8 ms·

Paul Graham's articles always shoot immediately up to the top of HN, but I agree with you, they're generally cursory and pithy thoughts which don't convince my

• blackshaw 5y ago
  Because he's the founder of this website?
  • lolive 5y ago
    Just like RMS is highly respected at the FSF :)
    • thought12342 5y ago
      I don't understand if your insulting RMS but the comparison is definitely insult to RMS. RMS is the legend.
    • true_religion 5y ago
      I understand the comparison, but the FSF can exist without RMS. PG on the other hand solely supports HN, I doubt he would continue to pay for a site that vilified him.
      • troygoode 5y ago
        This is incorrect. HN is run by Y Combinator; yes, PG started YC, but he retired from YC 7 years ago.
        • true_religion 5y ago
          Oh, I had thought he stepped down from the day to day role but still had significant investment and control. There are many firms where the owner is never present, but all employees know not to cross them. (E.g. Washington Post & Jeff Bezos).
          • lupire 5y ago
            WaPo is very critical of Amazon
            • true_religion 5y ago
              That wasn’t my impression 3 years ago when I worked there.
      • N00bN00b 5y ago
        This site is mainly supported by its volunteer moderators. I doubt it cost more than a few thousand a year at most to run. So the fact that PG pays for it doesn't mean much. If the community decided to no longer be under his care, they could easily find a replacement model or benefactor and they're more than capable to arrange such an uprising/migration.
        • vinceguidry 5y ago
          What matters far more than dollars paid is having his name attached to it. I recall Scott Alexander getting the forum started around his community to remove any associations to him because of things people were saying were happening “under his watch.”
        • triceratops 5y ago
          Pretty sure dang is not a "volunteer moderator".
        • Y_Y 5y ago
          Who pays dang? He can't be so cheap to maintain.
      • kelnos 5y ago
        PG doesn't run YC anymore (he retired quite a few years back), which is the org that pays for HN.
    • ncann 5y ago
      I love RMS but unfortunately his skepticism doesn't get treated well by the vocal mass. These days people like to view things in a very black and white manner and if you dare to express your skepticism in a topic that is considered clear cut by the mass you get ostracized.
      • ravenstine 5y ago
        I liked it better when people were religious towards philosophy and universal metaphysics rather than towards technology and science. Now that traditional religion has been in decline for some time now, people have transitioned the concept of orthodoxy towards systems that are antithetical to it. This is nothing new, as there's long been a level of orthodoxy within technology groups, academia, and so forth, but now it's actual heresy to be skeptical towards anything authoritative, especially if that skepticism stems from one's own intuition. Inversely, the "skeptics" behave so skeptically towards anything contrary their views that it has the effect of making them hardly skeptical in the first place. I'm not even talking about Stallman's form of skepticism, but what I deem "pop skepticism" that's permeated the mainstream narrative. If one is so skeptical that they are potentially missing out on critical new information, that's not actual skepticism. It's a stroke of the ego for someone too insecure to be wrong about anything. This is especially true when the evidence in front of them is sound and they refuse to consider it. We are living in an intellectual decline. A true skeptic can't have any sort of controversial opinion without being socially burned at the stake.
      • foobiter 5y ago
        the skepticism he was most criticized for was playing devils advocate for a convicted rapist I support skepticism, but you don’t make arguments like that for the same reason you don’t say “hitler was great for the german economy” - it plays a major role in minimizing abhorrent crimes, whether you intend it to or not. Fighting that concept in any way makes it incredibly hard to distinguish the argument from support, especially when you’re doing so from an armchair. RMS is (was?) an expert in one thing, and outrageously naive in most other things he’s written about.
  • iur12 5y ago
    Indeed. Meritocracy, hard at work.
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    And therefore... what? We listen to him because he founded the website? Do Facebook users listen to Zuckerberg because he founded Facebook? I doubt that many do. Or do we listen to PG because the kind of people who find his writings to be interesting have some overlap the kind of people who are attracted to the website that he founded?
• cryptoz 5y ago
  PG's recent articles have changed from what they used to be. Recently (last few years) there is a dramatic change towards defending riches, logical fallacies to explain why being rich is okay, a lot of focus on wealth and how to get it and why it's okay. A lot less technically interesting than he used to post. I used to send Startup=Growth to everyone I knew. I think people are used to high-quality content from PG and so the upvotes fly - but honestly, recently, the quality isn't there. And often the content of his posts I now find quite offensive and wrong. Not very interesting any more. Mostly wealth defenses and fallacies.
  • FpUser 5y ago
    >"being rich is okay" Sure being rich is ok. As long as they make mortals better off which is not what is happening now. Rather majority of the people are getting worse for wear in the process.
  • iur12 5y ago
    This isn’t a surprise. The religion that formed here hanging off his every word subscribed to it to get rich, just like he started YC to get rich. Now he’s happily rich, barely even looks in the mirror at these adherents that he left behind, and is writing for his new friends who are also rich. It was always pointless snake oil but the Sand Hill Greed here made everyone overlook that because maybe, just maybe, the key to get into YC and skip the bread line was buried in the ninth paragraph of some polemic from a guy who figured out retail in Lisp and somehow convinced a greed-seeking generation of hackers that he had all the answers. I’ll take my -4 for hitting close to home. The grayer I get — silencing unpopular ideas by making them grayer was his idea too — the more confident I’m right. We stopped telling you folks you were following someone who only cared about your impact on his RoI because that sort of unwashed heathen isn’t welcome here. Paul Graham, YC, and this creation of his on which we speak now has done more to distort and destroy any foundation of computing remotely paying attention to making the world better than almost anything before it, and while I’m happy to see people finally figuring out that it just might be bullshit, it’s a bit too late.
    • exhaze 5y ago
• EvilEy3 5y ago
  > Think of all the amazing writers across our civilization whose work is linkable Can you give some, please? I'm probably one those folks who cannot distinguish decent from amazing blog posts.
• sushisource 5y ago
  OTOH, the top comment is a criticism. So, probably not all is lost :)
  • idlewords 5y ago
    The front page giveth and the comments taketh away
    • ladon86 5y ago
      This is a really funny and pithy description of both HN and reddit - and according to Google, you're the first person ever to say it.
      • CRConrad 5y ago
        Any hits for the grammatically correct form "The front page giveth and the comments take away"?
• wanderer2323 5y ago
  PG is apropos for this forum, but beyond that he is plainly a good writer. I don't know who you consider 'amazing writers across our civilization' -- but whether it is Gracian or Scott Alexander, PG shares one thing with them, namely that his works will be quoted beyond the lifespan of his contemporary readers.
  • mattzito 5y ago
    It's impossible to know for certain, of course, but it seems highly unlikely that any of those writers will be quoted beyond the lifespan of contemporary readers (except potentially in scholarly books about rationalism/startups/etc). How many authors from the 1940s are still widely read, especially for essays/non-fiction?
    • InitialLastName 5y ago
      Excepting the WWII memoirs (because I'm not sure how I want to count either Anne Frank, Elie Weisel or Winston Churchill in terms of "authors from the 1940s"), among authors whose nonfiction works are still read, there are a few names that do occur to me: George Orwell, Friedrich Hayek, Simone de Beauvoir, John Maynard Keynes, Jean-Paul Sartre For fiction there are obviously many more whose works have come through to frequent readership: Hemingway, Shirley Jackson, Albert Camus, C.S. Lewis, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Ayn Rand to name a few.
      • wanderer2323 5y ago
        Lewis would be my example for nonfiction. Narnia is fun and all, but it's stuff like "The Inner Ring" (https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/ https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/) where he really shines.
        • three14 5y ago
          Normally I wouldn't comment just to say the equivalent of +1, but I hadn't encountered "The Inner Ring" before, and it's great! Thanks for the recommendation.
• hexhex 5y ago
  My two cents on why his writings are popular: - He uses anecdotal evidence which appears to be sound at first. Looking at the top 100 billionaires seems to give a good idea on how wealth is created and distributed, but really it is only a glimpse at a much bigger phenomenon (especially since the data only comes from two years). - His style of writing is very accessible and natural. He wrote an article on his style (http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html), and it seems to strike a chord with technicians who prefer this over more complicated prose. I feel these are the same reasons for why effective altruism is so popular among technicians. It offers clear cut answers, and avoids uncomfortable questions.
  • jrochkind1 5y ago
    Also his conclusions are what some people want to hear, that confirms their worldview. This is not at all unique to PG, you and I and everyone does the same thing, at least to some extent, in choosing what argument/opinion pieces (now the dominant form of textual media?) we are tickled by.
  • milesskorpen 5y ago
    Same reason Malcolm Gladwell is popular — it's pop science/economics/whatever, made to be readable and digestible, but over simplifies (and sometimes falsifies) in the process.
    • jonny_eh 5y ago
      At least Gladwell's writings are not so obviously self-serving.
  • tommyderami 5y ago
    Could you expand on the last sentence a bit more regarding effective altruism? Are the uncomfortable questions related to the utilitarian nature of how the movement racks and stacks the causes they choose to support or not?
    • hexhex 5y ago
• simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  Because he's famous (especially among the HN crowd), he's certainly smart, and it appeals to the bubble of internet startuppers that lurk in HN. Paul, and to a similar or even larger extent Sam Altman, and others, seem detached from reality, in the sense of the common man. Perhaps each one of us lives in a bubble of sort. His is immediately apparent to me, despite I kind of belong to the same crowd he preaches to. I don't think his intent is evil nor bad. I think he genuinely enjoys writing and thinking about deep stuff, and I am grateful that he shares his thoughts with the world.
• freewilly1040 5y ago
  There's a bias some people hold that people who are very wealthy must also be very wise.
• hardwaregeek 5y ago
  There's a cycle with blogs. The author starts a blog and they have a distinct, somewhat original voice with distinct, somewhat original views. In PG's case, the startup advice about building stuff that doesn't scale, not worrying about competitors, Lisp, etc. were quite fresh, at least to me. The author's blog becomes successful and their ideas become well understood throughout a community. But a person's ideas don't evolve that quickly. They start repeating themselves. The posts become variations on a theme. Maybe the author goes outside their area of expertise (No offense, but I trust PG's advice on startups a lot more than his advice on macroeconomics). By the end people are wondering what you're wondering. Why are we listening to this person?
  • kelnos 5y ago
    > No offense, but I trust PG's advice on startups a lot more than his advice on macroeconomics That's the key bit for me. I've found his writing about startups, software, hacker culture, product development, etc. to be mostly great and informative. But whenever I see anything he writes about society as a whole, I tend to find the conclusions he draws to be pretty out of line with reality, or at least (in the cases where I don't have data) counter to my experience and opinion.
    • airstrike 5y ago
      Unpopular opinion: this is similar to Stephen Hawking's gloomy predictions for AI
  • derekp7 5y ago
    In other words there is a brand identity associated with the articles. And brand identity is a time/effort savings device employed by human minds when making a determination on what to consume. You see this with consumer products all the time; for example the audiophile world may turn their nose up at Bose, but in the consumer space Bose is recognized as a known quantity (may be over priced for the quantity of quality you get but is recognized as not being extremely subpar generic).
  • aerosmile 5y ago
    You liked his idea that for a startup to scale, you should be doing things that don't scale. That article has mostly anecdotal evidence, and yet nobody ever pushed back on it. How do we know PG was right back then? (He was.) A few years later, that same guy writes an extensive essay with footnotes and data that must have taken days to compile (going all the way back to 1892). And yet, this one rubs you the wrong way. I am not defending PG or attacking you, but just consider this explanation as a possibility: when it comes to how to build a startup, you don't really have skin in the game. Whatever he says, it's unlikely to impact your life. But the minute we start talking about the Gini coefficient, the stakes are higher - it's getting political. Suddenly, it's like listening to Rush Limbaugh make an argument - isn't it clear that no Democrat will ever agree with anything that Rush has ever said, no matter how factual or not it is? I, for one, appreciate PG's ability to tie together global macro movements in a way that I've never heard anyone else summarize. You might agree or not with his take on the Gini coefficient (and especially his lack of acknowledgement or suggestions on how to deal with its consequences), and you might also get frustrated that PG is starting to dabble in politics, which is going to make him very polarized no matter how right or wrong he is. But there's still a ton of useful advice in this essay no matter which side of the political fence you stand on (eg: in 2021, if you're debating between entrepreneurship and finance/VC, choose entrepreneurship).
• random314 5y ago
  It is funny to read pg's take on wealth tax, given that Piketty has produced massive scholarly literature suggesting the exact opposite of what pg writes. If the pg's wealth tax blog was supposed to counter Piketty's work, it is comically pedestrian.
• jacques_chester 5y ago
  > I don't know, can someone explain why his work is so popular? It's a prosperity gospel for nerds: you are the special chosen ones, therefore you deserve every blessing. Anyone who says otherwise is sinful and blind to the holy truth.
• oscargrouch 5y ago
  Its the same reason any tweet by Elon Musk saying stupid stuff get 300k likes instantly.. Its about who say and not about what is being said. If you don't hack your mind from a philosophical perspective you wont stop this tribal hard-coded neural trigger of this automatic authority following. This is the only thing that can save us from being that person in the 30's Germany photos raising their hands and chanting 'Sieg Heil'. Remember that this is hardwired, but it worked somehow because we used to be packed in small communities where everyone knew each other. Now the same "wiring" is being used the same way, but now with a virtual global tribe, where we actually don't really know the people that is being granted authority or why we are supposed to follow them, because we simply follow them giving everybody is also doing it. Just observe yourself more often and question even the things you take for granted before doing it. You will see a lot of these things are actually unreasonable giving their actual context.
• rattray 5y ago
  > can someone explain why his work is so popular? He's an important person to our field, and he's contributed quite a lot to it (including, for example, this forum). That does count for something. However, to me if anything it really just confirms yet again that even great people can become thoroughly warped by wealth and fame. His wealth tax piece was quintessentially unconvincing and self-serving, and many of his recent tweets and posts have done much more to pat himself and his peers on the back than to contribute convincing or useful analysis.
• tubularhells 5y ago
  He is rich, and makes people rich. All the kids starting their tech company want to suck up to the man with the golden touch.
• lupire 5y ago
  "It turns out" (to use a popular pg phrase used when proof is too inconvet to produce) that pg is well liked among pg's fan club website users.