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Comment by cambalache | Hacker News Reader

These essays are getting ridiculous. We get it, you have tons of experience funding companies so it helps you to do a competent job filtering the candidates.But after that it is pretty much a crap-shoot, and all this theorizing are just post-hoc rationalizations to satisfy your ego.

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"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Under that premise nothing can be criticized. Even Mein Kampf must have a "charitable" interpretation.

Note that word plausible.

Have you read the last few of these essays posted here? Every single one of them I've read can be summarized as such: "I wish to focus on a certain characteristic. I will hint or explicitly state that negative qualities of said characteristic are found predominately in fields I do not care to work in and often have a negative stereotype about, and also hint or explicitly state that positive qualities are found predominately in fields I do care to. It so happens these positive qualities tend to be qualities I am ascribing to myself in this essay, or have ascribed to myself in the past."

Here is a choice selection:

"Do the earnest always win? Not always. It probably doesn't matter much in politics, or in crime, or in certain types of business that are similar to crime, like gambling, personal injury law, patent trolling, and so on. Nor does it matter in academic fields at the more bogus end of the spectrum. And though I don't know enough to say for sure, it may not matter in some kinds of humor: it may be possible to be completely cynical and still be very funny."

There's very little to be charitable about when reading that. It shows a profound lack of consideration for the fields and topics PG is dismissing out of hand, to the point where one seriously wonders whether he's actually given any more thought to it than whatever reaction from his own youth he's channeling in the moment.

Then there are the unsupported assertions that litter these essays, and they're all more or less alike in character: "Nerds in high school become Kings in adulthood". It's actually not only trite, but overbroad. In some ways it's true, but in many others it's not, but PG tends to generalize the former in his essays.

It's easy to insist on being charitable, but it's a bit harder when there's just so little to work with.

I don't think there's so little to be charitable about. But in any case the GP was a snarky, shallow dismissal, which is not what we want here, regardless of who the target is. From a moderation point of view your comment is totally different and I don't have a problem with it.

Btw, pg has been talking about earnestness for years—same with the topics of his other recent essays—and he has always written in this style. I don't think he's changed a bit. People have always gotten pissed off by them too. If there's a difference in public perception now it's a combination of his social status having changed [1] and the online climate having gotten steadily more acidic.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25233038

> But in any case the GP was a snarky, shallow dismissal, which is not what we want here, regardless of who the target is.

So no plausible charitable interpretation this time? A little bit hypocritical dont you think? I think you are confusing your role of moderator with one of mindless cheerleader. But who knows? Maybe that's part of the job so no judgment there.

I don't see a plausible interpretation of "all this theorizing are just post-hoc rationalizations to satisfy your ego" that isn't a snarky, shallow dismissal (of someone's work, btw, as the site guidelines ask you specifically not to do: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and a personal attack to boot.

I've posted so many moderation comments over the years that I'm comfortable saying "regardless of who the target is". If anyone bothered to look through that backlog (not that anyone would or should), they'd find me responding that way across a pretty full spectrum of positions and views [1], depending on whoever or whatever the commenter breaking the guidelines was going after. I don't see why threads about pg essays should be excluded from bog-standard moderation.

(It's true that I've also been posting some of my personal views in this thread and the last pg essay thread, but those are different from moderation replies. You can tell them apart by whether or not they say "please" and link to the HN guidelines.)

Btw also, please don't copy/paste comments, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400058. It strictly lowers signal/noise ratio.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

What's the difference between post-hoc rationalization and learning from experience though? I don't see him making any claims of pre-ordained success or that luck isn't a factor, he's just pointing out a quality he's seen to be valuable in the context of startups and how it can be a contra-indicator to the type of BS artist that proliferate around any kind of profitable industry.

Sure we can always question motivations (eg. yours could be envy or sour grapes), but that is unproductive.

It is to realize whether learning is possible at all. What can you learn from a successful game of rolling dice, from a successful game of flipping a coin? Was it the way you moved your wrist or did you you just luck out?

I think the original comment was directed at the seemingly pretentious nature of the essay. How do you quantify earnestness? Being sincere? I get the “we like demo over slides”, “2 founder over 1 founder” kinda thing, but talking about virtue and moral character seems like PG is struggling to find things to do after retirement. Philosophical musings are almost always due to too much time on hand and assumed profundity of one’s own thought process. Hence the post hoc rationalisation? Maybe?

Plus as it is said by someone in the other comment, success(especially in entrepreneurial ventures) is so much more like playing a game of roulette than it is like running a race. Luck! Lots of Luck! And chance does not fit well with assumed observations. It is a measurement bias that is being masked as concrete conclusions.

I think he lays it out pretty well: earnestness is more than sincerity, it's dedication to solving a problem for its own sake rather than as a means to an end. I'm not sure why you want that to be quantifiable, but I don't see that as being useful since Goodhart's law then kicks in.

I do agree that on a single continuum from roulette to race, entrepreneurship is closer to roulette, but it's a limited framing because entrepreneurship is neither a well-defined rote exercise like a marathon nor a discrete probabilistic event like flipping a coin. To the contrary, building a company is a continuous feedback loop involving thousands of decisions over which an entrepreneur has complete agency. The uncomfortable truth is twofold: founders' choices do affect outcomes, but those outcomes are not predictable and have no direct relationship to ones own perception of merit, hard work, fairness, or morals. Getting hung up on the luck aspect and whether or not some successful person is humble enough is a defense mechanism that ultimately gets in the way of maximizing your own success.

I won't go that far. But I will say that, contra his earlier writing, pg's recent stuff has a real "feedback in the bubble" feel. It's still treating SV culture as it was fifteen years ago and not really willing to engage with or even nod to the way the industry and its effects on society have evolved.

So e.g. Airbnb is still a hero story about disruption even as it settles into an established power and its inconvenient side effects on things like the real estate industry become apparent.

It's not that he's wrong, or that I even disagree with this particular essay. I just think the world has kinda moved on from this model of innovation and we need to be solving different problems than how to make the next batch of kids rich.

15 years ago SV was the same as now, there was never a nobler past. There has always been externalities than the tech companies are willing to sweep under the rug if it helps them to make money.

Yes, but the bad side-effects of e.g. fake news and hate speech on FB and Twitter, "industry disruptions" driving wages down, etc., maybe weren't all that readily apparent 15 years ago.

I think that's wrong, though. Through 2010 or so (very roughly) there was still a ton of unmined valued in straightforward applications of technology. I mean, sure, stuff goes wrong and there are bad aspects of culture, but looking at the industry through the Web 2.0 period it was really easy to convince yourself that this was all a Net Good Thing and making the world a better place (and that's true of Airbnb too!).

It's just not as true now. That fruit has been picked. There are still product ideas but they're about exploiting edges of an industry that has real problems, and not about fixing them.

I mean, whether the desire is there or not, the YC model isn't going to fix the climate crisis, or the disaster that the media ecosystem has become, or the increasingly dire level of income inequality in our society. And getting to my original point: pg's recent writings seem like he's made peace with that and is happy just chipping out new corners of the tech ecosystem and not Solving Problems People Have.

In 2010 it was old old old news that:

The world was drowning in electronic devices garbage, many containing toxic materials.

American companies were taking advantage of highly exploitative conditions in the third world, especially China.

Microsoft made millions "extorting" high licence fees for its software in many cases from poor 3rd world countries who had few option for what it was a de-facto monopoly.

Patent trolls were rampant,SCO was trying to kill Linux, all with MS funding.

RIIA was abusing the legal system, suing for millions a grandma who downloaded a couple of songs.

You may think whatever you want, but being ignorant of basic facts make your opinion a little bit better than total irrelevance.

In 2005 we didn't have the cloud, which lets you start a startup for next to nothing. We didn't have Lean Startup type books, podcasts and social media post from insiders which let us self educate on how business and startups worked. And we didn't have hundreds of VCs and billions of dollars chasing the next kid with a hot startup.

It would be interesting to see a essay from PG on why YC is still necessary.

AWS launched in 2006. The cloud was very much a part of and a driver of the earlier boom. It's not something that's arrived since. The cloud, too, is old news.

I'm not taking a position on whether or not YC is "necessary". I'm saying that fifteen years ago it was clear to most of us that YC was making society better. Now? It's really not clear.

Is he trying to stroke his ego, or is pg trying to signal to potential founders what qualities he is looking for? I would think the latter.

> But after that it is pretty much a crap-shoot, and all this theorizing are just post-hoc rationalizations to satisfy your ego.

On the other hand, all these baby boomers with money seeking to reinvent themselves as trend-predicting geniuses... at least they write checks.

Whom are you going to get money from instead, mom and dad? Someone has to take risks.

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