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Earnestness

• Quarrelsome 6y ago
  Earnest is my favourite word for describing that beautiful part during a child's development where they haven't yet had a negative experience from expressing themselves earnestly. That window of time where if you ask if they know something they would proudly reply "no!" because they have no idea that there might be shame in not knowing something. I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of fear of retribution/shame but I'm always a bit sad when I get in trouble because I was straight forward but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes.
  • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Twain wrote of this: I was glad to be able to answer promptly. "I don't know!" I said.
  • boxed 6y ago
    Once in my 20s I hung out with some young teenagers at a summer camp for reasons. One night we were talking and one girl started asking questions and the rest of the group sneered at her "not knowing". She ignored them and kept asking because I was earnest and knowledgeable. Five minutes turned to an hour and I think everyone in that group learned (or at least heard) more about the origins of the universe, stellar evolution, evolution, chemistry, physics, etc, than they had learned in school up to that point. I sometimes wonder what happened to those people. I suspect the girl who asked questions ended up way more knowledgeable than the other 10 combined.
    • warent 6y ago
      The sentence you opened this up with comes across kind of concerning and gross. For reasons?
      • bluntfang 6y ago
        I'm with you here buddy. seems like he was doing something shady the way he expressed it. probably lonely and providing alcohol/drugs for minors in order to have company.
        • Quarrelsome 6y ago
          > it sounds shady so it probably was c'mon catch people a break. Maybe they were a former alchy giving AA advice to troubled kids, maybe they don't like talking about their religion online
          • boxed 6y ago
            My gf was a camp mentor in fact. A totally boring an irrelevant fact. Thus the hand wavy thing.
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          • warent 6y ago
            Great point, thanks for the perspective
            • deleted 6y ago
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        • dang 6y ago
          That crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
          • bluntfang 6y ago
  • ignoramous 6y ago
    > I seek to try to make myself more earnest and undo the damage of fear of retribution/shame but I'm always a bit sad when I get in trouble because I was straight forward but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes. You might enjoy reading these two posts and discussions: "The power of ignorance" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23041281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23041281 "Asking questions" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22729028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22729028
    • swyx 6y ago
      I've also written about this effect, called Lampshading: https://www.swyx.io/lampshading/ https://www.swyx.io/lampshading/ asking the "stupid question" is a strength when done in taste.
      • pjc50 6y ago
        One of the most powerful things you can do as a senior engineer for juniors is to show by example that it's OK to ask questions and to not know all the answers. Especially if you can see that someone else isn't sure but dares not ask that question.
      • lambdatronics 6y ago
        Thanks for introducing me to that term! Right up there with 'bikeshedding' as my top new word this year. I lampshade frequently. My typical use-case: senior dev says something I think is mistaken, but nobody else questions it. How do I know whether they're just humoring him, or if they are all mentally translating between what he said & what he meant? (Btw, people do this translation often -- nobody wants to be a pedant.) Lampshading is a great way of getting people to "pop the 'why' stack" as well. https://mikebroberts.com/2003/07/29/popping-the-why-stack/ https://mikebroberts.com/2003/07/29/popping-the-why-stack/
  • boh 6y ago
    I think you have too much optimism regarding the value of people's earnest expressions. Children are children and so their earnestness is cute and endearing (in most instances)--adults are far less charming and far more petty, self-indulgent, spineless, fickle, fearful. Social media is a cesspool largely due to all this earnestness. Fear of retribution and shame is helpful in mitigating the self-absorption embedded in most people. We'd all like to think there's something special in all of us and that the world will benefit from the light of our creativity if it was set free. Truth be told, very few people are capable of much past mimicking and repeating what already exists. People should appreciate the template of conformity that allows them to find a place in the world and not let advertising, that often leverages the idea of uniqueness to sell things, diminish the value of their mediocrity. No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs. We know because if that's who you were, that's who you'd be. Some people seem to find success in art and innovation operating in the same repressive environment, so maybe the environment is not the problem. Maybe earnestness just isn't your thing and fear/conformity is the better strategy. *grammar edits
    • nitrogen 6y ago
      No, given the proper "freedom" to be "earnest" you wouldn't be the next Picasso or Steve Jobs. We know because if that's who you were, that's who you'd be. This statement cannot be allowed to stand uncontested. It suggests that everyone is exactly where they ought to be, that all bullying and harassment and isolation that keeps people from reaching their potential is right and just.
      • legel 6y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hear,_hear
      • boh 6y ago
        The only thing I'm suggesting is that freedom doesn't spare you from mediocrity. Real oppression, an experience the US professional middle class is largely spared of, the type experienced by the citizens of Venezuela or the people currently being held in Xinjiang re-education camps, is truly insurmountable and requires large macro shifts to institute change. To suggest individual bullying, harassment and isolation are counted as so insurmountable to a person's theoretical "potential" that the environment must change first to prompt it, is an illustration of the deep self-absorption very few people have the privilege to experience. Nothing is right or just in this context.
  • Razengan 6y ago
    > Earnest is my favourite word for describing that beautiful part during a child's development where they haven't yet had a negative experience from expressing themselves earnestly. ... but adult politics is sadly complex sometimes. And we’re narrowing that window by exposing children to social politics earlier on through likes and upvotes and whatnot.
    • maxerickson 6y ago
      Preschoolers have traditionally been well aware of social politics, carefully choosing what aspects of their home life to reveal to their peers.
  • pdonis 6y ago
    This is a different definition of "earnest" from the one pg is using in the article, although there probably is a relationship between them: children at the age you describe are interested in things for the sake of the things themselves and not for what the child can get out of them, and "expressing yourself" is one of those things they're interested in for the sake of the thing itself. It's much easier for young children to be like this because all of the stuff that older people think about that basically boils down to "how is this going to affect what other people think of me?" isn't even visible to the children, so it doesn't clutter up their mental processes.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• dash2 6y ago
  "The one vital thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
  • dang 6y ago
    https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/05/fake-honesty/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/05/fake-honesty/
• paganel 6y ago
  > It's a bigger social error to seem naive in most European countries than it is in America, and this may be one of subtler reasons startups are less commmon there. Founder culture is completely at odds with sophisticated cynicism. I have a high opinion of pg, but mocking an entire continent for non-earnestness because it doesn't make as much money as the US (because they have more startups because, supposedly, the Americans are less cynical than the Europeans) is borderline cynic (and I say that as a cynic myself). Money, and judging almost everything through the prism of money, is one of the most cynical things we do have right now in our society, and as such I appreciate more a "Greed is good discourse" because it shows its cynicism in plain view and does not try to hide it behind a veil of good intentions, like texts as this one do.
  • boxed 6y ago
    Comparing the US to Sweden it seems to other way around to me. Americans assume that all of government and all companies are evil. If that isn't absolute cynicism I don't know what is. (Plus it enables evil since it is expected so there is little anger.) Plus the whole thing with Americans being hopelessly naive against religion, the one area they should absolutely be cynical and/or uninterested like Swedes.
  • jasode 6y ago
    >non-earnestness because it doesn't make as much money as the US (because they have more startups [...] , and judging almost everything through the prism of money, You're interpreting the blog essay unfairly. PG isn't looking at everything (such as "earnestness") only through the prism of money. It's a blog post with deliberately limited scope. His first sentence sets the context for the rest of the essay: "Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're talking about _startups_." Yes, we all know there can be other activities to also express earnestness such as creating art paintings, music, parenting, volunteering, teaching, etc. but he omits those and discusses it in relation to startups because... startups is what he often specializes in writing about. It doesn't look like mocking Europe to me. I understand you want a more universal essay (measures of earnestness beyond startups) but that's not necessary for PG's blog audience.
  • darkerside 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
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• Razengan 6y ago
  > paulgraham.com Oh. All I know to expect from seeing that is a weird kind of popularity, agreement and participation you don't see for other blogs posted on HN, sometimes with the other half-or-so of comments being annoyed with Paul Graham. Does HN covertly promote all links to that blog or is there something more substantial to it?
  • 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
    I find this funny. I'll bite. Paul Graham created Hacker News. And is a founder of Y Combinator.
    • wincy 6y ago
      I didn’t know this, and I’ve been using HN for years now, thanks for the information. I just thought Paul Graham was some super popular vaguely tech person.
      • 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
        I should have recalled this sooner, but it happened to me once, too. I was doing a product demo of a remotely operated device with a guy from AT&T. We were supposed to be able to communicate through the device but it wasn't working well. They'd just rolled out a new network and it was spotty. I suggested at one point that we use text messages as a back up for communicating and I actually asked him if he was ok with that. He says, 'Yeah, no problem. My name's on the patent.' 'huh?', 'I'm on the SMS patent.'
    • zepto 6y ago
      Yes, and when we say ‘created’ hacker news, he coded it himself in a dialect of lisp which he also coded just for this purpose.
      • ajju 6y ago
        Is this a tongue in cheek reference to Ken Thompson’s trick in “reflections on trusting trust”? [1] if so, it wins the 2020 award for originality in HN conspiracy theories! 1 - https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/hh/thompson/trust.html
• croissants 6y ago
  My perception is that one drawback of earnestness is that it often comes off as just being boring. The most earnest people I know are not popular. The most popular people I know are more like twinkle-in-the-eye-kind-of-BS-but-not-pathological-liars. I don't mean to say "grr, why aren't nerds more popular!". I mean more that this specific kind of earnestness seems to preclude the playing of certain conversational games that most people seem to enjoy. Earnestness, for example, is pretty far away from my conception of "playful" or "flirty" or even "fun".
  • boxed 6y ago
    I've met some people like that. But only because they are earnest and also have a boring interest or just one or two interests. Not very common in my experience.
  • indymike 6y ago
    Earnestness is what happens when people "let the guard down" and just be themselves. That's a rare state for a lot of people, who have spent a lifetime trying to be anyone but who they really are.
    • ritchiea 6y ago
      Exactly, there’s nothing inherently boring about being earnest. You can be earnest and boring but you could also be earnest with a good sense of humor and an interest in film history or software engineering. I’m not going to go all in on pg’s earnestness essay but it’s a positive trait and if you have genuine interests, there’s a good chance being earnest makes you more interesting when discussing interests because you are less likely to be invested in impressing other people with your interest. If you’re earnest your interests tend to scratch your itches of curiosity. But if you are earnest and uncurious then yes you may be boring.
      • gbh444g 6y ago
        This made me think that there are two type of not-earnestness: "what's in in it for me?" and "what's in it for others?" The first type is what [office] politics is about. The second type is rare and an example of it is when a doctor could tell a patient point-blank that he has 2 months left, but instead strongly recommends to go on a 2 months round-the-world trip and even invents a plausible cause [such trips help so much that savings on meds are multiples of the trip's cost].
• 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  What are the some of the tells that someone is not earnest? Or in particular, feigning it?
• zuhayeer 6y ago
  It seems there’s always been a correlation between earnestness and humility too. Earnest people are always the first to say “I don’t know”
• kamilszybalski 6y ago
  I guess it's also true that earnestness often leads pursuits resulting in "build it and they will come".
• neilv 6y ago
  Great. Now my company's engineering recruiting email "honest and earnest" turn of phrase about culture is less likely to make candidates pause and consider why I focused on that, but instead probably gets classified as regurgitating whatever everyone read on HN. :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25088200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25088200
  • analog31 6y ago
    Goodheart's law at work. This is why you have to change metrics every six months. Just when I figured out "engagement," now "earnestness." Now a potential issue that you're probably already aware of is that many of these traits can serve as culture / age filters.
    • neilv 6y ago
      Yep, although I'm thinking "honest and earnest" is further from a typical metric, and closer to the end goal. One of my concerns, when I decided to be very forthright in the intro email, was that it would simply be taken as a cheat-sheet by a poor-match candidate for what culture to fake. But I figured there would be a greater risk that we'd miss recognizing or resonating with some of the best candidates, because they were trying to stick to the rules that the interview prep books told them. (Funny: were my company to become a FAANG, then the interview prep industry would coach everyone on the exact 5 notes to hit, at what formulaic points in the process. And to practice expressions of curiosity, to have ready in reaction to standard prompts by interviewer. Dictionaries eventually would be updated to redefine "genuine" to mean projecting a particular kind of professional persona mandated by my company. :)
    • neilv 6y ago
      Good point about filters. I think diversity of ideas and influences is inherently valuable in an organization, and to find it, we have to be thoughtful and not jump to conclusions. For example, even if we announce that speaking up is safe and encouraged, that's going to be more familiar to some, and others will take a while to integrate it and adapt it. I can definitely imagine, say, 2 engineers founding a company, and the company thus far was built on caffeinated whiteboard sessions, where they were comfortable shouting out their ideas, grabbing the marker from the other, etc. It worked for them so far, so it would be understandable if they think that's their culture and would be a key to ongoing success of the company. But if, for their next hire, they're passing over every introverted thinker, person raised being told not to interrupt, etc.-- then I'd suspect they'd probably be missing out on a ton of skills that their org will probably need, and also personally missing out on traits/practices/behaviors/etc. from which they'd grow by being influenced and meeting halfway. (I think this is tricky example, since the whiteboard jam session is a very appealing idea to a lot of us, and we might ascribe mythical power to it. But I think it's also easy to imagine some big design insight coming in a pause in the excitement, from someone who was standing slightly back from the flailing markers, and who hadn't said much in the first hour of battle. Or even from someone who went off to work something out on the computer, that was being missed in the endorphin rush of whiteboard eureka.)
• bob33212 6y ago
  It would be interesting to see YC to move to funding with less regard to business plan. I know they already do this but what if you totally threw out the market research and gut feeling about the usefulness of the product and gave people 500k based on their interest and ability only.
  • darkerside 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure that's how it works already. They are looking mostly for teams of people, not a perfect plan. It's just that, building a business plan successfully is a decent project for assessing the effectiveness of a team.
  • psyc 6y ago
    YC reportedly cares mainly about the traits of the founders, and expects that they might well pivot to a completely different plan.
• rayiner 6y ago
  What a great article. “Earnest” describes some of my favorite people not just in business but in life.
• darepublic 6y ago
  Though I agree with much of this article off earnestness can also be terrible in some circumistances. When people earnestly pursue something abhorrent or deluded.
  • pietrovismara 6y ago
    > When people earnestly pursue something abhorrent or deluded. Which is exactly what happens all the time. People like the "airbnbs" thinking they can make the world a better place and pursuing their delusion with earnestness, only to cause bigger problems in the end. I wish capitalists could at least be honest and admit they found an inefficiency in the market to exploit and they just want to profit from it. At least there's no hypocrisy in that.
• darkerside 6y ago
  > Interestingly, just as the word "nerd" implies earnestness even when used as a metaphor, the word "politics" implies the opposite. It's not only in actual politics that earnestness seems to be a handicap, but also in office politics and academic politics. I don't think this is always the case. I've found that no matter the size of the business, they are made up of people, and people have bullshit detectors. When you are able to speak truth and find meaning in an earnest way, people will follow you, peers will respect you, and executives will listen.
  • throwaway2245 6y ago
    In politics, the word "technocrat" is used to try to carve out a divide between specific intellectual talent and political leadership talent, with a heavy implication that these are mutually exclusive. I think that's how PG is using "earnest" here. He presents it first as a compliment but goes on to suggest that it is exclusive from understanding other people's motivations, and by extension, exclusive from business leadership. I take it as an underhanded compliment.
    • voidhorse 6y ago
      And on the other side, “politics” is anathema to “nerds” and technocrats because good technocrats typically have a nice mix of the old school sociopathic qualities required to succeed in business along with technical chops. They don’t like politics because they typically lack emotional intelligence, don’t comprehend the need for empathy, and think their experience is the only experience that matters. They likewise usually have a regressive ultra-utilitarian philosophy. This doesn’t apply to everyone or any actual human beings of course, but since we’re talking about abstract made up nonsense character types, might as well go along with it.
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      > In politics, the word "technocrat" is used to try to carve out a divide between specific intellectual talent and political leadership talent, implication being that these are exclusive. No, in politics, “technocrat” describes an advocate of rule by an elite of technical experts. When applied to a candidate for office, it often more specifically designates someone who sees their own self-evaluated membership in such an elite as their primary qualification for office. It does not designate actual talent, nor does it imply anything about the separation between different types of talent.
• KingOfCoders 6y ago
  The importance of being Earnest. [1] [1] Oscar Wilde, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Earnes...
• vincentmarle 6y ago
  PG is on an Aristotelian roll lately, talking about virtues and politicians... might as well read Nicomachean Ethics
• coldtea 6y ago
  And yet the most succesful founders are closer to scum than earnest...
• throwaway2245 6y ago
  Denial of the existence of white supremacy is a fun easter egg embedded in the middle of the essay.
  • disruptalot 6y ago
    The existence of white supremacy and bogus academia is not mutually exclusive. Of course it depends how you want to define it.
  • zepto 6y ago
    Obviously you’re going to get downvoted for this. But would you mind saying where the Easter egg is?
    • raphlinus 6y ago
      It's a link from the word "bogus." I'm going to expand on this a bit, possibly against my better judgment. I believe Paul Graham has a point here, and it's a good one. In intellectual pursuits, there's a spectrum from dealing purely with nature and facts, to dealing with human perceptions. To pick what I hope is a reasonably neutral example, doing the science to get containment of a fusion reaction is on one end of the spectrum. Planning and engineering a project to do it is in the middle. And making the case that carbon-based energy production poses an existential threat to humanity and that we should be investing hundreds of billions into fusion energy is on the other. All these inform each other, and I (personally) don't make a value judgment on which is most virtuous or most important. The salient thing is that Paul Graham did not choose a somewhat neutral example. Rather, he chose one that is perhaps at the very center of the culture wars, and has done so using a highly emotionally loaded word. Because he is someone who knows how to use words, I can fairly confidently conclude that he is effectively declaring his position on the issue.
      • zepto 6y ago
        Did you look at the references at the other end of that link? It seems like you are equating rejecting papers like that, with denying white supremacy. Would it be possible for someone to think that particular kind of academic work is of low value, and yet still think white supremacy is real?
• Dumblydorr 6y ago
  I earnestly think his writing has an overindulgent fandom here. Every single blog post rockets to the top and, in my opinion, they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or persuasion. He may write snappily, but is every single post worthy of Han's top slot?
  • pjc50 6y ago
    In some ways, this entire site exists to promote him.
    • jhawk28 6y ago
      It used to. If you look at the recent discussions, they have been very negative responses.
      • bonoboTP 6y ago
        I think his earlier posts were more insightful. Or I was just younger.
  • zepto 6y ago
    Yes. It’s because of who he is. If I wrote this post, it would not have the same meaning as if he wrote it. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but the reason is that we know that PG has huge experience of and access to startup founders and seen their outcomes and has had a great deal of opportunity to formulate thoughts like like this on the basis of what he has seen. I have experience of startups too. I could have written something like this, but it genuinely wouldn’t have been as meaningful coming from me, because I don’t have the same perspective as he does.
    • alecbz 6y ago
      I think if your perspective has enabled you to know things you wouldn't have otherwise, _most_ of that should just come through from the writing. It should be possible for you to write in a way that's convincing independently of who you are. A different person might not have been able to produce the same essay, but if the essay is the same, who the author is shouldn't matter too much (for a good essay).
• kabirgoel 6y ago
  > The most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia, and not surprisingly this is also the region with the highest number of successful startups per capita. I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” or “The British are terrible cooks.” Absent any evidence to back them up, many such statements in PG’s essays seem to be an expression of his prejudices. The very least he could do is to provide some criterion the reader can use to test “earnestness” at the population scale. In this case, I imagine that he started from “Scandinavia is the region with the highest number of startups per capita” and inferred that this must mean that they are more earnest, rather than going the other way around.
  • ajju 6y ago
    Why do you assume bad faith? Having worked closely with folks from many parts of Europe as an early stage founder, folks from Scandinavia certainly seem to take “naive” or “earnest” efforts of founders more seriously than other parts of Europe (or even Asia for that matter).
    • nindalf 6y ago
      GP didn’t assume bad faith. They just want some evidence for the assertion, or even an objective way to measure this quality.
      • ajju 6y ago
        PG says “the most earnest part of Europe is Scandinavia [and therefore it has more successful startups]”. Afaict GP is saying PG doesn’t believe what he is saying and is disingenuously suggesting causality just to support his main thesis.
  • nindalf 6y ago
    His posts aren’t fact based, they’re mostly an expression of his feelings. A great example are his 5-6 posts talking about how the most important facet of a programming language is its brevity (https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sexers.html https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sex...). At no point does he cite any facts backing that up. Even when the brevity chasing language he created failed to gain traction, he didn’t see that as an indication to recheck his assumptions. In other words, “feelings don’t care about your facts”. But hey, there’s a market for that sort of article. So who are we to judge?
• rst 6y ago
  Odd to see a stress on interest in a problem for its own sake from pg, who has elsewhere written that the startup economy would be crippled by raising taxes on people who had already gotten fabulously rich. If being in it for the money is "the wrong motive" to do a startup, downgrading the potential financial gains from set-for-dynasty to merely set-for-life would seem to be a way of ditching the poseurs...
  • didibus 6y ago
    > downgrading the potential financial gains from set-for-dynasty to merely set-for-life would seem to be a way of ditching the poseurs I've really started to think that inheritance is one of the biggest problem we have. Each one has the right to their own worth and riches acquired through their own effort, but if you pass those on afterwards then you create a dynasty that defeats the point of meritocracy and equality of opportunity. The incentives then become tribal, to your family, to your friends, and not simply a realization of your earnest passion.
    • selestify 6y ago
      Also, in my opinion: 1. The elite will still hand down a superior education and social connections to their progeny, so their children will still be privileged, just not ridiculously so like they are today 2. This will incentivize parents to invest more in their children's soft development, rather than just handing down their wealth and calling it a day
  • qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
    "People's motives are as mixed in Silicon Valley as anywhere else. Even the founders motivated mostly by money tend to be at least somewhat interested in the problem they're solving, and even the founders most interested in the problem they're solving also like the idea of getting rich."
    • retsibsi 6y ago
      Yeah, but the parent talks about 'raising taxes on people who had already gotten fabulously rich', not some kind of radical egalitarianism. You'd have to be very strongly money-motivated to be deterred by the prospect of merely having hundreds of millions rather than a billion, or a couple billion rather than several billion, or whatever.
• ddevine 6y ago
  Retrospectively ascribing success to character traits that we favour is subjective to the point of meaninglessness. Earnestness, like any other trait or 'virtue' is not innate or absolute. Everyone has the capacity to exhibit this trait or be seen to exhibit it, when refracted through the non-objective lens of someone else's bias and perception. For example, a politician for partyX is seen to be an earnest 'straight man' who cares deeply by his supporters, while supporters of partyY view him as a reckless oaf. To promote the use of personality traits as a predictor of success is naive at best.
  • dash2 6y ago
    Well, here is an article by a Nobel prize winner, reviewing a large amount of empirical evidence that personality traits predict success. See particularly section 4. https://www.dphu.org/uploads/attachements/books/books_4871_0.pdf https://www.dphu.org/uploads/attachements/books/books_4871_0...
• danhak 6y ago
  In my view, there is a uniquely American fiction that there exists for everyone some pursuit that both (a) will satisfy their passion and (b) be highly remunerative. Your job is to find that pursuit. And if you fail, I guess it's because you weren't earnest enough. I don't doubt that successful founders are highly motivated by the challenges of their work. But the suggestion that the point isn't to build a business and make money is, I'm sorry to say, typical of the self-serving retconning we are starting to see from those at the top. And that we have always seen from Silicon Valley: "Don't Be Evil," "We're Changing the World," "Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected." *Thanks to my mom, barber, third grade teacher, roommate, dog and barista for reading drafts of this comment.
  • 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
    Not speaking for all Americans, but I've never believed that (a) and (b) are both out there if I can simultaneously solve them. I chose to give one preference and then did the best to support the other. It's an optimization activity that may or may not achieve satisfaction on either one. It's the outliers who become wealthy doing what they love. No illusions there. The other 'responsibility' we take collectively is to strive to create circumstances where the process of pursuing (a) and (b) is not impeded by society.
    • rrdharan 6y ago
      I agree and don’t believe in the fiction either, but just because many or even most Americans do (or do not) believe in the fiction does not preclude it from being fair to describe it as “uniquely American” - in my mind OP was pointing out the origin of this worldview and the source of most of its advocacy and propagation, and I think they’re right?
    • oblio 6y ago
      > It's the outliers who become wealthy doing what they love. No illusions there. More than that, even if you love your work, there will still be moments you hate it. That's why we get paid/need rewards. People generally love an idealized version of their work, where everything works the first time, there is no grunge work, people are pleasant and cooperate with you.
• deleted 6y ago
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• TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  If you're interested in X for its own sake, you are very unlikely to want to turn that into a business. Unless you're also interested in business and money for their own sakes - both of which should trigger very justified cynicism, because there are far more effective ways to make the world a better place than by getting extremely rich after an IPO.
  • dash2 6y ago
    I disagree. There are many problems that can only be solved by a self-funding organization which sells its solutions to consumers - aka a business. Suppose I would like to build entertaining, educational toys for children. Should I do it as a hobbyist? No. If I seriously want many children to benefit, I will have to get the toys to them, and producing them will take money. Should I get a grant from a charity? No: only children can judge whether a toy is fun, and if I ask charities to be the judge I will end up optimizing the toys to appeal to the charities, not the children. (The same applies to becoming a charity myself, or to asking for a government grant.) Instead, I should sell toys to children and their parents. That way, I may be able to tell whether I have succeeded in my goal. The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback. Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism. The list of businesspeople who are genuinely interested in what they do is long. It ranges from Steve Wozniak down to your local bookshop owner. Paul Graham claims that the best businesspeople are always interested.
    • walleeee 6y ago
      > The market is a discovery mechanism. If you are serious about achieving something, you should seek useful feedback. Willingness to pay is one powerful feedback mechanism. True, but many of the markets we have are neither free nor fair. And even if they were, we should exercise caution before concluding that what is discovered is a need. Markets are equally capable of exploiting wants, socially conditioned propensities, addictions, manifestations of the subconscious, etc. Even developments which appear unambiguously good can lead to unexpected side effects and easily overlooked externalities.
• hootbootscoot 6y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYMw_dlnVH0&ab_channel=Ernest.P.Worrell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYMw_dlnVH0&ab_channel=Ernes...
• wombatmobile 6y ago
  “I am never so happy as when I am really engaged in good earnest, & it makes me most wonderfully cheerful & merry at other times, which is curious & very satisfactory.” — Ada Lovelace
• rel2thr 6y ago
  Not sure if gambling should have been lumped in with the other professions. A successful long term gambler looks a lot like a hacker in my experience
  • mkl 6y ago
    I think he means the people running casinos etc., not the gamblers.
• afpx 6y ago
  I love PG, but some of his essays lately seem to make me sad, like he's out of touch. I know plenty of earnest (and, frankly, quite talented) people. What they lack is capital and guidance (and maybe some discipline and motivation, to be fair). But, they will read a PG essay and say, "Hey! That's me! Why can't PG invest in me?". To which case, they quickly realize, "Oh, cause I can't show that I can make any money from my idea. Or, because I'm not savvy at manipulating people or presenting my ideas well." Or something like that. So, what are those types of people to do?
  • pietrovismara 6y ago
    Not much. The idea that through hard work you can get anywhere, no matter where you come from, is just a gigantic delusion and a lie we've been insistently taught to believe. There's billions of people working daily harder than any CEO just to bring food to their families. They will never become rich.
  • dash2 6y ago
    I don't think the essay argues that being earnest is sufficient to get very rich.
  • rossdavidh 6y ago
    I think the point of the essay is not that being earnest is enough to get funded, but rather than being earnest is NOT a disadvantage. There's a goodly chunk of the populace, even within tech, who might believe that it is, and I think the point of the essay is to demonstrate that it is not, and in fact it is even an advantage.
• nbzso 6y ago
  Future sadly needs more morality and honesty, the concept of monetary hyper-success created by SV has ruined the idea of balance between passionate craftsmanship and modest business enterprise. Today everyone wants to be big and powerful and we feel the impact of business size as users everyday. Success in life cannot be limited to "be a billionaire" just because. At this point in time I consider this trend as a dark religion and an evil cult.
• Bresenhams_Line 6y ago
  > Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery. How can these founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible they sound? I can't speak for someone like Kara Swisher, but attempting to channel her, I don't think she would think it is beyond belief that some hacker teenager who dropped out of a good college to work on X was earnest that they were trying to make the world better. The mockery over naivete and implausibility comes from that those teenagers will walk into a VC office on Sand Hill Road, where they will sign over various rights for the future. They will then form a Delaware corporation. With plans to raise more VC, after that an IPO, and finally dividends. Which means what? What came from those who did this in the past? - The Steve Jobs orchestrated formerly secret cabal, that included Eric Schmidt and others, to drive down engineer salaries in the Bay. - Social networks amplifying traffic saying Covid is a hoax, and here we are with 3000 dying of Covid in the US on Wednesday. - The widespread spying and surveillance of people that almost all these companies have a hand in - even Adobe has become a surveillance company. It's the thinking that the corporations that will be the IBMs, Oracles and Microsofts of the future are there to "make the world better". It is risible.
  • tim333 6y ago
    Microsoft kind of started with >“When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software,” recalls Gates. “We had dreams about the impact it could have. We talked about a computer on every desk and in every home. It’s been amazing to see so much of that dream become a reality and touch so many lives. I never imagined what an incredible and important company would spring from those original ideas.” Which is kind of world better if you like computers. Of course companies change as they grow.
• greentimer 6y ago
  "There's nothing morally wrong with starting a startup to make money." This shows how ignorant Paul Graham is on certain subjects.
  • srean 6y ago
    Could you elaborate ?
• adamsea 6y ago
  tl;dr nerds are honest good and pure (aka earnest) and thus deserving when they achieve success and wealth. Non-nerds are dishonest and impure and maybe even bad.
• Bresenham 6y ago
  > Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery. How can these founders be so naive as not to realize how implausible they sound? I can't speak for someone like Kara Swisher, but attempting to channel her, I don't think she would think it is beyond belief that some hacker teenager who dropped out of a good college to work on X was earnest that they were trying to make the world better. The mockery over naivete and implausibility comes from that those teenagers will walk into a VC office on Sand Hill Road, where they will sign over various rights for the future. They will then form a Delaware corporation. With plans to raise more VC, after that an IPO, and finally dividends. Which means what? What came from those who did this in the past? - The Steve Jobs orchestrated formerly secret cabal, that included Eric Schmidt and others, to drive down engineer salaries in the Bay. - Social networks amplifying traffic saying Covid is a hoax, and here we are with 3000 dying of Covid in the US on Wednesday. - The widespread spying and surveillance of people that almost all these companies have a hand in - even Adobe has become a surveillance company. It's the thinking that the corporations that will be the IBMs, Oracles and Microsofts of the future are there to "make the world better". It is risible.
  • LMYahooTFY 6y ago
    >The Steve Jobs orchestrated formerly secret cabal, that included Eric Schmidt and others, to drive down engineer salaries in the Bay. Can you elaborate/provide links on this one? I'm unfamiliar.
    • fullshark 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... https://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-brin-hiring-apple-2014-3#ixzz2xGmZK9nv https://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-b... https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper-trail-steve-jobs-and-eric-schmidt-didnt-want-you-to-see https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3906310/the-no-hire-paper...
  • andrewmutz 6y ago
• ghufran_syed 6y ago
  I think this essay would be more effective if the author defined what they mean by “earnest”. I think based on the essay, they mean seriousness + sincerity. But there is also a sense that the author considers “correct” as part of the definition: >“when you call someone earnest, you’re making a statement about their motives. It means both that they’re doing something for the right reasons [my emphasis] and they’re trying as hard as I can” So why assume that “interest in the problem” is intrinsically good? Do we really believe it’s not possible for a politician to be addressing the problem of “improving people’s lives” via the intermediate aim of “gaining political power”? So why wouldn’t that also be classified as “earnest”? If a gang leader is addressing the problem of “keeping our guys safe”, and therefore murders members of a rival gang who pose a threat to them, wouldn’t that also be “earnest”? Is it just because the author holds people working individually on a certain class of problems to be admirable, while having a much more negative view or politicians and criminals? [Edit: I forgot to mention that I think there are some good points in this essay, and I agree with many of them, but I think it leaves some important areas unexplored]
  • hodgesrm 6y ago
    > Do we really believe it’s not possible for a politician to be addressing the problem of “improving people’s lives” via the intermediate aim of “gaining political power”? In my limited understanding the writers of the US Constitution held exactly this belief: that the government would be run by imperfect and self-interested actors. They introduced mechanisms like separation of powers to play them off against each other to the benefit of the governed. It seems as we've moved from that focus on outcomes to judging people based on the purity of their motives.
  • selestify 6y ago
    Does PG not already define earnest as > interest in the problem for its own sake. That is the root of earnestness
  • pdonis 6y ago
    > why assume that “interest in the problem” is intrinsically good? I agree. I also think there's another aspect that the article leaves out: what is the definition of "solving the problem"? For example, another recent pg article that was on the HN front page was the one about the founders of AirBnB. Although pg didn't use them as a specific example of "earnestness", I suspect he would describe them that way. But AirBnB, at scale, has created a lot of negative externalities (and much of the HN discussion of the article was focused on that). It doesn't seem to me like dealing with those negative externalities was part of the problem the AirBnB founders were earnest about solving. And that, to me, is what we computer nerds call a security hole. If it's better to have earnest people trying to solve hard problems, then startup founders are not the only people that need to be selected for earnestness; the people that are going to run the company at scale and deal with the negative externalities it creates at scale also need to be. But those people are not being selected for earnestness at all; in fact earnestness in those positions, I would argue, is selected strongly against.
• kazinator 6y ago
  "Earnestness sounds like a boring, even Victorian virtue." Well, that's because it's even in the title of a Victorian book: The Importance of being Earnest, Oscar Wilde.
• deleted 6y ago
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• cambalache 6y ago
  These essays are getting ridiculous. We get it, you have tons of experience funding companies so it helps you to do a competent job filtering the candidates.But after that it is pretty much a crap-shoot, and all this theorizing are just post-hoc rationalizations to satisfy your ego.
  • jhawk28 6y ago
    Is he trying to stroke his ego, or is pg trying to signal to potential founders what qualities he is looking for? I would think the latter.
  • newacct583 6y ago
    I won't go that far. But I will say that, contra his earlier writing, pg's recent stuff has a real "feedback in the bubble" feel. It's still treating SV culture as it was fifteen years ago and not really willing to engage with or even nod to the way the industry and its effects on society have evolved. So e.g. Airbnb is still a hero story about disruption even as it settles into an established power and its inconvenient side effects on things like the real estate industry become apparent. It's not that he's wrong, or that I even disagree with this particular essay. I just think the world has kinda moved on from this model of innovation and we need to be solving different problems than how to make the next batch of kids rich.
    • cambalache 6y ago
      15 years ago SV was the same as now, there was never a nobler past. There has always been externalities than the tech companies are willing to sweep under the rug if it helps them to make money.
      • Tainnor 6y ago
        Yes, but the bad side-effects of e.g. fake news and hate speech on FB and Twitter, "industry disruptions" driving wages down, etc., maybe weren't all that readily apparent 15 years ago.
      • 6y ago
• benatkin 6y ago
  The word "earnest" seems a bit antiquated to me. I've rarely used it since I was a child, except in the phrase "earnest money". https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earnest-money.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/earnest-money.asp I guess "honest", "dedicated", "non-flaky", "good follow-through", and "good track record" would be terms I would use to communicate it instead. Edit: oops, I hadn't yet read the second paragraph.
• ANarrativeApe 6y ago
  As someone who has been accused of earnestness I have long maintained that Earnestness-ness-ness is the enemy. Earnestness minus humor is the enemy of building a scalable community. Churchill once defined a fanatic as someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject. To move beyond the early adopters and get through to the late majority we need to work out not how to keep the conversation on track, but how to let our audience develop it and still be able to deliver our punchline.
• cambalache 6y ago
  Another ridiculous thing of this essay is the outstanding moral character granted to SV founders. For sure, a fraction of them is guided by objectives different than money in their pursuits but that fraction is dwarfed by people in other fields, like academy, social work and NGOs. There is nothing in the startup culture that makes me thing of nobler, more earnest, more enlightened people.
• pietrovismara 6y ago
  The biggest display of naivete and arrogance to me is sincerely believing you can improve the world through capitalism. How many failed shared economy experiments did we have that only made things worse? Take AirBnb. An apparently great idea, it became popular because many needed an additional income to survive, to the point people accepted the idea of having strangers sleep in their houses for money as the norm. Beside the incredible damage AirBnb did to the housing situation in many cities -in my city, 35% of the housing is now AirBnb only. Locals have been forced out of their own city-, did the "airbnbs" ever think that the problem they were trying to solve (people in need of more money just to survive) was caused exactly by capitalism, the same mechanism they thought they could use to make the world "a better place"?
• geofft 6y ago
  This is spin, and it's important to understand why it's spin, because somewhat unusually, this essay seeks to prevent you from using your critical reasoning facilities. Here's the context: This essay is, at its core, a rebuttal to https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sexers.html https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sex... , which makes the argument that while Paul Graham is undeniably an extraordinarily successful businessman, he's not that successful of a public intellectual, and in particular that one of the major things he's tried to be a public intellectual about - namely, Lisp / programming language design - has been a field where he has basically no successes to show. For most people, that would be wonderful. I'm about 25 years younger than PG, and I've been interested ("earnestly," as he would say) in software packaging for a long time. If the Ghost of Christmas Future came to me and said, in 25 years you won't have really changed the field of software packaging but you'll be a billionaire who's helped thousands of people work on their life's dream, I'd say, wow, awesome. But that's not enough for PG, who took it as a personal attack (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1336005166626197506 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1336005166626197506 - the author of the above post was not "mad" in any sense, just trying to talk about a serious conversation) and his VC buddies attempted to rebut this "silly essay" by arguing loudly that it didn't matter if Arc failed because it wasn't important and PG has made tons of money (https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336043592339472388 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336043592339472388 , https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336056247481630721 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336056247481630721 , https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336048188264828929 https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336048188264828929, https://twitter.com/m2jr/status/1336146070485626882 https://twitter.com/m2jr/status/1336146070485626882). (Before you argue "Arc didn't fail, you're using it right now," please read the post in question, which addresses this.) So, now PG comes out with an essay arguing how "earnestness" and being "naive" is important - that being interested in a problem for its own sake is valuable, regardless of results - and throws in a comment on how "would-be intellectuals find it so difficult to understand Silicon Valley," i.e., that Silicon Valley is immune from the sorts of (constructive) criticism intellectuals usually have internally. Then he shifts gears right at the end to talking about making money and its relationship with "earnestness" (after introducing the essay by saying that they're conflicting motivations) and how ever since Henry Ford, working on the thing you're passionate about has been more closely entwined with making money. "But," you say, "this essay doesn't talk about that other essay at all! How do we know it's a response to it?" I invite you to reread this essay closely, knowing the context I'm claiming it has, and I think you'll find it makes more sense. It no longer looks like a disjointed collection of interesting ideas, and there seems to be a reason now why it's worth advocating earnestness and naivete (and dismissing Twitter critics in a footnote). What this essay has done by the end is argued, like Balaji Srinivasan did but more subtly, that it doesn't matter whether you're good at the thing you're earnest about by traditional measures; if you tried really hard and you made money, it's the ultimate sign you were good at it all along, and you don't need to evaluate your work on the merits as traditional. It's a deflection of the criticism that PG is an above-average Lisper but a world expert businessman - which is hardly a "criticism," really. PG is, without a doubt, a Lisp nerd, earnest about Lisp, but what he's shipped (extremely successfully!) is a change to how the world creates businesses, not a change to how the world writes code. But for some reason, he wants you to keep thinking of him as a successful Lisp nerd.
• maram 6y ago
  Several comments here make me want to reply with Steve Jobs email to Gawker reporter: “By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?”
  • deleted 6y ago
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• ummwhat 6y ago
  Here's an easy way to figure out where earnestness matters vs where it's just bullshitting all the way down. Are there any prodigies? Mathematics: yes. Music: yes. Real estate: no.
  • iWorshipFAANGS 6y ago
    How would you know there are no prodigies in Real estate? There are certainly children who display an early knack in resource allocation. How would a child practice real estate anyway? There are no astronaut prodigies either, as far as I know.
    • ummwhat 6y ago
      There are no child prodigy realtors because very few people are willing to take a child seriously enough to buy a house off them. The learnable part of realty (as measured on the realtors exam) is far outweighed by the bullshit part of looking the part. Astronauts per se no. But there are pilots as young as 16.
  • puranjay 6y ago
    You'll find earnestness in fields where the "system" is known, transparent, learnable, and verifiable. Musicians and mathematicians can't bullshit because other practitioners will catch on easily. In real estates and startups, the "system" is usually esoteric, highly network dependent, and non-verifiable. You can't tell if a startup founder is truly a genius, or just lucked out (or had access to his dad's millions as seed funding). Any field where knowledge remains locked away in closed networks essentially becomes the domain of bullshit. Open knowledge breeds earnestness. If everyone knew exactly how every real estate deal in the world was structured, there would be no bullshit real estate investors.
  • anubidiocane 6y ago
    > Real estate: no What about Graham Stephan?
• omalleyt 6y ago
  Every essay is about how and why Paul Graham had a hard time in high school
• iWorshipFAANGS 6y ago
  If you click on the hyperlink Paul Graham hyperlinks as "academic bogus," you'll find a google scholar search for "hermeneutic dialectic hegemonic whiteness." First of all, I don't think Paul Graham read those 5000 article returned by the search. Instead I think he just typed in a chain of academic words he thought represented useless academic research, and then told himself these "tee-hee postmodern bogus." I think this is pretty dumb, for multiple reasons. First of all, all of those terms have long historical uses in academia. -hermeneutics. Meaning close text interpretation. Probably the oldest forms of literary criticism. -dialetics. Broadly meaning "an conversation between two opposing points." Term dates back to Aristotle. -Hegemony. Meaning "a dominating power." Critical term in International relations. -Whiteness. The quality of having the color white. Also relates to the concept of race, which is an important topic in the history of America. Melville wrote about both color and race at the same time in his bogus book Moby Dick. So maybe these all have long histories, but as soon as you chain these terms together, we all know what happens: PoMo madness! Bad Faithery. I myself used to think that the "post-modern" philosophers like Derrida and Focault were all a bunch of drivel. Then I read them and I found out a lot interesting things to say. PG seems to think that all "useless" research in this is done for some non-earnest intention. This is not a new; he said in "How to Do what you love" that no one would seriously look for symbol in Conrad for fun (interesting, Genius.com seems to have tons of amateur criticism). Now it seems like he's getting a little fiestier, specifically singling out "whiteness." His site, he's free to single out whatever he wants. But the fact is that humanities research absolutely does expand human knowledge of the world, in a way that SaaS startups cannot. It's also done, if one can believe, in earnest. Feel free to tell me I'm not being fair to the article. However you respond, I'll be sure to take a few key words, stick them in google scholar search, and come back at you with a nice big BOGUS.
  • dvt 6y ago
    I'm upvoting you because I think you make a fair and well-thought-out argument. With that said, there's certainly a hand-waviness to "soft" fields like gender studies or ethnomusicology (I took classes in both, just out of curiosity). And no matter how much you think Derrida or Focault contributed to philosophy, I would argue it pales in comparison to their Analytic contemporaries (Godel, Lewis, Anscombe, Moore, etc.). I was extremely skeptical of philosophers like Nietzsche and after a couple of semesters, I definitely appreciated the Continentals a bit more -- but not enough to take him (and his ilk) as seriously as I take the aforementioned. The problem lies with falsifiability: it's too easy to claim one just doesn't "get" whiteness, or critical theory, or what-have-you. PG studied philosophy, often talking about it in a very positive light, so the claim that he doesn't see value in humanities is -- apologies -- bogus.
• timdaub 6y ago
  Blaaaa blaaa. How come earnestness is such a great virtue in that $100 billion company you had lots of shares in, but still Y Combinator's strategy is to invest as diversely as possible in as many good teams a possible since they know that > 90% of them will ultimately fail.
• escape_goat 6y ago
  What Graham is attempting to prescribe here is an unmediated engagement with a problem. In truth, "making the world better" is no less ulterior a motive in engaging with that problem than "making piles of money."
  • deleted 6y ago
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• courtf 6y ago
  > it may be possible to be completely cynical and still be very funny I guess this depends on how hard you want to laugh, but would you say George Carlin or Dave Chappelle are not cynical? I don't think earnestness and cynicism are so dichotomous.
• Alex3917 6y ago
  > Reporters literally can't believe it when founders making piles of money say that they started their companies to make the world better. The situation seems made for mockery. To be fair a lot of startup origin stories are so ridiculously fake that they seem like they could have only been created as a mockery of earnestness. Like the founders know they're lying, they know everyone else knows they're lying, and they're just doing it anyway as a weird flex or whatever. Say what you will about Bezos, but at least he was honest that he just put every CPG product into a spreadsheet and discovered that books had by far the best unit economics and flywheel potential, rather than making up some bullshit backstory story about childhood literacy or whatever.
  • dcx 6y ago
    I went looking for the source of this anecdote, I believe this is it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgzi_jUBu9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgzi_jUBu9U
    • galgalesh 6y ago
      I watch that video and I see an internet and logistics nerd who proudly explains he found the best way to build a company around it. Although it's clear that profitability is important to him, the video also shows he's deeply passionate about building this "virtual store". This gives him the incredible drive the article was talking about.
  • freshhawk 6y ago
    I don't see how you expect to sell that particular story to a group of people who have likely sat in the meetings where those BS stories were crafted. And most of whom have had more than one "oh damn, i thought we were ironically riffing but now I can't tell if they are very funny and very dry or if this person is very new and drank the kool aid and is completely earnest" moments.
• war1025 6y ago
  I think it's interesting that PG seems to so often focus on the whole "nerd" thing. Maybe it was just a happy accident of my adolescence, but the whole "nerd" stereotype never seemed to apply to anyone or be used against them. People were singled out for other reasons, but academics or interests along those lines was never one of them.
  • courtf 6y ago
    Yeah this is something he writes about regularly, and it is certainly anachronistic. I also think it's important for rich nerds to justify their position to themselves somehow, and to have some imagined hardship to point to in their past that helps explain their superiority (ha!) over the non-nerds. In reality, it's mostly a bunch of rich kids who would have been rich no matter what nonsense they got up to. Maybe not billionaire rich, but rich enough for the distinction to be sort of meaningless. I think PG falls into numerous traps in this piece, and many other posts, but I appreciate his writing all the same. In particular, I think the idea that making some business, even if trying to solve a "serious" problem, can never really be fully earnest. There is so little room for pure problem solving, it's all politics. There are more than enough talented people, more than enough funding, to solve all sorts of problems. What remains is the negotiation about who will get the opportunity. Politics.
• deleted 6y ago
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• mikewarot 6y ago
  All the earnestness in the world can't help when all you want to do is share a good idea, and make sure people know what's really possible. It drives me nuts that we still have computer virii, and a whole field of "computer security professionals", when it could all be solved, and was, but Unix short-circuited history, and we've got this mess instead.
• lawwantsin17 6y ago
  PG hardly ever writes worthy stuff anymore. Move over your Rich A Hole.
• deleted 6y ago
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• austincheney 6y ago
  Earnestness is some mix of ethics and disclosure. Perhaps truth coupled with reasonable expectations (honesty meets humility) would be a better characterization, but most people don’t really know what truth, or rather alignment, really entail in a purely communication capacity. The challenge with earnestness is not everybody can either attain or receive it. It is a gift that takes a certain level of intellectual capability and personality to appreciate otherwise it’s written off as unintelligible or an insult.
• zemo 6y ago
  he poses the idea of being earnest about something in a way that is disingenuous. > Why can't there be people interested in self-driving cars or social networks for their own sake? If you are interested in self-driving cars, but you are not interested in the effects that self-driving cars have on society, you are not actually interested in self-driving cars: you are interested in yourself. To be interested only in the problem-solving aspect of a domain is, first and foremost, to be interested in your own mastery. I am not saying that it is bad to be motivated by mastery: I am personally very motivated by mastery. It's what has kept my interest after a decade of programming professionally. I relate to being interested in a problem because it's an interesting puzzle. But we should not pretend that being interested in the aspect of solving a problem is the most genuine manner of interacting with that problem (or the opposite: that caring about the side-effects of your work more than you care about the work itself is somehow lacking in earnesty). It is not. What you are building does not stop at the problem-solving phase. How the things you build affect the world is what you have done. If we set our ethical standard at "so long as I am interested in doing the building, I am being earnest", our efforts will forever be deployed by others, perhaps with effects that do not align with our values.
  • fractionalhare 6y ago
    > If you are interested in self-driving cars, but you are not interested in the effects that self-driving cars have on society, you are not actually interested in self-driving cars: you are interested in yourself. To be interested only in the problem-solving aspect of a domain is, first and foremost, to be interested in your own mastery. This distinction seems completely semantic and vacuous. What do you call it if I'm interested in my own mastery, but only for some subset of all things I can have mastery in? Then we're right back where we started.
    • zemo 6y ago
      > What do you call it if I'm interested in my own mastery, but only for some subset of all things I can have mastery in? specialization. I don't know why you thought this question was some sort of gotcha. I'm not rejecting the idea that someone can specialize or be a domain expert. I'm rejecting PG's argument that "being earnest" means "ignoring externalities".
• kazinator 6y ago
  > Starting a successful startup makes you rich and famous. So a lot of the people trying to start them are doing it for those reasons. Instead of what? Instead of interest in the problem for its own sake. That is the root of earnestness. [2] What a load of pretentious twaddle this is. People have gotten rich on completely idiotic ideas, whereas people pursuing interesting ideas for their own sake have lived poor lives. A lot of the people forming startups to get rich are actually pretty smart and have plenty of ideas they could chase for their own sake, while becoming poor in the process. "I wanna get rich" is honest, which is close cousin of earnest. To get rich, it does have to have an interest in a particular problem domain for its own sake: the domain of how to get people to part with their money, in your favor. That's it. If you make that domain your passion, you will likely end up well-off. If any other domain is your passion, then you should probably pair up with someone whose passion is that one.
  • tim333 6y ago
    Google is perhaps a counter example - they were interested in how to index the web without much idea on how to monetize. Worked out quite well.
• georgewsinger 6y ago
  I appreciate these essays. Cannot believe all of the negativity and cynicism in the comments.
• jamesmehaffey 6y ago
  I have never bothered to classify the personality traits of the people I enjoy spending time with, but there is nothing more exciting and interesting than being around a group of nerds who are trying to solve a problem or whatever. people who never get a chance to experience that process really just cannot understand the mindset. It is nice to get paid, but I would probably want to be involved in that sort of thing anyway. I simply thought that is how nerdy and eccentric people behave.
• jonmc12 6y ago
  > Can you imagine a more important change than one in the relationship between intellectual curiosity and money? Semantics and edge conditions aside, no. I can't imagine a more important change; this is truly a concise and meaningful question. The world will be a little bit better if you ask your 3 closest peers this question. Including semantics, I believe our language must provide a thought framework to guide intellectual curiosity towards sustainability; ie, named classes of intellectual curiosity that create more opportunity for intellectual curiosity. Further, our language must meaningfully relate the concepts of intellectual curiosity, economic productivity and capital. For example, discussing the relationship between global economic productivity and the potential of a viral pandemic could frame problems in a way that promote intellectual inquiry, incentivized by capital, to preserve future economic productivity. Including edge conditions, I believe we at least need to constrain intellectual curiosity that would harm. Part of this goes back to semantics; ie, what is harm? But another component exists around cultural norms of transparency, regulation and authority.
• sidlls 6y ago
  Yet another PG essay in which he defines as positive characteristics those which he thinks he has, and in broad strokes completely dismisses the value of anything else.
• machinelearning 6y ago
  I wonder who the intended audience of this post is?
  • greendude29 6y ago
    relatively shallow startup founder wannabees, ie the kinds of people he sells his anti-intellectual "genius" to in order to make money off of.
    • machinelearning 6y ago
      Seems like he doesn't make money off of wannabees but rather the successful ones, no? PG has been quite respected in the valley for a while so its surprising to me that people suddenly dislike him. What was the turning point for you?
      • greendude29 6y ago
        > Seems like he doesn't make money off of wannabees but rather the successful ones, no? Depends on your definition of success. Founding a business that operates at loss but is subsidized in a false economy of other businesses doing the exact same thing is not a good definition of mine, and that's the vast majority of bay area startups. > What was the turning point for you? I've always found him to be an anti-intellectual, like much of modern tech.
• galaxyLogic 6y ago
  > Starting a successful startup makes you rich and famous. So a lot of the people trying to start them are doing it for those reasons. Instead of what? Instead of interest in the problem for its own sake. That is the root of earnestness. [2] I think he got the definition of "earnest" wrong. It is not about genuine interest. "Earnest" simply means something like "honestly revealing your motivations", no? What if you earnestly want to become rich and famous? What's wrong with that?
• tardismechanic 6y ago
  "You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction." Possibly the most famous verse (2-47) from the Bhagavad Gita. https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/2/verse/47 https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/2/verse/47
  • tempodox 6y ago
    That's exactly what every corporation would tell their employees.
  • booleandilemma 6y ago
    Seems like real slave morality to me. Also, that kind of attitude could be used to convince people to do some horrible things: Tasked with executing a political dissident? No problem! Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities.
    • pkd 6y ago
      It doesn't translate very well to English. The word for "duty" has way more weight attached to it. It's things you ought to do from a sense of righteousness, not things prescribed to you by some random corporation.
• foxes 6y ago
  Another Paul Graham blogspam that takes a stereotype, a limited sample of datapoints, or a simple idea, then assumes its true and then generalises it immediately to a rambling wall of text. The actual point of the article is to really just drop the -- quote -- "bogus" -- dogwhistle so all the other racists can identify them. Otherwise why would you choose that paper on such a controversial topic as "bogus"? I think all PG articles follow the same format. Why is there always some questionable example?
  • cpufry 6y ago
    yea its general tech/sv thought leader styles content. there's the other guy on twitter nevel or something? i cant remember. i hate follow a bunch of these guys idk why really. they're like living memes but also really rich with cult like following. im probably just a hater though. who can never be sure these days.
    • rebelos 6y ago
      Naval Ravikant is a bit of a "head in the clouds" type, but he does have some genuinely interesting ideas that are worth paying attention to. The problem with both Ravikant and Graham is that they're pontificating in a space where the ideas seem superficially trite but become powerful when applied. I think of Dale Carnegie's book 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' as a good illustration of this. People around here especially love to hate on it, but that's because they don't quite understand the point of it. The point of that book (and of the musings of people like Ravikant and Graham) is to explain to people that success is a product of attitude and behavior as much as it is a product of intellect. That simple ideas, routinely applied, can yield wondrous outcomes. And, perhaps most importantly, that the ingredient for success absent in most STEM-inclined minds is the capacity to restrain analytical/cynical impulses in just the right way. Neither Ravikant nor Graham is an intellectual slouch. They have noteworthy backgrounds in STEM that categorically refute any possible accusation of dimwittedness. When they decide to discuss 'soft' ideas, it's because their experience in the real world, pattern matching against countless observations made in the trenches of the tech industry, has taught them that these ideas are crucial.
  • 6y ago
• fairity 6y ago
  > It's interesting how many different ways there are NOT to be earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant, to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to be orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make. The majority of negative comments here fall squarely under the description of clever cynic. I'd wager most commenters are proud of their skepticism. Speaking truth to power makes the world a better place. But, what's the opportunity cost to being cynical? Being cynical takes energy. And, doing so in an intellectually sound manner takes even more energy.
• eloff 6y ago
  I don't understand why Paul Graham puts himself out there in the public sphere like this. To read all the haters and cynicism here that he gets in response - a lesser man like myself would just say screw it and walk away. Like his critics here are terribly accomplished people. Paul Graham is a expert with a proven track record and some multiple of billions of "market votes" behind him. But the armchair critics on HN know better. I expect that on YouTube comments, I have higher expectations here. Whatever his motivations, I enjoy his essays and find them thought provoking. I just hope the peanut gallery here and elsewhere doesn't discourage him.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • adamsea 6y ago
    He’s a great man indeed.
• lazydon 6y ago
  It's funny how a team develops their own common vocab not only for the stuff they work on (Ubiquitous Language as in DDD) but also to describe people. When a few teammates and I interview folks, other than the usual official evaluations, the best we understand each other's feedback is through this common language. A language that got unconsciously developed while interviewing and working together for years and our experiences with other folks in the organization. We are no YC, but what PG is referring to as earnest would be in our language simply "good energy". The opposite of it would be "looks tired" i.e. for someone showing completer lack of interest in what they do. Another ones would be "fighter" (one who doesn't gives up on hard problems) and "pacifier" (one who stays calm and composed that's good for handling production incidents and help team through with difficult people). To further muddy the waters, I think if the job descriptions came up with more details about the personality traits required for the job, that could help people have better job matches and satisfaction. I know it becomes too subjective if you overdo it but perhaps things like StrengthsFinder can help. On the other hand there's a risk of going too further on altogether a wrong path as it happened with Myers-Briggs.
  • TheDong 6y ago
    > When a few teammates and I interview folks ... simply "good energy". The opposite of it would be "looks tired". At our office, we have the more normal term of "easy to communicate" and "good culture fit" and so on. "Culture fit" seems like a slightly more convenient term for applying ingrained racist and sexist biases, but I guess saying any applicants who don't match your racial or socioeconomic background seem "tired" works well too! I think "looks tired" is also even more convenient for ageism than the usual "that old person didn't seem like a good culture fit". I know this is a really negative interpretation of what you're saying, but in my experience those sorts of things really are used to filter out people who aren't like you. People of different races, people who have young kids and are thus naturally tired, people who have lazy eyes, people with minor speech impediments. All of those people coincidentally have higher rates of being bad culture fits and looking tired. I wonder if pg would think those people are earnest or not.
    • lambdatronics 6y ago
• nojvek 6y ago
  At this point pg’s articles have a huge survival bias, it’s really hard to know. The only way to know is YC valuing each company on demo day 1, 5 and 10 years in the future, publicly keeping a record of predicted valuations and their hypothesis for their model Waiting 10 years and regressing to see if their model made the correct predictions. It could very well be that YC could just shoot money in dark and by the mere fact of being where talent and VCs are, companies turn into unicorns out of sheer luck and timing. We don’t know. The YC process isn’t scientific, or at-least not open to scientific scrutiny.
• spoonjim 6y ago
  It's only in Silicon Valley that earnestness, or the appearance or earnestness, is important. Here, you need to say "we're transforming patient outcomes and helping people achieve their best health." It's just not a requirement anywhere else I've worked. There are more billionaires outside of Silicon Valley than inside it, and very few of them have had to put up such pretense. They just say "we're starting a health insurance company to outcompete incumbents through better operational efficiency, delivering best-in-industry margins and double digit revenue growth."
  • lambdatronics 6y ago
    Agreed. It's sort dystopian if you ask me. It's like toxic positivity, or LinkedIn 24/7... I'm struggling to define it, but it's easy enough to evoke. Edit: OTOH, I have nothing against earnestness itself. It's just that Goodhart’s Law[0] kicks in, and then all you have is fake earnestness. [0]"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
• lambdatronics 6y ago
  > When the problems get harder than the fake ones you're given in high school, caring about them starts to matter. I wonder how much damage we're doing by forcing kids to work fake useless problems? Granted, it's tough to come up with problems that have never been solved before (nobody's expecting a PhD-level solution from a grade-school kid). However, what if we at least asked kids questions where the answer wasn't literally a list of letters for a multiple choice exam?
• thunkshift1 6y ago
  Earnest question: why do Paul grahams articles get so much coverage on hacker news?
  • mkl 6y ago
    PG created Hacker News (and wrote its code, and was the primary moderator for a long time, setting the tone).
• lkrubner 6y ago
  I like Zach Tellman's response to this: "Pretty sure Paul just called me a Renaissance man" https://twitter.com/ztellman/status/1337921811397283842 https://twitter.com/ztellman/status/1337921811397283842 At this point, my main criticism of Paul Graham is that when he's called out, he never backs down. He never admits he's wrong.
  • codeflo 6y ago
    I'm sorry, but would you care to explain the inside baseball to the uninitiated? Who is Zach Tellman, what's a Renaissance man and how does it relate to a paragraph that doesn't mention time periods, how is this calling out Zach Tellman specifically or rather, what's the backstory there, and what does any or all of that have to do with previous criticism of Paul Graham? I'm completely lost here.
    • lkrubner 6y ago
      Many of us make the assumption that Paul Graham's essay, discussed here, is partly in response to Zach Tellman's criticism, which was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25325716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25325716 The footnote, in particular, which Tellman highlights, seems to be a swipe at Tellman. It reads as Graham accusing Tellman of not being earnest. A "Renaissance man" is an old phrase, referring to someone who is good at many things (since Renaissance people like DaVinci were good at art, engineering, architecture and more). Tellman was making a joke about the laundry list of vices that Graham seemed to be imputing to Tellman. Not that the whole essay is in response to Tellman, but, the idea that Tellman's essay was on Graham's mind seems likely, especially when Graham makes the crack about Twitter.
    • itronitron 6y ago
      All I know about Zach Tellman is that he has a different definition for 'renaissance man' than I do.
• guenthert 6y ago
  "They are doomed to be the straight man. [..] it becomes an advantage later." That's not my experience (and I'm nearly as old as Mr. Graham).
• KukiAirani 6y ago
  Earnestness aligns well with the powerful idea of "Strong opinions, loosely held". Being very convinced of ones ideas, but readily willing to change them in the face of new evidence, is a trait of a person who cares a lot but also has no hidden agenda.