Brown Political Review Interviews Paul Graham
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This really stood out to me - what an excellent articulation of the intrinsic reason why founders want to be founders.
One could retort that nice conspiracy theory to almost everything, and some people actually specialize into it. Now the thing is, having some constraints is a great way to get aware of a problem and try to solve it. This of course doesn't fit well with the whining mentality that some groups try to implant onto other for their own benefits.
In what sense is it a conspiracy theory? Look at what COVID-19 is already highlighting over there where people can't get tested[1], get no help for being unable to work, etc.
[1] Unless, of course, you're a baseball team and then you can get instantly tested.
To that a counter-retort may say, even if we acknowledge the "systemic unfairness" in the US, the country is leading the world as far as entrepreneurship and startups go.
There is a very small group of people that are thinking about these ideas at a higher level with enough conviction that they will act on it.
For all sorts of reasons, no doubt, but that's what it is. I didn't even meet another developer in the wild who actually liked building things on his own until I was in my late 20s and we became co-founders. And I went to a large public university with a good comp sci department.
Not everyone is going to be a creator. Not sure what is so controversial about this. Getting hostile over the word "thin" seems a bit silly since it's also completely unquantified. And I wonder what your life circumstance is if you're encountering more of a "thick" stream. Are you a hackathon event planner or something?
What is pretentious about the quote that started this thread is the apparent belief that the kinds of people that do the things we talk about and admire on this site - building new kinds of software, starting growth-focused companies - are the only people "that are interested in ideas and making new stuff". I agree that there is a fairly thin stream of the building-software / starting-companies hackers that you're thinking of, but I see huge numbers of people from all walks of life being interested in ideas and creating things. Artists, writers, journalists, directors, bureaucrats, other types of business people, on and on and on. I think it is pretentious to look down our noses at pursuits that are not our own, that's all.
Your comment about hackathon event planning is illustrative: hackathons are honestly not at all where I would go to find the highest concentration of people creating interesting new things.
Your meaning of "being interested in ideas" and specially "stuff" is different to Graham's.
This is not a surprise because both "idea" and "stuff" are just generic placeholders in which you can enter whatever you want.
I see that a lot when I write or speak to a big group of people. No matter what I say somebody somewhere interprets it in the worst possible way I could barely imagine myself.
Ideas are cheap. That long-nursed startup idea you've had has been tried a half-dozen times and discarded even more.
PG: "Maybe Pebble. It could have been the next Apple. But hardware startups are a bitch. External factors can kill you in a way that doesn’t happen with software, and you can’t do things as gradually as you can with software."
This answer stood out to me the most since many of the other questions are answered somewhat in his essays already.
Graham: That the axiomatic approach John McCarthy used when defining Lisp is the optimal way to design general-purpose programming languages.
Interviewer (silently): Oh my god what did I get myself into? Next question, quick!
Me: Really? what metrics do you make that optimality claim on?
Having read numerous articles and books he's written on Lisp, and the recently published source of his Lisp dialect (written in itself of course) - it's a fascination/obsession spanning decades.
I respect that "long-sightedness" and a kind of dogged determination, for better or worse, a conscious or natural inclication to persist in pursuing important truths - even if "very few people agree with you" on them.
Someone needs to sit him down and do nothing but ask about programming languages for an hour or two at some point.
On the other hand, the question about his homepage was neat.
So that (and the 3% thing) interests me - I have always found myself on the wrong side of someone else's line - aorry Paul you cant take that exam / goto that university / get that job / build that software - and it riles me.
I wonder how often simply being told no, makes someone do it anyway and how you spot that in a day.
I pursued this illusion for some time as well. Then the first 50-some pages of Sartre's Being and Nothingness started a turn toward my present view that 20th-century academic philosophy is on the whole little more than a sophistical hustle.
Funny, this is also what philosophers think about modern tech companies.
If you're going to fault Sartre and talk about 20th c. academic philosophy, you may as well also fault Hegel or Nietzche or Marx for their 18th and 19th c. philosophy, and then Heraclitus for his 4th century BC obscurities. Maybe you only meant "continental" philosophy, but you'd probably need metaphilosophy to argue the point as to what is genuine and a "sophistical hustle".
Apparently the people who study Sartre come out with some pretty interesting ideas[0]. It's a little tiring to hear people reading 50 pages of a French philosopher known for his difficulty and concluding that 20th c. academic philosophy is sophistry(?!)[1] A non-mathematician might just say the same thing about Erdos. The fact that people feel comfortable making such sweeping judgements on a wide-ranging and deep discipline is frankly shocking. You're not alone, however; the gwern.net guy has done the same.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/
[1] Sartre mostly wrote books on philosophy, rather than publishing in academic journals, alongside plays and novels. If you mean to talk about "academic philosophy", Sartre is certainly not your best example. Neither would Marx or Nietzche be good examples. Heidegger and Hegel maybe.
It's par for the course in tech, unfortunately. I think tech leadership in particular would benefit from a rigorous education in ethics.
I’m not aware of any evidence that education in ethics leads to more ethical behavior though it obviously leads to being able to discuss ethical problems better. The evidence suggests ethicists steal more books than other philosophers[1].
]1] Do ethicists steal more books? Eric Schwitzgebel
If explicit cognition about morality promotes moral behavior then one might expect ethics professors to behave particularly well. However, professional ethicists’ behavior has never been empirically studied. The present research examined the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity. Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books. Study 2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing.
In any case, this paper covers most of the objections you are raising and answers them quite well, IMO:
I supposed that if a vague criticism of Hardt and Negri is your justification for dismissing the school of thought they draw from (in, it should be mentioned, very controversial ways), you must not be able to say much about what most experts think of when they hear "Marxism": Capital, V.I. Lenin, Dobb/Meek/Sweezy, Postone, etc. Put it this way: every philosopher who has seriously engaged with Marx critically has not had the hubris to call Marxism "intellectually worthless" - flawed, logically inconsistent, immoral, convoluted, unnecessary, whatever, sure - but not worthless as a result of "sheer obscurity and bullshitting". The only part of Marx that has been called needlessly obscure (aside from misguided remarks by Pareto) is the Wertform - and Marxists themselves criticize that heavily. Some Marxists (Rational Choice Marxists) would even agree with you, and still hold Marx to be highly relevant and fruitful. Empire seems cherry-picked at best, and a dishonest representative of late 20th c. and 21st c. Marxian literature at worst. If it's all you've read from Marxists, then my apologies - but criticize Hardt and Negri, not the discipline as a whole, which has worked for the past century to create a great many introductory materials, lecture series, video series, companion guides and more.
You are referring to gwern's "dismissal of Marx's thought" in your reply to everybodyknows?
I'm confused.
You stated your experience, and the conclusion that experience led you to. The conclusion that Marxism is "really that intellectually worthless" on the basis of what you wrote on your site is unwarranted - and yet, considering how most Marxist literature isn't nearly as "bullshitty and obscure" as you paint Empire to be, as the opinions from experts and scholars demonstrate[0], it's a fairly reasonable conclusion for me to draw. All of this is still assuming that Empire really is as "bullshitty and obscure" as you say it is. I'm yet to see anyone else make that claim - despite your claim that "it's not just [you]".
>I don't feel the need to reiterate the many excellent objections, theoretical and practical, which refute Marxism
I suppose that is how the Internet works. You don't need to present or defend a specific claim; instead, you can pick out one example, infer that it is representative of the whole, and claim you're right - but right in what way isn't your job to show.
If Empire is "the most egregious", why is the most egregious example being used to attack the whole and being taken as representative? I'm sure you know about the concept of steelmanning - to take the most charitable interpretation of your opponent's claims.
On your page, you write "[...] concluding the problem was not me [...]", how could you possibly come to that conclusion when scholars in related fields and experts on the topic have no issue navigating the work[1]?
This isn't an issue of Marx[ism] being correct or not. I disagree with a few of Marx's conclusions. This is an issue of Marxist literature being "bulshitty and obscure". That is the claim you have failed to back up. By pointing to "excellent objections", you only strengthen my point that even the harshest critics can navigate Marxism.
When two Nobel prize winning economists consider 20th c. Marxism sufficiently readable and strong to argue against in a series of publications, maybe the problem is you. It appears you even failed to give proper appreciation to the place of Analytical or Mathematical Marxism - the stuff published in economics journals through the latter half of the 20th c. and to this day. You'll find that contrary to your opinion, they're plenty readable even by people who aren't experts of Marx[3].
[0] Pick up any comprehensive book on the history of economics and there'll be a chapter on Marx. It may not be a generous chapter, but the authors clearly were able to navigate through the work in order to write their chapter. Pick up any book on mainstream theories of philosophy, history or sociology and you'll find the same. In a PolEcon book you'll find more than one chapter. Are you sure the problem isn't just you?
[1] Not only that, but there are hundreds of short books, lecture series and pamphlets that explain the topic pretty well[2]. Marx himself wrote a short lecture series. Your post makes it out to be as if the discipline keeps things well hidden in an obscurantist conspiracy.
[2] If you don't care for a sympathetic overview of Marxism, Kolakowski, one of Marxism's harshest critics, wrote The Main Currents of Marxism.
[3] Example: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3468758 and https://econpapers.repec.org/article/fisjournl/19s0102.htm and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/030981681985277... and http://digamo.free.fr/jefferies15.pdf
This is akin to eating a potato, disliking it, and swearing off all vegetables.
My impression (from undergrad & postgrad philosophy) was not far off - much philosophy is grounded in sincere attempts to clarify issues of importance, but it's largely doomed to failure (as are scientific attempts to take over canonical 'philosophical' problems - just witness neuroscience's often hilarious tilts at consciousness). That's too long an argument to justify here, but suffice it to say philosophy is truly excellent at revealing our limitations. Which strikes me as no bad thing for a species (and indeed era) whose primary motif could reasonably be considered to be the Dunning–Kruger effect.
When I made that link on why we behave the way we do, I realized that philosophy is a little like theology, and the real truths are much darker.
Part of philosophy's job is finding a solid epistemological basis for the "hard sciences", and what claims such sciences can legitimately make about the world.
>I realized that philosophy is a little like theology, and the real truths are much darker.
Philosophy has plenty of "dark truths". What are nihilism or moral skepticism, for instance, if not philosophical theories that negate the meaning of life and morality? Besides, to justifiably throw out philospohy because its claims are inconvenient to you (e.g. by "sounding nice") would require some philosophy to begin with.
The dark truths are even darker than that. It is what will get you deplatformed.
Paul has a very nice article on this somewhere on his blog. somewhere. lazy to link. something about things you can't say.
This is not what I meant, nor is it what the majority of philosophy of science concerns itself with. I specifically mentioned epistemological basis[4]. Questions such as what deliniates science from pseudoscience, and what empirical investigation tells us about how things really are, are questions in the domain of philosophy[0]. Even so, what rigorous justification deliniates a good statistical significance from a bad one?
>The dark truths are even darker than that. It is what will get you deplatformed.
Sure enough, philosophy studies those too[1][2][3].
>Paul has a very nice article on this somewhere on his blog.
It's hard to see why PG should be considered an authority on philosophy.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/
[3] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/
[4] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#WhatKnow
Can you name a single positive result in all of philosophy that there is any consensus for across the field? Sure, philosophy provides a fair number of attempts at a solid epistemological basis for the hard sciences, but there are so many of them, and despite philosophers not really agreeing on one, physicists can somehow do their jobs perfectly well. Meaning that the philosophy part really doesn’t matter, at least not frequently.
In fact, many philosophers implicitly admit this through how they do philosophy. Lots of philosophical arguments are just intuition pumps, with the only real work being to develop some logical theory that stitches together these intuitions. But there’s still the implicit assumption that those intuitions were correct to begin with, and if you’re making that assumption, why do you need the philosophy if you already have intuition?
Physics is an interesting example, because it has so many intersections with philosophy. The kind of claims physicists make may appear reasonable through intuition, and nobody would deny they are useful, but we must answer what it means to do a job well. Religion also does its job well, if considered to work as Feuerbach or Marx described. Many things are useful but undesirable. We separate science from pseudo-science, but there are still contentious areas. The notion that physics is useful but astrology is not on the basis of falsifiability, a theory popular a couple of decades ago, is no longer generally considered justified. It was philosophers who both proposed and refuted the idea that falsifiability is necessary and sufficient to declare something scientific.
>Lots of philosophical arguments are just intuition pumps, with the only real work being to develop some logical theory that stitches together these intuitions.
This answer to whether philosophers rely so heavily (or at all!) on intuition is pretty contentious, and some argue that intuitions are indispensable[0], and in some fields there's evidence against it. Moral nihilism or moral error theory deny the intuition of there being (even relative) moral authority, for example; some argue that a statement like "murder is morally wrong" merely expresses a negative opinion on murder, yet others argue that the statement cannot possibly be true or false. Feminist philosophy denies the intuition that the scientific method is independent of historical and current gender roles. Philosophers both defend and object to intuitions that pornography doesn't count as art based on more than intuition. The notion that we "have rights" in some sense is a common intuition, but several schools of thought dispute this. The intuition that capitalism is desirable has been taken to task by Marxists. The economist's intuition that price has no relation to labour-time has been debated by value-form theorists. The intuition that things get better as time goes on has been taken to task by Adorno (with examples such as the Holocaust).
The theory of contingent identity was one philosophy had nearly completely done away with: the notion that "all necessary truths can be known a priori", but Kripke showed that in cases such as the claim that H2O = water (which can't be known without experimental observation), this can't be true. But philosophers found problem with Kripke's answer[1]. That doesn't mean we're back where we started. Philosophers can't just make the same arguments again. The fact that people found a problem with Kripke's answer is surely a good thing. It would be an intellectual tragedy if we accepted a potentially wrong answer as a good answer. In that view, a "solved problem" in philosophy is actually suspicious, and not necessarily a good thing. Desirable, for sure, but we can't always have what we want.
If, hypothetically, philosophers could come to a consensus that physics has no good epistemological foundation, it would mean that physicsts doing their job well has no more meaning than to say astrologists do their job well.
In my own view, once you get past a certain point of making your work accord with intuitions about the world, a particular theory can be internally consistent, or internally inconsistent. Take logic, for example - the foundation of classical and formal logic that A != !A is purely an intuition. Some logics play with that rule, too. If the foundational rules of logic are decided by intuition, then mathematics as a whole is too. That doesn't mean I can say that d/dx x^2 = 3 - because it would be internally inconsistent. I'd first have to elaborate a system in which that statement makes sense.
The notion of philosophical progress is, itself, highly debated, with many positions on the matter. Sometimes philosophical problems become solved when evidence from the physical sciences is provided (such as Molyneux's Problem). Other times, we need to define what progress really means[2].
In short, whether or not philosophy does make progress, and at what rate, whether the "fact" it doesn't make progress now rules out that it may some day make progress, whether progress is desirable are all philosophical questions anyway. The attempt to answer the question may not be "useful" to daily life, but a lot of mathematics is practically useless too. For that matter, so is the existence of the Higgs Boson or dark matter. So what?
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/experimental-philosophy/#... "For instance, some philosophers argue that in order even to pick out the kind of interest, we need to rely on our intuitive sense of what belongs in the category (e.g., Goldman 2015). To determine the characteristics of knowledge, we need to have a way of picking out which items are genuine members of the kind, and for this we must rely on our intuitive understanding of knowledge."
[1] https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/11474 "People talk about the big problems and they propose positions on them, some of which are more convincing, some of which are less convincing. The problem is that you can't really call any of these positions definitive solutions because each position engenders other difficulties, and the solutions to those difficulties engender other problems. It's not that no progress is being made, in these cases. Rather, I think it's that philosophical problems are like fractals. We can delineate broad families of solutions to the big problems that seem reasonable."
[2] https://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=139...
> The kind of claims physicists make may appear reasonable through intuition
No, not really. Often they’re extremely counterintuitive and difficult to communicate in any way except mathematically.
> If, hypothetically, philosophers could come to a consensus that physics has no good epistemological foundation, it would mean that physicsts doing their job well has no more meaning than to say astrologists do their job well.
No, it would probably mean that philosophers were all full of shit.
Molyneux's Problem. Even then, so what if the asnwer is "no"? What would that mean? Solving a problem is not an indicator of progress, anyway.
More solved problems are listed here: https://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/02/examples-of-solved-phi...
>Often they’re extremely counterintuitive and difficult to communicate in any way except mathematically.
You're talking about specific claims, not kinds of claims, which I was discussing. The claim that something has been observed to work in a certain way in one situation and therefore must work that way everywhere is a kind of claim. That's the universalist principle. Physics, like all sciences and possibly all knowledge, is victim to the Munchhousen trilemma[0].
>No, it would probably mean that philosophers were all full of shit.
So if results are inconvenient to you or against your intuition, they're invalid? "Gravity is inconvenient, so physicists are full of shit." On what basis can you argue that intuition is shaky, when you use it yourself for that result?
Sure. None of which has stopped physicists from being able to make some basic assumptions like universality, move on, and deliver results.
> So if results are inconvenient to you or against your intuition, they're invalid? "Gravity is inconvenient, so physicists are full of shit."
In the hard sciences, there are right and wrong answers that can be validated with experiment. Or at least there are better and worse answers. In mathematics there are right and wrong answers. This enforces a type of rigor on the field that makes it highly unlikely that the entire field is full of shit—the phonies and second-rate theorists typically have a hard time making it very far. So they all end up in the humanities, where nobody can really tell for sure who’s right and who’s wrong and intellectual fashionability can rule the day.
So far, some parts of philosophy have resisted this mediocritizing influence and maintain high standards of intellectual rigor compared to other humanities fields. But in the counterfactual circumstance where academic philosophers just write off physics as nonsense that’s no more valid than astrology, it’s far more likely that trolls and fools managed to drive the last reasonable people out of philosophy.
Great! But just because you operate on an assumption, it doesn't mean the assumption is valid. Einstein, for instance, went to his grave believing quantum mechanics was false. This was in no small part due to his metaphysical commitments. The same applies today to the nature of time, dark matter and various QM interpretations.
>This enforces a type of rigor on the field that makes it highly unlikely that the entire field is full of shit—the phonies and second-rate theorists typically have a hard time making it very far.
We're discussing the field of philosophy and its goals in abstract here, though I will note that along with the hoaxes in some social sciences (which mostly aren't hoaxes in philosophy), there have been some in the harder sciences too. You need logic for mathematics. Given a logic system, mathematics is internally consistent. Philosphy works in much the same way with both logic and conceptual frameworks. Although it can be hard to prove, say, moral realism, it is possible to verify claims within moral realism to be logically consistent or not. Much the same goes for logic. I discussed this with my mathematical example a couple of posts to you previously. You don't get a free pass from logic or argumentation if you hold up a card that reads "philosopher".
My only point in this discussion was to pass along the idea that philosophy is (or at least in many cases is) about as consistent as mathematics in the sense that we procede from axioms, and given those axioms, we can verify the truth or falsity of a preposition. Philosophy produces results in a different way, like the Fibonacci sequence or a fractal. The only difference is that philosophy has no fear of challenging, replacing, or adding axioms. That's comparatively rare in mathematics today.
>it’s far more likely that trolls and fools managed to drive the last reasonable people out of philosophy.
That's one reading; another reading would be that a theory we've been working with for a long time has just been found not to hold up. Physics, like religion, can still maintain its usefulness in such a scenario. Popper's criteria for separating science from pseudo-science would have (apparetly unknowingly to him) included both physics and astrology as scientific.
We already know Paul knows the power of buying good PR: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Ironically, PG accidentally helped create today's phony Silly Valley culture, because after YC's first few big wins with earnest founders, people started smelling money, and gold-rushing douchebags colonized the nascent startup scene in its infancy.