Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

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The PG quote that leads the essay on the topic of PG's extra-curricular rangings ("Dabblers and Blowhards") seems apposite:

'I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it'

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Edit: the essay itself seems... not very perceptive. Notably, putting things on a continuum between far left and far right and imagining that everything is somehow a process of picking out options on this continuum seems amazingly reductive.

Further, the dig on "intentional moderates" also seems to miss the point that many intentional moderates might well be seeking to function politically - so picking out moderate positions in the range of public opinion might be a case of keeping your powder dry and being effective, not compulsively trying to be a moderate because it's nifty. This was very much the case with the way Obama analyzed his own politics (turning the huge ship, very slowly). Not saying I agree with that but the assessment of "intentional moderates" really feels like a cartoon.

I want to be careful not to criticize the post on its own terms. Paul Graham should totally write things like this on his own site! It sucks having to be careful about what you because of what other people will do with it, and the weird debates you'll be forced into as a result.

I'm just saying, to the extent this post is political, it's political in a totally routine way that doesn't clear the "interestingness" bar for this site, other than that Paul Graham wrote it. It doesn't belong on the HN front page.

I don't understand this. if you don't want people to engage with your ideas then don't publish them; there's a very well known medium for this kind of expression/exercise called a private journal. the obviousness of this fact proves that published ideas are intended to be engaged with.

Clearly, posting something to your own site isn't by itself a request to start a debate about it on Hacker News.

Sure okay but you do expect someone somewhere to debate you on it. That the forum ends up being hackernews isn't really significant to me visavis your opinion that some published writing could be free from debate.

> It sucks having to be careful about what you because of what other people will do with it, and the weird debates you'll be forced into as a result.

I have just the tiniest sliver of Paul Graham's innate valence with HN, but it's enough to make me pretty empathetic about this problem: there is a pretty strong chance that if I blog something relatively superficial (just because it's on my mind), someone will submit it here. A throwaway I wrote about Javascript Cryptography has been on the front page here something like 5 times, and I've felt like I had to apologize for it each time. It is not a great feeling, and I "blog" less than I'd like to as a result, and, again, I'm not Paul Graham, where literally the simplest thing I could possibly blog about politics ("there is a difference between both-sidesism and moderation") generates a huge front-page thread.

i'm not being obtuse but why don't you simply unpublish the post? whatever the reason is (whatever the tangible/intangible benefits conferred upon you for having it remain up) obligates you in direct proportion.

i write math notes for myself that i only publish to a public github repo. the repo is public because it lends me some credibility to have it on display that i study math. if there's an error in them and someone chances upon them and internalizes that error then i am (to a small extent) culpable.

I don't own the post anymore and can't unpublish it. But even if I could: it's annoying that I can't just post my shitty first drafts of things to some random website and not have them get periodically featured on a huge, busy community. That's what blogs are for. I have a backlog of blog posts, about a dozen entries long, none of which are published because I don't feel prepared to defend them here. I guess you can say "good, you have a personal journal". I don't feel great about that.

(And, for the nth time, I have just a teeny tiny sample of the problem Paul Graham has! It's not like what I write is all that popular. Paul Graham has a rabid fan base here.)

i'm giving you the benefit of the doubt since you generally style yourself as voice of reason on hn.

that being said you're not addressing my challenge, that this thing

>That's what blogs are for.

isn't actually the case.

take for example your characterization of this kind of miscellany

>shitty first drafts of things

can you name another medium/form/forum where authors publish "shitty first drafts"? why is blogging different? because it is ephemeral and has 0 mass by virtue of being digital?

on the contrary take something like twitter, for example, and compare its relative weight, ephemerality, inchoateness to your blog posts; tweets are very much fair game for all any kind of engagement.

Sure: Twitter, and Hacker News comments. Two places I write a lot (one of which Paul Graham uses as well). What's annoying is that putting something in a better medium --- blog posts are better than both Twitter and HN comments for a number of reasons --- they're elevated in this weird way to the front page of HN.

>they're elevated in this weird way to the front page of HN

you could also publish anonymously. you have a choice. so does he.

Did you just take me to task for not directly responding to a point you made earlier and then, after I took the time to generate that response for you, pretend that hadn't happened at all? Are you conversing with me or just using me as an opportunity to riff for the thread? I doubt anyone's really reading this far down other than you and I.

no?

here's your partial response

>I don't own the post anymore and can't unpublish it. But even if I could: it's annoying that I can't just post my shitty first drafts of things to some random website and not have them get periodically featured on a huge, busy community. That's what blogs are for.

the first sentence does directly address it (choice) wrt to you and your blog (not pg's which he owns).

but the last sentence

>That's what blogs are for.

even according to you

>But even if I could

is the crux of what's at issue. and this you have not addressed anywhere that i can see

When you have a foundational role in hacker news and post a lengthy exposition of your views on a continually contentious topic I would think a reasonable individual would expect engagement. Most importantly the individual themselves is more than capable of making that concept clear himself if he so chooses. We don't need to speak up for him.

Empathy for Paul Graham's predicament is the topic of this branch of the subthread, but it wasn't the point I made at the top of the thread, which is that regardless of whether Graham wants this post on the front page of HN, it doesn't belong here.

But whether or not it belongs here is just your opinion. People have reposted plenty of stuff from your site here that I thought “doesn’t clear the bar”, but everyone else disagreed. And while you are no Paul Graham, you’re a big enough member of the community to get support/upvotes just because of your name.

Very few people posting things publicly request people to start a debate about it.

Is your issue more that pg is a public enough figure that he can't not get attention for things he posts? Or is it that the attention he gets is likely to occur in a forum he views regularly and has an attachment to?

Lots of similar thinkpieces get posted on HN every day that people have all sorts of debates about without being invited to do so. And most figures with the wealth and visibility of pg can't really publicly post things without a group somewhere arguing over its content. A downside of having that level of fame I suppose.

> Paul Graham should totally write things like this on his own site!

He sure can, but having a platform and competence in one area doesn't mean your skill applies to another. This whole article is a fascinating example of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

The idea, of two kinds of moderates is interesting. The framing is, at best weak and at worst very flawed, shallow and a gross oversimplification.

The shots at the left, at marxists, are palatable. At no point does this article take a genuinely "moderate" stance on the current political climate. Rather it takes an insidious right leaning view.

This comment is exactly what I mean about the post being off-topic for the site.

To quote the article:

> and the far right and far left are roughly equally wrong.

So everyone is right some of the time?

> Moderates are sometimes derided as cowards, particularly by the extreme left.

I can name half a dozen right leaning issues that would get me thrown out of a gathering if I expressed my views, maybe even threatened with physical harm.

> If I knew a ... people in the entertainment business, ... Being on the far left or far right doesn't affect how ... how well you sing.

Is followed up with...

> You could be mindlessly doctrinaire in your politics and still be a good mathematician. In the 20th century, a lot of very smart people were Marxists — just no one who was smart about the subjects Marxism involves.

Holly crap this is the most ignorant thing I have read in a long time. There was large attraction to Marxism after the Great Depression. Not only did smart people take it up but droves of them in the "entertainment" industry. Is he completely unaware of the House Unamerican Activities Committee and the blacklisting?

> It's possible in theory for one side to be entirely right and the other to be entirely wrong. Indeed, ideologues must always believe this is the case. But historically it rarely has been.

Both extremes have been bad "historically" but it ignores the common theme of totalitarianism as an overriding ideology.

> For some reason the far right tend to ignore moderates rather than despise them as backsliders. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it means that the far right is less ideological than the far left.

Again, House Un-American Activities Committee ... And just about every issue the US far right champions today. In fact the far right base could be grouped into a few "single issue items" (guns, taxes, abortion)

> But if the ideas you use in your work intersect with the politics of your time, you have two choices: be an accidental moderate, or be mediocre.

This whole article is mediocre, it is a right leaning assessment and bent on politics. Shades of Ben Carson, pyramids as grain storage.

> Rather it takes an insidious right leaning view

I mean, if you want to talk about partisan accusations...

Just because someone doesn't buy into your views doesn't mean they're secretly scheming to reinforce the other side. Someone can be the same side of the aisle as you _and also_ still disagree with you.

I got 2 angles on this essay:

1) As far as I am concerned, it just shows PG's colors where he stands on the spectrum, and that is: Useful on its own. It also appears to refute its own point.

2) The accidental moderate serves a different purpose: it diffuses the left vs right as being black and white set in stone. The worst thing in a political discussion is saying "you are X on political spectrum" (or any name calling) and ignore whatever the other person has to say. It is akin to being Republican or Democrat (or any other 2 political parties) without considering the candidates or viewpoints they expressed.

That being said before I opened the essay I expected it to be about the act of (self-)moderation, so I was disappointed.

There are two kinds of people in the world. Nuanced people that I personally know, and some strawman that I just made up.

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