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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Paul Graham, on the front page for more unsubstantial Paul Graham content.

I mean, his essays are decent but this was a snooze-fest of an interview. And recent Paul Graham blog posts that have shown up here have been obvious nonsense.

I think we need to stop encouraging personality cults. This is a guy who’s a decent writer and also happened to ride the dot com boom to wealth. There’s nothing really admirable about it. You can’t gain any magical advice from someone like this because they stumbled into success. All the self-help style advice offered is basically either already obvious or impossible to replicate.

All you gotta do is make a product that Yahoo! will buy off you for millions of dollars and you too can spend most of your time writing essays and starting venture capital funds.

If I ran my own venture that had a community forum I’d probably be creeped out by people talking about me like I’m a savant of advice all the time...

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I was sitting at my cubicle not sure what to do in 2005 and read his essays and it crystallized some vague feeling I'd had. I am not completely sure it made the difference, but it definitely helped me get going. I quit my good job, started a company and now over a decade later I have a lot to show for it.

Maybe he isn't the best writer, I dunno. I have no one to compare it to really. But I read his stuff and got tremendous value from it. I feel lucky to have read his stuff when I did and I recommend it to people at least as a first step.

It isn't about PG necessarily being great in everything he writes. It's that the readership of HN has his writings in common, possibly more than anything else.

Some articles are on the front page to be read on their own or maybe even just to look at the pictures. Some are effective just for being a jumping off point for the discussion. Since what he writes about is so closely aligned with the readers here his articles almost always qualify for the latter, and occasionally for the former.

Replace his name with Jim Bakker or Joel Ostern and everything you said still applies to their followers.

The following of a personality in this way can lead to crappy groupthink.

A lot of YC companies seem to think they got useful advice from him.

I don't know what you mean by "obvious nonsense". Here's my dissection of one recent essay, which seemed generally true and useful: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/essays_that_endeavor_to_be_pers...

In that breakdown, what part do you think is obvious nonsense?

You're embodying the equal, opposite and more distasteful flavour of the exact thing you're criticising as you're criticising it.

..why not just comment on posts you want to read, and have thoughts on.

I guess what you mean is, after we have liked someone's work for a while we should stop.

Because I tend to think he has a lot of great ideas. Is that the beginning of a personality cult?

This new psychology of thinking that someone who is successful is nothing but lucky is very dangerous. Obviously the opposite is dangerous too--that luck plays no part.

If that's "all you gotta do" what are you waiting for?

He worked on writing a programming language, of course he’s not just lucky. But I bet his net worth is at least 10 times higher than the authors of Go and we hear from him 100 times more often.

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