Thought Leaders and Chicken Sexers
ideolalia.com
ideolalia.com
The essay is labelled ad-hominem by many, even though it provides a cogent argument and multiple supporting facts. Of course, to take an example, the question of the enterpreneur as a luminary and an exploiter depends greatly on what you already believe. I happen to already think that Facebook, Google and co are exerting bad influence, holding and using information they collect about everyone to their own advantage. Others, like Uber, are easy to be thought as direct exploiters.
The attacks on Arc and Bel and succinctness are also argued with factual arguments. (Arguments that I happen to agree with; bias, bias...).
In the end, the essay posits a simple thing: that behind all the pseudo-theoretical posturing underlying PG essays, they are mere opinions pieces.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#/medi...
Then it mentions nothing more about said views instead - yes - launching into an ornate argument about PG’s technical ideas from a decade ago to conclude that PG is an ‘unserious intellectual’, with the hope that its original thesis has been settled.
That’s ad hominem - don’t be fooled by the bloated, foot-noted middle.
I'm not convinced that role of intuition is exactly similar in something as subjective as political commentary as in designing a programming language. Even more frustrating is that the author doesn't clarify what characteristics someone needs to have to become a "serious public intellectual". He clarifies what PG should have done for Arc (read a scientific paper), but there isn't any such specific criticism directed against PG's political essays.
The actual thrust of the argument seems so broad (i.e. reliance on intuition), this could be used to label almost anybody outside pol-sci academic circles a "profoundly unserious public intellectual" for commenting on politics.
I feel like I'm in the same boat as the author. PG used to be one of my favorite writers on the web, and now he just seems full of it.
That seems like a fair assessment IMHO. Most of us are not "serious public intellectuals," especially w.r.t. politics. This isn't a moral failing; politics is hard.
I don't think the thrust of the author's point necessitates him to rigorously define what a "serious public intellectual" is, although perhaps he'd be a better "serious public intellectual" by doing so. Rather, it's building on the already numerous critiques of PG's political essays, and saying, "He's been like this all along. It's not that he got worse; he's always been like this."
PG's brand relies on us taking him seriously, and this essay's main thesis is that PG - despite his monetary success - has not earned that right, whether through his essays about programming language design or politics.
> I'm not convinced that role of intuition is exactly similar in something as subjective as political commentary as in designing a programming language.
I don't know if one is more or less subjective, but I also don't think that clarifies to me how much success in one or the other has to do with intuition. The essay uses chicken sexing as an example, which is pretty damn objective; yet success is only obtained through trained intuition.
The term doesn't really convey real meaning. It's just a rhetorical sneer. Like, if I wrote "Zach Tellman is basically Microsoft's idea of a smart person." It is somehow putting down the author, and Microsoft, and implying that I'm so much better and smarter. In the same way "He's not a serious public intellectual" implies not only that PG is unserious or non-intellectual, but that the author is some high authority who can cast these judgments.
In reality, of course, the author has no claim to judge who is serious or who is an intellectual.
To be fair (and to contradict your point), you are better and smarter for saying this, it's hilarious.
> In reality, of course, the author has no claim to judge who is serious or who is an intellectual.
Precisely. And even more, the personalized attack on PG seem more like a giant projection of Tellman's.
"I recognized that he had a tendency towards self-aggrandizement..."
"In many ways, those early essays contained the clearest articulation of his framework; it just took me ten years to see it."
It took Tellmen ten years of deep thought to finally crack this nut: that PG is a profoundly unserious intellectual! Ten years, but finally he did it, he cracked it.
Hard to find more ridiculous self-aggrandizement than that.
You're pretty much spot on with this line. Most people are terrible public intellectuals, and of the people who identify as such, many are profoundly unserious and completely useless. This article is asserting that Paul Graham does not belong in the vanishingly small set of people one should consider as a serious public intellectual.
Why anyone would elevate either of these two to "public intellectual" is beyond my grasp.
I'm all for substantial criticism and discussion, and am always desperately looking for it, but this (unequivocally political) essay unfortunately has all of the distinct hallmarks of the simplistic contemporary political discourse.
It takes a great many words to offer no substantial criticism of any of PG's recent thinking but rather hopes to indict his whole person (as an "unserious intellectual") based on a protracted and exhausting discussion of his naive ideas about programming from 20 years ago.
Who is a serious intellectual? What does that even mean? One thing I know is that serious thinking involves going through many ideas, many of them at risk of being naive or flawed, to sort out how to think about the world.
If an "unserious intellectual" is one that puts substantive ideas out into the aether, however flawed, however self-aggrandizing and, well, human, the messenger might be, then I'll take that over whatever you would call this essay. Everybody is wrong about everything, in part.
I propose a heuristic: if you're reading (or writing) anything whose thesis is "X is a bad person" (or "X is a ____", for that matter), perhaps you're participating in a religious game rather than a thinking game. There's no dialectic available after an essay like this, no opportunity for growth. There is just a like or upvote button -- with only the thought that if you press it you might just be on the right side of 'good'.
The only way this is can be seen as a personal attack is if PG (and his followers) identify with being a "serious intellectual." At that point it makes sense that it would seem like an attack to point out that no, he is not a "serious intellectual." Someone's character is only tarred if they insist that they are while being demonstrably not.
Are we to ‘believe’ all ‘serious intellectuals’ and disregard the ‘unserious’ ones. There’s a clear attempt at this weird kind of classification here—at best it’s a weird kind of paternalized way of thinking about people with ideas; at worst, its a poor rhetoric for classifying PG into the category of ‘wrongthinker’.
The internet gives a mouthpiece to many, many people; not everyone's opinion should be considered with equal weight. The essay's author uses the example, "EARTH HAS 4 CORNER SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY TIME CUBE." It is content that someone put a lot of time and effort into. How should I use the ideas and world view found in the timecube website to forge my own?
Probably not much. That's what I equivalate with "taking seriously," and a "serious public intellectual" is someone whose opinions I would probably consider when forming my own.
I don't think the author is tearing PG down to try and oust him from his material wealth; just saying, maybe what he writes in his essays shouldn't be taken as seriously as some of us thought.
Anyone that needs to be 'told' that EARTH HAS 4 CORNERS is silly thinking isn't going to hear you - so that's a terrible analogy right there.
When it comes to politics and essays like this that so indirectly (by 20 years! and subject matters miles apart!) try to make their case against a whole person's intellectual status - we are in weird territory.
Maybe you just didn't understand the analogy?
The point was that valuing being "aggressively independent-minded" above trying to be right can lead you to being a crank. One should value a process and rigor that leads you in the right direction, rather than valuing thinking different for the sake of thinking different.
None of these observations on PG's blogging are particularly new, and I've had the same criticism of much of his startup specific advice as it essentially attributed success to nebulous concepts like "pattern matching skill."
Back to this article. PG's entire worldview centers around an assumption that wealthy, powerful people are inherently good and a benefit to society. I don't think he believes all of them are, but that generally they are. Except for the ones he doesn't like or got lucky.
This is, of course, obvious retroactive defensiveness of his own wealth and influence and once you know to look for it, you see it in many of his essays. In PG's worldview, successful founders (Himself included ofc) just have "it", some kind of natural talent and ability for creating wealth and value, and we (everyone else) should get out of their way and let them fix things. "It", by the way, can be anything from resourcefulness to intelligence, to determination, depending on what PG feels like writing about.
Whenever one of these great men runs into adversity and is unsuccessful (Arc for example), then it is clearly the fault of others who simply Do Not Get It. Perhaps they are stupid, perhaps he has simply failed to make them see. He isn't sure yet. But he is sure it is definitely not his fault. It cannot be, because he has "It".
In spite of having worked with hundreds or thousands of startups, there is no curiosity in his worldview. No desire to dig deep into the data and understand why some people succeed and others do not. No analysis on the opportunities some have that others do not (what a remarkable privilege it is to be able to take several years off to start a company in your 20s and have the resources to do it). There are so many interesting things he could try to learn from the data he has.
But there is no need. Great founders just have "It" and the world is definitely a better place for them. Nuff said.
a serious intellectual is one that poses falsifiable arguments that other intellectuals attempt, and fail, to falsify. PG does no such thing.
Not really, a serious intellectual is one that does their research and does it competently, and from that foundation skillfully tries to articulate the truth. It's not a requirement that they do that within a Popper-approved framework.
But Graham’s analysis of brevity, and indeed of all language design, was fundamentally unserious. He wasn’t interested in a rigorous definition of brevity, because the ultimate measure of a language’s quality was still his hacker’s radar. All of his essays, and Arc itself, were just spokes around that central hub. If his essays sometimes disagreed, or if Arc didn’t reflect his essays, it’s hardly surprising; their only connection was they all, in the moment, seemed right and true to Paul Graham[..]
I dont understand what the author means by 'brevity'. Is that the same as what one might call 'elegant code'? I prefer to use the term elegant. From the article, it seems to me that PG's prefers elegant code that is modular and neat. It is reflected in his essays and how he approaches subjects.
Code can be elegant and modular. People are complex. You can hack them, but you cant debug people.
> It would not be far from the truth to say that a hacker about to write a program decides what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he’ll have to type.
If you want to write your own articles and explicitly replace brevity with elegance, don’t let me stop you.
thanks. have a great day.
This is technically true. However the only thing separating someone at the top of the field from an average expert is intuition. Both has access to exactly the same explicit knowledge and any expert with years of experience will know most of it already.
For example, what is "good code"? Nobody has written a program that programmers agree can tell if your code is good or not. Yet "good code" is extremely important, making things composable and scaling up means we can make larger and less bug prone programs. It is one of the key things of a top programmer, yet the only way we can identify it is ask experts whether a piece of code is good or not, and they wont even agree. We know for a fact that different programmers writes code of vastly different quality, we just can't pinpoint what that quality is.
The problem with Paul Graham isn't that he rely too much on his intuition, the problem is that his intuition for programming language design isn't as good as his intuition for making programs or startups. Lisp isn't as great as he claims, Java is much greater than he thinks, he just has created a mental blocker keeping him from seeing this and therefore ensuring that he will never be great at designing languages, since that blocker keeps his intuition from doing its job.
I'm not sold on either Arc or Bel! But if nerding out on programming languages was the only limb Graham ever climbed out on, nobody would read a post like this.
For what it's worth, in the field of Critical Paul Graham Theory, I don't know that anyone's done better than "It Turns Out". https://jsomers.net/blog/it-turns-out
Intuition based on knowledge and experience. Paul Graham seems to have no programming design experience besides Arc, no apparent knowledge acquired from study, and thus no basis for his intuitions. Which is why, as you write, "his intuition for programming language design isn't as good".
There are plenty of people with a similar level of knowledge and experience who disagree that brevity is everything. And for that matter, insisting that brevity should be measured in "AST size" rather than lines or characters seems objective and technical, but different implementations of the same language can use different AST formats, so this isn't the meaningful measure it's made out to be.
Because it seems like a strikingly ho-hum collection of samples.
Paul certainly didn't pull a Hammock-Time Hickey with Arc. Arc was a low mileage side project that fizzled out. Like any engineer, he dicked around and built a mediocre forum on it but lost interest when it came to polish. He made some comments about libraries and brevity. Used bytestrings and not immutable maps. He wrote blog posts, some about Arc.
It's not like Paul is revered as a proglang designer, yet it reads like Zach is trying to build up a damning contradiction from sideshow scraps.
And 80% through the post is when Zach finally charges Paul with spinning the silk of YCombinator from perhaps overvalued essay clout. I mean, didn't those early investors know that bytestrings couldn't possibly have been the best way to future proof Paul's hobbylang for 100 years?
(Isn't the flag to plant here simply that Zach's tour of his least favorite Paul Graham blogs could be leaving out the things that did make Paul ascendent in the tech/biz space? That perhaps something even like Viaweb could make up for blogging a tech prediction that didn't pan out?)
Then the blog post ends a few paragraphs later but not before Zach decides to crank the aggro up from mouse's hiss to puppy's roar by drawing a just-so line between white supremacy and the blog post where Paul bemoans anti-intellectual conformity going on in uni campuses.
In other words, Zach dedicates paragraphs of his post to drive home a scandal as big as Paul's one-praise-too-many endorsement of brevity in 2002, yet Zach leaves the connection between white replacement theory and anything else he's uttered on the page as an exercise for the reader.
I get the feeling that Zach gives his true feelings and motivation away in one of his opening paragraphs:
> Recently, however, his writing has taken a reactionary turn which is hard to ignore. He’s written about the need to defend “moderates” from bullies on the “extreme left”, asserted that “the truth is to the right of the median” because “the left is culturally dominant,” and justified Coinbase’s policy to ban discussion of anything deemed “political” by saying that it “will push away some talent, yes, but not very talented talent.”
And then Zach spends the rest of the blog procrastinating ever getting around to it, something that could finally be taken seriously as a real disagreement.
----
Something feels very withheld about Zach's message which is surprising because I think Zach is such a good communicator on technical subjects (e.g. Elements of Clojure).
I'm not even sure what Zach wants the reader to think Zach feels about Paul. The whole comment above is me trying to meander a guess. Where does Zach actually put Paul on a scale from outright intellectual fraudster to just someone Zach avoids on Twitter? It's hard to interpret the blog post without even knowing that much.
How much is Zach provoked by obvious political disagreement? What really is his point about Hickey and Clojure? Just a passing comment that Hickey did the build-your-own-lisp better, or is it that Arc's failure should have pilfered every bit of credibility from Paul?
If Zach ever read this, I would encourage him to introduce the same honest ("what I think" -> "why I think it") clarity that makes his technical work so easy to read.
If the author has a good case, he should just debate PG directly on his Coinbase stance. Because it sure feels to me that that's the real issue here. All the rest of the snarkiness is motivated by a disagreement on THAT issue.
But, even if Paul Graham has been wrong about language design, it doesn't mean he's been wrong about current affairs or the importance of startups in the coming future.
If anything, his bets have been largely successful and by openly sharing his thoughts he attracts some criticism from the different minded folks, like the author of this essay, who's clearly a smart fellow.
I saw that piece from the NY Times about Coinbase and I feel that it's reactionary to the announcement from Coinbase about not mingling into politics, which I support btw, I don't like the politization of every aspect of our lives.
I've also heard a podcast with Brian Amrstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, and it's not hard to get to the conclusion that he's a great human being.
I may be wrong, but I distrust most of what the NY Times has been publishings in the past few years, particularly because of their focus on politization. I even feel repugnant by it. It feels like a stance that somebody that doesn't believe in progress would take. Somebody that blames others for his problems and thinks that humans are inherently evil. Usually nihilistic.
The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets.
HN Guidelines say:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I guess if you choose your target carefully, you can get around that rule by writing an entire blog post that fails to make any kind of real and substantive argument with anything in particular and merely calls him an "idiot" at length.
HN is no longer "turning into Reddit." Now it's turning into "People" magazine as long as the people you gossip about are tech people.
If you think Paul Graham is "out of touch," maybe you can work on an app that helps rich people solve the problem of finding themselves surrounded by a sea of either yes men sucking up to them or haters. I imagine that sucks the oxygen out of their intellectual life for quite a lot of successful people.
(And DoreenMichele is quite wrong about this post; right or wrong, one thing it clearly is not is "vapid").
I'm failing to see this generate meaty discussion here. I am currently seeing mostly lots of flagged to death or grayed out comments, likely because it's basically gossip and mud slinging and not really anything more than "Some guy has a bee in his bonnet about Paul Graham for some reason."
PS there's only one L in my name, not two.
(Fixed the name thing, sorry about that).
What does bother me is that this article is generating so many grayed out and downvoted comments because of the manner in which it was written. If you think there is something useful to be gained from the piece, you know a helluva lot more about programming than I do. You are in a much better position than I am to leave a top level comment that will help turn this pile of manure (by which I mean the comments on HN) into something thought provoking and interesting.
I'm in no position to do that.
My goal is to see better discussion here. As someone who has studied things like Social Psychology, I'm only qualified to comment on the defects in this and why it's generating such lousy comments. I'm not qualified to tell people where to look for some meat here and help them focus on that. You are.
I also think we tend to fall into a trap here of assuming that an article's impact on HN is indicative of its quality. Most people don't write "for" HN, and lots of good stuff doesn't play well here.
And yet there isn't a single comment by you engaging directly with the article itself. Only engaging with your opinion that my opinion of it is wrong.
To me this fact only lends further support to my view of what is going on here.
But I don't intend to argue it further. This isn't remedying the problem at all. It isn't somehow leading to better discussion here.
I'm someone who finds social stuff very interesting. I mostly don't like gossip rags and a lot of psychological studies are essentially useless garbage.
What value does this article really provide? Does it tell us where you can look out for Paul Graham's personal biases in order to get more value out of his writing? Does it propose better answers to anything in particular?
This amounts to jealousy or something and it reminds me of an old comic strip where the punch line was to the effect of "After 12 straight hours online this woman is going You People Need To Get A Life!"
But if you look at the overall pattern of behavior, the real point is to attack or exclude a particular person or particular group of people.
Among other things I've had a college class in Social Psychology. I object to a gossipy piece of garbage getting so many upvotes on HN while bringing down the quality of discussion here.
If you find something meaty in his analysis of pg's work, then why don't you comment on that instead of arguing with me?
If my comments here are so off the mark, why do they have so much attention? This piece is failing to generate meaty discussion. It's mostly generating hot takes about Paul Graham and not commentary on the criticism of his work because the framing of the piece doesn't really fit with the idea that it's about criticizing his work.
If it were really about criticizing his work, what we should see here is debate about whether or not that criticism holds water. And I'm not really seeing that.
I've proposed a remedy: That someone -- anyone -- more knowledgeable than me about programming should leave a top level comment engaging with the actual meat of the article. There's no reason it can't be you.
Engaging further with my comments is not a remedy for what I feel the issue is. And engaging with my comments specifically because they are mine is just adding to the problem.
I commented on the matter because I've studied social phenomenon and I see a negative social pattern here and because I value HN for its high quality discussion. This article is mostly failing to foster good quality discussion. The primary focus has been on Paul Graham and not on something more substantive, like his writing, his ideas or his work.
After I left my remarks, people began leaving remarks that deny that this is an ad hominem attack on Paul Graham. That's problematic because it means the focus remains on Paul Graham. In discussing whether or not it is an ad hominem, the focus remains on pg, not on something more substantive.
It's a little like when I used to argue with someone and say "All you do is talk about you and I am not even a part of this discussion" and the reply was "I'm sorry. I'm a dirt bag. I'm a terrible person. I'm a lousy excuse for a human being." Like, I wasn't asking the person to attack themselves. I was asking them to include me in the discussion. Going from "Me. Me. Me." to "Negative things about me, me, me." doesn't fundamentally change the fact the topic is still "me."
It really shouldn't matter to you too much that it's me saying this -- unless it helps you figure out what my point really is. If you look at my comments and think to yourself "She has studied social phenomenon a lot more than she has studied programming and her observation is about quality of discussion here and I can see that" -- cool. Other than using what you know about me to help you understand my point, it shouldn't matter that I'm the author of the comment.
If you think that the substance of the article should be discussed, then go discuss it. If you think it's basically an ad hominem on Paul Graham, the best thing to do is ignore it.
I'm trying to step away from this discussion. Me being here is only deepening the issue that I dislike. It's not remedying it.
You take a class with each.
From the Very Great professor you get several maxims that don’t seem to actually help you, nor can you figure out how to apply them to your work.
From the Ordinary Great professor you get a bunch of advice that you can easily apply to your own work, and you feel that you’ve immediately improved in the subject.
Is it jealousy to then say the Very Great professor seems to have a reputation that exceeds his actual skill?
That’s how I read the comparison of Graham to Hickey.
It’s an important issue, especially if Very Great has a prominent position in the industry and is using that prominence in harmful ways.
In other essays, Zach Tellman has made the point that Clojure is unique in that it’s syntax allows it’s written to form to almost exactly represent its AST tree. The comparison then is between Arc and Clojure and between Paul Graham and Rich Hickey. Both men wrote essays about programming which seemed to promise new ideas but Hickey delivered real innovations whereas we can now see that Graham was unable to deliver. And Graham’s failure is in part traceable to his inability to make explicit what he actually knows, or why he believes the things that he asserts.
The debate over how to make tacit knowledge explicit is important. The debate over what constitutes good programming is important to the whole tech industry. I’m astonished that you would think this essay was merely a matter of gossip.
It’s possible that Tellman should have repeated some of his earlier essays, to give more context to his remarks, but this is the Web, so he embedded hyperlinks to some of the previous discussions.
Anything that Zach Tellman writes is going to get attention simply because Tellman has a following that takes him seriously.