least favorite Paul Graham blogs could be leaving out the things that did make Paul ascendent in the tech/biz space? That perhaps something even like Viaweb could make up for blogging a tech prediction that didn't pan out?) Then the blog post ends a few paragraphs later but not before Zach decides to crank the aggro up from mouse's hiss to puppy's roar by drawing a just-so line between white supremacy and the blog post where Paul bemoans anti-intellectual conformity going on in uni campuses. In other words, Zach dedicates paragraphs of his post to drive home a scandal as big as Paul's one-praise-too-many endorsement of brevity in 2002, yet Zach leaves the connection between white replacement theory and anything else he's uttered on the page as an exercise for the reader. I get the feeling that Zach gives his true feelings and motivation away in one of his opening paragraphs: > Recently, however, his writing has taken a reactionary turn which is hard to ignore. He’s written about the need to defend “moderates” from bullies on the “extreme left”, asserted that “the truth is to the right of the median” because “the left is culturally dominant,” and justified Coinbase’s policy to ban discussion of anything deemed “political” by saying that it “will push away some talent, yes, but not very talented talent.” And then Zach spends the rest of the blog procrastinating ever getting around to it, something that could finally be taken seriously as a real disagreement. ---- Something feels very withheld about Zach's message which is surprising because I think Zach is such a good communicator on technical subjects (e.g. Elements of Clojure). I'm not even sure what Zach wants the reader to think Zach feels about Paul. The whole comment above is me trying to meander a guess. Where does Zach actually put Paul on a scale from outright intellectual fraudster to just someone Zach avoids on Twitter? It's hard to interpret the blog post without even knowing that much. How much is Zach provoked by obvious political disagreement? What really is his point about Hickey and Clojure? Just a passing comment that Hickey did the build-your-own-lisp better, or is it that Arc's failure should have pilfered every bit of credibility from Paul? If Zach ever read this, I would encourage him to introduce the same honest ("what I think" -> "why I think it") clarity that makes his technical work so easy to read.

256 points by michael_fine 6y ago

The author starts with a few political comments and then goes into another direction - programming languages. I was expecting a conclusion on the political comments, without finding it. But, even if Paul Graham has been wrong about language design, it doesn't mean he's been wrong about current affairs or the importance of startups in the coming future. If anything, his bets have been largely successful and by openly sharing his thoughts he attracts some criticism from the different minded folks, like the author of this essay, who's clearly a smart fellow. I saw that piece from the NY Times about Coinbase and I feel that it's reactionary to the announcement from Coinbase about not mingling into politics, which I support btw, I don't like the politization of every aspect of our lives. I've also heard a podcast with Brian Amrstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, and it's not hard to get to the conclusion that he's a great human being. I may be wrong, but I distrust most of what the NY Times has been publishings in the past few years, particularly because of their focus on politization. I even feel repugnant by it. It feels like a stance that somebody that doesn't believe in progress would take. Somebody that blames others for his problems and thinks that humans are inherently evil. Usually nihilistic.

santoshalper 6y ago
Well, it's good to know that Brian Armstrong seems like a good guy. Clearly nothing to see here.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

wellpast 6y ago

I haven't followed PG much either of late but it was recently brought to my attention by a coworker that he is now on the side of the 'bad guys'. I'm all for substantial criticism and discussion, and am always desperately looking for it, but this (unequivocally political) essay unfortunately has all of the distinct hallmarks of the simplistic contemporary political discourse. It takes a great many words to offer no substantial criticism of any of PG's recent thinking but rather hopes to indict his whole person (as an "unserious intellectual") based on a protracted and exhausting discussion of his naive ideas about programming from 20 years ago. Who is a serious intellectual? What does that even mean? One thing I know is that serious thinking involves going through many ideas, many of them at risk of being naive or flawed, to sort out how to think about the world. If an "unserious intellectual" is one that puts substantive ideas out into the aether, however flawed, however self-aggrandizing and, well, human, the messenger might be, then I'll take that over whatever you would call this essay. Everybody is wrong about everything, in part. I propose a heuristic: if you're reading (or writing) anything whose thesis is "X is a bad person" (or "X is a ____", for that matter), perhaps you're participating in a religious game rather than a thinking game. There's no dialectic available after an essay like this, no opportunity for growth. There is just a like or upvote button -- with only the thought that if you press it you might just be on the right side of 'good'.

lilactown 6y ago
I don't see any point in the article where the author says that PG is a _bad person_. Just that perhaps we shouldn't take him seriously as an intellectual, which is perfectly okay. You can be a good person and but "unserious" w.r.t. being an intellectual - I mostly am! The only way this is can be seen as a personal attack is if PG (and his followers) identify with being a "serious intellectual." At that point it makes sense that it would seem like an attack to point out that no, he is not a "serious intellectual." Someone's character is only tarred if they insist that they are while being demonstrably not.
- wellpast 6y ago
  I don’t understand the motivation for categorizing someone like PG as a un/serious intellectual. Are we to ‘believe’ all ‘serious intellectuals’ and disregard the ‘unserious’ ones. There’s a clear attempt at this weird kind of classification here—at best it’s a weird kind of paternalized way of thinking about people with ideas; at worst, its a poor rhetoric for classifying PG into the category of ‘wrongthinker’.
  - lilactown 6y ago
    It feels like you're the one trying classify what the essay's saying in a weird way. Someone can critique a person without condemning them. One can say that PG's opinions shouldn't be taken seriously without saying that he's a 'wrongthinker.' The internet gives a mouthpiece to many, many people; not everyone's opinion should be considered with equal weight. The essay's author uses the example, "EARTH HAS 4 CORNER SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE." It is content that someone put a lot of time and effort into. How should I use the ideas and world view found in the timecube website to forge my own? Probably not much. That's what I equivalate with "taking seriously," and a "serious public intellectual" is someone whose opinions I would probably consider when forming my own. I don't think the author is tearing PG down to try and oust him from his material wealth; just saying, maybe what he writes in his essays shouldn't be taken as seriously as some of us thought.
    - 6y ago

troughway 6y ago

Well I guess it was only a matter of time before people started making posts proclaiming that pg’s lack of conformism is problematic.

paperdropper 6y ago

Not surprising to see that a thoughtful critique of HN's monarch garners such little attention, compared to when the cult leader himself drops some verbal turds for his acolytes to polish.

wellpast 6y ago
Lots of votes, but little ‘attention’, as in: little discussion. Why? Not because of “monarchy” but because there’s little intellectual material in this hit piece. It’s pure ad hominem.
- paperdropper 6y ago
  Kind of ironic to invoke a dead language in criticizing this essay, given its content.
- TT3351 6y ago
  I fail to see how this is an ad hominem, can you please explain?
  - jdlshore 6y ago
    It’s the “ad hominem fallacy fallacy”—in a nutshell, thinking that abuse (or mere criticism, in this case) is an ad hominem attack. I love this article on the subject: https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html Ironically, the GP is ad hominem; as the above link says, “while he pretends to deal with A's argument, in using the term "ad hominem" incorrectly, B is in fact trying to dismiss the argument by imputing that A is resorting to personal attacks.”

loxias 6y ago

Wow, "Dabblers and Blowhards" (essay) sure has aged well.

santoshalper 6y ago
Of all the various internet pundits who are totally full of shit, MC is definitely my favorite. At least he has the decency to be funny.

vehemenz 6y ago

I've had the same feeling for a long time. To be a Jaron Lanier-type public intellectual, you need to have some humility and curiousity. PG seems to think he's figured everything out already.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
I would say of Jaron Lanier that he also believed had figured everything out already, he just turned out to be wrong, which can be a bit of an experience to deal with. Why anyone would elevate either of these two to "public intellectual" is beyond my grasp.

o_class_star 6y ago

Who is a serious intellectual? What does that even mean? One thing I know is that serious thinking involves going through many ideas, many of them at risk of being naive or flawed, to sort out how to think about the world. I could name one person but not only is he banned but I would probably be too if I mentioned him.

wellpast 6y ago
Winston Smith?

o_class_star 6y ago

Paul Graham had good intentions, I think, but he indirectly contributed to something that ruined a lot of people's lives. I was there in the mid-2000s. I used to read everything he wrote. I loved his Lisp books. I totally bought into what he was selling. I really admired the guy. He made greed morally acceptable and I was a confused kid. He said that in "the real world" all the petty drama that makes nerds unpopular would go away. (It ain't true. Unless you're in tech in the 1990s, the corporate world is worse than high school.) I considered applying for YC. Looking back, I'm glad I didn't. I know too many people who flew too close to a garbage fire in the Mountain View sky they thought was the sun and are still recovering, 5–10+ years later. The fact is, I don't dislike Paul Graham. I think he got out of his depth. Y Combinator, though, is a sleazy institution with a record of ageism, atrocious founder quality— the number of YC-backed people who've turned out to be spousal abusers is shockingly high— and marketing-sans-substance. I actually think that most of YC's atrociousness happened in spite of PG's influence and probably set in after he was a major factor.

captain_price7 6y ago

The summary of this essay appears to be that Paul Graham relies too much on his own intuition, but intuition can lead people astray- a lengthy discussion on the failure of PG's own Arc language is used to support this argument. And apparently his recent political/social commentary fails for the same reason. The author went as far as to call him "profoundly unserious public intellectual". I'm not convinced that role of intuition is exactly similar in something as subjective as political commentary as in designing a programming language. Even more frustrating is that the author doesn't clarify what characteristics someone needs to have to become a "serious public intellectual". He clarifies what PG should have done for Arc (read a scientific paper), but there isn't any such specific criticism directed against PG's political essays. The actual thrust of the argument seems so broad (i.e. reliance on intuition), this could be used to label almost anybody outside pol-sci academic circles a "profoundly unserious public intellectual" for commenting on politics.

santoshalper 6y ago
I think his real assertion is that PG is a bullshit artist, which seems essentially accurate to me. The world is full of people who, having achieved success (and more critically fame and money) become intellectually lazy and convinced that their own intuition (or other relevant natural ability) is infallible. I feel like I'm in the same boat as the author. PG used to be one of my favorite writers on the web, and now he just seems full of it.
- deleted 6y ago
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lilactown 6y ago
> The actual thrust of the argument seems so broad (i.e. reliance on intuition), this could be used to label almost anybody outside pol-sci academic circles a "profoundly unserious public intellectual" for commenting on politics That seems like a fair assessment IMHO. Most of us are not "serious public intellectuals," especially w.r.t. politics. This isn't a moral failing; politics is hard. I don't think the thrust of the author's point necessitates him to rigorously define what a "serious public intellectual" is, although perhaps he'd be a better "serious public intellectual" by doing so. Rather, it's building on the already numerous critiques of PG's political essays, and saying, "He's been like this all along. It's not that he got worse; he's always been like this." PG's brand relies on us taking him seriously, and this essay's main thesis is that PG - despite his monetary success - has not earned that right, whether through his essays about programming language design or politics. > I'm not convinced that role of intuition is exactly similar in something as subjective as political commentary as in designing a programming language. I don't know if one is more or less subjective, but I also don't think that clarifies to me how much success in one or the other has to do with intuition. The essay uses chicken sexing as an example, which is pretty damn objective; yet success is only obtained through trained intuition.

o_class_star 6y ago

Getting to Paul Graham levels of wealth and influence is, in fact, very simple: 1. Be white and well-enough off that you know how to talk to rich people. 2. Be in technology on a US coast (West is better, East also works) during the late 1990s— an anomalous time and place with a level of opportunity that appears about once in 250 years. 3. Get really good at programming and use a "10x" programming language like Lisp. #3 is actually optional, but it's the one people can control so it's the one you get the most fans if you talk about.

samatman 6y ago
Well that certainly explains Kanye West!

o_class_star 6y ago

The author went as far as to call him "profoundly unserious public intellectual". IQ-wise, Paul Graham is probably above 140— possibly well above 140— but that's not the same thing as being intellectual. No one who follows him will say that he's not intelligent. Paul Graham is no Noam Chomsky. I think we can all agree on that. He's not even in the same category as "He Who Must Not Be Named" (whom I should probably shut up about, lest I risk being banned or accused of being him). PG has nerd credibility because he got rich in technology and may or may not have had something to do with the Morris Worm. He's charismatic by nerd standards because he probably would break 165 on a GRE-V and because he's learned enough about how rich people talk and think to bridge the otherwise impassible chasm between money people and makers. He made a shit-ton of money by coming of age in the year we all wish we had come of age in; he made that an even bigger shit-ton of money (YC) by monetizing the reputation he earned by writing half-decent essays and knowing the right people. Paul Graham is like Jordan Peterson. In his native field of expertise, he knows a few things and he can present them very well. When it comes to politics, his opinions are poorly-thought-out, self-serving, and generally worthless.

wellpast 6y ago
> When it comes to politics, his opinions are poorly-thought-out, self-serving, and generally worthless. As are 99.999% of everybody's. Except what you're saying (ie your judgement about PG's 'poor' political thinking) is self-referentially meaningless unless you consider yourself a "native expert" in political thinking. Why are we not to take and measure and discuss ideas a la carte? What value is there in group-classifying the 'wrongthinkers', except to save people the exhaustion and torture of learning new and diverse ideas and for thinking for themselves?
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > What value is there in group-classifying the 'wrongthinkers', except to save people the exhaustion and torture of learning new and diverse ideas and for thinking for themselves? The pleasant feeling of superiority and relief from the obligation of considering anything the labeled person says on its own merits.

o_class_star 6y ago

The problem with Paul Graham isn't that he's "not intellectual". It's that he pretends to be something he's not. He's a business guy. He rolled a Natural 20 (or few) on the "where and when to be born" check... which is kind of 95% of what it takes to make money in capitalism (unless you're born rich). He's a decent technical writer. I tend to find his opinions on PL out-of-date and pedestrian— but I imagine mine are, too, because I'm a middle-aged ex-techie who left the industry in disgust. For a contrast: Joe Rogan, whatever you think of him, doesn't pretend to be an intellectual or a brilliant guy. His schtick is that he's an average-ish guy with a lot of curiosity— not that he's a genius who has conversations with God on the regular. Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, embarrasses himself with shit takes well outside of his expertise. (His claim to fame is interpreting a reasonable Canadian law in an extremely unreasonable way.) Peterson's experiences as a therapist aren't to be discounted, but his opinions on politics and society and economics are utterly worthless. Paul Graham's original Lisp books were very good. His "Billionaires are a Gift From God" schtick is a massive embarrassment. That's self-serving polemic, not intellectual discourse. Chomsky, he ain't.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

This is a vapid personal attack on one person. This amounts to little more than gossip and mud-slinging and if the target were anyone but Paul Graham, it likely would have been flagged to death long ago. The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets. HN Guidelines say: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." I guess if you choose your target carefully, you can get around that rule by writing an entire blog post that fails to make any kind of real and substantive argument with anything in particular and merely calls him an "idiot" at length. HN is no longer "turning into Reddit." Now it's turning into "People" magazine as long as the people you gossip about are tech people. If you think Paul Graham is "out of touch," maybe you can work on an app that helps rich people solve the problem of finding themselves surrounded by a sea of either yes men sucking up to them or haters. I imagine that sucks the oxygen out of their intellectual life for quite a lot of successful people.

neurotech1 6y ago
It's very telling that pg or other admins haven't flagged or removed this submission.
- tptacek 6y ago
  pg has nothing to do with HN anymore, and hasn't for many years. Dan doesn't kill things that are critical of pg or YC. (And DoreenMichele is quite wrong about this post; right or wrong, one thing it clearly is not is "vapid").
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    vapid: offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging. I'm failing to see this generate meaty discussion here. I am currently seeing mostly lots of flagged to death or grayed out comments, likely because it's basically gossip and mud slinging and not really anything more than "Some guy has a bee in his bonnet about Paul Graham for some reason." PS there's only one L in my name, not two.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pierrebai 6y ago

I wish I'd find it curious the extreme negativity toward the essay, but unfortunately it fits with my world view of people in general: they'll approve of things that concord with their own opinions and interpret everything through the prism of what they already believe. The essay is labelled ad-hominem by many, even though it provides a cogent argument and multiple supporting facts. Of course, to take an example, the question of the enterpreneur as a luminary and an exploiter depends greatly on what you already believe. I happen to already think that Facebook, Google and co are exerting bad influence, holding and using information they collect about everyone to their own advantage. Others, like Uber, are easy to be thought as direct exploiters. The attacks on Arc and Bel and succinctness are also argued with factual arguments. (Arguments that I happen to agree with; bias, bias...). In the end, the essay posits a simple thing: that behind all the pseudo-theoretical posturing underlying PG essays, they are mere opinions pieces.

jdlshore 6y ago
I’m going to hijack this comment to repost a link to “The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy,” a favorite essay of mine. Anybody who thinks this article is an ad hominem should read it. It’s short and fun. https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html
SoylentOrange 6y ago
I would like to add for the folks saying this is an ad-hominem that using Paul Graham’s own “hierarchy of disagreement” pyramid [1], this is at least at the level of Refutation, putting it 4 solid rungs above Ad-Hominem. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#/media/File:Graham's_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement-en.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#/medi...
wellpast 6y ago
To the ‘ad hominem fallacy’ people: the opening paragraph states its entire motivation and thesis: Pg’s recent ‘reactionary’ political views and then purports to figure this out. Then it mentions nothing more about said views instead - yes - launching into an ornate argument about PG’s technical ideas from a decade ago to conclude that PG is an ‘unserious intellectual’, with the hope that its original thesis has been settled. That’s ad hominem - don’t be fooled by the bloated, foot-noted middle.

MikeOfAu 6y ago

This essay smells like referred pain. If the author has a good case, he should just debate PG directly on his Coinbase stance. Because it sure feels to me that that's the real issue here. All the rest of the snarkiness is motivated by a disagreement on THAT issue.

username90 6y ago

> to be at the top of your field, explicit knowledge is almost always required. This is technically true. However the only thing separating someone at the top of the field from an average expert is intuition. Both has access to exactly the same explicit knowledge and any expert with years of experience will know most of it already. For example, what is "good code"? Nobody has written a program that programmers agree can tell if your code is good or not. Yet "good code" is extremely important, making things composable and scaling up means we can make larger and less bug prone programs. It is one of the key things of a top programmer, yet the only way we can identify it is ask experts whether a piece of code is good or not, and they wont even agree. We know for a fact that different programmers writes code of vastly different quality, we just can't pinpoint what that quality is. The problem with Paul Graham isn't that he rely too much on his intuition, the problem is that his intuition for programming language design isn't as good as his intuition for making programs or startups. Lisp isn't as great as he claims, Java is much greater than he thinks, he just has created a mental blocker keeping him from seeing this and therefore ensuring that he will never be great at designing languages, since that blocker keeps his intuition from doing its job.

tptacek 6y ago
I think Paul Graham is very probably right about Lisp relative to Java; with Arc (and Bel) he set out to do something more ambitious than evangelizing Lisp. The bit about Java in this post wasn't the strongest argument. (I thought it was solid overall, though). I'm not sold on either Arc or Bel! But if nerding out on programming languages was the only limb Graham ever climbed out on, nobody would read a post like this. For what it's worth, in the field of Critical Paul Graham Theory, I don't know that anyone's done better than "It Turns Out". https://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out https://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out
tom_mellior 6y ago
> However the only thing separating someone at the top of the field from an average expert is intuition. Intuition based on knowledge and experience. Paul Graham seems to have no programming design experience besides Arc, no apparent knowledge acquired from study, and thus no basis for his intuitions. Which is why, as you write, "his intuition for programming language design isn't as good". There are plenty of people with a similar level of knowledge and experience who disagree that brevity is everything. And for that matter, insisting that brevity should be measured in "AST size" rather than lines or characters seems objective and technical, but different implementations of the same language can use different AST formats, so this isn't the meaningful measure it's made out to be.

jelliclesfarm 6y ago

>A more serious analysis of brevity might define it as “the entropy of a parse tree recursively inlined/macroexpanded down to language primitives.” This suggests our focus ought to be on two questions: how compressible are our primitives, and how can we enable users to achieve something close to optimal compression? Since the first question has a relative measure (what’s the compression ratio for our expanded parse tree?), we could productively iterate on both better primitives and better tools for abstracting over them. But Graham’s analysis of brevity, and indeed of all language design, was fundamentally unserious. He wasn’t interested in a rigorous definition of brevity, because the ultimate measure of a language’s quality was still his hacker’s radar. All of his essays, and Arc itself, were just spokes around that central hub. If his essays sometimes disagreed, or if Arc didn’t reflect his essays, it’s hardly surprising; their only connection was they all, in the moment, seemed right and true to Paul Graham[..] I dont understand what the author means by 'brevity'. Is that the same as what one might call 'elegant code'? I prefer to use the term elegant. From the article, it seems to me that PG's prefers elegant code that is modular and neat. It is reflected in his essays and how he approaches subjects. Code can be elegant and modular. People are complex. You can hack them, but you cant debug people.

ashtonkem 6y ago
It is quite explicit in the article that "brevity" is measured in literal characters. From a PG quote in the article: > It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he’ll have to type.
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  i know what brevity means. i choose to call it 'elegant' for the purposes of comparing it to his essays as the article mentions. his essays can sometimes be more rambling before it gets to the point. albeit precise. imo.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago

hombre_fatal 6y ago

This blog post reads like the author decided to dig up some epic dirt but went too hard in the spot where they found the first lukewarm morsel (Paul being wrong about Java) hoping to find more proglang failures instead of continuing the hunt. Because it seems like a strikingly ho-hum collection of samples. Paul certainly didn't pull a Hammock-Time Hickey with Arc. Arc was a low mileage side project that fizzled out. Like any engineer, he dicked around and built a mediocre forum on it but lost interest when it came to polish. He made some comments about libraries and brevity. Used bytestrings and not immutable maps. He wrote blog posts, some about Arc. It's not like Paul is revered as a proglang designer, yet it reads like Zach is trying to build up a damning contradiction from sideshow scraps. And 80% through the post is when Zach finally charges Paul with spinning the silk of YCombinator from perhaps overvalued essay clout. I mean, didn't those early investors know that bytestrings couldn't possibly have been the best way to future proof Paul's hobbylang for 100 years? (Isn't the flag to plant here simply that Zach's tour of his least favorite Paul Graham blogs could be leaving out the things that did make Paul ascendent in the tech/biz space? That perhaps something even like Viaweb could make up for blogging a tech prediction that didn't pan out?) Then the blog post ends a few paragraphs later but not before Zach decides to crank the aggro up from mouse's hiss to puppy's roar by drawing a just-so line between white supremacy and the blog post where Paul bemoans anti-intellectual conformity going on in uni campuses. In other words, Zach dedicates paragraphs of his post to drive home a scandal as big as Paul's one-praise-too-many endorsement of brevity in 2002, yet Zach leaves the connection between white replacement theory and anything else he's uttered on the page as an exercise for the reader. I get the feeling that Zach gives his true feelings and motivation away in one of his opening paragraphs: > Recently, however, his writing has taken a reactionary turn which is hard to ignore. He’s written about the need to defend “moderates” from bullies on the “extreme left”, asserted that “the truth is to the right of the median” because “the left is culturally dominant,” and justified Coinbase’s policy to ban discussion of anything deemed “political” by saying that it “will push away some talent, yes, but not very talented talent.” And then Zach spends the rest of the blog procrastinating ever getting around to it, something that could finally be taken seriously as a real disagreement. ---- Something feels very withheld about Zach's message which is surprising because I think Zach is such a good communicator on technical subjects (e.g. Elements of Clojure). I'm not even sure what Zach wants the reader to think Zach feels about Paul. The whole comment above is me trying to meander a guess. Where does Zach actually put Paul on a scale from outright intellectual fraudster to just someone Zach avoids on Twitter? It's hard to interpret the blog post without even knowing that much. How much is Zach provoked by obvious political disagreement? What really is his point about Hickey and Clojure? Just a passing comment that Hickey did the build-your-own-lisp better, or is it that Arc's failure should have pilfered every bit of credibility from Paul? If Zach ever read this, I would encourage him to introduce the same honest ("what I think" -> "why I think it") clarity that makes his technical work so easy to read.