How to Pretend That You Are Smart | Hacker News Reader

How to Pretend That You Are Smart

currentaffairs.org

46 pointsrideontime12 comments

Good lord, the author comes out swinging at Paul Graham. I encourage upvoting the article to prove to ourselves that this is a truly open forum (regardless of my or your opinion on it). We cannot believe that without being confident that even a sharp invective towards one of its cofounders can feature on the front page. Otherwise, HN would be more like Al Jazeera, which is one of the best news outlets in the Arab world, but unfortunately is tainted, on the margins, by its inability to criticize its patron Qatari regime. I know other articles disagreeing with Paul Graham have been upvoted, but this is on another level. A free forum is one that is worth your time. Yes, I know there are rules, and that's part of what makes HN so good.

PG probably takes an attack from Robinson as a compliment.

The initial discussion of the article on YC almost touched on what the article hits, noting that Paul Graham is actually quite vague in specifically what behaviors he finds troubling, or what debates he thinks can no longer be had. But, I think the article does a really good job of demonstrating how empty his argument really is.

The author of this piece engages in a lot more of the vapid argumentation that he's accusing Graham of than Graham himself has ever been guilty of.

Would you mind being specific? Are you making a claim about the author in general, or this particular essay? What is an example of a claim in the essay that you think is vapid?

I feel vindicated for the downposts on calling out the original posting of that PG article here on HN as excuses for treating others poorly.

It could be used that way, but do you think that’s the inevitable conclusion of his argument?

I doubt PG would use his own reasoning to harm others, but by placing his incomplete and non-comprehensive reasoning out in the world, he invites others to take his essay as advice. Advice that can cause misery if followed by a less accomplished, less astute individuals. His essay lacks acknowledgement of compromise, as any essay tends to do, but with content detailing how to judge others pushes the essay into dangerous ethical territory.

It seems like the thesis of this diatribe is that people recognized generally or in their own niche as intelligent may not be, which is supported by saying they expressed ideas which allow the author to call them trash, which means they aren’t smart after all.

Isn’t that a self-defeating argument? Recognition makes them noteworthy, but being wrong makes them notorious idiots?

That's not anywhere close to the author's core argument. I'll let the author speak for themselves:

    'They also are both good examples of a kind of fake social science, whereby you simply make unsubstantiated observations about human beings that confirm things people already believe, and the reader’s pre-existing feelings (their pre-judgments or “prejudices” if you will) are doing the work that evidence should be doing. I would argue that this kind of writing is extremely common and that we need to watch out for it because, if we share the prejudices of the author, we will end up believing things that may be totally untrue, and we will think we have read a good argument when we have in fact just been told that we were right all along.'

Robinson does note that the respective authors' fame, in some ways, insulates them from realizing the vacuousness of their prose:

    'Incredibly, Graham says that he had nine people review and give comments on his essay before he published it, including Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis. Apparently not one of those people asked Graham “What the hell are you talking about? What is this referring to? Could you please buttress this with some examples?”'

But the vast majority of the articles is dedicated to explaining why the essays are poorly-argued and poorly-sourced, without appeals to the authors' notoriety.

Disproving their points is secondary to the argument made by the author, which is rhetorical - don’t listen to pseudointelligence just because it comes from the ‘Very Smart’ (using the author’s sarcastic phrasing here).

It’s not as though the subjects didn’t put forward thoughtful arguments, but the author doesn’t agree and so goes on to say that their arguments are vacuous and the subjects are vacuous, which is an extraordinary leap.

Robinson argues that two particular pieces of work are poorly structured logically and insufficiently backed by evidence. He posits a particular source for how these arguments were constructed in the first place (that the authors mistake the assertion of their worldview for evidence of that worldview), and says that this is something the 'Very Smart' can get away with essentially because they allow themselves or are allowed by others to rest on their (earned or unearned) laurels:

    'A lot of time in college is spent teaching students that they cannot simply expound their theories of the world without reference to any scholarly literature. But once you have your credentials, and have made your way into an intellectual sinecure, whether in academia, media, or as a rich guru whose opinions are valued because people think the rich are smart, you no longer need to follow the rules.'

I can't argue for the Mead article (it was behind a paywall and was retracted ten days after its publication date: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-020-00496-1... ), but I think Robinson demonstrates this pretty well for the PG essay. As he notes:

    'I want to draw your attention to what is common between these two pieces of writing, because while most of us will probably wave away an essay like Mead’s, the actual *reasoning* in Graham’s is no better.' (original emphasis)

I don't think Robinson makes a claim that the subjects of the articles are vacuous. In the PG case, he claims that the subjects aren't even specified:

    'It’s hard to know what Graham is even talking about most of the time. What ideas does he think are not being debated? What restrictions have been put in place? What are some examples of things that are being affected by the inability to pursue certain lines of thinking? Which norms have eroded and in which institutions and to what degree and what consequences are imposed for Thinking The Forbidden Thoughts? How are we to evaluate whether there has been a loss to intellectual discourse without understanding what has been lost?'

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