Comment by david927 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by david927 | Hacker News Reader

This falls into the Malcolm Gladwell genre of arguments made on top of specious anecdotal data. Paul's not wrong, per se, but it's not a well-formed argument.

Bill Gates made his fortune by being in the right place at the right time with connections from his wealthy family, and software that he first sold and then went out and bought. If hard work helped him grow his empire, great, but I wouldn't use him as a great example of what hard work can bring you.

PG Wodehouse is considered by most to be a great "fun commercial fiction" writer. Comparing him to, say, Joyce, says more about Paul than about either of these writers.

For me, I prefer this quote by Calvin Coolidge: "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."

> This falls into the Malcolm Gladwell genre of arguments made on top of specious anecdotal data. Paul's not wrong, per se, but it's not a well-formed argument.

That pretty much describes anything that he writes on his blog.

Carrots are good for you. I had a friend who ate a carrots as a kid. He's a doctor now.

I wouldn't have even written my comment but this was just a big talking point after Gladwell's 10,000 hours book a few years ago (which also speciously and strangely used Bill Gates as an example of effort).

That Coolidge quote is 100 years old. I like us talking about things but let's endeavor to make it new things.

What I'm hearing is that you should startup a biz to sell those doctor-making carrots.

And I think a strong argument can be made that if Bill Gates had taken a little time to look at the big picture in his early days, Microsoft might have had a more positive effect on the world, rather than become a company that valued crushing opponents over technical quality or real innovation. Imagine the quality of Linux with 10% of the money of Microsoft.

Or the fair play might have meant Microsoft would never have surpassed Intel so we would have no big corporation making hardware decoupled OS.

Another strong argument is that, if you showed the place where Bill Gates actually worked hard, it was in crushing every single competitor in sight in such vicious terms that not only did those competitors shut down but none sprang up in their absence. Those small competitors were often wildly innovative. That all went away.

One often-cited reason why Europe did so well in the last half millennium, when it was far behind the Islamic world and the Far East, was not just the printing press but also that the various powers had reached a detente. There was not a single dominating, controlling power, and this spurred innovation.

Anyway, this whole argument Paul is proffering here is because people, especially the youngest generation, are seeing behind the curtain and realizing that their sweat drives the engines, and yet they're not benefiting from that the same way the wealthiest are. They're not going to "hustle" for a remote shot at millions. It's a crooked game and they don't want to play it. Good for them.

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