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> 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 fin

> 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?
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
  I think you folks are holding PG to a standard that the vast majority of essays which hit the HN frontpage would not meet. Even this critical essay looks like it fails to meet its own standard. A "profoundly unserious" writer which is "mired in intuition and incuriosity"? Nowhere in the post are these terms rigorously defined! And look! The author accuses Graham of "tantalizing the reader by reducing complex problems down to singular, nebulous concepts" without mentioning principal component analysis! "Profoundly unserious", I say. Anyway, pg himself has been clear about rejecting seriousness as a virtue multiple times. See this essay for instance http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html
  - nindalf 6y ago
    The vast majority of essays submitted to HN don’t reach the front page because the author isn’t famous. Whereas PG rockets to the top of the front page within an hour of submission. Even then, the average HN comments section is highly sceptical of any claims in any post. The top comment is usually critiquing the link for one reason or another. For some reason, that wasn’t the case with PG articles. You’re only remarking about this now because HN is finally holding PG to the same standard that others are.
    - qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
      I value PG's opinion more than a rando blogger because he's very successful, has observed a lot of data about what makes startups successful, seems unusually serious about being correct, and has written a lot of things I consider insightful in the past. He's a name I know and I click it when I see it on HN. There are a lot of other people with similar HN clout, patio11 for instance. I haven't noticed a trend for comments on PG articles to be less critical. If anything I think I've noticed users feeling a need to be more critical (as I feel your comment illustrates). It's OK to hold pg to a higher standard than others in terms of factually supporting his claims. Fine. Just be clear that you are doing so. It's fine to remind others not to take his word as gospel as well.
bonoboTP 6y ago
Scandinavian countries have very high trust societies, based on any survey that looked into this. Why that is is a difficult question and leads us very far. Is it money? Where did the money come from? Oil (but that's not there in all Nordic countries)? Lack of war? Did the lack of war come from their high trust? Or the geographic distance to warring nations and empires of Europe? Is it related to the cold environment, perhaps harder to conquer and less valuable for empires? Do social temperaments have to do with climate? Is it about their genetic homogeneity? Which one is the cause of which? If they go in cycles what influences what in the strongest way? It's a very complicated issue! It's too reductionist to take only the part "earnest, therefore startup". Sort of implying that if only other nations were also more earnest they'd also have startups and wealth, disregarding all the possibly good reasons that those other nations have not to be trusting/earnest. But it's also too dismissive to say to this that it's "national stereotyping" therefore it immediately must be false and there can be no connection at all between earnestness/trust and startups in the case of Scandinavia.
- nindalf 6y ago
  Trust is something that is defined and measurable. And yes you’re right, it is complicated. But the complexity isn’t helped by introducing a random thing called “earnestness” without a way to measure that.
- qwerty1234599 6y ago
  Scandinavian countries are not really countries. More like a family club. (This is starting to change though) When everybody is just like you, it leads to high trust, no us vs them mentality. Same is true in eg. South Korea and Japan. Contrast this with their similarily northern neighbour Russia, which is basically the America of eastern europe. A nation resulting from a melting pot of ethnicitiess, languages, cultures (most current Russians are really assimilated from smaller native cultures, their great grandparents didn't identify as Russian). And the end result? Corruption. Everybody just tries to milk public funds as much as they can, and so forth.
  - trap_chateau 6y ago
BlueTemplar 6y ago
Well, there is a well known cliché of people in Northern Europe being more cool-headed than in Southern Europe. You can see how it would translate to earnestness being more or less punished in social situations... (Yet it would also come with being more or less "cool", which is opposite to what pg suggests, so I guess I have no idea ! XD)
tcldr 6y ago
I think it’s a cultural thing. Take France. My anecdotal experience is that the bourgeoisie seem to place a certain social capital on having a degree from the right school. Entrepreneurialism is something to be studied, not attempted. Hard to take a risk with that kind of social expectation.
wott 6y ago
> What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? Experience, perhaps? As a French who lived a number of years in Scandinavia, it is day and night. It doesn't mean that people in those countries never cheat, but in France, the default attitude is cheating. Always. About everything and anything. Even when there is nothing to win and being straight or earnest would be much easier. It is exhausting. > This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” Well, this assertion is equally true :-D
kwhitefoot 6y ago
I can't speak for Sweden or Denmark but here in Norway great store is set on straightforwardness, plain speaking, and trust. Generally you are assumed to be telling the truth and if you say that you will do something then people will assume that you mean it and possess the necessary skill. This sort of atmosphere means that there is less bureaucracy involved in getting things done, paperwork is on the whole simpler than elsewhere. Doing your duty and pulling together are important features of life in Norway. Whether any of this is really the cause of there being more startups in Scandinavia than elsewhere is something I'm not able to answer, but the earnestness is certainly present. The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge of it. My personal experience is that life is simpler here than in my country of origin (UK); mostly things 'Just Work (tm)' and that might be why startups are more common.
- retsibsi 6y ago
  > The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge of it. Is this a downside, or has the rest of the word devalued its academic qualifications by lowering its standards, failing to seriously tackle cheating, and (relevant to postgraduate degrees and academic titles) prioritising novelty and sensation at the expense of rigour? I've never seen the inside of a top UK or US university, so I can't be sure that they're churning out meaningless undergrad degrees, but they certainly seem to be complicit in these trends at the level of publishing and hiring/promotion/tenure.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    The specific example I had in mind was an acquaintance who held a doctorate from Trinity, Dublin. and it was quite a while ago. So no, I don't think devalued qualifications was the issue.
romanoderoma 6y ago
> I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest, it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises. Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers have Portuguese nationality. I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia. I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the facts are definitely not there. If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with a very different idea of what being earnest means.
inopinatus 6y ago
It’s also absolutely the opposite of my experience. I’ve met a bunch of Swedes, Norwegians, Finns and Danes and they are some of the most sophisticated and cynical folks I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Perhaps the particularly dry brand of Scandinavian pragmatic irony is lost on pg because pg is too earnest to notice that they’re on the other side of a zetetic event horizon.
apsec112 6y ago
This is what you see if you look at the Perceptions of Corruption Index. That only looks at the public sector (not private companies), but one could reasonably assume the two correlate: https://jakubmarian.com/corruption-perceptions-index-of-european-countries/ https://jakubmarian.com/corruption-perceptions-index-of-euro...
varjag 6y ago
Believe it or not, Europe is actually a diverse place with numerous cultures, each with own social norms and behaviours.
Nimitz14 6y ago
I am European (Eng/Ger) and totally agree with his assessment. And yeah, most of the time, brits are relatively bad cooks.

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?

qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
I think you folks are holding PG to a standard that the vast majority of essays which hit the HN frontpage would not meet. Even this critical essay looks like it fails to meet its own standard. A "profoundly unserious" writer which is "mired in intuition and incuriosity"? Nowhere in the post are these terms rigorously defined! And look! The author accuses Graham of "tantalizing the reader by reducing complex problems down to singular, nebulous concepts" without mentioning principal component analysis! "Profoundly unserious", I say. Anyway, pg himself has been clear about rejecting seriousness as a virtue multiple times. See this essay for instance http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html
- nindalf 6y ago
  The vast majority of essays submitted to HN don’t reach the front page because the author isn’t famous. Whereas PG rockets to the top of the front page within an hour of submission. Even then, the average HN comments section is highly sceptical of any claims in any post. The top comment is usually critiquing the link for one reason or another. For some reason, that wasn’t the case with PG articles. You’re only remarking about this now because HN is finally holding PG to the same standard that others are.
  - qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
    I value PG's opinion more than a rando blogger because he's very successful, has observed a lot of data about what makes startups successful, seems unusually serious about being correct, and has written a lot of things I consider insightful in the past. He's a name I know and I click it when I see it on HN. There are a lot of other people with similar HN clout, patio11 for instance. I haven't noticed a trend for comments on PG articles to be less critical. If anything I think I've noticed users feeling a need to be more critical (as I feel your comment illustrates). It's OK to hold pg to a higher standard than others in terms of factually supporting his claims. Fine. Just be clear that you are doing so. It's fine to remind others not to take his word as gospel as well.

bonoboTP 6y ago

Scandinavian countries have very high trust societies, based on any survey that looked into this. Why that is is a difficult question and leads us very far. Is it money? Where did the money come from? Oil (but that's not there in all Nordic countries)? Lack of war? Did the lack of war come from their high trust? Or the geographic distance to warring nations and empires of Europe? Is it related to the cold environment, perhaps harder to conquer and less valuable for empires? Do social temperaments have to do with climate? Is it about their genetic homogeneity? Which one is the cause of which? If they go in cycles what influences what in the strongest way? It's a very complicated issue! It's too reductionist to take only the part "earnest, therefore startup". Sort of implying that if only other nations were also more earnest they'd also have startups and wealth, disregarding all the possibly good reasons that those other nations have not to be trusting/earnest. But it's also too dismissive to say to this that it's "national stereotyping" therefore it immediately must be false and there can be no connection at all between earnestness/trust and startups in the case of Scandinavia.

nindalf 6y ago
Trust is something that is defined and measurable. And yes you’re right, it is complicated. But the complexity isn’t helped by introducing a random thing called “earnestness” without a way to measure that.
qwerty1234599 6y ago
Scandinavian countries are not really countries. More like a family club. (This is starting to change though) When everybody is just like you, it leads to high trust, no us vs them mentality. Same is true in eg. South Korea and Japan. Contrast this with their similarily northern neighbour Russia, which is basically the America of eastern europe. A nation resulting from a melting pot of ethnicitiess, languages, cultures (most current Russians are really assimilated from smaller native cultures, their great grandparents didn't identify as Russian). And the end result? Corruption. Everybody just tries to milk public funds as much as they can, and so forth.
- trap_chateau 6y ago

BlueTemplar 6y ago

Well, there is a well known cliché of people in Northern Europe being more cool-headed than in Southern Europe. You can see how it would translate to earnestness being more or less punished in social situations... (Yet it would also come with being more or less "cool", which is opposite to what pg suggests, so I guess I have no idea ! XD)

tcldr 6y ago

I think it’s a cultural thing. Take France. My anecdotal experience is that the bourgeoisie seem to place a certain social capital on having a degree from the right school. Entrepreneurialism is something to be studied, not attempted. Hard to take a risk with that kind of social expectation.

wott 6y ago

> What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? Experience, perhaps? As a French who lived a number of years in Scandinavia, it is day and night. It doesn't mean that people in those countries never cheat, but in France, the default attitude is cheating. Always. About everything and anything. Even when there is nothing to win and being straight or earnest would be much easier. It is exhausting. > This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” Well, this assertion is equally true :-D

kwhitefoot 6y ago

I can't speak for Sweden or Denmark but here in Norway great store is set on straightforwardness, plain speaking, and trust. Generally you are assumed to be telling the truth and if you say that you will do something then people will assume that you mean it and possess the necessary skill. This sort of atmosphere means that there is less bureaucracy involved in getting things done, paperwork is on the whole simpler than elsewhere. Doing your duty and pulling together are important features of life in Norway. Whether any of this is really the cause of there being more startups in Scandinavia than elsewhere is something I'm not able to answer, but the earnestness is certainly present. The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge of it. My personal experience is that life is simpler here than in my country of origin (UK); mostly things 'Just Work (tm)' and that might be why startups are more common.

retsibsi 6y ago
> The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge of it. Is this a downside, or has the rest of the word devalued its academic qualifications by lowering its standards, failing to seriously tackle cheating, and (relevant to postgraduate degrees and academic titles) prioritising novelty and sensation at the expense of rigour? I've never seen the inside of a top UK or US university, so I can't be sure that they're churning out meaningless undergrad degrees, but they certainly seem to be complicit in these trends at the level of publishing and hiring/promotion/tenure.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  The specific example I had in mind was an acquaintance who held a doctorate from Trinity, Dublin. and it was quite a while ago. So no, I don't think devalued qualifications was the issue.

romanoderoma 6y ago

> I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest, it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises. Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers have Portuguese nationality. I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia. I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the facts are definitely not there. If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with a very different idea of what being earnest means.

inopinatus 6y ago

It’s also absolutely the opposite of my experience. I’ve met a bunch of Swedes, Norwegians, Finns and Danes and they are some of the most sophisticated and cynical folks I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Perhaps the particularly dry brand of Scandinavian pragmatic irony is lost on pg because pg is too earnest to notice that they’re on the other side of a zetetic event horizon.

apsec112 6y ago

This is what you see if you look at the Perceptions of Corruption Index. That only looks at the public sector (not private companies), but one could reasonably assume the two correlate: https://jakubmarian.com/corruption-perceptions-index-of-european-countries/ https://jakubmarian.com/corruption-perceptions-index-of-euro...

varjag 6y ago

Believe it or not, Europe is actually a diverse place with numerous cultures, each with own social norms and behaviours.

Nimitz14 6y ago

I am European (Eng/Ger) and totally agree with his assessment. And yeah, most of the time, brits are relatively bad cooks.