8 ms·

Re: What You Can't Say

95 points by kf 17y ago

blasdel 17y ago
There are largely two categories of "things you can't say", that by all "community standards" are obscene: Prurience: http://www.asstr.org/files/Collections/Alt.Sex.Stories.Moderated/Year97/3923.txt http://www.asstr.org/files/Collections/Alt.Sex.Stories.Moder... Politics: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/
- vsync 17y ago
  A little more warning than that might have been nice.
deleted 17y ago
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dennisgorelik 17y ago
Why Paul's article doesn't have a date on it?
- ynniv 17y ago
  Archive.org goes back to 2004: http://web.archive.org/web/20040207184543/http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html http://web.archive.org/web/20040207184543/http://www.paulgra...
warwick 17y ago
It took me a couple re-readings of the first page or so, because I didn't understand that these were responses to some objections you got. I spent several minutes trying to decide if French Literary profs might be able to publish physics journal articles in your scenario. I eventually decided they would be able to, since the physics journals would now be run by French Literary theorists.
- deleted 17y ago
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- dennisgorelik 17y ago
  That's a good point about publishing physics articles in physics journals ran by French Literature theorists :-)
- jodrellblank 17y ago
  As a physics journal editor you could publish articles by French lit. profs which would save their lives, but which any competent physicist would see were clearly bluffs, so wouldn't you be somewhat obliged to do so?
  - Tichy 17y ago
    I am not that sure about the integrity of physics. Maybe with quantum physics, you can also get away with talking a lot of nonsense. Edit: I don't claim that quantum physics is nonsense, just that in the name of quantum physics a lot of strange ideas have been put forward. My impression is that quantum physics is sound (mathematically), but I remain doubtful about "many worlds", for example.
    - pmjordan 17y ago
      I'm not entirely sure (my physics days are a few years back), but I think the most nutjob papers are probably published in particle physics. (leaving aside metaphysics, which is philosophy, not physics) I doubt you can publish a QM paper which doesn't use any fairly involved maths, and the maths is probably the easiest giveavay. In particle physics, you might be able to get away with postulating particles you just made up if your justification is long enough and you have pretty diagrams showing where in the hierarchy of particles it appears. As a bonus, come up with yet another model to explain the existing particles. In fairness, I'm partly basing this on my experiences with professors in the subjects, all of whom managed to publish papers in their fields. :) The other strong factor determining your success would be the choice of journal you're submitting to. You're hardly going to pick Science, Nature or Physical Review Letters (PRL). In any case, my money is still on physicists getting published in French literary journals.
trapper 17y ago
Similar relationships exist in sport. Gymnasts can take up nearly any sport and excel. Swimmers can barely walk :) Gymnasts are the physicists of movement.
- forensic 17y ago
  That's not because swimmers aren't physically fit though (physical fitness being the comparison to intelligence) it's because swimming is more specialized than gymnastics. You really can't say gymnasts are more fit than swimmers, just that gymnastics is a more versatile sport so you learn a wider range of abilities.
  - trapper 17y ago
    It's nothing to do with fitness or being specialized. It's about "movement IQ" or "coordination capacity" for lack of a better term. Gymnasts typically have a huge talent reserve, and move to other sports and often dominate. It's why many national talent programs use gymnastics as their foundations. Swimming tends to attract the less talented for some reason, and these people don't adapt well to other sports. To paraphrase pg: Take some swimmers and gymnasts and tell them they have to learn each others discipline or be executed. Who's the most worried? Funny anecdote: a recent olympic swimming team failed to ride to the stadium in Beijing because most of them couldn't ride bikes.
    - giardini 17y ago
      The best gymnasts are short people; the best swimmers are not. There are always exceptions (Janet Evans). Short people have certain advantages in gymnastics due to the physics of motion. Years ago tall men and women did compete in Olympic gymnastics but do so rarely today. In today's increasingly competitive world, we find only short gymnasts in the top tier. Competitors will go so far as to change birthdates to get younger (ergo smaller) gymnasts into competition. "to paraphrase pg: Take some swimmers and gymnasts and tell them they have to learn each others discipline or be executed. Who's the most worried?" I don't think the gymnasts swim times would be nearly as good as the swimmers. Nor do I think the swimmers would perform as well as the gymnasts at gymnastics. Each sport has evolved to the point where body type must be taken into account. But consider a more realistic hypothetical: Put a swimmer and a gymnast in a room and tell them only one of them can come out. My money's on the swimmer!8-)) Finally, as Randy Newman once sang: http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Short-People-lyrics-Randy-Newman/3244F1D30051F75E48256A370048B6FA http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Short-People-lyrics-R... "Short people got no reason to live. They got little hands Little eyes They walk around Tellin' great big lies They got little noses And tiny little teeth They wear platform shoes On their nasty little feet"
kierank 17y ago
Smart people might work on sexy projects like fighter planes and space rockets for ordinary wages, but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs. I don't agree that this is the case. Many smart people don't see the need to be rewarded in a financially appropriate way. (Those that do make their way into finance or startups eventually). Look at institutes such as the CSIRO in Australia for science/technology in general or the BBC for broadcasting technology.
- gaius 17y ago
  The BBC's a good example, how long have they been working on their own Dirac codec? That's taxpayer's money they're spending. Sure it probably makes a few geeks happy but remember - these geeks know fully well that if they tried to do that outside the safety of the BBC, they'd starve. At the end of the day, in the private sector you get stuff done because if you don't you don't eat.
  - thristian 17y ago
    You seem to be implying that the BBC's Dirac work has produced no useful results; I would disagree. Sure, it's not the format-of-choice of BitTorrent users, and it hasn't cropped up in the endless discussions of the <video/> element in HTML5, but that doesn't mean it's vanished. A subset of Dirac colloquially called Dirac Pro has been standardised by the SMPTE as "VC-2" (Windows Media Video was VC-1): http://sonofid.blogspot.com/2008/02/vc-2-progress.html ...and there's a company selling professional video-encoding hardware using the Dirac Pro codec: http://www.numediatechnology.com/products.html Wikipedia says "Dirac Pro was used internally by the BBC to transmit HDTV pictures at the Beijing Olympics in 2008": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_%28codec%29
    - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
      you missed the point. in the private sector you don't need to justify costs back and forth to each other...either the product is wanted at its current production costs or it isn't. would it be used if consumers had to pay the full cost of its development? or do they only use it because those costs were offloaded to the taxpayer and it can essentially be given away?
unalone 17y ago
Dismissing socialism is as silly as dismissing capitalism would be. There is no simple answer to society: The best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of socialism there. Similarly, perhaps Paul was criticized for his dismissal of French Literature professors because a lot of people realized what a stupid blanket statement he made. Just because it's easier to bullshit about literature doesn't mean the whole of literature is bullshit. That's like assuming that just because math is about simplistic formulas, the entirety of math is simple to comprehend. I don't know much about French literature, but what I do know of it tells me that by learning about it, I'd be learning not just about literary theory but about French sociology, French history, and the feelings behind France at various moments in times. There's an incredible amount of information in literature. It's not a bug that it's subjective in nature and prone to debate. That's the feature.
- chrispine 17y ago
  But it wasn't a blanket statement (applying to all french lit profs equally). It was a generalization (a reference to the average intelligence of french lit profs). It's meant to be understood in the same way that "men are taller than women" is meant to be understood; a counter-example will get you nowhere here.
- joss82 17y ago
  Even in a capitalist society, you need some socialist parts. The best example would be the roads. Who paid for it ? Tax payers. End everyone is happier for it.
  - perokreco 17y ago
    Actually in many more socialist countries, highways and some urban roads are payed by the people who use them. Better examples are military and police force.
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    Adam Smith gives the example of paying for roads by road tolls in his book The Wealth of Nations. In the United States, much of state and federal funding for highways is derived from a tax on gasoline and diesel vehicle fuel, to much the same effect. The ultimate incidence of ALL taxation is on consumers (and everyone is a consumer), as any competent economist will tell you. These forms of paying for roads are not socialism, by any definition of socialism that I have ever seen, but they are forms of taxation that allocate the cost of using the tax-supported, publicly available resource rather well.
spazmaster 17y ago
If you live in Holland, that last point is pretty much a no-brainer. Politicians are constantly accusing each other of saying things that are 'not done'. We have our wannabe-Fortuyn (Geert Wilders) at the moment. Heck, a politician just stepped down for not adhering to 'the code' another sign we're not that tolerant. We're just tolerant about homosexuality and drugs.
- stingraycharles 17y ago
  The world mistakenly confuses us for a tolerant country: we're not. We're just indifferent.
rms 17y ago
This was in response to one of the replies here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956774 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956774 (showdead=on required to see) Specifically, this response is what I wanted to bring up. The fact that you can't say something doesn't mean it's true. I believe this is implicit in "So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today." In an earlier version I made this point explicitly, but it seemed repetitive, so I cut it.
haon99 17y ago
Not to be a jerk, but "[Copernicus] was forced into it, because it was the only way to make the numbers come out right" just isn't correct. Tycho Brahe's measurements showed that Ptolemy's model was more accurate than Copernicus's. The point still stands that Copernicus transcended his time, but he was really riding on the coattails of Ptolemy's genius. Ptolemy never gets enough credit...
- stcredzero 17y ago
  Really, Copernicus' accomplishment was that his model worked very well yet left out a huge heap of epicycles. Heliocentric = fewer epicycles. That was Copernicus' contribution. This pales in comparison to Kepler's "Equal areas in equal time." That observation is a very strong hint towards Newtonian mechanics and Calculus.
  - jimbokun 17y ago
    This makes me think of over-fitting in machine learning algorithms. The epicycles fit the data very well, but added a lot of parameters to the model. It makes me wonder if there is a bias/variance trade off for scientific models, but I don't know how to express the connection formally. In machine learning algorithms, we hold out a dataset to test for over-fitting. We don't exactly have a spare universe to test our scientific models for over-fitting, but maybe if there were a second planetary system at the time to test against it would have been clear sooner that the "epicycles" model fit only this solar system from the vantage point of earth? Maybe you could "train" the model on some heavenly bodies, then test on others? I'm pretty sure I'm making a fool of myself at this point and missing something obvious, and I'm hoping one or more of you will point that obvious thing out to me.
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      Kepler's ellipses fit the data with an even simpler model. Newton added an underlying model which could be generalized to hypothetical bodies. In other words, you could plan something like an Apollo mission with it. I doubt you could do something like that with the Copernican, Ptolemaic, or even the Keplerian model. Newton's model gave you enough insight to hack. And not just surface hacks, but deep hacks. Everything before was merely descriptive. Newton's model also showed convergence. The way the planets moved became connected with the way cannonballs behaved. Mechanics could also subsume models of buildings and machines. Engineering and architecture were unified by Newtonian Mechanics. It's not just a matter fitting. It's a matter of transcending current models. (Another reason to study different programming languages/paradigms.)
bartl 17y ago
For most of these points I don't even understand what he's trying to say.
- jey 17y ago
  Context: http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html
  - bumblebird 17y ago
    Again, I am shrugging. Whatever you say, someone will complain.
  - Sukotto 17y ago
    I find this really annoying about Paul's otherwise insightful and interested articles. Namely that he assumes you know everything he's written and when and what it was called and that you know how to easily find it so you can understand the context. Paul, would you PLEASE date your articles (and RFS for that matter) and link to whatever it is you're talking about?
    - iamwil 17y ago
      No worries. If you don't know, just ask on here, and one of us will know. It's not like you don't read HN. but I'd have to agree about dating articles and blogposts. It's not just pg, but everyone.
    - philwelch 17y ago
      To be fair, unless someone goes and posts the URL to Hacker News or something, the only way you'd get to this post is by reading "What You Can't Say" and reading the links at the bottom. His top-level essays do have the date on them.
alex_c 17y ago
What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal? Well, actually... http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  That's a funny link, but you really, really don't want to open up the "are physics or computer scientists smarter" debate, a lot of people here probably don't want to know the truth.
- m0nty 17y ago
  And also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n "Jan Hendrik Schön (born 1970) is a German physicist who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs that were later discovered to be fraudulent.[1] Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics in 2001, the Braunschweig Prize in 2001 and the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002."
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  Note that this appears to be a scam conference. The people who pulled this prank were proving that the conference had bad reviewing practices, not that the study of physics does: http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~jz/sci/ http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~jz/sci/
sfk 17y ago
"There are indeed things you can't say in Holland. Oops, yes, I forgot about the fate of Pim Fortuyn." I live in the Netherlands (as opposed to "Holland"), and this poor rhetoric device beats everything I've read about the matter in terms of oversimplification and naivety.
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  "and this poor rhetoric device beats everything I've read about the matter in terms of oversimplification and naivety." It would be useful to the rest of us(who don't live in Holland) if you could explain why the "rhetoric device" is "poor", "oversimplified" and "naive" (vs a bald statement that it has all these qualities).
  - AndrewDucker 17y ago
    Because the murder of one person says nothing about the attitudes towards freedom of speech across a whole country.
    - plinkplonk 17y ago
      It might say something about countries with large numbers of unassimilated minorities (in this case mostly Muslim). That aside, pg's point was that even in Holland (which he uses as an example of a "tolerant" country), there are negative consequences to actually saying "can't say" things. E.g: Many things about Islam and its prophet are (in practice) "can't say"/undebatable things (without assuming a serious risk of getting killed).
  - sfk 17y ago
    Fair enough. Long before he went into politics, Fortuyn, a columnist and frequent guest in talk shows, had always expressed opinions that were not politically correct. I do not remember him being ostracized for those opinions in any manner. On the contrary, many people found him witty and refreshing. In fact he would be a prime example of a charismatic person getting away with saying things that other people would be called upon. Naturally, many people disagreed with him. A single individual - possibly deranged - killed him. Both of these facts do not imply in any way that you cannot say certain things in the Netherlands.
JulianMorrison 17y ago
French Lit is harder. Much harder per Kolmogorov complexity, but even if you're running it on monkeys, getting the right answer out to the limits of evidence would be a huge work of detective and archeological and historical study far beyond the source text. You would be attempting to reconstruct someone's mind from the outside in, with very fragmentary life-logs. IOW, French lit only seems easy because academics aren't aiming to be right. They just want an informed guess. In physics, this is considered the start of an investigation, not the end product.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  Having had some training in classical lit. and [previously] gone out with a girl reading French Lit. at university I cant help but agree. I expect a Physicist could write enough to fool a French Lit. magazine - but only superficially. I dont think they could write meaningfully on a subject. I also know a few literary students who I suspect could write a sufficiently obtuse piece of work in, say, a month to fool some physicists. Again only superficially. I think the fallacy Paul falls into is the thinking that French Lit. professors don't question what they read in the same way Physicists do. Unfortunately it's a stereotype that does bear out in some respects - but the top guys certainly do question everything. Indeed they will almost certainly disagree by default and go out of their way to find proof. If you think you've seen scientists bitching and arguing you've never hung round with literature scholars :D
- tokenadult 17y ago
  French lit only seems easy because academics aren't aiming to be right. But that is the whole problem: whether or not the discipline aims to be right. I am very closely acquainted with a relative who has a Ph.D. in French literature, and he literally would rather die than attempt to earn even an undergraduate degree in physics.
- anamax 17y ago
  > French Lit is harder. What definition of "harder" are we using? In physics, there's at least the illusion that there's a "correct" answer. If your theory predicts that a cubic meter of gold has less mass than a cubic meter of water, you've got a serious problem. In literature, there is no "gold standard" to use as a referee or to consult in helping to make a decision.
david927 17y ago
physicists are smarter than professors of French Literature I would tend to say the opposite. Paul, you're mixing up here what I would call "savantism" with intelligence. We know that there is no true definition of intelligence, but I think whatever the definition ends up being, it has to be based more on understanding than just knowledge and mechanizations within that knowledge. Who would be more afraid, in your scenario, between the physicist and a Cantonese scholar? if [Finland] seems that much more socialist than the US, it is probably simply because they don't spend so much on their military Exactly. So it's not about dismissing Socialism (especially since all modern countries operate on both Socialistic and Capitalistic principles), as much as making an argument as to what the upper tax bracket should be. And for that, I would look at companies that have tremendous bonus systems. (I won't exhibit the obvious.) Are they more productive? Do they take more risks? What are the benefits and consequences of those risks? Personally, I'm not as concerned about the marginal incentive between $10 million and $1 billion as I am that a society, as a whole, functions, and doesn't degenerate into something "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".
- wlievens 17y ago
  It's not so much what the upper bracket should be, it's about what the threshold for the bracket needs to be! In Belgium, the top bracket of 50% starts at about 32,000 euro's. In addition to that, there's a separate flat social security tax of 13%, meaning that my marginal tax rate is about 60% - with a mediocre salary.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
    - wlievens 17y ago
      I definitely agree with the fact that good services cost money. And I don't mind paying a high tax rate per se, but when almost every full-time worker ends up in the highest bracket, something is wrong.
- Tuna-Fish 17y ago
jstevens85 17y ago
What do academic economists actually have to say about the link between entrepreneurship and taxation? My impression is that new tech companies start in response to new technological opportunities and have little to do with marginal tax rates. Hewlett Packard 1939 - Top Income Tax Rate 79% Intel 1968 - 75% Microsoft 1975 - 50% Adobe 1982 - 50% Google 1998 - 40%
- falsestprophet 17y ago
  Income tax rates are a red herring. In general, entrepreneurial activity is taxed as long term capital gains. You can see those rate are more attractive. Hewlett Packard 1939 - 63% (1 year holding) to 23% (10 year holding) Intel 1968 - 25% Microsoft 1975 - 20% Adobe 1982 - 20% Google 1998 - 20% source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_capital_gains_tax_in_the_U.S http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United.... If at any point I experienced a tax rate of 98%, I imagine I would not be highly motivated to earn more money.
  - jstevens85 17y ago
    Yet the Beatles continued to pump out more than one album a year. I think there are incentives other than money - fame, status, power, creativity, curiosity etc.
    - KC8ZKF 17y ago
      Bad example. The Beatles only released albums for seven years, then quit.
      - jstevens85 17y ago
        Not exactly. Paul McCartney subsequently released 22 studio albums, Lennon 8, Harrison 10 and Starr 15. I think we can safely say that all four would have already been in the top income tax bracket from their Beatles royalties alone. Yet they were somehow motivated to continue making music.
Create 17y ago
but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs. Life in the Soviet Union would have been even poorer if they hadn't had American technologies to copy. semiconductors: it wasn't e-commerce plumbing driving it, but fear from Sputnik and its consequences (mobile computing ...in Minutemen). That wasn't entrepreneurship (no risks taken on behalf of "entrepreneurs") at Bell either: state subsidized monopoly which was somewhat acknowledged a little later with the babies. The Valley had its paying customers before anything to "market" (see HP f[o]unding letter). light bulbs: that's a dead horse kicked around too often. plumbing of e-commerce: being in the right circle helps (No Such Ancestors). Btw. Minitel "3615" was there way before on scale with the actual plumbing (net and terminal used to sell services from the armchair countrywide [amazon/paypal/etc do not serve every country either]). Also from State Monopoly. The Kahns in the USA never ran any risks. And life in Afghanistan is as poor as it was, America has copied the Soviet Union.
euroclydon 17y ago
" If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible." Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson didn't believe the Bible to be literally correct. It's well documented. Jefferson even went as far as to create his own Bible, editing out most miracles, the resurrection, and immaculate conception.
- jswinghammer 17y ago
  We can be more general than that. It wasn't really until the fundamentalist movement that people felt inclined to defend the literal truth of the Bible. Catholics historically (going back to Augustine) have believed that parts of the Bible like the creation account in Genesis are allegorical rather than literal. They wouldn't have gone as far as Jefferson (obviously) but it's sort of a myth that Christians have always felt the need to defend the literal truth of everything in the Bible.
- ericb 17y ago
  Agreed--don't forget Thomas Paine. The whole "Christian Nation" thing peeves me. http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/part1.html#1 http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_...
- crystalis 17y ago
  I'm not sure that Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson count as "people in 1830" in the same way that the Salem Witch Trials might constitute "people in 1692". I'm also of the opinion that you should also account for the other two points, even if to say that you don't mean to refute them by refuting the third.
  - euroclydon 17y ago
    I am not trying to refute the other two points, I just quoted the whole sentence so it would make sense. I would like to think that the 1700s and 1800s represented a golden age in American religiosity, where our political and cultural leaders were deeply spiritual, yet not biblical literalists. Now, it seems that dialog has broken down and we are in fractious camps. I'm sure I am just romanticizing the period though.
diego 17y ago
Thought experiment: would this essay be at the top of HN if Paul Graham wasn't its author?
- thras 17y ago
  You can't say that.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Of course not. Neither would "Things You Can't Say".
  - jimbokun 17y ago
    I remember that "Things You Can't Say" was picked up and discussed a lot by people with no connection to hacking or technology. Several political blogs made their list of predictions for ideas today that will be considered barbaric in the future, for example. I specifically remember Andrew Sullivan linking to it (my favorite political blogger).
    - tptacek 17y ago
      It may have been successful (though it also tells bloggers what they want to hear, and does so with a stamp of authority --- the fact that it came from a tech/startup person adds novelty for political bloggers, and probably subtracts nothing). That's kind of not my point. I'm actually a lot more interested in what jimbokun really thinks of the article than what Andrew Sullivan thinks about it. What's the insight you got from it? That thinking forbidden thoughts is, in fact, like stretching your brain?
  - wglb 17y ago
    I disagree. I showed the original article to several friends of mine who are in no way hackers and had no idea who Paul was and they all felt that it was a very good, thoughtful article.
seanc 17y ago
The reason I forbid my children to use words like "fuck" and "shit" is not that I want them to seem innocent, but because these words are ill-mannered and contribute nothing to communication. For me that's not why. I don't let my seven year old curse for the same reason I don't let her use power tools (yet). They require skill and can be a bit dangerous if you don't use them properly. I suppose if I sat down and thought about it I could come up with an appropriate occasion for my seven year old to curse. But then to explain that corner case to her and expect her to manage it isn't worth the effort. And for my four year old it's simply not possible. My kids will figure out these rules on their own, in due time.
- pfedor 17y ago
  If you ask parents why kids shouldn't swear, the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like "it's inappropriate," while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations. -- (also from a Paul Graham's essay)
  - nvn1 17y ago
    ' while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations' - one or all of which might be correct?
  - tptacek 17y ago
    "If you ask parents why kids shouldn't [violate social norm X], the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like 'it's inappropriate', while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations." I see no loss of meaning, but that's probably because there's so little meaning in the dismissive little excerpt you've chosen to deploy here. My kids aren't allowed to swear either, for exactly the same reason that this commenter gave. People who think words can't be dangerous, especially for a 10 year old, seem likely to me to be leading sheltered and confined lives.
  - junklight 17y ago
    my rule is simple - they can use the words when they understand (properly) what they mean. Meanwhile we explain they are "grown up" words and they shouldn't use them. Like another poster above this seems to provoke outbursts of "ooh you shouldn't say that" from the children when we swear.
nzmsv 17y ago
It's too bad that the majority takes the moral fashions Paul talks about in these two articles so seriously. So, in the end, one can only discuss these topics with close friends, whose reaction you can be fairly sure about. Case in point: someone's comment in a thread about suicide last night. Sure, it was offensive. And the karma drop that resulted was frightening. Which is exactly the point: if you state a certain opinion on certain subjects, the outcome is something entirely different from rational discussion.
dasht 17y ago
The funny thing about Sokal is not so much that he (supposedly) slipped a bogus paper past the editors, but rather in how so many people react to the event and take it as proof positive that the entire field is bogus or even that publishing that paper was a mistake of the editors. The editors, by publishing the piece, were not saying "Aha! Brilliant reasoning in this text!" but rather "People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well." What didn't happen after Sokal's paper was published? Years of earnest, tortured academic work by others commenting on it as if it were serious on its face. The Wikipedia article on it gives some balance. -t
- jerf 17y ago
  '"People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well."' This doesn't strike me as a good defense; in fact it seems to me to concede the point you think you're fighting. The editors think that people should see sheer nonsense? What are they doing, again? There's no justification for publishing sheer nonsense; there's an infinite supply of that, and precious few journal pages by comparison. If they did not see some value in it, they would not have published it. Therefore, they did see some value in utter nonsense. Therefore, I am justified in treating them as people who see value in total nonsense. As a person interested in learning, these are not people I want to emulate or respect.

95 points by kf 17y ago

There are largely two categories of "things you can't say", that by all "community standards" are obscene: Prurience: http://www.asstr.org/files/Collections/Alt.Sex.Stories.Moderated/Year97/3923.txt http://www.asstr.org/files/Collections/Alt.Sex.Stories.Moder... Politics: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/

vsync 17y ago
A little more warning than that might have been nice.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

dennisgorelik 17y ago

Why Paul's article doesn't have a date on it?

ynniv 17y ago
Archive.org goes back to 2004: http://web.archive.org/web/20040207184543/http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html http://web.archive.org/web/20040207184543/http://www.paulgra...

warwick 17y ago

It took me a couple re-readings of the first page or so, because I didn't understand that these were responses to some objections you got. I spent several minutes trying to decide if French Literary profs might be able to publish physics journal articles in your scenario. I eventually decided they would be able to, since the physics journals would now be run by French Literary theorists.

deleted 17y ago
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dennisgorelik 17y ago
That's a good point about publishing physics articles in physics journals ran by French Literature theorists :-)
jodrellblank 17y ago
As a physics journal editor you could publish articles by French lit. profs which would save their lives, but which any competent physicist would see were clearly bluffs, so wouldn't you be somewhat obliged to do so?
- Tichy 17y ago
  I am not that sure about the integrity of physics. Maybe with quantum physics, you can also get away with talking a lot of nonsense. Edit: I don't claim that quantum physics is nonsense, just that in the name of quantum physics a lot of strange ideas have been put forward. My impression is that quantum physics is sound (mathematically), but I remain doubtful about "many worlds", for example.
  - pmjordan 17y ago
    I'm not entirely sure (my physics days are a few years back), but I think the most nutjob papers are probably published in particle physics. (leaving aside metaphysics, which is philosophy, not physics) I doubt you can publish a QM paper which doesn't use any fairly involved maths, and the maths is probably the easiest giveavay. In particle physics, you might be able to get away with postulating particles you just made up if your justification is long enough and you have pretty diagrams showing where in the hierarchy of particles it appears. As a bonus, come up with yet another model to explain the existing particles. In fairness, I'm partly basing this on my experiences with professors in the subjects, all of whom managed to publish papers in their fields. :) The other strong factor determining your success would be the choice of journal you're submitting to. You're hardly going to pick Science, Nature or Physical Review Letters (PRL). In any case, my money is still on physicists getting published in French literary journals.

trapper 17y ago

Similar relationships exist in sport. Gymnasts can take up nearly any sport and excel. Swimmers can barely walk :) Gymnasts are the physicists of movement.

forensic 17y ago
That's not because swimmers aren't physically fit though (physical fitness being the comparison to intelligence) it's because swimming is more specialized than gymnastics. You really can't say gymnasts are more fit than swimmers, just that gymnastics is a more versatile sport so you learn a wider range of abilities.
- trapper 17y ago
  It's nothing to do with fitness or being specialized. It's about "movement IQ" or "coordination capacity" for lack of a better term. Gymnasts typically have a huge talent reserve, and move to other sports and often dominate. It's why many national talent programs use gymnastics as their foundations. Swimming tends to attract the less talented for some reason, and these people don't adapt well to other sports. To paraphrase pg: Take some swimmers and gymnasts and tell them they have to learn each others discipline or be executed. Who's the most worried? Funny anecdote: a recent olympic swimming team failed to ride to the stadium in Beijing because most of them couldn't ride bikes.
  - giardini 17y ago
    The best gymnasts are short people; the best swimmers are not. There are always exceptions (Janet Evans). Short people have certain advantages in gymnastics due to the physics of motion. Years ago tall men and women did compete in Olympic gymnastics but do so rarely today. In today's increasingly competitive world, we find only short gymnasts in the top tier. Competitors will go so far as to change birthdates to get younger (ergo smaller) gymnasts into competition. "to paraphrase pg: Take some swimmers and gymnasts and tell them they have to learn each others discipline or be executed. Who's the most worried?" I don't think the gymnasts swim times would be nearly as good as the swimmers. Nor do I think the swimmers would perform as well as the gymnasts at gymnastics. Each sport has evolved to the point where body type must be taken into account. But consider a more realistic hypothetical: Put a swimmer and a gymnast in a room and tell them only one of them can come out. My money's on the swimmer!8-)) Finally, as Randy Newman once sang: http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Short-People-lyrics-Randy-Newman/3244F1D30051F75E48256A370048B6FA http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Short-People-lyrics-R... "Short people got no reason to live. They got little hands Little eyes They walk around Tellin' great big lies They got little noses And tiny little teeth They wear platform shoes On their nasty little feet"

kierank 17y ago

Smart people might work on sexy projects like fighter planes and space rockets for ordinary wages, but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs. I don't agree that this is the case. Many smart people don't see the need to be rewarded in a financially appropriate way. (Those that do make their way into finance or startups eventually). Look at institutes such as the CSIRO in Australia for science/technology in general or the BBC for broadcasting technology.

gaius 17y ago
The BBC's a good example, how long have they been working on their own Dirac codec? That's taxpayer's money they're spending. Sure it probably makes a few geeks happy but remember - these geeks know fully well that if they tried to do that outside the safety of the BBC, they'd starve. At the end of the day, in the private sector you get stuff done because if you don't you don't eat.
- thristian 17y ago
  You seem to be implying that the BBC's Dirac work has produced no useful results; I would disagree. Sure, it's not the format-of-choice of BitTorrent users, and it hasn't cropped up in the endless discussions of the <video/> element in HTML5, but that doesn't mean it's vanished. A subset of Dirac colloquially called Dirac Pro has been standardised by the SMPTE as "VC-2" (Windows Media Video was VC-1): http://sonofid.blogspot.com/2008/02/vc-2-progress.html ...and there's a company selling professional video-encoding hardware using the Dirac Pro codec: http://www.numediatechnology.com/products.html Wikipedia says "Dirac Pro was used internally by the BBC to transmit HDTV pictures at the Beijing Olympics in 2008": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_%28codec%29
  - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
    you missed the point. in the private sector you don't need to justify costs back and forth to each other...either the product is wanted at its current production costs or it isn't. would it be used if consumers had to pay the full cost of its development? or do they only use it because those costs were offloaded to the taxpayer and it can essentially be given away?

unalone 17y ago

Dismissing socialism is as silly as dismissing capitalism would be. There is no simple answer to society: The best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of socialism there. Similarly, perhaps Paul was criticized for his dismissal of French Literature professors because a lot of people realized what a stupid blanket statement he made. Just because it's easier to bullshit about literature doesn't mean the whole of literature is bullshit. That's like assuming that just because math is about simplistic formulas, the entirety of math is simple to comprehend. I don't know much about French literature, but what I do know of it tells me that by learning about it, I'd be learning not just about literary theory but about French sociology, French history, and the feelings behind France at various moments in times. There's an incredible amount of information in literature. It's not a bug that it's subjective in nature and prone to debate. That's the feature.

chrispine 17y ago
But it wasn't a blanket statement (applying to all french lit profs equally). It was a generalization (a reference to the average intelligence of french lit profs). It's meant to be understood in the same way that "men are taller than women" is meant to be understood; a counter-example will get you nowhere here.
joss82 17y ago
Even in a capitalist society, you need some socialist parts. The best example would be the roads. Who paid for it ? Tax payers. End everyone is happier for it.
- perokreco 17y ago
  Actually in many more socialist countries, highways and some urban roads are payed by the people who use them. Better examples are military and police force.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Adam Smith gives the example of paying for roads by road tolls in his book The Wealth of Nations. In the United States, much of state and federal funding for highways is derived from a tax on gasoline and diesel vehicle fuel, to much the same effect. The ultimate incidence of ALL taxation is on consumers (and everyone is a consumer), as any competent economist will tell you. These forms of paying for roads are not socialism, by any definition of socialism that I have ever seen, but they are forms of taxation that allocate the cost of using the tax-supported, publicly available resource rather well.

spazmaster 17y ago

If you live in Holland, that last point is pretty much a no-brainer. Politicians are constantly accusing each other of saying things that are 'not done'. We have our wannabe-Fortuyn (Geert Wilders) at the moment. Heck, a politician just stepped down for not adhering to 'the code' another sign we're not that tolerant. We're just tolerant about homosexuality and drugs.

stingraycharles 17y ago
The world mistakenly confuses us for a tolerant country: we're not. We're just indifferent.

rms 17y ago

This was in response to one of the replies here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956774 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956774 (showdead=on required to see) Specifically, this response is what I wanted to bring up. The fact that you can't say something doesn't mean it's true. I believe this is implicit in "So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today." In an earlier version I made this point explicitly, but it seemed repetitive, so I cut it.

haon99 17y ago

Not to be a jerk, but "[Copernicus] was forced into it, because it was the only way to make the numbers come out right" just isn't correct. Tycho Brahe's measurements showed that Ptolemy's model was more accurate than Copernicus's. The point still stands that Copernicus transcended his time, but he was really riding on the coattails of Ptolemy's genius. Ptolemy never gets enough credit...

stcredzero 17y ago
Really, Copernicus' accomplishment was that his model worked very well yet left out a huge heap of epicycles. Heliocentric = fewer epicycles. That was Copernicus' contribution. This pales in comparison to Kepler's "Equal areas in equal time." That observation is a very strong hint towards Newtonian mechanics and Calculus.
- jimbokun 17y ago
  This makes me think of over-fitting in machine learning algorithms. The epicycles fit the data very well, but added a lot of parameters to the model. It makes me wonder if there is a bias/variance trade off for scientific models, but I don't know how to express the connection formally. In machine learning algorithms, we hold out a dataset to test for over-fitting. We don't exactly have a spare universe to test our scientific models for over-fitting, but maybe if there were a second planetary system at the time to test against it would have been clear sooner that the "epicycles" model fit only this solar system from the vantage point of earth? Maybe you could "train" the model on some heavenly bodies, then test on others? I'm pretty sure I'm making a fool of myself at this point and missing something obvious, and I'm hoping one or more of you will point that obvious thing out to me.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    Kepler's ellipses fit the data with an even simpler model. Newton added an underlying model which could be generalized to hypothetical bodies. In other words, you could plan something like an Apollo mission with it. I doubt you could do something like that with the Copernican, Ptolemaic, or even the Keplerian model. Newton's model gave you enough insight to hack. And not just surface hacks, but deep hacks. Everything before was merely descriptive. Newton's model also showed convergence. The way the planets moved became connected with the way cannonballs behaved. Mechanics could also subsume models of buildings and machines. Engineering and architecture were unified by Newtonian Mechanics. It's not just a matter fitting. It's a matter of transcending current models. (Another reason to study different programming languages/paradigms.)

bartl 17y ago

For most of these points I don't even understand what he's trying to say.

jey 17y ago
Context: http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html
- bumblebird 17y ago
  Again, I am shrugging. Whatever you say, someone will complain.
- Sukotto 17y ago
  I find this really annoying about Paul's otherwise insightful and interested articles. Namely that he assumes you know everything he's written and when and what it was called and that you know how to easily find it so you can understand the context. Paul, would you PLEASE date your articles (and RFS for that matter) and link to whatever it is you're talking about?
  - iamwil 17y ago
    No worries. If you don't know, just ask on here, and one of us will know. It's not like you don't read HN. but I'd have to agree about dating articles and blogposts. It's not just pg, but everyone.
  - philwelch 17y ago
    To be fair, unless someone goes and posts the URL to Hacker News or something, the only way you'd get to this post is by reading "What You Can't Say" and reading the links at the bottom. His top-level essays do have the date on them.

alex_c 17y ago

What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal? Well, actually... http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

InclinedPlane 17y ago
That's a funny link, but you really, really don't want to open up the "are physics or computer scientists smarter" debate, a lot of people here probably don't want to know the truth.
m0nty 17y ago
And also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n "Jan Hendrik Schön (born 1970) is a German physicist who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs that were later discovered to be fraudulent.[1] Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics in 2001, the Braunschweig Prize in 2001 and the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002."
byrneseyeview 17y ago
Note that this appears to be a scam conference. The people who pulled this prank were proving that the conference had bad reviewing practices, not that the study of physics does: http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~jz/sci/ http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~jz/sci/

sfk 17y ago

"There are indeed things you can't say in Holland. Oops, yes, I forgot about the fate of Pim Fortuyn." I live in the Netherlands (as opposed to "Holland"), and this poor rhetoric device beats everything I've read about the matter in terms of oversimplification and naivety.

plinkplonk 17y ago
"and this poor rhetoric device beats everything I've read about the matter in terms of oversimplification and naivety." It would be useful to the rest of us(who don't live in Holland) if you could explain why the "rhetoric device" is "poor", "oversimplified" and "naive" (vs a bald statement that it has all these qualities).
- AndrewDucker 17y ago
  Because the murder of one person says nothing about the attitudes towards freedom of speech across a whole country.
  - plinkplonk 17y ago
    It might say something about countries with large numbers of unassimilated minorities (in this case mostly Muslim). That aside, pg's point was that even in Holland (which he uses as an example of a "tolerant" country), there are negative consequences to actually saying "can't say" things. E.g: Many things about Islam and its prophet are (in practice) "can't say"/undebatable things (without assuming a serious risk of getting killed).
- sfk 17y ago
  Fair enough. Long before he went into politics, Fortuyn, a columnist and frequent guest in talk shows, had always expressed opinions that were not politically correct. I do not remember him being ostracized for those opinions in any manner. On the contrary, many people found him witty and refreshing. In fact he would be a prime example of a charismatic person getting away with saying things that other people would be called upon. Naturally, many people disagreed with him. A single individual - possibly deranged - killed him. Both of these facts do not imply in any way that you cannot say certain things in the Netherlands.

JulianMorrison 17y ago

French Lit is harder. Much harder per Kolmogorov complexity, but even if you're running it on monkeys, getting the right answer out to the limits of evidence would be a huge work of detective and archeological and historical study far beyond the source text. You would be attempting to reconstruct someone's mind from the outside in, with very fragmentary life-logs. IOW, French lit only seems easy because academics aren't aiming to be right. They just want an informed guess. In physics, this is considered the start of an investigation, not the end product.

ErrantX 17y ago
Having had some training in classical lit. and [previously] gone out with a girl reading French Lit. at university I cant help but agree. I expect a Physicist could write enough to fool a French Lit. magazine - but only superficially. I dont think they could write meaningfully on a subject. I also know a few literary students who I suspect could write a sufficiently obtuse piece of work in, say, a month to fool some physicists. Again only superficially. I think the fallacy Paul falls into is the thinking that French Lit. professors don't question what they read in the same way Physicists do. Unfortunately it's a stereotype that does bear out in some respects - but the top guys certainly do question everything. Indeed they will almost certainly disagree by default and go out of their way to find proof. If you think you've seen scientists bitching and arguing you've never hung round with literature scholars :D
tokenadult 17y ago
French lit only seems easy because academics aren't aiming to be right. But that is the whole problem: whether or not the discipline aims to be right. I am very closely acquainted with a relative who has a Ph.D. in French literature, and he literally would rather die than attempt to earn even an undergraduate degree in physics.
anamax 17y ago
> French Lit is harder. What definition of "harder" are we using? In physics, there's at least the illusion that there's a "correct" answer. If your theory predicts that a cubic meter of gold has less mass than a cubic meter of water, you've got a serious problem. In literature, there is no "gold standard" to use as a referee or to consult in helping to make a decision.

david927 17y ago

physicists are smarter than professors of French Literature I would tend to say the opposite. Paul, you're mixing up here what I would call "savantism" with intelligence. We know that there is no true definition of intelligence, but I think whatever the definition ends up being, it has to be based more on understanding than just knowledge and mechanizations within that knowledge. Who would be more afraid, in your scenario, between the physicist and a Cantonese scholar? if [Finland] seems that much more socialist than the US, it is probably simply because they don't spend so much on their military Exactly. So it's not about dismissing Socialism (especially since all modern countries operate on both Socialistic and Capitalistic principles), as much as making an argument as to what the upper tax bracket should be. And for that, I would look at companies that have tremendous bonus systems. (I won't exhibit the obvious.) Are they more productive? Do they take more risks? What are the benefits and consequences of those risks? Personally, I'm not as concerned about the marginal incentive between $10 million and $1 billion as I am that a society, as a whole, functions, and doesn't degenerate into something "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

wlievens 17y ago
It's not so much what the upper bracket should be, it's about what the threshold for the bracket needs to be! In Belgium, the top bracket of 50% starts at about 32,000 euro's. In addition to that, there's a separate flat social security tax of 13%, meaning that my marginal tax rate is about 60% - with a mediocre salary.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - wlievens 17y ago
    I definitely agree with the fact that good services cost money. And I don't mind paying a high tax rate per se, but when almost every full-time worker ends up in the highest bracket, something is wrong.
Tuna-Fish 17y ago

jstevens85 17y ago

What do academic economists actually have to say about the link between entrepreneurship and taxation? My impression is that new tech companies start in response to new technological opportunities and have little to do with marginal tax rates. Hewlett Packard 1939 - Top Income Tax Rate 79% Intel 1968 - 75% Microsoft 1975 - 50% Adobe 1982 - 50% Google 1998 - 40%

falsestprophet 17y ago
Income tax rates are a red herring. In general, entrepreneurial activity is taxed as long term capital gains. You can see those rate are more attractive. Hewlett Packard 1939 - 63% (1 year holding) to 23% (10 year holding) Intel 1968 - 25% Microsoft 1975 - 20% Adobe 1982 - 20% Google 1998 - 20% source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United_States#History_of_capital_gains_tax_in_the_U.S http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United.... If at any point I experienced a tax rate of 98%, I imagine I would not be highly motivated to earn more money.
- jstevens85 17y ago
  Yet the Beatles continued to pump out more than one album a year. I think there are incentives other than money - fame, status, power, creativity, curiosity etc.
  - KC8ZKF 17y ago
    Bad example. The Beatles only released albums for seven years, then quit.
    - jstevens85 17y ago
      Not exactly. Paul McCartney subsequently released 22 studio albums, Lennon 8, Harrison 10 and Starr 15. I think we can safely say that all four would have already been in the top income tax bracket from their Beatles royalties alone. Yet they were somehow motivated to continue making music.

Create 17y ago

but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs. Life in the Soviet Union would have been even poorer if they hadn't had American technologies to copy. semiconductors: it wasn't e-commerce plumbing driving it, but fear from Sputnik and its consequences (mobile computing ...in Minutemen). That wasn't entrepreneurship (no risks taken on behalf of "entrepreneurs") at Bell either: state subsidized monopoly which was somewhat acknowledged a little later with the babies. The Valley had its paying customers before anything to "market" (see HP f[o]unding letter). light bulbs: that's a dead horse kicked around too often. plumbing of e-commerce: being in the right circle helps (No Such Ancestors). Btw. Minitel "3615" was there way before on scale with the actual plumbing (net and terminal used to sell services from the armchair countrywide [amazon/paypal/etc do not serve every country either]). Also from State Monopoly. The Kahns in the USA never ran any risks. And life in Afghanistan is as poor as it was, America has copied the Soviet Union.

euroclydon 17y ago

" If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible." Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson didn't believe the Bible to be literally correct. It's well documented. Jefferson even went as far as to create his own Bible, editing out most miracles, the resurrection, and immaculate conception.

jswinghammer 17y ago
We can be more general than that. It wasn't really until the fundamentalist movement that people felt inclined to defend the literal truth of the Bible. Catholics historically (going back to Augustine) have believed that parts of the Bible like the creation account in Genesis are allegorical rather than literal. They wouldn't have gone as far as Jefferson (obviously) but it's sort of a myth that Christians have always felt the need to defend the literal truth of everything in the Bible.
ericb 17y ago
Agreed--don't forget Thomas Paine. The whole "Christian Nation" thing peeves me. http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_of_reason/part1.html#1 http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_...
crystalis 17y ago
I'm not sure that Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson count as "people in 1830" in the same way that the Salem Witch Trials might constitute "people in 1692". I'm also of the opinion that you should also account for the other two points, even if to say that you don't mean to refute them by refuting the third.
- euroclydon 17y ago
  I am not trying to refute the other two points, I just quoted the whole sentence so it would make sense. I would like to think that the 1700s and 1800s represented a golden age in American religiosity, where our political and cultural leaders were deeply spiritual, yet not biblical literalists. Now, it seems that dialog has broken down and we are in fractious camps. I'm sure I am just romanticizing the period though.

diego 17y ago

Thought experiment: would this essay be at the top of HN if Paul Graham wasn't its author?

thras 17y ago
You can't say that.
tptacek 17y ago
Of course not. Neither would "Things You Can't Say".
- jimbokun 17y ago
  I remember that "Things You Can't Say" was picked up and discussed a lot by people with no connection to hacking or technology. Several political blogs made their list of predictions for ideas today that will be considered barbaric in the future, for example. I specifically remember Andrew Sullivan linking to it (my favorite political blogger).
  - tptacek 17y ago
    It may have been successful (though it also tells bloggers what they want to hear, and does so with a stamp of authority --- the fact that it came from a tech/startup person adds novelty for political bloggers, and probably subtracts nothing). That's kind of not my point. I'm actually a lot more interested in what jimbokun really thinks of the article than what Andrew Sullivan thinks about it. What's the insight you got from it? That thinking forbidden thoughts is, in fact, like stretching your brain?
- wglb 17y ago
  I disagree. I showed the original article to several friends of mine who are in no way hackers and had no idea who Paul was and they all felt that it was a very good, thoughtful article.

seanc 17y ago

The reason I forbid my children to use words like "fuck" and "shit" is not that I want them to seem innocent, but because these words are ill-mannered and contribute nothing to communication. For me that's not why. I don't let my seven year old curse for the same reason I don't let her use power tools (yet). They require skill and can be a bit dangerous if you don't use them properly. I suppose if I sat down and thought about it I could come up with an appropriate occasion for my seven year old to curse. But then to explain that corner case to her and expect her to manage it isn't worth the effort. And for my four year old it's simply not possible. My kids will figure out these rules on their own, in due time.

pfedor 17y ago
If you ask parents why kids shouldn't swear, the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like "it's inappropriate," while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations. -- (also from a Paul Graham's essay)
- nvn1 17y ago
  ' while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations' - one or all of which might be correct?
- tptacek 17y ago
  "If you ask parents why kids shouldn't [violate social norm X], the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like 'it's inappropriate', while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations." I see no loss of meaning, but that's probably because there's so little meaning in the dismissive little excerpt you've chosen to deploy here. My kids aren't allowed to swear either, for exactly the same reason that this commenter gave. People who think words can't be dangerous, especially for a 10 year old, seem likely to me to be leading sheltered and confined lives.
- junklight 17y ago
  my rule is simple - they can use the words when they understand (properly) what they mean. Meanwhile we explain they are "grown up" words and they shouldn't use them. Like another poster above this seems to provoke outbursts of "ooh you shouldn't say that" from the children when we swear.

nzmsv 17y ago

It's too bad that the majority takes the moral fashions Paul talks about in these two articles so seriously. So, in the end, one can only discuss these topics with close friends, whose reaction you can be fairly sure about. Case in point: someone's comment in a thread about suicide last night. Sure, it was offensive. And the karma drop that resulted was frightening. Which is exactly the point: if you state a certain opinion on certain subjects, the outcome is something entirely different from rational discussion.

dasht 17y ago

The funny thing about Sokal is not so much that he (supposedly) slipped a bogus paper past the editors, but rather in how so many people react to the event and take it as proof positive that the entire field is bogus or even that publishing that paper was a mistake of the editors. The editors, by publishing the piece, were not saying "Aha! Brilliant reasoning in this text!" but rather "People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well." What didn't happen after Sokal's paper was published? Years of earnest, tortured academic work by others commenting on it as if it were serious on its face. The Wikipedia article on it gives some balance. -t

jerf 17y ago
'"People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well."' This doesn't strike me as a good defense; in fact it seems to me to concede the point you think you're fighting. The editors think that people should see sheer nonsense? What are they doing, again? There's no justification for publishing sheer nonsense; there's an infinite supply of that, and precious few journal pages by comparison. If they did not see some value in it, they would not have published it. Therefore, they did see some value in utter nonsense. Therefore, I am justified in treating them as people who see value in total nonsense. As a person interested in learning, these are not people I want to emulate or respect.