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None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. I granted him "entrepreneur" sta

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.
  - coldtea 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 Pics or it didn't happen. >I didnt because HN comment boxes are not vehicles of long essays. (...) Far too much effort to spend on a crowd whose faith in pg's intellectual status is based on his money-making ability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtracking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtracking
    - mjburgess 13y ago
      It isnt back tracking when at the time you made the comment you said it was an off-hand comment. It isnt "backtracking" to criticize a person for one thing while you are doing another. Jon Stewart criticizes news programs whilst his program isnt a very good news program. Fortunately he's in the comedy business. Equally, my off-hand comment isnt a very good essay but fortunately I didnt post it to an Essays section of a website and then go and read it to a conference audience.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      >It isnt back tracking when at the time you made the comment you said it was an off-hand comment. So, it isn't backtracking if you pre-emptively declare that you are backtracking. Right. >It isnt "backtracking" to criticize a person for one thing while you are doing another. Jon Stewart criticizes news programs whilst his program isnt a very good news program. Fortunately he's in the comedy business. Unfortunately the similarity doesn't hold, because Jon Stewart doesn't also say "I can do a much better news program than them", whereas you did said that you could write a respectable "5k word essay on this very small point" (and then didn't). >Equally, my off-hand comment isnt a very good essay but fortunately I didnt post it to an Essays section of a website and then go and read it to a conference audience As if the section of website where something is published matters one iota. It's not like having an essays section necessitates that you only put George Steiner quality material in it. Heck, Zed Shaw has an essays section on his website. Also, you keep mentioning this conference audience a lot -- Sounds like sour grapes to me. As if Defcon is some elite philosophical conference, and Paul Graham failed to keep to the level of previous speakers, like Plato or Heidegger.
jswinghammer 13y ago
Nothing he said is out of line with what a lot of classical liberals were saying throughout the 19th century and they were refining ideas that basically go back to Aristotle. If echoing their thoughts qualifies one to be a pseudo-intellectual then I'm going to guess in horror at what you consider to be genuine intellectual thought.
- mjburgess 13y ago
  He isnt "echoing their thoughts" any one who has read Adam Smith systematically would know that the very first few lines of this are explicitly rejected by him. They're childish research-lite versions of a 50s-style classical liberalism. It is much the same as Ayn Rand another amateur philosopher who knew very little on the topics she was writing about. I dislike the "talking head" approach to serious topics. I dont think "giving your opinion" excuses a lack of serious research. Half-baked, under-informed opinion isnt truth or even the attempt to reach it; regardless of whether it is phrased with feigned objectivity. I wouldnt be too annoyed if he wasnt glorified by other $-eye'd idiots.
  - jswinghammer 13y ago
    And anyone who has done any serious reading of economics is well aware that Smith is hardly considered authoritative on any subject in economics. His only insights are almost word for word copies from Cantillon. I'm not the biggest fan of Rand but she's far from a joke. Her writings deserve to analyzed and taken as seriously as any other philosopher. I don't know if PG is the right about everything he says or even most of what he says but he has inspired a lot of people to do things (largely for the good of society). A philosopher could hope for little more I suspect (not even suggesting PG would self-ascribe that term but I would ascribe it to him).
  - ars_technician 13y ago
    >I dislike the "talking head" approach to serious topics. Similar to your unsubstantiated comment about Ayn Rand?
    - 13y ago
coldtea 13y ago
>None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. You don't get insights into these by getting a degree from some university on the subject. You get insights into those things by studying them, practical experience, and more importantly thinking. If anything, the most clueless people in those areas I know are tenured professors. And REAL thinkers, the kind that leave a mark in history, from Socrates to Sartre and from Kierkegaard to Popper and Wittgenstein to leave it to philosophy, are full of scorn for academia in general and professors in particular, and even if they sometimes happen to be working as such themselves, they are greatly atypical to their "churn papers" colleagues. Not that pg is on that level, but critisizing him because "none of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on" is bullshit. Your a priori abstract attack that he lacks insights has no meat at all behind it. You could just as well have said that "he has tons of insight into what he writes" -- and it would be exactly the same. If you want to provide something worthwhile, do a SPECIFIC critique of what he wrote somewhere, and tell us what is wrong with it by providing counter-arguments and rebuttals.
- mjburgess 13y ago
  > the most clueless people in those areas I know are tenured professors. Not about the subjects they research. That is the purpose of research. > are full of scorn for academia in general All of those people are academics par execellance. I'm not talking about business-ified institutional academica. I'm talking about spending a long time on a topic, researching it and thinking deeply, clearly on it before you offer your opinion as though it were valuable. > do a SPECIFIC critique of what he wrote somewhere I have on one of his essays, but I took it seriously to write that critique. The audience I would be targeting in a critique of the man (via a critique of his under-informed rants) are those who equate money with success and "money-making" with intelligence. I value my time too much to spend the amount required undoing that confusion.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >the most clueless people in those areas I know are tenured professors. >>Not about the subjects they research. That is the purpose of research. They are cluless _especially_ about the subjects they research. Most philosophy, political economy etc academics are beyond mediocre -- not only in advancing their field, but even in understanding the greats who contributed to it and rightfully presenting their knowledge. Most real development comes from outsiders to this system -- people incombatible with academic life, even if they happen to work as professors (like Adorno or Wittgenstein did for example). And that was true already in the '40s and '50s, were academic discourse and research freedom in those fields was extremelly better compared to (market driven, low quality, paper churn) today's reality. >The audience I would be targeting in a critique of the man (via a critique of his under-informed rants) are those who equate money with success and "money-making" with intelligence. Oh, those poor fools. Because there are other, proven, definitions of success that everybody should ascribe to, right? >I value my time too much to spend the amount required undoing that confusion Yep, I expected this part.
mortyseinfeld 13y ago
None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. It's pretty creepy calling people "intellectuals" if they babble on about "political economy".
scythe 13y ago
The comment you linked fails to substantially address the article you claim to critique. You basically quoted him once on a rather controversial point and said "I disagree with this quip!". This particular sentence is hilarious: > if you have any serious reading on the last two hundred years of economic, political and sociological critiques of capitalism, wealth and power It seems like you're calling Paul Graham a pseudo-intellectual not because he's posturing, but because you disagree with him. You don't address any of the actual claims in the article, but you do call them "silly". Here's the problem with your response to that one quote you took out of context: >"The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption? We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power." >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. It's a matter of degree. Many countries which rank low on various measures of corruption are nonetheless capitalist (New Zealand, Sweden, etc). Many countries which are socialist nonetheless suffer nepotism of the form Graham described in his previous example (Argentina, Zimbabwe, etc). Sure, it's a "small off-hand point", but it's the only part of your comment which isn't simply an insult without any backing. >One's ability to make money - to have one's skills suit the market; or to be lucky - has nothing to do with the value of your opinions or how frequently/prominently they should be offered to the rest of us. This is not related to the essay you had claimed to respond to. It apparently represents drawback of inequality, but it is left up to the reader to magically grasp your intuition that this drawback exceeds the benefits Paul Graham claims may be derived by rewarding those who are successful in business endeavors. One way to phrase this comment in a mature, reasonable way would be the following: "I think that the lacuna between the abilities of rich and poor to communicate to a large audience makes the level of inequality Graham advocates in society unacceptable." I might respond as follows: since people can only consume a finite amount of information, there will always be a situation where only a tiny minority have the ability to broadcast their views effectively. It is not clear to anyone how to identify in an objective manner who is most deserving of a wide audience, and so no society which has attempted to restrict this has ever succeeded in improving the quality of media reporting (but please provide examples!). In fact, essentially all societies which replace "communication by the rich" with "communication by the community-endowed-communicators" have even less reliable media than capitalist countries, consider e.g. Pravda. Thus your claim about inequality does not really provide much basis for an alternative, nor is it a problem specific to monetary inequality per se. >None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. Actually, a great deal of the essay Inequality and Risk focuses on the motivations of entrepreneurs, which, considering that he has worked with dozens of them, one would expect him to be in a uniquely important position to address. He usually does a pretty good job sticking to what he does know in this and many other essays. I downvoted you. In this and your subsequent comments you show little willingness to contribute to the discussion in any but a superficial way, and you provide little substantial argument or evidence to back up your repeated insults. Since you have been commenting on this thread (we can see your timestamps) for over an hour, one would expect it to be worth your time to write a comment that is worth reading.
pdonis 13y ago
Most of this is just bluster and argument from authority. The only substantive critique I see you making here is that pg's suggestion about decoupling wealth and power won't work because wealth is power. But your definition of "power" is "increased ability to do something", whereas pg's implicit definition of "power" was "the ability to corrupt important social processes that are supposed to treat everyone fairly". So I don't see the force of your critique: pg and you can both be right. Wealthy people can have more ability to do things even if there are systems in place to prevent them from corrupting particular processes that are considered worthy of such protection.
grifpete 13y ago
I read your comment. And the article you were commenting on. To be honest I found your comment shallow and mean spirited. You didn't present a true criticism of the article. You simply alleged that it was lame. Ironically, whilst you may be correct that being an entrepreneur will not give a person insights into philosophy, he happens to have a degree in philosophy so perhaps that gives him some insight. More specifically, he has a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Cornell University. As for his achievements not giving him insight into 'anything else he writes on' that appears to me to be patently silly. A good deal of what he writes on is about entrepreneurship. All in your criticism smacks to me of small minded jealousy. It's a familiar pattern - small petty people trying to boost their flagging self esteem by trying to tear down those who have achieved.

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.
- coldtea 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 Pics or it didn't happen. >I didnt because HN comment boxes are not vehicles of long essays. (...) Far too much effort to spend on a crowd whose faith in pg's intellectual status is based on his money-making ability. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtracking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtracking
  - mjburgess 13y ago
    It isnt back tracking when at the time you made the comment you said it was an off-hand comment. It isnt "backtracking" to criticize a person for one thing while you are doing another. Jon Stewart criticizes news programs whilst his program isnt a very good news program. Fortunately he's in the comedy business. Equally, my off-hand comment isnt a very good essay but fortunately I didnt post it to an Essays section of a website and then go and read it to a conference audience.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >It isnt back tracking when at the time you made the comment you said it was an off-hand comment. So, it isn't backtracking if you pre-emptively declare that you are backtracking. Right. >It isnt "backtracking" to criticize a person for one thing while you are doing another. Jon Stewart criticizes news programs whilst his program isnt a very good news program. Fortunately he's in the comedy business. Unfortunately the similarity doesn't hold, because Jon Stewart doesn't also say "I can do a much better news program than them", whereas you did said that you could write a respectable "5k word essay on this very small point" (and then didn't). >Equally, my off-hand comment isnt a very good essay but fortunately I didnt post it to an Essays section of a website and then go and read it to a conference audience As if the section of website where something is published matters one iota. It's not like having an essays section necessitates that you only put George Steiner quality material in it. Heck, Zed Shaw has an essays section on his website. Also, you keep mentioning this conference audience a lot -- Sounds like sour grapes to me. As if Defcon is some elite philosophical conference, and Paul Graham failed to keep to the level of previous speakers, like Plato or Heidegger.

jswinghammer 13y ago

Nothing he said is out of line with what a lot of classical liberals were saying throughout the 19th century and they were refining ideas that basically go back to Aristotle. If echoing their thoughts qualifies one to be a pseudo-intellectual then I'm going to guess in horror at what you consider to be genuine intellectual thought.

mjburgess 13y ago
He isnt "echoing their thoughts" any one who has read Adam Smith systematically would know that the very first few lines of this are explicitly rejected by him. They're childish research-lite versions of a 50s-style classical liberalism. It is much the same as Ayn Rand another amateur philosopher who knew very little on the topics she was writing about. I dislike the "talking head" approach to serious topics. I dont think "giving your opinion" excuses a lack of serious research. Half-baked, under-informed opinion isnt truth or even the attempt to reach it; regardless of whether it is phrased with feigned objectivity. I wouldnt be too annoyed if he wasnt glorified by other $-eye'd idiots.
- jswinghammer 13y ago
  And anyone who has done any serious reading of economics is well aware that Smith is hardly considered authoritative on any subject in economics. His only insights are almost word for word copies from Cantillon. I'm not the biggest fan of Rand but she's far from a joke. Her writings deserve to analyzed and taken as seriously as any other philosopher. I don't know if PG is the right about everything he says or even most of what he says but he has inspired a lot of people to do things (largely for the good of society). A philosopher could hope for little more I suspect (not even suggesting PG would self-ascribe that term but I would ascribe it to him).
- ars_technician 13y ago
  >I dislike the "talking head" approach to serious topics. Similar to your unsubstantiated comment about Ayn Rand?
  - 13y ago

coldtea 13y ago

>None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. You don't get insights into these by getting a degree from some university on the subject. You get insights into those things by studying them, practical experience, and more importantly thinking. If anything, the most clueless people in those areas I know are tenured professors. And REAL thinkers, the kind that leave a mark in history, from Socrates to Sartre and from Kierkegaard to Popper and Wittgenstein to leave it to philosophy, are full of scorn for academia in general and professors in particular, and even if they sometimes happen to be working as such themselves, they are greatly atypical to their "churn papers" colleagues. Not that pg is on that level, but critisizing him because "none of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on" is bullshit. Your a priori abstract attack that he lacks insights has no meat at all behind it. You could just as well have said that "he has tons of insight into what he writes" -- and it would be exactly the same. If you want to provide something worthwhile, do a SPECIFIC critique of what he wrote somewhere, and tell us what is wrong with it by providing counter-arguments and rebuttals.

mjburgess 13y ago
> the most clueless people in those areas I know are tenured professors. Not about the subjects they research. That is the purpose of research. > are full of scorn for academia in general All of those people are academics par execellance. I'm not talking about business-ified institutional academica. I'm talking about spending a long time on a topic, researching it and thinking deeply, clearly on it before you offer your opinion as though it were valuable. > do a SPECIFIC critique of what he wrote somewhere I have on one of his essays, but I took it seriously to write that critique. The audience I would be targeting in a critique of the man (via a critique of his under-informed rants) are those who equate money with success and "money-making" with intelligence. I value my time too much to spend the amount required undoing that confusion.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >the most clueless people in those areas I know are tenured professors. >>Not about the subjects they research. That is the purpose of research. They are cluless _especially_ about the subjects they research. Most philosophy, political economy etc academics are beyond mediocre -- not only in advancing their field, but even in understanding the greats who contributed to it and rightfully presenting their knowledge. Most real development comes from outsiders to this system -- people incombatible with academic life, even if they happen to work as professors (like Adorno or Wittgenstein did for example). And that was true already in the '40s and '50s, were academic discourse and research freedom in those fields was extremelly better compared to (market driven, low quality, paper churn) today's reality. >The audience I would be targeting in a critique of the man (via a critique of his under-informed rants) are those who equate money with success and "money-making" with intelligence. Oh, those poor fools. Because there are other, proven, definitions of success that everybody should ascribe to, right? >I value my time too much to spend the amount required undoing that confusion Yep, I expected this part.

mortyseinfeld 13y ago

None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. It's pretty creepy calling people "intellectuals" if they babble on about "political economy".

scythe 13y ago

The comment you linked fails to substantially address the article you claim to critique. You basically quoted him once on a rather controversial point and said "I disagree with this quip!". This particular sentence is hilarious: > if you have any serious reading on the last two hundred years of economic, political and sociological critiques of capitalism, wealth and power It seems like you're calling Paul Graham a pseudo-intellectual not because he's posturing, but because you disagree with him. You don't address any of the actual claims in the article, but you do call them "silly". Here's the problem with your response to that one quote you took out of context: >"The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption? We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power." >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. It's a matter of degree. Many countries which rank low on various measures of corruption are nonetheless capitalist (New Zealand, Sweden, etc). Many countries which are socialist nonetheless suffer nepotism of the form Graham described in his previous example (Argentina, Zimbabwe, etc). Sure, it's a "small off-hand point", but it's the only part of your comment which isn't simply an insult without any backing. >One's ability to make money - to have one's skills suit the market; or to be lucky - has nothing to do with the value of your opinions or how frequently/prominently they should be offered to the rest of us. This is not related to the essay you had claimed to respond to. It apparently represents drawback of inequality, but it is left up to the reader to magically grasp your intuition that this drawback exceeds the benefits Paul Graham claims may be derived by rewarding those who are successful in business endeavors. One way to phrase this comment in a mature, reasonable way would be the following: "I think that the lacuna between the abilities of rich and poor to communicate to a large audience makes the level of inequality Graham advocates in society unacceptable." I might respond as follows: since people can only consume a finite amount of information, there will always be a situation where only a tiny minority have the ability to broadcast their views effectively. It is not clear to anyone how to identify in an objective manner who is most deserving of a wide audience, and so no society which has attempted to restrict this has ever succeeded in improving the quality of media reporting (but please provide examples!). In fact, essentially all societies which replace "communication by the rich" with "communication by the community-endowed-communicators" have even less reliable media than capitalist countries, consider e.g. Pravda. Thus your claim about inequality does not really provide much basis for an alternative, nor is it a problem specific to monetary inequality per se. >None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on. Actually, a great deal of the essay Inequality and Risk focuses on the motivations of entrepreneurs, which, considering that he has worked with dozens of them, one would expect him to be in a uniquely important position to address. He usually does a pretty good job sticking to what he does know in this and many other essays. I downvoted you. In this and your subsequent comments you show little willingness to contribute to the discussion in any but a superficial way, and you provide little substantial argument or evidence to back up your repeated insults. Since you have been commenting on this thread (we can see your timestamps) for over an hour, one would expect it to be worth your time to write a comment that is worth reading.

pdonis 13y ago

Most of this is just bluster and argument from authority. The only substantive critique I see you making here is that pg's suggestion about decoupling wealth and power won't work because wealth is power. But your definition of "power" is "increased ability to do something", whereas pg's implicit definition of "power" was "the ability to corrupt important social processes that are supposed to treat everyone fairly". So I don't see the force of your critique: pg and you can both be right. Wealthy people can have more ability to do things even if there are systems in place to prevent them from corrupting particular processes that are considered worthy of such protection.

grifpete 13y ago

I read your comment. And the article you were commenting on. To be honest I found your comment shallow and mean spirited. You didn't present a true criticism of the article. You simply alleged that it was lame. Ironically, whilst you may be correct that being an entrepreneur will not give a person insights into philosophy, he happens to have a degree in philosophy so perhaps that gives him some insight. More specifically, he has a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Cornell University. As for his achievements not giving him insight into 'anything else he writes on' that appears to me to be patently silly. A good deal of what he writes on is about entrepreneurship. All in your criticism smacks to me of small minded jealousy. It's a familiar pattern - small petty people trying to boost their flagging self esteem by trying to tear down those who have achieved.