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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Disagree. This sounds a bit harsh, nitpicking at one instance of a class.

Go back and read all his essays. You'll learn more than if you got your MBA. (I know. I've done both.)

Believe me, I'm not PG fan boy, but he doesn't have to do this and I hope he never stops.

I don't have an MBA but I think you're vastly overestimating the information density of these essays. Or maybe MBAs are really just that vacuous, I don't know.

PG has wrote some really great essays (the Submarine Article, anyone?). I've read all of them, some of them many times. But if I'm being completely honest, lately it feels like he's writing to write instead of writing because he has something genuinely new and insightful to say.

PG does have a good, prescriptive insight here: you should constantly question what the truth is in a manner of detached concern. You could more concisely call it dispassionate skepticism.

But take away all the dressing about conventionality and thinking in ways others don't, and drill down into that one idea. That would be a great essay.

> MBAs are really just that vacuous

You got it. There's some technical information for, you know, administering business, like doing CFO and COO, stuff but the main purpose for "famous" MBAs is to make friends you can do deals with.

"the main purpose for "famous" MBAs is to make friends you can do deals with"

Well, that and most companies are willing to pay you much more and put you much higher up on the totem pole if you've got an MBA.

Somewhat more charitably, I think he’s writing about very basic things, which a different skill than writing about new and exciting things. Such essays are more useful to some people than others.

> read all his essays. You'll learn more than if you got your MBA.

> Believe me, I'm not PG fan boy

Sorry, but after that first sentence of course I'm not going to believe you.

It's not that harsh. He wrote some good things in the past, but his recent essays are very simple minded and anti-scientific. You can't categorize people like you are in a middle school and be taken seriously, human behavior is very complex, no one can be "conventional- or independent-minded", it's always both simultaneously or rather neither, as those ideas don't describe human behavior even to a slightest degree. I get that in the US people are used to the idea of classifying everyone into simple buckets, given how political propaganda there divides people into classes, like democrats and republicans, etc., so pg is comfortable with such idea, but it doesn't make it less of a nonsense.

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