Shut Up, Paul Graham: The Simplified Version | Hacker News Reader

Shut Up, Paul Graham: The Simplified Version

eev.ee

139 pointsamluto41 comments

"Perhaps someone with millions of dollars could give more of their money to organizations fighting poverty rather than investing in a premium coffee subscription service."

I do look up to Paul Graham and don't like to see him attacked unrightfully. However reading the several responses made me ask as well: why does someone like PG just accept economic inequality, and blog about it, instead of using some of his visiblity to reduce it, however little this might be.

I don't like economic inequality which is why I do a small bit of my own - loans on Kiva and volunteering every now and then. I'm just a software engineer and this is what I decided to do based on my belief and my available resources. Bill Gates has more of the means and he is also using some of his resources to reduce poverty, and thus economic inequality. There are many other people who care about it, and do something, and even more who just don't care and don't do anything about it.

We know PG also cares about economic inequality, as this is his second blog post. It only is fair to ask: what is he doing to help reduce it? If he shared some of this, it would make his post much more credible.

Kevin Systrom made around $400M before tax when he sold Instagram. After 15% CGT, there's $340M left in cash. Whether this is a "fair" reward or not is a political opinion. I'll put forward mine here:

1. Equity stake is a poor proxy for share of value added, or risk assumed. One man alone did not create $400M worth of value.

2. Massive payouts provide incentives, but is $340M such a greater incentive than, say, $100M? If founders knew they could not make more than $100M, they would work just as hard.

3. The amount of money gained exceeds both the value created and the amount required to be sufficiently motivating. The remaining $300M, could therefore more equitably be used to save around 60,000 lives with negligible ill effect.

This is one case (sorry Kevin) but I think it illustrates how out of whack things can seem.

The whole pg post came off as very defensive, almost kind of persecuted. Which is understandable, that's the knee-jerk reaction to criticism levelled at one's moral standing. Here's hoping he'll be a little more analytical and take his ego out of the analysis in future.

> Massive payouts provide incentives, but is $340M such a greater incentive than, say, $100M

Yes, it can be. At least the general principle of not capping upside. For someone with $0, sure, I'd agree that $100M is approximately within the same region of desire as $340M, and maybe even $1B.

But if a founder had already made $100M, the prospect of making only another $100M will ensure that you'll have fewer repeat founders. You'll still have people like Elon Musk, who I think would have started SpaceX/Tesla even if he knew he couldn't become a billionaire for tax reasons, but some founders would be dissuaded from starting new companies after their initial $100M gain, if there wasn't the prospect of making billions on their next venture.

Ironically, at some point in time Elon Musk went broke spending his money on his post-PayPal ventures, and was borrowing money from friends. If he had made less money from PayPal, we would not have Tesla/SpaceX, or at least he would have sold them early.

This post opens by stuffing words in Paul Graham's mouth:

"I wrote a LiveJournal post so preposterous that even Hacker News didn’t swallow it. I’m painting this as ‘controversial’, which only makes sense if you accept that I am roughly as important as the entire rest of the Internet. Rather than step back and wonder if I might be wrong, I wrote this patronizing Playskool edition, to give the unwashed masses a second chance at appreciating my brilliance. Please admire my generosity."

Oh come on. This is just a better-spelled version of "ur a fag!!!!!!". Reminds me of Scott Alexander's post about micronations:

"I think everyone should have the media perform a hatchet job on them at least once. It’s this really scary feeling when you know you’re trying to be honest and do the right thing, and yet you see how easy it is for a hostile writer to cast every single thing you do as corrupt and destructive. And how quick everyone is to believe them. And how attempts to set the record straight get met with outraged “how dare you give one of those typical sputtering non-apologies!”. It reminds me of those computer games where “ACCUSE” is just a button you press, and it doesn’t even matter what the accusation is or whether it makes sense." - http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/things-i-learned-by-spe...

Maybe the brutal terseness, toilet language and straw manning is apparently holding traction against his blogging? It seems the longer, more eloquent, and extremely well researched works that shame PG's ridiculous lower-than-high-school-sociological waxing _do not_.

I know it is often viewed as a grand cop-out to withdraw from an a debate until someone has read XXX, however I can't help but feel that this is the case with PG. Go take some sociology classes. Go study the humanities. Go learn in that place you constantly tell people to drop out from.

Except he won't. He doesn't need to. His privilege buys him a platform, ears, and a ridiculous following that actually defends his pompous soap boxing. Worse, again, is that it simply isn't bringing anything to the table. At all.

So while I am not a huge fan of the language or attack posturing, I also feel better knowing that there is a wave rising up against the derivative pablum PG peddles. The hubris it takes to actually forward thoughts as his and _believe_ they are novel, valuable, or even remotely insightful is... Frightening.

Uh... I'm not saying this legitimizes his arguments in any way, but to interpret your comment literally, he did study the liberal arts - both of them:

Paul Graham has a BA in Philosophy from Cornell "and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence."

http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html

I suppose I should have been more explicit with “humanities”, but alas. Have a bump for your accurate correction.

>> No doubt even this version leaves some room. And in the unlikely event I left no holes, some will say I’m backpedalling or doing “damage control.” But anyone who wants to can test that claim by comparing this to the original.

> “It is literally unthinkable that my ideas are bad.”

This "translation" is ridiculous. Clearly, PG is claiming that his simplified version is fully consistent with his long version, and in this quoted part not making claims of value.

I could similarly "translate" eevee's translation to "This has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with how evil you are!"

"This seems akin to suggesting that skin cancer is not bad per se" is not a fair analogy. What PG is trying to say is that the state of inequality can arise from a system (of incentives) that is beneficial to humanity as a whole (you may or may not agree with him). But your biased analogy isn't a fair criticism of his argument.

Is it not? Paul seems to be saying, essentially, that because <things Paul Graham likes> cause economic inequality, it therefore doesn't matter.

Exactly, I think the author of this piece was trying to argue that startups aren't necessarily so clearly "on the whole, good". Who gets to decide that startups are good but small businesses aren't? PG has a vested interest in VC backed startups and has been an insider for so long that he's fallen victim to his own observations (see his essay on being an insider).

Not really (at least the way I interpreted it). PG seems to be saying that attacking the "final state" may not be the most productive approach here. Rather the discussion and consequent solutions should be focussed on the obviously bad factors that lead to this state (and his argument is that not all factors that lead to this outcome are bad - again you can disagree with that but the analogy in the article isn't appropriate because it focusses the discussion again on the outcome (the cancer)

He's saying that inequality is the wrong thing to optimize against. Rather than attacking inequality writ large, it's best to attack the negative causes of it.

The author ignores this, and says that economic inequality is bad, full stop. PG does a much better job than the author of making his point.

Consider the case of global warming. It's caused by CO2. But lots of things produce CO2. Some, like people and farm animals, are good. Others, like coal, are less so. Attacking CO2 production as a whole, rather than the CO2 production we can do without, is likely to lead us to make poor decisions about what sorts of CO2 we limit.

Creation of wealth is good. Concentration of wealth can result from the creation thereof. That's not a bad thing. Fighting economic inequality by limiting the creation of wealth would be asinine. That's what PG was saying, which the author went out of his way to not acknowledge.

I don't think so...Paul's point is that economic inequality is not in itself a bad thing: for example, consider the economic difference between David Beckham and Mark Zuckerberg. Beckham is worth $350 million, while Zuckerberg is woth $36 billion. But no one would suggest that this inequality is an injustice, even though Zuckerberg is worth 100-times Beckham.

The fundamental issue isn't economic inequality, it's poverty.

Edit: removed 'the' typo.

Skin cancer can arise from a system (of biological processes) that are beneficial to the organism/species as a whole. :)

Pushing a bad analogy, it means that you should remove the cancer, not skinning human altogether ...

I think the analogy is obviously designed to provoke an emotional response, but it’s not wildly unreasonable.

The sun is beneficial for humanity a whole. But one side-effect is that you get skin cancer.

Alice argues that overall, we’re better off, so don’t turn the sun off: Learn to live with skin cancer.

Bob argues that maybe we can have the benefits of the sun while avoiding, curing, or reducing skin cancer. So don’t turn the sun off: Put your energies into fixing skin cancer, not complaining about the sun’s harmful rays.

Those two arguments are certainly parallel to a lot of other arguments about capitalism, poverty, and inequality. Whether they are particularly convincing is another matter. Whether there are other options is another matter. And whether Paul’s essay matches either argument is yet another.

I agree. In conversation, people choose their "devil terms." For some, income inequality is one. My devil term (the bad-in-itself beyond argument) is "a situation where poor people can never rise." This might be the result of income inequality, but it isn't the definition of it. Whether it is the result is determined by studies done by experts.

I'm sorry for going on a tangent. Skin cancer is a devil term like income inequality. I can't follow the argument because I don't agree with the choice of terms.

> YC invested in five different career websites

Which makes sense given how much of a person's time and brainspace is taken up by their career. Why shouldn't significant resources be devoted to improving that?

Not sure this needs to be this inflamatory.

Are people surprised that PG will defend and explain away income inequality the way he did? Why was there that much shock and dismay. I don't get it. Are people afraid others will read post and start believing it because it comes from PG?

Startup envoronment thrives on myths, promises and hope. Myths are what keep it alive: founders have to say they have a burning desire to change the world (even if they really want a phat exit). Early employees are given magic points (options) that they believe will turn into money. Investors hope the company they invested in will grow a horn and four hooves.

One of the things leaders do is build up these myths. Without them things might start to fall apart. So one problem everyone is talking about lately is income inequality. It is not just crazy hippies, some more serious people are mentioning it. This inequality thing seems to be a odds with what startups do, and, most imporantly, with what keeps them going. So PG as a good leader stepped up to provide an interpretation, and surprise! it is favorable to startups.

If someone approaches a founder and says, "Your Uber for dogs just got valuated at $27B... what do you think about income inequality in this country". Well, they can safely pull out the phone, surf to the "essays" section and say something like "it's complicated, and let's look at the causes" etc.

To put it another way, would anyone be as surprised if say if Starbucks published an article how coffee is really good for you, etc.

What would be the proposed alternative to economic inequality? Some type of communism, only somehow tweaked so it wouldn't be the total disaster it was before?

You lost me at "weed delivery service". Weed delivery service is an amazing experience that is already a thing. It is natural that this service will be monopolized/oligopolized by capitalists given enough time.

What's funny is that Eaze, a weed delivery startup is founded by the cofounder of Yammer which sold to Msft for something like $1.2B.

If what creators are making is so great and they have an audience that loves their work then they wouldn't be "scraping by". You can have all the free users in the world but if people aren't willing to pay you for your work then I'm sorry but the conclusion isn't that you're valuable. Some guy earning $20k/year on patreon and someone founding a multimillion dollar startup are not even in the same ballpark of creating value. In a market economy you get rich by giving people what they want.

This whole rant is poorly written and riddled with obvious holes. Twitter is full of ads BECAUSE users don't value the service all that much, not the other way around. If people were willing to cough up as much cash as they spend time on Twitter and demanded an ad free one then that's what they'd get. People value a free ad supported Twitter over a premium one though. Just like with most other web apps they use. So that's what the market gives them.

Did the author stop to think that people might actually want smart luggage, valet dry cleaning, or weed delivery? On face value those all sound like the kinds of things people want to me. Drinking water to Africa? I know far more people that smoke weed regularly than I do people that care about how Africa is doing. Perhaps the author is just misinformed as to how self interested people are and is confusing business accommodating that as forcing it? Shooting the messenger so to speak. The day people start caring about Africa more than they do about getting high, YC will be full of a ton of startups to that effect.

YC invested in 5 different career websites and the author claims this as evidence that PG thinks we need 5 competing career websites. I can't read that as anything other than disingenuous. Even the most casual reader of PG would understand that he expects most startups to fail.

This is complete bullshit. The number of famous artists/scientists/writers/etc that have been completely unpopular until after they died is staggering. Using $ as a basis for value is a completely flawed measure.

I don't see how that's relevant. They weren't valued at the time. Later they were. $ being a flawed measure of value doesn't make any sense. $ IS value.

This is pretty silly.

Also, Paul Graham's premise, I'm sorry to say, is sensationalized (by invoking concepts like "inequality" and "startups") but wrong. The premise is, basically, "inequality has bad CAUSES, but startups and technology are never one of them."

Only at the end does he hint at what I believe to be the more accurate analysis: AUTOMATION and OUTSOURCING lowers demand for expensive human labor, therefore reducing one of the main ways that money trickles down to the middle and lower class. The better and more widespread the technology, the more I can

1) Outsource jobs to regions with a lower cost of living, leading to two losses of trickle-down:

1a) local workers don't get the job, and the money goes to someone in another country

1b) either way my company writes the expenses off its taxable income, but my country doesn't get the tax $$ from the worker's income to spend on social programs, safety nets etc.

This by itself is fine, unless you're a nationalist, because it helps reduce poverty where people are poorer, which is outside your country. However, technology also enables:

2) AUTOMATION, which means I now reduce the amount of HUMAN workers, and once again it has two aspects:

2a) Now, the demand for human labor drops, and since the supply of workers remains the same, their average wages drop.

2b) The worst one: monopolies with server farms, contracts of adhesion, and all the power. Like Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, etc. extracting rents from users and providers, until open source disrupts them.

By commoditizing the providers and workers, they get squeezed. See Amazon's dealings with wage slaves, and its tactics with publishers (middlemen which it eliminates). But those same workers are also supposed to be spending money back into the economy on things they need.

It takes time to invent new industries and educate everyone, there is no guarantee that will happen forever, and there is no guarantee that demand shocks for labor won't be severe. So, there should probably be unconditional basic income, negative tax or some other scheme for people to KEEP BEING ABLE TO AFFORD THE BASICS even if they face no prospects of making money, which a growing unemployed class will.

On the bright side, automation will help wean countries from their dependence on an ever-growing population to fund social security schemes. Endless population growth is unsustainable, and countries are currently worried about birth rates mainly because of that. So in a global sense, the solution is: tax the gains from automation, redistribute the proceeds, use condoms.

2a) I would even argue that the supply of workers on the market is increased.

Well, the number of humans willing to work remains the same... unless you mean the number of humans willing to work BELOW A CERTAIN RATE has increased, but that's the market clearing level, not supply. I know you are agreeing with me, and I don't want to nitpick, just clarifying.

i've noticed this article just disappeared from the front page (flagged to death i presume).

I totally disagree with the person who wrote the article, but I think it's sad that the "flag" button is now a "i'm offended" or "i disagree" button.

the comments in this discussion provide interesting perspectives that are now hidden to the general readership.

I think this is why 4chan still has a massive user base -- less opinionated moderation.

It has been flagged once (when it was the second link in the front page), then de-flagged somehow. Not sure if there is a penalty associated to that.

Flagged stories have a [flagged] tag. This is plain blatant censorship.

No, only flagged stories that reach a certain threshold [number? quality?] of flags get a [flagged] tag.

That's false. [flagged] is displayed when a story is flagged by enough users to be killed (closed to new comments). This story did receive that many flags, but we don't kill threads when they have a lot of comments, so in this case the flags demoted the article but didn't kill it. No moderator touched it or AFAIK even saw it until now.

Edit: hmm this one got killed after I posted the above, which looks like a bug in the software. We've unkilled it now.

Hacker News needs more opinionated moderation, not less, if it's going to retain the quality of discussion. 4chan is not exactly a shining example of quality discourse.

Why isn't this on the front page?

Stephen Hicks produced a flowchart that helpfully explains the recent fixation on inequality:

http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/hicks...

It's funny how the HN user base is sensitive to propaganda of some kinds (for example, relating to encryption) but are hostile to the idea that the inequality issue might be an example of the same.

The problem seems to revolve around: what is good and what is evil? The age-old answer is that it is forbidden to do a number of things but that besides that, you are free to do as you please. Unfortunately, these waters are muddied by the existence of man-made law ("high incarceration rates and tax loopholes"). With unfair inequality the result of the ultrarich buying man-made law, the problem can only get solved by getting rid of man-made law, while people like Evee usually propose to solve the problem by creating some more man-made law.

"This seems akin to suggesting that skin cancer is not bad per se, because it’s caused by the sun, and the sun is good. Where would we be without the sun? Attacking the sun is a bad idea. So stop trying to fight sun-related skin cancer. Also, I own a large share of the sun."

The author's right. Communism is bad. It results in mass poverty among many other atrocities.

In the real world, everyone isn't an altruistic completely selfless person. Therefore, communism has never worked and never will. The entire premise of it is founded on an assumption that, if true, would render the entire need for forceful conscription mute.

You're attacking a strawman. No one has suggested anything remotely resembling full-one Marxist Communism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com