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Comment by qPM9l3XJrF | Hacker News Reader

I think you folks are holding PG to a standard that the vast majority of essays which hit the HN frontpage would not meet.

Even this critical essay looks like it fails to meet its own standard.

A "profoundly unserious" writer which is "mired in intuition and incuriosity"? Nowhere in the post are these terms rigorously defined!

And look! The author accuses Graham of "tantalizing the reader by reducing complex problems down to singular, nebulous concepts" without mentioning principal component analysis! "Profoundly unserious", I say.

Anyway, pg himself has been clear about rejecting seriousness as a virtue multiple times. See this essay for instance http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html

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The vast majority of essays submitted to HN don’t reach the front page because the author isn’t famous. Whereas PG rockets to the top of the front page within an hour of submission.

Even then, the average HN comments section is highly sceptical of any claims in any post. The top comment is usually critiquing the link for one reason or another. For some reason, that wasn’t the case with PG articles. You’re only remarking about this now because HN is finally holding PG to the same standard that others are.

I value PG's opinion more than a rando blogger because he's very successful, has observed a lot of data about what makes startups successful, seems unusually serious about being correct, and has written a lot of things I consider insightful in the past. He's a name I know and I click it when I see it on HN. There are a lot of other people with similar HN clout, patio11 for instance.

I haven't noticed a trend for comments on PG articles to be less critical. If anything I think I've noticed users feeling a need to be more critical (as I feel your comment illustrates).

It's OK to hold pg to a higher standard than others in terms of factually supporting his claims. Fine. Just be clear that you are doing so. It's fine to remind others not to take his word as gospel as well.

I mean it's at least technically quite possible that someone like PG would have a very good intuitive understanding for what works and what doesn't, without this meaning that he is able to systematise this implicit knowledge in such a way that it is empirically solid and/or can be usefully taught to others.

This is similar to the fact that experts are not always the best teachers, or that a rhetorically skilled speaker/writer is not necessarily a competent linguist or literary scientist, or how many great musicians know little about music theory.

Of course, you are correct that many, many other tech bloggers don't back up their claims either (most notoriously the "I did this thing once at company X, it worked ok, and now I'm preaching it as a new gospel (but it hasn't even been a year that we did this and we don't understand the long-term implications of it yet)" blog posts). I think this is in general a real shame because it leads to all the cargo culting madness that's so prevalent in the industry.

In PG's case, I find that most of his blog posts read like post hoc rationalisations based on sweeping generalisations (e.g. that you can be either "earnest" or jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a particularly false dichotomy). Which wouldn't nearly bother me as much if they weren't also often full of thinly veiled contempt for different kinds of people (e.g. people who are actually good at bringing people together). It sometimes reads to me as a sort of "I was bullied/excluded as a nerdy teenager and now I'm gonna show them how much better nerds are and why they will (or at least should) rule the world". In a world where we increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies making decisions that impact all of us, including people completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't think this is a very good position to take.

You make a good point: while PG may be able to intuitively pick out "winners," this does not mean he will be successful at making those intuitions explicit, as he attempts to do in his blog posts.

>I mean it's at least technically quite possible that someone like PG would have a very good intuitive understanding for what works and what doesn't

Fair point

>you can be either "earnest" or jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a particularly false dichotomy

I'm looking at the essay and I'm not seeing where it says this? Maybe I just forgot.

>people who are actually good at bringing people together

From the essay (in a footnote):

>It's interesting how many different ways there are not to be earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant, to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to be orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make. This pattern suggests that earnestness is not one end of a continuum, but a target one can fall short of in multiple dimensions.

The closest thing on the list to "bringing people together" in my mind would be being cool, which isn't very close IMO.

>In a world where we increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies making decisions that impact all of us, including people completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't think this is a very good position to take.

I don't trust the general population to make decisions either--see our current president for an example of what they can sometimes go for.

"…finally holding PG to the same standard…"

The typical reaction to PG essays on HN has been the exact same flavor of negative for many, many years now. Go back and read the comments on his previous submissions. PG himself even wrote an essay about uncharitable criticism and basically exited the site in 2015.

It's very surprising to me that anyone could think that, in 2020, it's new and original to bash PG articles on HN.

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