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pg, a pseudo-intellectual? I'm frankly surprised you've been here for 2 years and never realised. You see the ycombinator in news.ycombinator.com? In this web

pg, a pseudo-intellectual? I'm frankly surprised you've been here for 2 years and never realised. You see the ycombinator in news.ycombinator.com? In this website? That's pg's company. Do you know what ycombinator is? That he started the seed funding movement? That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups? Before lean startup existed? That he's written his own dialect of LISP? That he started and sold his own startup in the early days of the web? And that, now this is some serious respect, it was actually written in LISP? That's not cultish, it's earned respect and pg's got it in buckets around here. Crikey. Little drunk, but crikey, talk about having absolutely no fucking clue. The guy's a machine of intellectualism, most things he turns his mind to he de-constructs, encapsulates and then explains brilliantly. Yeah, occasionally he's wrong, especially when he tries to justify certain aspects of exploitative capitalism, but damn he's good. Very good. And that response was classic pg as grellas said.

rsl7 13y ago
pg started the seed funding movement? puh-leeeze.
- mattmanser 13y ago
  I meant seed accelerator.
seiji 13y ago
That's not cultish I am disinclined to acquiesce to your assertion. Listing accomplishments is okay. Listing accomplishments paired with fawning and idolatry is cultish.
- mattmanser 13y ago
  disinclined to acquiesce Oh dear. But anyway, given that I actually pointed out I disagree with him in some aspects, how is that fawning? The guy's got a history that reads better than any of us here could probably hope for and he writes some amazingly well thought out and well reasoned essays. I'm don't idolize him, I think he's more intelligent than me. Which I say about very, very few people. I think it's absurd to call him a pseudo-intellectual.
  - mjburgess 13y ago
    > Which I say about very, very few people. Going by your personality as demonstrated here it seems you idolize intellect so when you "think he's more intelligent than" you you're going to put him on a pedastle. This may seem natural to you, but it comes across as fawning and misplaced.
    - mattmanser 13y ago
      You can determine my personality from a single comment? Wow. I'm sure the NSA wants to hire you.
    - mattmcknight 13y ago
      ...but you've invented the idolatry here. To dig into word choice here a bit. You attack someone for placing a value on "intellect", but criticize pg for being a "pseudo-intellectual". One interpretation of this is that you regard an "intellectual" to be something other than person who effectively used their intellect. Instead, you seem to regard an intellectual as a person who expresses conformity with the majority view of American academia (i.e., a modern liberal who isn't fond of markets.)
    - Blahah 13y ago
      *pedestal
- Confusion 13y ago
  If I list the accomplishments of the current Pope and explain how great I think he is doing and has always been doing and how he is just an awesome person, then I'm being cultish... even though I'm an atheist? Your argument does not make any sense at all. It's a string of words ordered to seems to mean something rational, while it is in fact complete gibberish. Listing accomplishments paired with fawning and idolatry is ... exactly that. Reverence, not cultism.
mjburgess 13y ago
None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. I granted him "entrepreneur" status. He can have "compu-sci" intellectual too. You can see my comment here on his pseud-osity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 to save repeating myself.
- tvladeck 13y ago
  I read the linked comment, and some of your other comments on the topic on this thread. You took this into meta meta (yea, 2x) territory. Not the actual issues, not the person who wrote the linked essay (pg), but the people discussing the person discussing the issues. Why would you do that? And furthermore, how can you possibly feel you survive your own critique of "pseudo-intellectuals"? This is you [0] spouting amateur social science: > Umm... how about in a capitalist society money is the vehicle of positive freedom... to increase ones ability to do something on has to have more money. Therefore under capitalism there is always a fundamental tie between money and power. Which, by the way, I have no problem with. A well-regarded logical fallacy is "appeal to authority", the contrapositive of which implies that we should judge arguments on their merit regardless of where they come from. So if people find some writing illuminating, attack the logic, not the writer, and not the readers. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150
  - mjburgess 13y ago
    It's "amateur social science" in the sense that it's an "off-hand comment". I could write a 5k word essay on this very small point and make it respectable, I didnt because HN comment boxes are not vehicles of long essays. If pg's observations were confined to small discussion threads on HN i wouldnt have much issue. But he presented the article I mentioned at Defcon. And his "Essays" section are presented as essays, not "off-hand comments". > Why would you do that? I'm responding to the questions raised in the most convenient way. I'm not going to give a serious critique of the many essays which require it to make a small point about his blase approach to serious academic topics. Far too much effort to spend on a crowd whose faith in pg's intellectual status is based on his money-making ability.
pwang 13y ago
I don't know you, Matt, and I certainly don't have a beef with Paul Graham - I have much respect for him. But, the specific components of your encomium do not recommend you. More specifically: > That he started the seed funding movement? Um, people were doing seed rounds before YC. For like, decades. They weren't blogging about it, because there was no HTTP and HTML and always-on broadband, but crikey, how the hell do you think half of silicon valley started? > That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups? I don't even know what this means. Every true startup is fundamentally a hack; it's probing at the boundary of the risk frontier. (I'm not talking about those VC dice rolls on the flavor du jour, manifest as a bunch of brogrammers with zero understanding of the time value of their own risk profile.) For "hack startups <v.>" to make sense, one would have to infer a new usage of the word "startups", namely, to refer to the pattern-matching herd mentality of tech VC dealmaking and The Great Game of Deal Flow. Partially driven by real opportunity and partially driven by the wealthy exodus from equity markets in a post-HFT world, the modern funding bubble has led to a difficult climate for seed-stage companies, and Paul & YC are merely taking advantage of that impedance mismatch between them and traditional VCs. But to imply that there is some fundamental new structure that Paul discovered with YC is absurd. Incubators & incubation is a decades-old concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_incubator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_incubator > Before lean startup existed? The term "lean startup" started being popularized in 2011 by Eric Ries. This is less than three years ago. There are innumerable things older than this. Actually, there are few truly noteworthy things in the technology space that cannot be described as existing "before lean startup". > That he's written his own dialect of LISP? I think many LISPers have done this. Isn't the whole point of LISP to write your own dialect of it for each problem? Anyways, I just wanted to point out that your list is not very impressive at all, and the fact that they impress you doesn't really reflect well on you.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- grifpete 13y ago
  I would be curious to know what PG has done to earn your respect as nothing above does.
vvvVVVvvv 13y ago
Hacking startups ? Is there such a thing ?

rsl7 13y ago

pg started the seed funding movement? puh-leeeze.

mattmanser 13y ago
I meant seed accelerator.

seiji 13y ago

That's not cultish I am disinclined to acquiesce to your assertion. Listing accomplishments is okay. Listing accomplishments paired with fawning and idolatry is cultish.

mattmanser 13y ago
disinclined to acquiesce Oh dear. But anyway, given that I actually pointed out I disagree with him in some aspects, how is that fawning? The guy's got a history that reads better than any of us here could probably hope for and he writes some amazingly well thought out and well reasoned essays. I'm don't idolize him, I think he's more intelligent than me. Which I say about very, very few people. I think it's absurd to call him a pseudo-intellectual.
- mjburgess 13y ago
  > Which I say about very, very few people. Going by your personality as demonstrated here it seems you idolize intellect so when you "think he's more intelligent than" you you're going to put him on a pedastle. This may seem natural to you, but it comes across as fawning and misplaced.
  - mattmanser 13y ago
    You can determine my personality from a single comment? Wow. I'm sure the NSA wants to hire you.
  - mattmcknight 13y ago
    ...but you've invented the idolatry here. To dig into word choice here a bit. You attack someone for placing a value on "intellect", but criticize pg for being a "pseudo-intellectual". One interpretation of this is that you regard an "intellectual" to be something other than person who effectively used their intellect. Instead, you seem to regard an intellectual as a person who expresses conformity with the majority view of American academia (i.e., a modern liberal who isn't fond of markets.)
  - Blahah 13y ago
    *pedestal
Confusion 13y ago
If I list the accomplishments of the current Pope and explain how great I think he is doing and has always been doing and how he is just an awesome person, then I'm being cultish... even though I'm an atheist? Your argument does not make any sense at all. It's a string of words ordered to seems to mean something rational, while it is in fact complete gibberish. Listing accomplishments paired with fawning and idolatry is ... exactly that. Reverence, not cultism.

mjburgess 13y ago

None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. I granted him "entrepreneur" status. He can have "compu-sci" intellectual too. You can see my comment here on his pseud-osity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 to save repeating myself.

tvladeck 13y ago
I read the linked comment, and some of your other comments on the topic on this thread. You took this into meta meta (yea, 2x) territory. Not the actual issues, not the person who wrote the linked essay (pg), but the people discussing the person discussing the issues. Why would you do that? And furthermore, how can you possibly feel you survive your own critique of "pseudo-intellectuals"? This is you [0] spouting amateur social science: > Umm... how about in a capitalist society money is the vehicle of positive freedom... to increase ones ability to do something on has to have more money. Therefore under capitalism there is always a fundamental tie between money and power. Which, by the way, I have no problem with. A well-regarded logical fallacy is "appeal to authority", the contrapositive of which implies that we should judge arguments on their merit regardless of where they come from. So if people find some writing illuminating, attack the logic, not the writer, and not the readers. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150
- mjburgess 13y ago
  It's "amateur social science" in the sense that it's an "off-hand comment". I could write a 5k word essay on this very small point and make it respectable, I didnt because HN comment boxes are not vehicles of long essays. If pg's observations were confined to small discussion threads on HN i wouldnt have much issue. But he presented the article I mentioned at Defcon. And his "Essays" section are presented as essays, not "off-hand comments". > Why would you do that? I'm responding to the questions raised in the most convenient way. I'm not going to give a serious critique of the many essays which require it to make a small point about his blase approach to serious academic topics. Far too much effort to spend on a crowd whose faith in pg's intellectual status is based on his money-making ability.

pwang 13y ago

I don't know you, Matt, and I certainly don't have a beef with Paul Graham - I have much respect for him. But, the specific components of your encomium do not recommend you. More specifically: > That he started the seed funding movement? Um, people were doing seed rounds before YC. For like, decades. They weren't blogging about it, because there was no HTTP and HTML and always-on broadband, but crikey, how the hell do you think half of silicon valley started? > That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups? I don't even know what this means. Every true startup is fundamentally a hack; it's probing at the boundary of the risk frontier. (I'm not talking about those VC dice rolls on the flavor du jour, manifest as a bunch of brogrammers with zero understanding of the time value of their own risk profile.) For "hack startups <v.>" to make sense, one would have to infer a new usage of the word "startups", namely, to refer to the pattern-matching herd mentality of tech VC dealmaking and The Great Game of Deal Flow. Partially driven by real opportunity and partially driven by the wealthy exodus from equity markets in a post-HFT world, the modern funding bubble has led to a difficult climate for seed-stage companies, and Paul & YC are merely taking advantage of that impedance mismatch between them and traditional VCs. But to imply that there is some fundamental new structure that Paul discovered with YC is absurd. Incubators & incubation is a decades-old concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_incubator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_incubator > Before lean startup existed? The term "lean startup" started being popularized in 2011 by Eric Ries. This is less than three years ago. There are innumerable things older than this. Actually, there are few truly noteworthy things in the technology space that cannot be described as existing "before lean startup". > That he's written his own dialect of LISP? I think many LISPers have done this. Isn't the whole point of LISP to write your own dialect of it for each problem? Anyways, I just wanted to point out that your list is not very impressive at all, and the fact that they impress you doesn't really reflect well on you.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
grifpete 13y ago
I would be curious to know what PG has done to earn your respect as nothing above does.

vvvVVVvvv 13y ago

Hacking startups ? Is there such a thing ?