4 ms·
Naval on the Age Question: You Create for Sex
- portLAN 19y agoUpvoted for combining multiple relevant sources including Douglas Adams into one post.
- mechanical_fish 19y agoMost of the article is reasonable - except for the bit about the "sublimated sex drive". Did this guy just step out of a time capsule? Freudianism is past its expiration date. I call foul. The idea that nerds are nerds because they can't get a date - that serious math is something that the sexually satisfied wouldn't bother with - is a pernicious stereotype, and if you're gonna flirt with that argument in the 21st century then you're gonna need data. Real data, not one-shot anecdotes like the life of Paul Erdos. (I'll see your Paul Erdos and raise you the thrice-married Richard Feynman. Now it's your turn: name a celibate jazz musician.) If the urge to create software comes from a sublimated sex drive, why hasn't the world ground to a halt since we installed 24-hour vending machines for free porn on every programmer's desktop? Was reddit founded by eunuchs? How can YC possibly compete with all those live webcams and chat rooms?
- menloparkbum 19y ago"Modern entrepreneurship, especially web entrepreneurship, is extremely competitive / time sensitive, requires enormous amounts of iteration even within a single product life-cycle, and often requires solving many challenging technical and business problems one after the other in a public view (with the opposite sex watching)." This doesn't make sense. Every web entrepreneur knows the opposite sex isn't watching.