Fierce Nerds
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Not just one or two, but the majority of them. To the point that the aggressive geniuses stood out. And I worked for/with two abrasive ones as well, so I know the difference.
The same was true for the two startups I worked at after that, and Qualcomm, and now the third startup where I work.
The really productive geniuses in each situation were easy to work with, I think largely, because of their confidence in their own grasp of the subject at hand. They had nothing to prove, they knew that, and it showed. The difficult people were never stupid, far from it, but they felt like they needed to defend everything they did, every decision they made, and that made working with them less productive.
With the gentle geniuses, if you thought you came up with something that was an improvement on what was being done, they would look at it honestly, and if it was not better, they would calmly explain why, and if it was better, they would acknowledge it right out and discuss how to merge that into the current work.
The 'less gentle' ones would take pride in pointing out the flaws in your idea if you were wrong, and if you were right, would fight you over whether it had any real value at all, then would stiff arm you as far as getting it accepted as a change.
I avoid the other kind of person like a plague now. They ruin otherwise excellent teams. They might be fine to have a drink with or something, but in day to day work, they are sand paper.
Another thing I find is that the gentle variety tend to understand and appreciate realistic timelines. Highly competitive "nerds" tend to fight on timelines, or suppress others using them. Why wasn't that done sooner? Wait, all you did in 3 days was this? It's a terrible tool used to knock team mates down a peg on a routine basis.
No ego here, I just absorb, absorb and absorb!
I try to remind myself to show some gratitude, not just for my team's knowledge and insights that they share, but for having selected me as a person to join them as well. It's a real privilege to have a good team. I think they consider me more of an equal than I give myself credit for but I really do get an education pretty much every day. Life is interesting.
I assume the implication here is that the productive folks didn't necessarily defend everything they did, and thus went with other people's solutions sometimes even when their own was better? Is that what you're trying to convey? or should I be reading it differently? Curious how their behavior contrasted in your experience.
It doesn’t have to mean that the gentle genius never defends their viewpoints, but highlights the key differences in how these personality types operate on a day-to-day basis, and the resulting impact on the team around them.
I think this "fierceness" is an expected sign of intellectual dominance of your peers at 15-20. At 25+, it's a sign that you've either never entered a pond with genuinely big fish, or you've never managed to recognize that big fish are swimming around you.
Of course, you could just be dominating big fish at 25+. It's logically possible. But the incident of "fierceness" is muuuuch higher than the incidence of that level of genius.
another comment mentioned that it's a matter of tamping down the inner asshole, having self awareness. this still allows for an enormous domineering ego but supposes it can be self regulated, held back.
I feel like even that is still a radical take. fierce nerds just see opportunity in the world. they want to strike, want to seize good, promote the paths everyone else disregards as too difficult too hard top unknown, to say, let's really find out. fiercely try. try to learn if we fail & try again next time too. thw competition is not with each other, not about who; it's a competition against mediocrity & safety & fragility. a competition to collaboratively find excellence & further truths.
you should remain fierce. there are not many other real big fish on the sea. most folk have narrow windows of experience, limited views, & your nerdly bigger picture takes of the fierce are direly needed. especially when we don't attach ourselves to the try, when we are all aligned to try greatly & learn & adjust as we go, with fierceness, but without ego.
Who is a wise man?
The one that always seeks to occupy the smallest place/room.
Nota Bene: I am not a Russian, but simply encountered this formulation several times.
* Whoever said this didn’t own a grand piano. Just saying.
I work with "fierce nerds". Some of them are self-aware, and try very very hard not to be assholes to the people around them. They do this without sacrificing their passion. And they are tolerable to work with only because they consciously push back against their inner asshole.
It takes a lot of effort in some areas to stay calm and allow the other side to play out their argument, and I recognize how critical it is in maintaining a positive attitude towards work.
I find that minimizing unnecessary conference calls was a monumental step in the right direction. When a technical conversation is serialized through a Github issue, it tends to get a lot more thought and time applied. It is also easy to walk away from a frustrating issue, go for a run, come back, and write a much more reasonable reply than you otherwise would have if compelled to do so.
* Confidence of not needing to prove something to themselves.
* Comfort with their situation, aka not needing to prove something to others -- for practical reasons, separate from validation of own security/insecurity. (In your Bell Labs example, having gotten into there, getting to do the kind of work they want, presumably having sufficient respect of others for a pleasant environment, not feeling like they have to fight their way to opportunity and respect.)
* Intellectual humility that comes with experience, having realized how easy and frequent it is to be mistaken.
* Maybe differences of personality wiring. (I know nothing of the psychological research, but, anecdotally, there seems to be variation among people in how problem-solving interacts with emotions, for example, and maybe how that affects their interactions in that context.)
Also, taking a step back, I don't know how good our perceptions of humility. (Of course, different people express themselves differently, which I suppose affects perceptions of those people's humility. And maybe, when we're characterizing humility of others, we're usually basing that on perceptions, rather than some more objective criteria.)
Career coaches teach you how you can get ahead and to be confident.
But having knowledge also means you know about your limits, so your only option is to pretend to know everything.
It can be useful to convince people with low tech literacy of your solution, but I don't think confidence is a good metric. It is basically a dysfunctional form of communication.
Did you know any of them via mailing lists or Usenet, just face to face?
People's abrasiveness will come out in situations in which they think there won't be any repercussions.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate...
"Fierce nerds" can be valuable. Sure. But the folks who truly stand out in my mind are a level higher. They're the ones at the top of their game, who know how to demand & command excellence, without being jerks about it.
I'm reminded of this episode of "The Chef Show" where Jon Favreau compliments Roy Choi behind his back. He tells Bill Burr that he had followed Roy around for a full day, going to all his restaurants and food trucks, and not once did Roy raise his voice to his staff. It's pretty cool to see how much admiration one artist/leader has for the other, not because of their technical skills but because they choose to be kind.
I don't think we need to settle for being "fierce nerds".
Sorry what are you trying to say here? It's admirable or difficult not to yell at your employees?
What about companies now that go out of their way to make sure none of the workers in their supply chain are exploited? That should be the bare minimum - should we ignore the effort that they've gone to?
What about a family member who's been clean from drugs for 10 years? Should we celebrate with them, or just ignore their achievement because not being addicted to drugs is pretty much considered the bare minimum by broader society?
Man, who would have thought "not yelling at your employees isn't an accomplishment" would be controversial...
> Should the anti-slavery campaigners of the 1800s receive no admiration, despite social norms at the time, because vocal opposition to slavery "should be the bare minimum"?
Not even close to the same. This case would be like admiring all the people that happened to not own slaves. Congrats?
Anti-slavery campaigners were doing way more than the bare minimum. No one lost their lives over just not having slaves.
> What about companies now that go out of their way to make sure none of the workers in their supply chain are exploited? That should be the bare minimum - should we ignore the effort that they've gone to?
Not even close to the same. This case would be like admiring the factory manager for not exploiting their employees. Congrats?
> What about a family member who's been clean from drugs for 10 years? Should we celebrate with them, or just ignore their achievement because not being addicted to drugs is pretty much considered the bare minimum by broader society?
Maybe if yelling at employees was incredibly physically addictive.
Literally my whole point is that you all are saying, "Wow, it's so admirable that you're not a piece of shit!".
The fact that this guy refused to shout at his staff, even though he was in an environment where shouting at staff is completely tolerated, is an admirable and frankly rare trait.
It shows he actually cares about other people, rather than doing what is socially acceptable/beneficial to himself.
That an interesting read, thanks. I struggle to square what Bezos is saying with what Amazon has become. He is clearly incredibly clever but appears devoid of any kindness toward his low level employees. Am I missing something?
To put it in perspective, there may be employees that hate working at Amazon, but there are also 100,000 employees. If only 10% of the employees hated working there, that's still 10,000 employees. But a 90% satisfaction rate for any company is amazingly high.
In most low-skill positions (especially the ones which favor physical labor over soft-skills), you are a body to be instrumentalized until you either leave leave or are disposed of. That's the reality of most work. Retention is as high as it needs to be to ensure continuous operations, and employee happiness is either incidental or primarily a slogan. The human element is made to be as irrelevant as the market will allow.
The Amazon Warehouse workers I've known have described it as warehouse work. Little better or worse in their experience than working at any other distribution center, though some centers are naturally likely to be ran more poorly than others.
I’ve talked with people who work there as engineers. I haven’t any friends there.
The engineers seem well looked after, but engineers are not what I’d describe as ‘low level employees’.
I’m not sure that rejection of unionisation says as much as you are attributing to it and if reports are to believe, Amazon used a few dirty tricks.
Likely both sides did, but there is plenty to suggest that Amazon isn’t a kind or benevolent employer.
Probably how good his publicist is.
If I'm being really cynical, Jeff is suggesting these Princeton grads be kind so that he may become clever at their expense.
E.g '...In 2009, Onetto’s human resources deputy, David Niekerk, wrote a paper titled “Respect for People,” and presented it at an S-team meeting. The paper drew from Toyota’s proven Lean ideology and argued for “treating people fairly,” building “mutual trust between managers and associates,” and empowering leaders to inspire employees rather than act as disciplinarians. Bezos hated it. He not only railed against it in the meeting but called Niekerk the following morning to continue the browbeating. Amazon should never imply that it didn’t have respect for people embedded in the very fabric of how it operated, he said...'
"...Among the final straws for Onetto was a September 2011 story in the Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The paper reported that the company’s warehouse in the Lehigh Valley had gotten so swelteringly hot that summer that workers were passing out and being transported to nearby hospitals by ambulances that Amazon had waiting outside. An ER doctor even called federal regulators to report an unsafe work environment..."
"...Before the incident, Onetto had presented a white paper to the S-team that included a few paragraphs proposing to install rooftop air-conditioning units in Amazon’s facilities. But according to Niekerk, Bezos bluntly dismissed the request, citing the cost. After the Morning Call article drew widespread condemnation, Bezos approved the $52 million expense, establishing a pattern of making changes only after he read criticism in the media. But he also criticized Onetto for not anticipating the crisis. Fuming, Onetto prepared to remind Bezos of his original proposal. Colleagues begged him to let it go, but he couldn’t. As they anticipated, the meeting did not go well. Bezos said that as a matter of fact, he did remember the paper and that it was so poorly written and ambiguous that no one had understood what course of action Onetto was recommending. As other S-team members cringed, Bezos declared that the entire incident was evidence of what happens when Amazon puts people in top jobs who can’t articulate their ideas clearly and support them with data..."
"...Bezos didn’t want another empathetic business philosopher to replace Onetto as the head of Amazon’s operations; he sought an uncompromising operator..."
> people in top jobs who can’t articulate their ideas clearly and support them with data..."
That IS a legitimate problem. Through the lens of Hindsight, and based on an interview with Onetto it's easy to retell this story as "Bezos was told upfront, had all the available information upfront, and chose to do nothing until it was too late."
But another way to present the same story is "Onetto didn't articulate the importance of his ideas. Did not present data to support it. And it led to a catastrophic outcome."
I'm not saying the latter interpretation is correct. The truth is somewhere in the middle - probably closer to the original telling of the story. But the key is that good ideas are useless unless you can convince the right people of them. Ultimately, Onetto did not convince Bezos of his ideas. The blame for that can't rest solely with Bezos, because clearly there is ample evidence throughout Amazon's history that people can convince him, and situations like this are an outlier.
[1] If his strategy for this book is anything like for his first: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1Q4CQQV1ALSN0/re...
I don’t think you need much information to understand that an un-airconditioned warehouse in a hot location is a disaster waiting to happen.
If someone is proposing a 52M dollar expense to install those, maybe it’s a good idea to ask more until you know why?
> I struggle to square what Bezos is saying with what Amazon has become. He is clearly incredibly clever but appears devoid of any kindness toward his low level employees.
That seems perfectly consistent - he chose option A.
-- Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
During the last year or two pg has written more than a few essays and tweets which appear to be of a defensive nature. People like him contribute more than other people, it's alright to to be fierce, can't speak the "truth," etc.
Whenever there is dichotomous thinking, cognition has moved away from clarity. If it were me, I'd be asking myself, What is being defended? (This kind of question can be a multi-decade inquiry.)
Although most of us are easily baited into self-justification or self-promotion, I think going down that path it is ultimately a distraction from doing real work and knowing who you are.
You will always be mistreated by someone if you work for a corporation. We have it easier than almost everybody else, really.
But at nearly 6 years in I still wake up every day amazed that I get paid as much as I do to do this thing that I really enjoy. With overall reasonable hours. Without having to deal with the general public. Considered an asset despite the fact that I cost so much and write bugs. And with people banging on my door constantly to get me to work for them. I feel extremely fortunate.
Other companies may fight this, sure, but stop throwing NASA (an exploration agency) in with those who would benefit from suppressing SpaceX.
Personal opinion.
It seems clear that NASA is more happy than not about what SpaceX is bringing to the table. Any model that spins a NASA-vs-SpaceX narrative is confused and wrong. I think that's an agreement with your point.
But when you look at what SpaceX is operating in opposition to, whether it's cost-plus bids, or closed contracts for various launch services, etc etc, NASA has been very much a part of that whole system.
So, my point is, it makes sense to talk about SpaceX's model vs the model of "the NASA/Boeing/Big Government Contractor complex".
Can you expand on this?
Sometimes you have to go with your misunderstanding or oversimplification to make a decision or to make progress, but keep in mind you are doing so based on beliefs which are unlikely to correspond to reality.
It's striking that so many mental health difficulties are characterized by dichotomous thinking. [1]
Rationality itself can be profitably critiqued at the meta-level.[2] So, don't be an asshole, unless you need to be. Do you see the world as consisting of assholes and non-assholes? How does that feel? What are the advantages of that view? What are the disadvantages? Is considering that question worth your time?
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/she-comes-long-way-b...
[2] https://metarationality.com/introduction
EDIT: Fixed link, spacing
(I added this as an edit to my other reply, but it seems the edit is lost.)
Maybe just settle for "try to limit the extent to which your cognitive biases and priors shape how you think the world is". You can't reduce them to zero, but you can reduce them a bit.
It is possible to experience non-dual consciousness in high concentration states. [EDIT: For many, this experience is a milestone in psychospiritual development, which undermines the habit of dichotomous thinking.] Awareness and perception aren’t the same thing. Way, way off the subject, but your main point stands, be mindful of priors.
Beside your point, but wondering if you could expand on this. I have a tendency to do this, and while it's fun, I'm starting to get the sense that it's a bad habit, possibly because I sense I'm overly confident on something that might be 100% wrong and it feels... invasive?
Thinking this way can certainly lead to worthwhile and actionable insights. But I think any skilled amateur will overestimate their abilities. Therapists build their insights on top of huge amounts of biographical information that they gather in intense, concentrated sessions. Their observational skills are trained, and they use them to gather as much information from posture, tone, and expression as they do from narrative. Even if an amateur's observational skills are good, they won't have the right context (the session) to gather that kind of information. So the amateur will be lacking in both theory, and information - compared to the pros. And yet the amateur often has more confidence than the pro - leaping at the first theory that "clicks", not considering alternatives, and with an unwillingness to revise.
The next pitfall comes if/when you decide to act on your insights. And once you have those insights, it becomes tempting to act on them. Then, when you do act, you're almost by definition being manipulative. Your behavior towards the other person is no longer a straightforward reaction to what they're sending your way, but is instead following an agenda constructed to fit a diagnosis that is unknown to them. If they knew what you were up to, they would most likely object, even if your agenda was "for their own good." At best it's paternalistic. Therapists do act on their insights in opaque ways (and often screw up despite all their training) but the particulars of the patient-therapist relationship resolve the ethical violations that us civilians are likely to stumble into.
So, I would say that the tendency to psychoanalyze needs to come with heaps of humility, openness to revision, and a reluctance to act on the resulting insights in 9 out of 10 cases.
Agreed with all of your post, I think this is the most crucial point here. Genuine, skilled psychoanalysis is less about being some master discerner of psychological motives, and instead being very good at giving the subject of analysis a lot of psychological safety to express their innermost thoughts and most personal life experiences. Unless you build that kind of (responsible and professional) intimacy for lack of a better term, you're largely just projecting imo.
Armchair psychoanalysis ostensibly seeks to understand the subject of analysis, but rarely makes the effort to first understand the subject on their terms or in a way where they can articulate their own experience; instead, someone usually has their presumptive conclusion about the subject in mind ("they're just doing this because they haven't gotten over being bullied as a kid" or whatever), and tries to wrangle the limited information they have about that person into their conclusion.
Underrated advice. Psychoanalytics helps with self reflection, not with reading minds.
I can recommend Erich Fromm "Fear of Liberty" these days, because it describes many dilemma we face today. Might be interesting if you can see some effects he describes in yourself or others.
Psychoanalysis should be eaten with a pack of salt though. I think it vastly more fitting to model behavior than what writers from the field of psychology produce these days, apart perhaps from advertisers.
Speaking as a contrarian myself, I think the biggest challenge / trap is it's easy to point out things that are wrong or stupid, but tougher to do anything positive about it. I think this equates to the idea about avoiding becoming bitter.
Also, something he missed, and the curse of the contrarian, is "the market can stay irrational long enough for you to lose all your money". This happens all the time with unorthodox ideas, you can be right but if the mainstream doesn't shift in your favor before too long, you get ignored, discredited, or worse. I'd argue this is a bigger problem now, there is more polarization and a shorter feedback cycle so ideas get shot down and people fall out of favor much more quickly. Popular but wrong ideas, once they have "network effects" are much stickier than they once were. All this is tougher on the contrarian, or "fierce nerd".
In the '00s, before the FAANG giants had arisen, I would say things were more dynamic than they are now, and there was more room for smaller players.
If we're talking about the Bronze Age then this is a different conversation entirely. Then there was more continuity in each place with the past, but more difference between different places.
If I'm understanding you correctly, he doesn't miss this. He addresses it directly and comes to the opposite conclusion.
> The good news is that your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems. And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that nerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases. Recently getting rich became one of them: 7 of the 8 richest people in America are now fierce nerds....In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it.
Im sure all of us see ourselves in this essay, in part because it's ego catnip. But this part resonated very strongly with me. I was in my early 20s when I realized how crucial it was for me to work somewhere where my work was measured as objectively as possible, which has finally led me to hone in on small/mid-sized co applied research[1] as the path that fits me.
It's definitely my perception that the world supports this more now than it ever used to. You can't ignore people skills entirely, but the path to success through technical work instead of management has never been better (eg the IC ladder at my co easily goes up to $1M/yr).
> Popular but wrong ideas, once they have "network effects" are much stickier than they once were. All this is tougher on the contrarian, or "fierce nerd".
I'm not convinced that this is __worse_ than it once was. There's too much heterodoxy, too much pluralism, too low barriers to entry, and too much opportunity for the quiet dissenter to build their niche and wait out the irrationality longer than they could ever have dreamed in the world of 50 or even 20 years ago.
[1] driven by well-defined problems instead of product people's beliefs about the market, or the politics and bureaucracy of academia. It's actually been very useful ground for me to practice my political skills, since the impact of rubbing people the wrong way while figuring it out is heavily mitigated by the clear and measurable impact of my work.
The useful follow on to this essay, I would think, is to give a list, as long as possible, of places where "fierce nerds" are wanted, demanded, needed - both well-known institutions and startups.
Another useful follow up would be to give better advice about achieving harmony. Everyone deserves peace; to put it another way, progress that requires a human to sacrifice love isn't worth making.
"How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects" is a pretty good read in this vain https://neilonsoftware.com/difficult-people-on-software-proj...
Do they? I mean one of the define characteristics is an overconfidence in themselves.
I think PG is trying to justify some kind of assholish behaviour in his past by reframing it as a virtue.
Really, I think the “fierceness” is incidental. Do immensely successful people need to be somewhat competitive? Sure. Do they have to interrupt everyone, lack social awareness, etc? Probably not.
Lots of people, like artists, visionaries, and weirdos who make strides to live a unique life have to act confidently to get to that life yet many also have a lot of self doubt. They just do the brave thing to move ahead with their vision even though it could likely end in failure. For many it does, whether they are remembered posthumously or not.
This is essentially the pathology of a narcissist.
It's almost like a positive form of gaslighting which unfortunately still has negative consequences like you've pointed out.
I wonder how much Bill Gates triggered this write up.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1392756490138791937
It appears he sees himself as the shop steward for the Silicon Valley Asshole Union.
I couldn't help but read part of it as a response to/rationalization of the recent pushback he (and other "fierce nerds") have been receiving lately...the former underdogs are now the establishment.
The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooter down of new ideas.
The tech landscape is littered with failed projects that could have been stopped early if the idea person had a sounding board that keep him/her realistic.
Even if someone happens to be exceptional at everything you choose to do and thus have confidence, they can only do so many things. And that means that for every thing they are exceptional at, there are a thousand things where they are unimaginably outclassed by others. MIT was awful for that.
For me personally, the more I learn about my areas of expertise, the more I realize how clueless I am about so many other areas. But if the knowledge of your general cluelessness makes you timid outside of your domain of expertise, it limits how much you can accomplish.
Also, I didn’t really read ‘fierceness’ to mean ‘assholeness’. I’ve been around some people who had ideas that they desperately wanted to see out into the world. They were fiercely passionate and they did have a tendency to interrupt, but they definitely weren’t assholes.
Happens on every PG post.
I've grown into that fierce nerd. Being in forced conscription in my 20s has made me wary of the 'wait to rush for nothing meaningful' culture. Then I joined companies and it feels like a ton of my time is wasted by processes, norms and ideologies. I did break out once to try and make a business but that hasn't worked out. So now I'm in employment just to earn/invest to have enough for a certain level of financial independence and I'm feeling that bitterness rise up again.
I'm very likely destined to burn out of industries/companies that aren't my own quickly, and this could cascade into bad looking resumes. It feels like a do or die situation sometimes.
So, all the stuff that helps society function?
Some processes, norms, and ideologies exist for reasons that aren't obvious. It's often not difficult to find somebody to explain them to you, but you have to be prepared to genuinely listen to the answer. It's easy to be impatient when you see them as getting in your way, and the first explanation you get may not actually be a very good one. (If you don't know why the fence was put up there's a good chance others won't either -- but that doesn't mean that an unsatisfactory explanation implies that there isn't a satisfactory one.)
That does slow you down, and that's hard when you're not the one who gets harmed by violating those norms, processes, and ideologies. But that doesn't mean nobody gets hurt, and such harms have a way of making society around you worse though mechanisms you don't see -- even though they do end up affecting you, too, eventually.
Heard a "rockstar" lamenting he would never win Grammy because of his niche but was not unsatisfied with the 60 year arc of his career.
Retrospectively, I see I could have been a contender several time but me then (brash) nor me now (wiser, possibly) could have been capable of elevating myself from a working nerd to a famous rich nerd.
I work in biotech and I smiled when I read this. The entirety of our business relies on people following processes, norms and ideologies. Once the "thinking" stage is done - the rules and framework are now in-place. You need to trust them and follow through to produce results for the company.
In tech so many nerds are constantly sharpening their tools or creating new ones and chasing some mythical 'perfection' that they lose sight of the results - the thing that matters the most to the company. Being entirely result oriented has changed my outlook completely, and made me a happier person. I am much more respectful towards people who produce actual results using any tools rather than judging someone who uses Java or Perl or whatever other language/tool that is not the flavor of the month. And working in biotech has made me value long term reliability over everything else. The single most thing that is important to me is that the tool be reliable and ready for me to use to produce results.
I dare say PG's analysis of the psychology of Crick & Watson is correct, but one should not take only Watson's word for it about the source of their success. Rosalind Franklin was the first to observe the double-helix structure, a fact omitted from Watson's book.
https://sites.psu.edu/magdaliapassionblog/2018/02/08/watson-...
I wonder if that statement is overly specific. AFAIK, young people in general, or at least young men in general, have a reputation for being overconfident.
The overconfidence is not a trait endemic only to male "nerds".
Of course, it's still helpful to concede that humans should recognize and be aware of that weakness in themselves. Overconfidence is the reason so many spend the healthy end years of their lives so much less well off financially than they spent their healthy prime years. It behooves us all to be on guard against our overconfidence.
Of course, this is a broad generalization, but seems to fit where I'm living right now, but it's all anecdotal as it's based on my own perceived view of things of course.
That's a bit different than when I think of young men in general being more confident than they ought to be. It has more to do with the goal: status within a group vs putting effort into finding what you believe is true and accurately representing that truth potentially at a social cost.
When I think of James Watson, I think of someone who a) stole his major work (the one thing for which he is famous) from a woman without giving credit, and b) has been almost-literally cancelled for being consistently racist, also by his colleague-science-nerds who consistently report that they don't like him.
Not someone that I want to celebrate for being a 'fierce nerd'.
He said nothing about Dre, focusing entirely on saying "He's a good guy, actually", which is the epitome of the strategy taken by men historically to defend other shitty men.
That's not "defending sexism" per se, but it is excusing sexism because of the content of someone's character. "Sure he said sexist things but he is not sexist". It does not pass even the most baseline level of scrutiny.
I think it's also worth saying here that the comparison to Dre is super irrelevant:
1) Musicians may write lyrics in the first person, but the general default for all musical content is it's "fictional", and not representive of their personal views on the matter. It's artistic license with ideas - occasionally problematic. That is not the case with "autobiographies", which is what Antonio's book was purported to be.
2) Dre has taken complete ownership of all of his past indiscretions and apologized for them [2]. Antonio double down.
[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1392756490138791937
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dre#Violence_against_women
> From the outset, Franklin and Wilkins simply did not get on. Wilkins was quiet and hated arguments; Franklin was forceful and thrived on intellectual debate. Her friend Norma Sutherland recalled: “Her manner was brusque and at times confrontational – she aroused quite a lot of hostility among the people she talked to, and she seemed quite insensitive to this.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/23/sexism-in-sc...
And socially maybe the people at work can keep you in check without firing you, because you can't respond well in a socially-clever environment for example, no matter how amazing your insights.
In my case, my fatal flaw career-wise wasn't abrasiveness or asshole-ish behavior, but a strong aversion to promoting my work or any of the other non-goal tasks required to advance in an organization. I hate every minute I have to spend making it clear that I'm productive instead of just _being_ productive.
However, this is almost unavoidable in most organizations that aren't tiny. You either have to "manage your brand" and play politics, or you have to make sure that you're fitting a squishy, inherently-subjective rubric. At a bare minimum, you need to craft a presentation of your output at performance review time, and hope your interpretation of the rubric matches the decision-makers'.
My solution was to find a company with fairly objective and well-defined measures of output[1], where there's more than enough impact to go around. You can't avoid having people skills to get things done, but I don't mind using my people skills in service of getting shit done instead of internal organizational BS.
[1] This does not mean that we're tolerant of assholes. We've fired people for being pathological "brilliant jerks", though everyone I've come into close personal contact with is well above the jerk bar. What this does is separate "are you toxic in a way that hurts your coworkers or the company" from "what is your output", allowing people who are awkward and well-intentioned to thrive on one axis and grow on the other. This is in contrast to the usual case, where measuring output is polluted by interpersonal skills that are not related to output, and being awkward means your work isn't recognized either.
Also, many of those 'skills' are nothing more than shared cultural backgrounds and/or biases.
> It's hard to be independent-minded without being somewhat socially awkward, because conventional beliefs are so often mistaken, or at least arbitrary. No one who was both independent-minded and ambitious would want to waste the effort it takes to fit in
It excuses poor social skills, tells you that you too can become rich by simply "getting the right answer" and that it's the best time ever to be a nerd.
I don't buy it. The only way this makes sense is in hindsight if you're massively successful. Otherwise you're just the weird person who has poor social skills and is obsessed with "solving problems".
[1]: https://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality
[2]: https://www.16personalities.com/intp-personality
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
That's an understatement. It's meritless pseudoscience.
I have found the MBTI to be useful despite the empirical inaccuracy of the test itself. Even without taking the test, people can self-identify as one (or more) types. This then serves as a meaningful basis for discussion as well as raising awareness that people are deeply different in terms of their ways of thinking. It is quite an eye opener the first time you see someone self-identify as a personality type that is very different to your own.
None of the personality theories are 'proven' of course. We won't get that until we have a fuller understanding of the brain. But it is well accepted within psychology that personality is a thing. And personality types (Big 5, MBTI, etc) are useful models for now despite their shortcomings.
This is a fairly good post with some additional thoughts on the MBTI debate: https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html
It actually has international data to support its model.
A lot of people - including very intelligent people - have other things they'd rather do than play such a stupid game. Unfortunately the world is pushing everyone in that direction which will create a lot of bitterness because most people necessarily lose that game.
“Invest” in the stock market in X way, and you can stop working earlier – that is, if you had enough savings to do so.
I agree with GP's dislike of Graham's emphasis on getting rich. There's more to life.
His observation was that even if you aren't trying to do things for the money and just want to solve some problem, a lot of times the only practical option is to form a company. Maybe that isn't always true, but at least it seems plausible. He also notes that not chasing money can have advantages: craigslist isn't a charity, but they run it like one. That makes them pretty hard to compete against.
Exerpt:
> Back when I was working on spam filters I thought it would be a good idea to have a web-based email service with good spam filtering. I wasn't thinking of it as a company. I just wanted to keep people from getting spammed. But as I thought more about this project, I realized it would probably have to be a company. It would cost something to run, and it would be a pain to fund with grants and donations.
> That was a surprising realization. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work.
> I didn't want to start another company, so I didn't do it. But if someone had, they'd probably be quite rich now. There was a window of about two years when spam was increasing rapidly but all the big email services had terrible filters. If someone had launched a new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it.
> Sometimes really talented people have heard for so long how great they are, they begin to feel they really are better than everybody else. They might smirk at ideas they find unintelligent, roll their eyes when people are inarticulate, and insult those they feel are less gifted then they are.
At Netflix, they say “no brilliant jerks” because they will “rip your organization apart from the inside”.[0]
A lot of this sounds like justification for a brilliant jerk’s behavior. While it’s tempting to take the “fierce nerd” badge and wear it proudly, ferocity can turn into jerkiness pretty quickly.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/No-Rules-Netflix-Culture-Reinvention/...
fierce =/= jerk. There are many well intentioned nerds who try their best to be considerate and kind that can't help but be impatient in technical discussions. Some organizations don't tolerate that and some do, and those who do are at a natural advantage.
Right, we’re not. We’re referring to behavior in the workplace.
> There are many well intentioned nerds who try their best to be considerate and kind that can't help but be impatient in technical discussions.
This is true, but I don’t think that accurately describes pg’s definition of a “fierce nerd” in the article. Also, Netflix would probably still classify someone like this as a “brilliant jerk”. Maybe they would give this nerd a chance to change their behavior, since it’s unintentional.
> Some organizations don't tolerate that and some do, and those who do are at a natural advantage.
These days, no one could confidently make the claim that Netflix has a “natural disadvantage” in this respect. They have the strongest technology in their market and have no lack of talent in any of their technical departments.
Companies that win have top talent, but this talent needs to be able to work with the team effectively. Whether you want to use the term “jerk” or “fierce”, if a team member is being disrespectful to other team members then the team breaks down.
- - - -
There's a lot to unpack in this essay, some good some bad IMO.
One thing I feel is worth mentioning: I don't think the cure for bitterness is success, I believe it's helping others.
I do, and I think you should invest in these things (not "devote your life", PG shows his deep ignorance here of these things as though they are black and white). if you are in the overwhelming vast majority of "fierce nerds" that does not become a billionaire, or even if you do, you will invariably have a lot of problems in social situations and close relationships until some investment is made in tempering this extreme sort of personality.
> But it doesn't seem the optimal solution to me. If you're given a sharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge to avoid cutting yourself.
PG encouraging people to be emotionally unhealthy so that they can add to his pool of talent for him to profit from. The fierce nerd, great term btw, is ambitious and brilliant. they can do all of these things at the same time. It might just cut down the full on "become a billionaire" mindset, but that's a good thing, since it's unethical to be a billionaire.
I know a lot of people that fit this mold, and for this type of personality there's nothing that will meaningfully dull the edge [1]. But, if they learn how to control it, they can avoid cutting their friends and themselves, and live a much happier life.
The last thing this world needs is more emotionally stunted leaders alone in their suffering.
[1] This point in particular seemed like pg engaging in pure speculation, not something based on specific examples
I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is that your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems. And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that nerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases. Recently getting rich became one of them: 7 of the 8 richest people in America are now fierce nerds.
starting one of the 10 most successful businesses of the past 2-4 decades business vs solving a problem are not the same thing though. Problem solvers on average do not make that much money. Look at all the problems solved everyday on stack overflow/exchange. How many of those ppl are making lots of money. Same for freelancing sites. The rates are pretty low. making money means a lot to PG, but it's a separate type of skill than solving problems. It is something that is probably harder in many respects because it requires not only solving problems but making money from it, which means competition and other aspects of business.
There are no secret backdoors (like athletics) for the rich in the public schooling and university realm that exist in most of these countries. In essence everyone is a nerd or trying to be a nerd.
In the US system, one could make the argument that elite legacies and the fencing team help the manufactured diversity and lower the “nerd” (achievement oriented) “toxicity.”.
A study abroad for just a semester would be an eye-opener for many of us on the normalcy of nerdness in many societies. Most parents hope their kids become doctors, engineers etc.
Academics have to go through undergraduate programs too, but most non-academics end their education with a bachelor's degree simply to help them get a (typically) non-nerdy job.
Other countries have students who study harder than Americans, for sure. As someone with a multi-ethnic background, I find that students in lesser developed countries have fewer options in their future so they study hard as a student for the chance to make it out of poverty. Students in highly developed nations don't worry as much because they think they have a decent standard of living waiting for them regardless.
I don't think that (for example) India has dramatically more nerds than (for example) America because being a nerd is driven by your personality. Nerds genuinely enjoy studying <x> in particular and they find ways to do just that. Nerds can end up as doctors or engineers but typically nerds aren't primarily motivated by careers. I think you notice this difference in the wide prevalence of cheating in poorer countries. Non-nerds feel the pressure to study but they're not actually interested in the work so they cheat to get by. Cheating exists in America too, but there's less risk of falling into poverty so students who aren't interested in a subject will more often accept a low passing grade.
The only time in a fairly long career I have seen some one really unsuited to working in tech was case of this.
It's good that we've gotten past the tedious "solving society's problems" blather.
"If you do choose the ambitious route, you'll have a tailwind behind you. There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it. At least not till the nerds end it themselves by bringing about the singularity."
Isn't Graham a dealmaker? Isn't that exactly what Y Combinator does?
And given Graham's comments about inequality, why am I ambivalent about the singularity of the fierce nerds?
YC itself was born out of an attempt to hack the hack the VC funding system. Shift things to be more friendly to technical types.
So it was an attempt to improve a complex system as opposed to focussing on making deals. Systems focussed instead of people focussed.
But it has also been true that moving to a dealmaker provides more impact, especially once you get past a certain point.
http://www.paulgraham.com/bel.html
Not sure how that doesn't count as technical.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
He may be a dealmaker these days, but that doesn't take away that he is a luminary in the nerd community.
”There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it.”
I think the continuous transfer is in nerds learning how to be dealmakers, not in some magic power shift to nerds.
George Westinghouse was an inventor. So was Thomas Edison. You can think of both as “fierce nerds” in my book.
When the deals go away because the contract is standardized and non-negotiable, it's because the dealmaker got more powerful!
If the company fails, or is aquihired by the skin of its teeth, it doesn't matter which terms the various rounds offered when.
YC is perceived as offering a greater chance of success, a combination of being plugged into a large network of alumni and having the halo effect which comes from getting into a cohort.
As long as that perception is there, founders will keep taking the deal. If that perception is accurate, then they're smart to: and the terms aren't worse than any normal VC would offer, they're better.
So there's a lot riding on that being true, which I have no special insight into. Having to guess, I suspect it's less true than it used to be.
But that's exactly what a dealmaker does, right?
We like to see people like Jordan or Kobe as normal people who happen to be really good at basketball. I disagree. They're nerds who happened to do a profession that doesn't seem nerdy to the public.
To bodybuilders (and I assume, also athletes), eating in a methodical and structured way is an important part of their job. The guy grew his own vegetables and spent a lot of time selecting food at markets, ate at very specific times, etc.
That, combined with supplements, experimenting with different training regimes, etc... it's a lot of experimentation and certainly there's a lot of cognitive work behind all of that.
I found this very interesting.
It's probably the same with startups -- most startups fail, mine included, but either we delude ourselves into thinking that it's just a matter of putting in enough effort, or we are in situations where we really can't see any other option to escape the gravity well of our situations. Not so far off from someone obsessively playing ball to try to get out, except for the broader applicability of the skills gained if the long shot doesn't pay off.
To give an example, a lot of my friends have been into Magic the Gathering for many years, and I recently tried to get into it myself, but the asymmetric gaps were too large for me to enjoy it -- they had way more knowledge, more cards, had spent more money, and had more time to spend playing outside of work hours, resulting in me getting crushed again and again.
There was two options I could take: 1) Try to catch up on years of accumulated knowledge, or 2) Change tactics, and see if instead I could play a game we all were more similarly matched with. I chose the latter.
In entrepreneurship, I feel like it's no different. For me, fighting a large startup on common ground is a losing game -- they have the money, the manpower, the knowledge, the social proof, and more. As competitive as I am, and as hard as I push, it's not going to be a fair fight to begin with. So instead, it's about me finding a battlefield where the odds change more in my favor -- perhaps something that doesn't scale, something I have innate knowledge in, etc.
Not sure if that lines up perfectly with what PG is saying here, but it's worked well for me.
PG probably agrees with you, as that's the first footnote from his article above.
I think I am paraphrasing Buffett here, this can apply to so many career/business decisions.
Is it, or it's just an anecdotal projection from PGs own experience ("I'm nerdy and I consider myself independently minded, also know a few others like that").
This is just extrapolating from the diminishingly small number of nerds who are also SV entrepreneurs.
But historically nerds (e.g. 50s and 60s "propellerheads") were just working for companies and research labs as employees, and mostly on what they were told. Most still do exactly that.
Socially also many nerds otherwise follow the herd and "try to belong" with the "cool people" (often in vain).
That someone would think nerds are not competitive is, to me, the strangest thing about this article. Perhaps because I'm one, but whether it's Magic the gathering, Demoparties, rubics cube solving, chess, Counterstrike LANs, academia, or any of my tech jobs, every "nerdy" activity I've ever engaged with has always been overly competitive.
The fact that so many open source projects have had to adopt "code of conducts" is IMO a direct reflection of the fierce competition that has always been inherent to software development. Whether it's code quality, clever hacks, optimization... everything about what we do has a competitive element.
Come to think of it, I can't actually think of any nerdy activity that isn't, in practice, extremely competitive.
This is something that has bothered me about a lot of people's views on competition, whether it's sports or business or whatever. Being competitive does not have anything to do with being an asshole.
I never got into trash-talking during games. It was always just easier for me to ignore it/use the other person's trash-talking as their own distraction against me running circles around them.
And then in software, Code of Conducts are not covering anything about how the project interacts with other projects. They're covering how contributors treat each other within the project. You're not in competition with your project mates. The sorts of harassing and belitting behavior that CoCs are supposed to address (whether they do or not is a different discussion) comes about from some sort of glory-hog mentality that is ultimately anti-productive. Insert roll-safe meme: "If I drive away most of the other contributors, my own efforts will be a much bigger proportion of the overall whole".
Culture follows power. Once a bunch of tech nerds became billionaires in the 1990s, every aspect of that subculture gained prestige.
Spelling bee competitors are seen positively, but also almost as a joke compared to quarterbacks. Mathlete? A joke in popular culture.
There is some evidence that this is changing, but there is also a lot of bad art. The Social Network, and Steve Jobs the film portray fierce nerds that basically no one wants to know.
The actual people?
Zuck and Dorsey just got through extracting maximum advertising value from the heart of US democracy.
Bezos hasn't done fierce nerds any favors with his squeezing of the lowest paid people in his organization.
Bill Gates' reputation is headed downhill right now faster than ever before.
Tim Cook has real potential. But the jury is still out. We do not know the calculus involved in compromising privacy values in China.
It is going to take a lot more well-known, rich, fierce nerds that also manage to round out their personality before we see mainstream positive portrayal and following of competitiveness in intellectual exercises.
I have heard far worse things about non amazon warehouse workers in the UK Sports Direct for example.
I think that is little bit you choosing very competitive things to engage in. People who were obsessed with start trek for example did not build competitive societies. And I worked in multiple teams that did not felt overly competitive to me at all.
Through, I would not see Counterstrike nerdy at all. This sort of games is more of the most stereotypical guy pastime that exists.
Maybe it's a generational thing (born in '92), but Graham often seems to paint a picture of nerds similar to what you might see in movies and TV shows depicting the 80s, like the kids in Stranger Things.
Even this article, while I can certainly conjure which of my friends growing up were the "fierce nerd", it still feels a little disconnected from my reality.
For example, Graham begins by explaining that the concept of a fierce nerd is one unknown to the general public. But I'm not sure I agree. In the era I grew up, there was not so much social distinction between who is a nerd, but there was a lot of social distinction for those who were argumentative, or "fierce". In my experience, everyone knew who the "fierce nerds" were (although not by that name), because they were known for their awkwardness and combativeness - not for their nerdiness. Indeed, my own nerdy friend circle in high school spanned a wide range of popularities and I would say "fierceness" (or rather, lack thereof) was probably the best indicator of popularity.
I see these themes spanning Graham's other musings on nerds, typically trying to characterize a class of kids who are hated for their interests and passions, but that's just never been my experience. I think it's a generational thing.
Xist versus Yist, and he showed us with some pretty basic math.
Now two groups is all we need to understand the world?
So perhaps the way to understand it is PG believes people fit in these two groups, but those are not the only two groups you fit in, and they are by no means all-encompassing.
It's kind of like, you are either a member of team red, or team blue. You may be a blue type of person, another is a red, but that by no means defines the entirety of your being.
Let's try to have a little more good faith here, when trying to understand people's musings. The reality is, most of us here wouldn't have the courage to put our thoughts and opinions out there on the internet for the whole world to see, at least not to the extent PG does.
I’ve been rummaging around the human experience for 41 years, applying technology to problems at public uni and big corp, building houses, growing food, hunting, earned degrees in electrical engineering and math.
To me that’s all there is, to go do directly.
All this feels like is someone who is riding off that lottery ticket.
That is, I’m not seeing an information advantage. Just a political capital advantage.
I thought we did away with allegiance to unelected political agents?
The reason that 4 quadrant divisions of the world seem like they always work is because any two vectors chosen at random in a high dimensional space are nearly orthogonal with high probability.
I'd probably go as far as saying that technology (or at least practical technical skills) has become far less relevant as a 'nerd' marker.
Many of the self identifying 'nerds' I meet might be avid technophiles, but it's not like most of them know how to code better than anybody else (or at all in many cases).
If you want a not very distorted glimpse of what it was like watch the movie, "Revenge of the Nerds".
Edit: in the movie nerds sell secretly taken naked pictures of said girlfriend to earn money. The movie is old and ridiculous, but when you start to claim this is how things were, I want to know wtf was going on in your school.
these kinds of events can fly under the radar if you aren't involved. I only know of the situation I'm thinking of because the girl found out and complained to the school, which ended up expelling the others involved.
More importantly, if movie is accurate, then nerds are no better then evil jocks. They are just two groups of bullies and assholes locked in a fight where everybody who avoids them is doing something smart.
In your school, did the girl that got her nudes public got together with the dude that took them and sold them? You can peel levels of that movie how much you want, you won't get meaningfull image of reality.
If it's truly a generational change, that would be a very interesting development. Especially if it happened in just the five years between when we were teenagers - I had no impression that people a few years younger than me had a wildly different experience than me. But I could certainly be mistaken.
Do you find no familiarity at all in these descriptions? Meaning some of the following - Being more interested in reading than gossiping, liking technical projects more than team sports, being uninterested in popularity contests and social status games to such a degree that you barely care about losing them, prioritizing learning over number of superficial acquaintances, having ideas and thoughts that you assume to be true but for which you experience lashback for stating out loud. Potentially experiencing some loneliness or hostility over this, not necessarily making that part of your identity, eventually seeking a small number of like-minded folks...
Has the world really changed this much? From my perspective, it seems likely that you're just not the target demographic for this essay.
On the other end, nerd-culture had permeated all levels of the social strata, and my very popular friends who partied every weekend were also semi-pro halo players and avid anime fans and didn’t hide either of those facts.
It’s only six years, but it could have been wide exposure to the internet? Also very possible I’m seeing the past through rose colored glasses.
Computers weren't available until the early '80s, and weren't affordable for another decade, so few kids had easy access to them, and networks didn't arise until about 1990. So if you were born before '80-'85, you had a tough time rallying around tech toys with other nerds/geeks to share your enlightened world view.
Stewing nerds in their own juices through adolescence tends to foment fierceness, which is just another word for not understanding or tolerating non-nerds very well. With today's omnipresent social connectivity, isolation should be less a problem in 2021, since tech content and cool devices are everywhere today.
What I would have given to play around with RPi or robots in my teens...
In challenging or AP classes you had essentially two groups, the jocks, who were trying to follow a college track, for which sports were essentially requisite in our district, and the nerds who just liked learning stuff. The jocks(male and female) did their homework as a group, complained loudly about difficult tests/assignments and consistently used their relative influence to affect their grades. The nerds brought in their own lessons, asked questions that lead the class off topic, consistently read the textbook and stayed late to ask questions rather than negotiate.
Anyway, thought I’d throw this anecdote out there for variety.
Graham's characterizations of nerds reminds me of the "They don't know" meme[1] guy.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristatorres/they-dont-know-twitter
Especially the last part.
He is not completely wrong, but also visibly bitter.
Instead of using Firefox?
Was that an April fools?
Also PG and others were evidently very upset that, aside from just laughing at the obvious humor of the situation, lots people expressed wishes—for a bunch of reasons; e.g its most viable business models all seem to involve spying or other shady behavior; it's just a bad sign for where the Web is at so it would be sad to see that become normal—that the company doesn't do very well.
Fierce Nerds :)
> Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by devoting yourself to meditation...
Huh? Lots of highly successful and effective people (who he would probably call fierce) cite meditation as a crucial tool for increasing their focus and mental discipline. This is just a bizarre take.
First, “independent-mindedness”. I’m guessing that if you survey people, approximately 95% of people would consider themselves “independent-minded”.
Then he talks about social awkwardness and intelligence. I would say about 90% of tech workers would consider themselves both of those things.
And competitiveness? Probably any CEO could be considered somewhat competitive. Just to succeed at that scale probably requires some competitiveness.
Edit: a word.
The contrarian position is to be anti-nerd and pro-charm. Taleb on this: https://www.azquotes.com/author/18869-Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb/...
> Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse
It may be that this source of insecurity is a driving force. But years later, when I see who is more successful I think it is the nonfierce nerds. The fierce nerds exhausted themselves with petty disagreements and arbitrary hills to die on. The nonfierce nerds were able to focus on the hills worth climbing and recruit others to work with them.
Perhaps it's a flattener of the bellcurve of success. If you only look at the right hand side you will see lots of fierce nerds. But you aren't seeing the many, many more who are just ordinary, annoying assholes.
In a more broad sense, you can be smart but easily work on the wrong thing or put your energy into the wrong area.
As a child I was mathematically precocious and often (to myself) compared my modest accomplishments to stories of prodigies like Gauss or von Neumann. Looking back it seems patently ridiculous, but I might not have spent dozens of hours per week reading math textbooks and Wikipedia if I had had a more realistic self-perception. I can't say I regret it.
But as the father of a kid with Asperger Syndrome, and as someone with a likely diagnosis myself (according to neuropysch testing), I'm a little bothered by the broad brush with which P.G. is painting.
If he focused on something more defined than a vague and derogatory term for smart people in general heay have had something worth reading.
Ps. Seriously, why is the grey subtext so hard to read? Stop with grey text. Please.
I think most of what you identify as "wokeness" is other people who aren't directly affected trying to help out, since the affected people are usually a minority who won't be heard if it's just them. That can lead to its own forms of tone-deafness and "you're not helping" behavior, but that just leads to more cases of people who are sincerely and effectively helping being dismissed as "SJWs" out of hand. That's a cheap way of avoiding genuine problems with one tiny all-purpose acronym.
I just wanted to point that out because what you wrote can be read like "I didn't care about anything except when it happens to me". It might give you a moment's pause the next time you want to deride something as "woke".
Err.. really? I mean, that's the definition of individualism against which many "woke" people would object. Even you say, "since the affected people are usually a minority". This is just false, if we take minority to refer to the usual "protected subgroups".
The relevant sense of Woke here, seems to me, to be concerned not with people's individual needs -- but their needs qua some alleged group. Esp., as you offer, "minority" groups.
It's a sort of perverse individualism. It's just substituting a different type of broad brush. Rather than starting with a maximally individual analysis (and hence construe treatment in terms of procedural fairness), rather, start by a group analysis and place individuals within those groups (and hence talk about aggregate distributional outcomes).
The derision here is the conflict in having to raise an issue because you are autistic, without inviting the Woke-style "and autistic people are a minority who need protected". The latter substitutes the underlying lack of procedural concern for individual needs with exactly the same problem: again ignoring individual difference expect now substituting alleged "group needs".
Woke analysis of this kind prescribes, a typically condescending, set of redresses for alleged group grievances. Individualism prescribes nothing of this sort, rather, adjusting the rules so as to maximise each person's ability to get what they each, as individuals, need.
"Don't paint me with a broad brush" means let me speak for myself alone. This attitude is antithetical to analysis which begins with "minorities", which by construction, are not people who are each individually empowered to speak for themselves.
> Don't paint me with a broad brush" means let me speak for myself alone. This attitude is antithetical to analysis which begins with "minorities",
This is, I think "just be race blind". Wokeness, as you seem to be describing it is an ideology that recognizes that identities impact how a person is perceived. To fairly judge an individual, you have to take into account that, because of their race or gender, their work may have been misvalued or falsely attributed.
For better or worse, society discriminates, and recognition of that is a part of fairly judging people as individuals.
It's entirely fair to say that whilst accommodating and judging people individually we need to account for that person's particular difficulty in first being judged in this manner -- because we, the judger, may be unable to properly understand their situation; and likewise they may not be able to argue their case, state their need, etc.
The problem enters when we take the goal of our project to actually be removing such "prejudices and obstacles" and, not rather, the empowerment of each individual. The former is an often optional detour to the latter.
Consider, for example, the most effective civil rights president in US history (LBJ) was a racist: did we need to solve his prejudice first? Would that have done anything positive?
Wokeism, if it means anything at all, I think has to be identified with this ends-means confusion. It's raising to the status of an end in itself the elimination of (minority) group hatred, (minority) group prejudice, etc.
This a deeply confused project; and routinely gets in the way of the actual end everyone cares about: each person, in their own particular situation, being able to live the way that best suits them.
If I read the message here correctly, the woke-dissenter is saying this: "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
Wokeism is the political incarnation of New Atheism, or likewise Evangelism: first we fight a total war against The Sins of The Mind themselves; and then, much much later, we help people in their particular situations.
The current iteration of the civil rights movement is solving a different problem than that of 1968. Due to LBJ's actions, minorities are equal under the law. You can't just pass laws to make them more equal. They already are.
But if you look around, they clearly aren't, so the question becomes, well why not? If you subscribe to woke ideology, the answer is something like "pervasive cultural and systemic biases across various aspects of society". I'll draw a parallel to another evergreen topic, "cancel culture". The idea being that a large group of distributed people can ruin someone's life by changing how they interact with that person and making them a pariah.
Well many of these systemic biases are similar, if less sudden. People and systems trained to see or treat people as lesser. How do you solve that problem? I only see one solution: to get the distributed group of people to be aware of and ultimately counteract those biases, to undue the incidental cancellation of these people. And what is that but raising awareness of and reducing those ingrained prejudices.
All of the other approaches are things that routinely get called "reverse-racist" themselves, things like affirmative action and such which ignore the individual.
> "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
And the response to this is that while your difficulties are particular to you, it's likely that the best tools and practices to empower you when you are mistreated are allies who are willing to stand up for you agains the person mistreating you. As in the limit, if no one believes you are being mistreated except you, you will have no recourse.
There's no law that says that PG isn't allowed to say things that make GGP uncomfortable. In fact, there's laws that say that we can't prevent PG from doing that. All we can hope for is that said mistreatment is recognized by others, and that people pressure him to correct his behavior.
Wokeness is a recognition that this is a political (in the sense of like human-interaction, not election-related), not legal issue.
The problem with Wokeism (a term I don't like btw) is the means. We all broadly agree on the ends.
The individualist things this type of change can be bottom-up (individual -> group) and the wokeist wants it to be top-down (group -> individual).
In the former case the intuition is that we aren't going to be able to solve the group problem, so starting at the group level is a waste of time and a bit tyrannical. All we can do is empower individuals who, over time, will aggregate and approximately solve the group problem.
I agree however that it has to be both top-down and bottom-up. I think wokeism as ideology of over-reaction, is towards the extreme end of that top-down approach.
He's talking about "nerds"; a cultural identity.
You are talking about asperger's, a medical condition.
PG doesn't draw any lines between them.
What is your objection, specifically?
It's not immediately obvious to me how this relates to the article. Can you elaborate? Is "fierce nerd" a reference to Aspergers?
It really sucks I guess to make 45K fixing tractors all day with demanding managers hearing all about how the person half your age is making 4x what you make by writing yaml files with basically no stress and good WLB.
The right answer to "how do I stop getting exploited" for many is unironically "learn to code" (yes, including to many of those coal miners in WV), but they HATE when you say this. Kinda sad too since most of the hate is from people that never even tried it. They seethe at our success, and would take it away from us in a heartbeat if ever given the chance. Just look at the culture war being waged against "big tech" right now.
Given the choice between having more language available to use or less, I don't see a reason to want less.
What right do you have to reclaim something that was never a source of harm for you to begin with? Doesn’t that make you just another set of bullies metaphorically shoving people into lockers?
On the other hand, within the LGBT community, tons of terms have been fully or partially reclaimed. Most notably "queer". That also isn't without controversy (and queer has been in the process of reclamation for longer than "nerd" has been an insult in its current context), but almost no one seems to think that by self-identifying as something (in good faith) you're bullying someone else.
The N word is interesting because most white people are very hesitant to utter it. It's a rare, off-limits place that isn't accessible to every person of privilege who otherwise feels entitled to go where they please.
Can’t stress this enough. Some reach for what others have. Others reach for what they need but get trolled into thinking they have nothing and start reaching for what others have.
This is the equation for misery. And the opposite is the equation for success. But I admit this is just one dimension and datum on the look of life.
Them somewhere aroud early 2010s being a nerd was the new cool and paid off. Tech teams had more non-nerd competent engineers, and suddenly nerds are a target for complains and a bad example of teamwork.
Either that or in history there are certain junction points in which a number of hard problems arise and if you are good at solving hard problems at that point you are going to do well for yourself. After which there is a period of consolidation until the next rise of hard problems. Probably Mr. Graham wouldn't like to consider that idea though.
But what surprised me is that instead of washing away negative traits as part of the package, two options for the "fierce nerd" are presented:
1. use power for good
2. be cynical and embrace bitterness
It's a lot easier to do #2 than #1.
Also, these days if you are a smart ambitious person looking to make an impact with technology you're not terribly edgy and you certainly aren't defying any major social norms. And that's a good thing.
In 9th grade insists "I don't see the point of these classes I'm going to be a programmer," takes AP comp sci as sophmore finds it insultingly easy [gets in trouble for going ahead of teacher], resents homework vocally and refuses to do it on principle but still gets great scores on tests, places in the school math competition but initially gets kicked out of the award ceremony for refusing for the "National Honor Society" performance, 12-grade gets official permission to work half-time coding and only take half classes.
That's what I was, and I don't think anybody else has ever given me a word for it. I knew pedantic nerds, and intense nerds, and condescending nerds, but few with real conviction.
Could the terminology just be in flux, and therefore create confusion? With woke et al., we've got pleeeeeenty of examples of smart folks who miss the social norm du jour, attempt to say something true but rather say something unacceptable. And then they get ostracized or fired.
Maybe these folks are some examples of what used to be called nerds. Do we have a name for them?
That's the case for all PG essays, isn't it?
The vast majority I would say that he is trying to retcon his huge success and the success of some businesses he has been associated with into a coherent worldview. I believe that in 'Hackers and Painters' he actually goes through some back-of-envelope calculations that show that the money he made when Yahoo bought Viaweb corresponded closely to the real value he had created, in some sense.
It is baffling to me why he isn't able to say "I got lucky - I worked hard and created something very valuable, but I was also in the right place at the right time." Clearly there were special factors at play selling an e-commerce platform to Yahoo in 1998. He's also done intelligent and pro-social things with both his money and his time since then it appears. I don't know what the shame is in saying "I won a lottery - but I have tried to do the right thing with my good fortune."
I think if you asked Jamie Zawinski, who I think was no less technically skilled, nor less purposeful about working on interesting and important things (nor, tbh, any worse at writing thoughtful essays), he would readily admit to having been extremely lucky. I don't know what the difference is between these two personalities. I think I'd rather be jwz in similar circumstances.
This is a very large number of words to essentially say "when I was a jerk in the past it was actually virtue." If you don't see that plainly and transparently I'm not sure what to say to you.
PG deserves credit for creating YC, but from the narrative in this essay it's clear he does not even understand how that happened or his own role in it (assuming he's not being straight up dishonest in his writing). He's a deal making power player, nearly a king maker, not a technocratic nerd. No amount of essay writing will erase that reality.
I am so very weary of this nonsense being taken seriously as sage advice.
We already have too many reductive stereotypes in tech. Let's not lionize them.
Agreed.
In fact, in the featured article, the author makes reference to the hard science achievement of Watson and Crick's discovery of the double helix structure of DNA as follows.
> And moreover it's clear from the story that Crick and Watson's fierce nerdiness was integral to their success. Their independent-mindedness caused them to consider approaches that most others ignored, their overconfidence allowed them to work on problems they only half understood (they were literally described as "clowns" by one eminent insider), and their impatience and competitiveness got them to the answer ahead of two other groups that would otherwise have found it within the next year, if not the next several months.
Pointing to this as an example of fierceness producing contrarian success completely ignores the sheer amount of luck that contributed to the timing of Watson and Crick's discovery. Given a different roll of the experimental dice, Watson and Crick's method might have had temporary setbacks that resulted in their names being relegated to footnotes.
As luck and effort would have it, two of the most ornery scientists of the twentieth century will figure as pioneers in the annals of science history.
Sorry for speaking out against The Messiah.
PG has personally mentored hundreds, perhaps thousands of founders – whatever it is, a sufficiently huge sample size to identify some traits that correlate with founder success and happiness.
Sure, the truth is probably more nebulous than presented here, but archetypes can be useful.
However, in this article the correlation only goes one way: He's not saying that most successful founders have these traits; he's saying that people with these traits can become successful founders. And the traits he talks about happen to perfectly match his own traits?
I'm sorry, but this reads very much like someone looking at their own past, not the result of an extensive, unbiased review of successful startup founders.
What makes you say that?
I find this accusation very ironic, considering that it started with writing essays a lot like this one.
I've grown accustomed to negs' (microaggressions) like these, but they do a greater injustice to actual genius. Mutual respect in a team will never be achieved when people treat others in this manner.
> If you don't see that plainly and transparently I'm not sure what to say to you.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.
Or, to say it differently, sometimes people might disagree with you, not because they're stupid, but because they know something you don't, or because you've made an error.
It's good to be fierce and intelligent, but it's really important to be compassionate and empathetic too. IQ without EQ is wealth without health. If you truly want to enjoy life, if you don't want to make other people miserable, and you would like other people to raise you up in good company, you need to work on how you treat and think about other people. For nerds I think this is as difficult a problem to solve as any other they could attempt.
Overall though, I'd say this does describe a certain set you are likely to find in tech quite accurately, although the correlation with success and wealth probably has more to do with investment preferences than any actual operational advantage created by this behavior. Believing in the need for hyper-competitive fierceness while also having influence over the direction of funding turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, when the reality is that luck and timing are much more impactful. No VC will ever just admit they're playing craps, and would rather everyone believe they have special knowledge that allows them to count cards.
And was Watson a nerd at all? I think the magic of The Double Helix is that Watson tells the truth (or "his truth") to a fault. That's necessary for good biography and it's very rare but I don't get the sense that Watson is unaware of what he's doing or what the consequences will be. It seems like a conscious decision to write down everything he thinks and, as they say, publish and be damned.
Anyway, I think the essay is making a semantic error here by identifying the usual heroes (odd men out, innovators, people who refuse to go along, people who do their own thing) as nerds. There's no doubt that going against the grain is almost a prerequisite for being an admirable person and also for being someone who changes the world. I just don't see that as nerdiness.
Meditation doesn't necessarily lead to a reduction in "ferocity." The Buddha was a fierce nerd, according to Graham's characterization of "fierce." He took on an ambitious goal, and made immense sacrifices to see it through. He could also be quite "fierce in his speech, post-enlightenment. E.g.
> "And to whom, worthless man, do you understand me to have taught the Dhamma like that? Haven't I, in many ways, said of dependently co-arisen consciousness, 'Apart from a requisite condition, there is no coming-into-play of consciousness'? [2] But you, through your own poor grasp, not only slander us but also dig yourself up [by the root] and produce much demerit for yourself. That will lead to your long-term harm & suffering."
many who have great vast deep activation potential (belief & knowledge & could mpetrncy, long & hard accrued) do not personalize themselves so.
Becoming comfortable with ambiguity, with not knowing, with mystery is one of the finest clearest signs of intellect to me. these folk are both deeply empassioned, fierce, but receptive able to be persuaded, not decidi ares to a side or themselves. they recognize the non-zero sum nature of reality, recognize that there are many lessons & potentials for improvement everywhere. to be fierce is to be hungry, to want to find the right & true & uncover & make use of as much as possible, to learn more, see more, experience more, much of which will be tainted & not right but in those failures equally constructive & establishing.
deeply dislike some of the characterizations here, but also grateful to have some persona of some kind of integrity that somewhat resembles the mensches I still identify the nerds as being strivers for.
And now we have this attempt at describing the properties of a sub-category of "Fierce Nerds".
In my opinion, this is a poor model, not super useful and with many potential drawbacks related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism.
Overall though, I agree with the general sentiment of the post. The end paragraph was a nice touch:
> There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I don't see anything on the horizon that will end it. At least not till the nerds end it themselves by bringing about the singularity.
It takes different kinds of leaders to be successful in different kinds of environments/challenges. Especially early on, you rarely win by making everyone happy or following the rules. You can rarely run a huge megacorporation if you aren't a master of keeping people on message and motivated across a huge swath of expertise and experience, and if you aren't following (or making) the rules in a wider sense you're going to get stomped by lawsuits and other legal issues once you reach a certain size. Before that, you often can't make much progress if you're not willing to do that (and can often get away with it).
The list of people who can be the best effective leaders in both environments is even smaller than the list of billionaire tech founder CEOs and giant megacorp unicorn FAANGs.
I don't think nerd is a bad thing to say anymore.
Also I can identify me with this personality. Last few years I can find myself turning more into bitterness and I just started realising that the cause is not external.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dork [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nerd
The answer is pretty obviously ADHD. Interrupting and "impatience" are very common traits in people with ADHD.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7759892
while I value the observation and concur, I'd like to semantically edit it vis :%s/socially awkward/behaviorally atypical/g
'awkward' just rubs me as poor word choice. for instance, throw me into a cs:go chat and I am the norm, complete with trolling, voices, and other things.
There is the "one who made it out" archetype for one example. The kind who left a very unsuccessful community and have even less sympathy for them than those taking a priveledged background for granted.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I've always been under the impression that this is what it's like to be a geek. Maybe someone can help me understand the two. I've always identified more as a geek for this reason, but maybe I'm a nerd.
nerd: intellectually inclined
geek: unusually interested in some hobby
And of course being one, or both, or none, and liking math, or liking star wars, or both, or disliking math, or disliking star wars, etc. are all valid combinations.
If by interesting you mean "humorless bellend", then yes, I agree wholeheartedly.
At the moment we are crammed full of Thomas Paines without the social or washing skills.
What does this mean?
... writes a man who was evidently not paying attention to the US presidential election of 2016 or the UK Conservative Party leadership election of 2019.
What happens if a nerd learns how to be charismatic? It's a winning combo, I guess.
It applies to a lot of what is happening in society today.
Understanding personality traits and how they relate to the people you're looking for has felt critically important as I work on my startup. It has come up over and over again in hiring (including MANY more inbound, exploratory conversations than I would have expected) and in client management (identifying the best point of contact on their side, but also keeping clients on track and responsive during an onboard).
Is right now. It's orders of magnitude more popular than it has ever been.
“Nerds” being a meaningful category isn’t an idea limited to high-school caste/cliques, especially in tech; one of the reasons software flipped from being predominantly female to predominantly male is the popularization of the idea (IIRC, in the late 1960s or early 1970s) that stereotypical nerds (socially maladapted, querulous, technophilic males) were the optimal workers in the field.
The idea, which best as I know was only grounded in thin popular management quasi-science, has become increasingly less popular in the last few decades.
It is weird, though, that Graham’s affected contrarianism requires him to pretend that fierceness as opposed to diffidence is contrary to the popular stereotype, nerds lacking the skills to manage/moderate conflict manifesting in both conflict avoidance where they are uncomfortable and fierce, intractable, often petty conflict within their comfort zone has always been central to the stereotype.
Fortunately for my generation, we didn't scrimmage or skate with helmets so we don't remember who wronged us. IDK how later generations manage.
With computer science being one of the most popular degrees being held by Gen Z, the "nerd" casting will slowly fade as computer work becomes more and more the norm vs. traditional trades and fields that require higher education.
Average Joe caught wind you could make Lawyer and Doctor money with a Bachelor's or less, makes sense to me.
This rush, not only to be right but to be right when everyone else is wrong and to show them the light, is what makes people susceptible to bandwagons, cargo cults, and conspiracy theories. We see it plenty right here. Elsewhere we see it in QAnon. In both we see it in arguments about COVID origins and countermeasures.
Like a chemical compound that's therapeutic in one dose but toxic in another, fierce nerds can be either a good thing or a bad thing. We're already well into the toxic side, so I think this is a poor moment for pg or anyone else to glorify more.
Or maybe instead of abusing mentally fragile people, we need something a bit more healthy.
We need to make it honorable to fail and those that fail get the help they need. We need to make the harms as small as possible and the benefits as broadly shared as possible. But many nerds trying many things don't need to be fierce. We can have many experiments with cooperation not competition. We need decentralization not centralization.
Graham has observed that intelligent, competitive, inquisitive, and confident individuals can do well in today's economy. He has also identified pitfalls associated with being too aggressive, too confident, or lacking other skills.
I am unable to find the positive value of sticking a label on this coincidence of qualities and strongly implying the quantities and characteristics of these qualities are at least mostly inherent (with the exception of "fierceness", which apparently can be "turned off"). Of course nature does play a role, but why ignore nurture? It must be quite depressing to believe you are condemned to a life of little personal development.
It's interesting to think about the difference, though, and he does nail a few things about nerds from my generation. Most importantly, that being socially awkward was a prerequisite, because functioning social instincts would have prevented you from ever saying anything unconventional or investing time in learning things that were outside the norm. Without the internet to expose people to a diversity of views packaged in well-edited, easily digestible chunks, the socially acceptable range of interest was limited entirely to what people heard from tradition, network television, and if you were "edgy," MTV. Any progressive ideas you got, any historical perspective you got, anything you learned about different cultures, any cool ideas you had about the future, you got from books and magazines, and you were a total weirdo if you treated them as part of the shared world you inhabited with other people.
And I'm talking about pretty mainstream stuff. Like, if you remembered something out of a National Geographic article you read and repeated it in conversation, that was already letting your freak flag fly. So we came to identify reading, curiosity, and a progressive attitude with social inappriopriateness, with grossness, and this had an enormous impact on us. It affected the way we presented ourselves, the way we dressed, everything.
A hugely consequential example is our gut response to the feeling that we're about to say something that other people would find off-putting or offensive. We learned the habit of embracing that feeling. That was the feeling we got whenever we admitted to liking a book we read in English class, or talked about anything to do with science or math, or said, hey, did you know the last time that country had a democratic government we overthrew it? If those things were good, then it was good to embrace the feeling of social disapproval they generated, the way an athlete embraces the burning in their muscles in a hard workout. To be honest and intellectually engaged, we had to be weird and distasteful, and we learned not to trust anybody who shied away from that.
The younger generations of nerds, I feel like they trust peer influence more. When they feel like they're about to say something inappropriate, their instinct is to pause and recheck their thinking, which, I have to say, I'm kind of jealous of that. They take it for granted that the people they feel pressure from are people they choose as their peers, people who reflect their own values and therefore have the potential to improve them.
For my generation, being socially maladjusted felt like a moral imperative. We had to be socially maladjusted to be the people we wanted to be: curious, open-minded, engaged with the information and ideas trickling in from outside our little towns and schools. It was necessary, but it selected for people who already had a difficult time integrating socially and then further warped us in a way that maybe the generations after us aren't warped.
This is something all intellectually honest people learn to do, one way or the other. We're all very familiar with claims that are simple, mostly plausible, and totally wrong for $COMPLICATED_REASON. After a while, you learn to double-check your thinking to avoid being nerd-sniped by someone saying "Bzzzzzzzt, that's wrong."
A significant difference is that incorrectness is context-sensitive in a different way than inappropriateness. Saying something incorrect can be a productive part of a conversation that serves a shared goal of achieving correctness. I'm not going to feel inhibited or embarrassed about saying something incorrect unless I haven't put in the appropriate level of preparation for the context. Saying something inappropriate cannot serve a higher shared goal of avoiding inappropriateness, because it spoils that goal from the start.
I wonder if he's counting Warren Buffet as a fierce nerd, I would.
I don't think a QB is ever "diffident". I bet he'd feel a lot more confident there than the nerd on a football field, or really anywhere.
Nothing precludes actual fierceness rather than strictly fitting to an archetype. I used to illegally street race for cash. I can detail strip most Glocks, ARs, and AKs, and fire each without occluded aiming. Grandfathers were both competition military wheel gun marksmen. There are such people as nerdy bodybuilders.
I took the SAT-I without any preparation (absolutely zero) and aced the math section, 5 on AP Calc BC with minimal preparation at school; no coaches, no practice tests, and no bootcamp classes after school. My school was supposed to be good but it sucked in one particular way as it picked me through testing to represent a math tournament but sent me completely unprepared in the fields and subject matter, it was embarrassing. I was usually the lone white dude amongst mostly Asian and Indian overachievers who had rich af parents with every sort of coach and social help. I road a steel-framed bicycle to school 4 miles each way everyday, they had hand-me-down BMWs and Mercedes parked in the school parking lot.
The other issue is like BUD/S and specops, the people told they couldn't or were unsuited also tend to be the ones with the most heart. Someone can't wish to be more fluidly-intelligent, but they can become more relentlessly-resourceful and dog-with-a-bone. Wisdom, experience, and mastery trends to swamp raw intelligence as someone ages... plus, fluid intelligence tends to decline.
Most non-nerds think of nerds as:
* quiet
* diffident
* small group [subset of nerds overall?]
* more competitive than highly competitive non-nerds
* competition is more personal for them; they're not
emotionally mature enough to distance themselves
personally from competition
* work in areas that are less random in the kinds of
competition they engage in [no points for
persuasion or style, I suppose]
* somewhat overconfident, especially when young
* intelligent, at least moderately so
* independent-mindeded, see fitting it as wasted effort
* annoyed by rules
* impatient, not sure why
Still, it's stuff like Andrew Yang's presidential run that really give me hope that we might be on the cusp of changing things outside of business as well. Not just in politics (obviously, since he lost) but at least in culture - with coherent ideas and platforms that can't be ignored. There have been others in the past who were like us and tried similar things (Huey Long comes to mind), but understanding technology gives our generation a huge economic tool that we can also use to our advantage. Of course, if my peers are any indication: our society and entire economic system seem designed for the express purpose of making millennials depressed. And it's not really easy to shrug that off and just build things when the state of so many people you care about is so dire.
You see, AGM isn't a misanthrope misogynist, he's fierce! He says the things everyone else is afraid to say and thinks the things everyone else is too afraid to think because he's an Unconventional Thinker (TM). Everyone else is simply just too threatened to acknowledge this and that's why they're bullying PG.
Uh, not firing people over Twitter drama? I swear America is getting more insane by the day. It's even more obvious if you take a break from social network sites and then come back after a while.
Edit: Well, it seems that, according to Wikipedia, the impetus might have been an article in tech media (which seems to mean anti-tech media these days).
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/13/tech/apple-antonio-garcia-mar...
It's a literary device, and it's sad that it's biting him in the ass (I don't know him, but know lots of people who do, and they mostly seem to think he's OK).
It's a huge leap to go from "you wrote x passage" to "you may be biased against women". If you want to fire someone for bias, you need evidence of bias, not a theory that someone might be biased.
If someone in your future/present management chain wrote a "I think people like slibhb are bad at this job" missive somewhere, would you then feel the need to wait for examples of bias?
The difference between "can" and "should" is the entire moral universe.
It's a siege mentality designed to shore up one's sense of superiority, and ensure that one doesn't need to do very much soul-searching.
I've never seen a blog post more worthy of a good old fashioned fisking. I mean come on - "confidence is a self-fullfilling prophecy" - are we being serious here? It's only self-fulfilling because of survivorship bias. Maybe he's running with a crew of super successful founders and that's true, but from my point of view, I remember the dudes at my place of work that could very confidently talk my ear off about something that they half-understood (or very confidently describe an unworkable solution to a problem) and then got fired a month later because they weren't productive enough to meet even the super-low requirements of software development at a car insurance company. It's easy to spin narratives about confidence and restlessness and intelligence when you've surrounded yourself with the winners. Less visible are the people who go all-in on a fintech startup and end up broke a year later. Those people have all the same traits and end up in the same boat as all the other un-fierce nerds.
I like this.
The more this Paul Graham person writes the more I realize they are just another regular person.