I get that this guy is like rich and famous and founded this website or something so people always post his stuff here but his writing always has this weird veneer of pseudo intellectual philosophy that I find very off putting.
People have had this kind of reaction to his writing for 20 years now and I've been puzzling about why for a long time, because even though I often don't agree with him (sometimes I disagree, more often I have no opinion), I wish I could write like him and know of few other writers who come close.
My current take: I think pg's unusual quality is that he thinks for himself. It used to be a truism that one should "think for oneself" (and even "question authority"!)—not so much anymore—but although we all tell ourselves we do that, mostly we don't. We mostly repeat things we've cobbled from other sources, usually sources tagged as authorities in our minds (and usually also in the culture at large). If you cobble from enough sources and have a bit of taste, that's the sweet spot for getting a good reception. You'll come across as clever and creative, but not weird, because you haven't left the tribe.
When encountering someone who actually does think for himself, the reaction is often a WTF. How dare he do that! Where are the citations?! Thinking-for-self stands out, not in a good way—and in pg's case the ruthless editing makes it stand out starkly. It's off-putting. The reaction isn't "hey, what would it be like if I thought for myself?" It's "hey, you can't do that."
The "rich and famous" aspect is a red herring because pg was this way long before he got rich and famous (except Lisp-famous), and it was by this quality that he got rich... that plus a lot of energy. But the rich-and-famous aspect intensifies the WTF reaction. It's no longer just "how dare you", it's "how dare that rich motherfucker" - which again, gets the causality the wrong way.
I know this sounds harsh about the cobbler type but I know these things by tracking them in myself—I'm no different. The funny thing is that one can notice such things and still feel perfectly sure about "thinking for yourself" or whatever else it is.
I think what you are getting at, though, is not so much "thinking for yourself" as pg is unafraid to say unpopular things that are on his mind. And I don't mean this in a derogatory way: it's good to have people who aren't just posting sycophantic opinions following the zeitgeist. But I don't think that's what causes my reaction to pg's writings. I think he gives advice that is overly universalizing from his position as a wealthy VC: for example, his "The Two Kinds of Moderate" post strikes me as very much the kind of thing that is really only taking his own experiences into account.
You're wrong about "position as a wealthy VC". As I said in the GP (but not before you replied! I was busy editing) - he was (1) exactly this way long before that, and (2) it was by being this way that he became a wealthy investor in the first place. YC was an exercise in exactly the same kind of thinking and writing that his essays are. And I do mean exactly.
Straw-manning is a telling sigh that you got defensive about PG, for some reason.
If people just dislike wealth, that's one thing, but nowadays they bring that up while criticizing his writing. I don't think those two things are connected, and it seems weird to conflate them.
They're also conflated because pg has written some very reductive stuff about smart people, sheep people, and ThInGs YOu JUSt CaNT SaY AnY MoRE. His stripped-back style makes for an easy read, but when he's not about his own experiences, it's ice-cold and humourless. That surely gets him pigeonholed quite fast outside of HN, even if you don't know what he does for a living.
Still this is the first of his blogs in years where I agree with him completely. No notes!
In a world of a million concepts, there are a trillion of possible directed associations between pairs of them, and each of them may be multi-valued. Say, what's a real-world relation between "ChatGPT" and "nighmare"? A good thinker will be able to find or come up with many that nobody has seen before, beyond the ones which, due to our 'social prior', are evident. What happens when instead of two, there are three or four concepts?
I would go further and say that parroting is often more complicated than being creative, you have to find those ideas to rehash first, and then rank them by popularity and efficacy at your goal, e.g. publicity or acceptance. In other words, you need to be able to "read the room", or "compute the social prior".
To think for oneself means to think based on one's experiences, not based on the thoughts of others.
It seems a key issue is that he often speaks in terms of what others should or should not do, rather than inviting others to see what has worked for him. Objectivity versus subjectivity. What makes it less palatable is that it appears carefully selected wording is used to (thinly) veil it to sound like something it isn't.
Ultimately it means the writing can come across as very self-indulgent. It does not often strike me as coming from a place of feeling genuine, authentic passion about sharing with other humans.
The "sharing with other humans" aspects is an interesting point though, because the way that pg strips things down to minimal expression involves stripping out the signals that make people feel they're being shared with. I wrote about this point 15 years ago (a horrible thing to say, but I'll link to it nonetheless): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143575.
It's very insightful to get to share different perspectives in these ways. Thanks for being so open
The reality is that many people are treading various intellectual ideas, and the idea that _you_ are the one with the new and innovative idea nobody else has thought of is... well.
I think what happens a lot of times though is that people will get to an idea that others dismiss, and then keep on going for whatever reason. Most of the time this leads to nowhere. Sometimes it leads somewhere interesting/valuable. But this is probably the most straightforward example of survivor bias out there. People with success will probably have done something counterintuitive or explored thoughts other people didn't have, but so many others waddle around endlessly in their search for having the unique idea.
If you want to get scientific with it, the way to prove if his ideas were valuable still would be to publish them anonymously. I'm a nobody and I have had things I post here get traffic. Some of pg's essays would also inspire some good conversations. But... this? I don't know.
Also, I am sure PG is really smart, but do not underestimate the effect on your brain of spending hours a day on HN, for many years. That's what makes me curious to read your stuff, in addition to Paul's.
Ah, I believe the simple main reason why people criticize Paul is... envy.
He doesn't need to be right all the time. He writes things that are provocative, and often make me/us think a lot about the topic. That's a success, in my view. Some people take it like that, others can't wait to criticize it to sound smart. And even if they're right, there are many ways to contribute to the conversation, instead of just bashing his writing as many often do.
I'm pretty content to stick to internet comments. They're below the radar, and I prefer to hide.
You might want to try writing anonymously and/or use a pseudonym.
It would allow you to share some of your thoughts with the world, and protect your privacy at the same time.
Oh and it's astonishing that anybody remembers that.
I’m not dismissing their cultural relevance, I’m just constantly baffled at the fideism, and it honestly scares me a bit, as if people were prey to a global hallucination making them believe that by appreciating and praising such figures then one day, maybe, they could be like them?
What I'm defending are qualities that I love and admire because they're admirable and which people are wrong to dismiss. Net worth, btw, is a terrible criterion to judge an individual by, even if wealthy people do bad and class dynamics are a thing. If a good and smart person becomes rich, do they instantly cease to be good or smart? Of course not.
Edit: I just noticed this part:
> wouldn’t take a minute to expend y’all as necessary casualties
On what basis can you possibly say that? Do you think this is true of everybody?
Re the latter comment: a commendable trait of a good capitalist is to take hard decisions aimed at growing wealth or a business. If that comes at the expense of expandable humans, well tough luck. Not having this trait inevitably makes you a bad capitalist, or one that won’t succeed as fast or so greatly. Pg is an excellent capitalist.
Edit: I take your point about capitalism, but sometimes optimization is suboptimal. That is, sometimes narrow self-interest ends up limiting you, and sometimes going against self-interest (as currently perceived) leads to greater outcomes—like navigating through a narrow waterway and ending up in an ocean.
This is what happened with YC. The YC founders (not just PG) did things that the rest of the industry thought were dumb. For example, if the founders of a startup wanted to get acquihired, YC would say "great, do what you think best", where other investors would say "over my dead body" because they weren't making money on the deal. YC's attorneys in those days would send the paperwork back because they thought there must be some mistake.
It turned out that optimizing for founders optimized for YC as well, but this was not obvious at the time. Why did pg and YC do that? it wasn't because they were "good capitalists". It was because of the kind of people they were and the ideas they thought were cool. That turned out to be massively more profitable than being a ruthless capitalist would have. So in the end it gets a bit hard to draw these distinctions. Sometimes being a good capitalist makes you a worse capitalist!
> It used to be a truism that one should "think for oneself" (and even "question authority"!)—not so much anymore—but although we all tell ourselves we do that, most of us don't.
We get beaten up when we do. The part that people envy isn’t his money, it’s his freedom.
Incidentally, if you really want an answer to your question, you can see this phenomenon in yourself. Run a thought experiment. If pg said X was a good idea, are you more or less likely to believe it than if I’d said it?
You could say this isn’t a fair comparison, since you have a lot of data about pg, so you’re using different priors. Still, even when he was Lisp-famous —- an era I miss —- he had the freedom to say whatever he wanted. He didn’t need to care whether you care what he thinks.
His recent rebellion against Twitter was especially notable. That’s what happens when you think for yourself. He can do that. The rest of us have to pick our battles.
So, the answer to your question of “Why are people dismissive of pg?” is undoubtedly related to the think-for-yourself aspect. It’s an aspect forced out of most of us, either by our parents or by authority. And that lack of freedom seems to be the underlying emotion.
Interestingly, you seem to imply that any of us can be like pg. Just think for ourselves, have good ideas, and don’t say dumb things. But when people actually try to do that, they risk far more than someone in pg’s position. So the “rich motherfucker” aspect is merely an extension of the same reaction that always tended to pop up. It’s a bit like a prisoner watching someone talk openly about how wonderful it is to walk outside whenever you want; of course they’d be jealous.
The important question is to figure out what one needs to do to become free (i.e. to feel free) oneself. How do you get from your initial conditions to that state? I've basically devoted my life, so far, to that question and I'm still at it.
p.s. I comment like this on HN pretty regularly; those comments are just drowned out by "if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future, we'd sure appreciate it lol xoxo"
If you met yourself at 10 and wanted to transmit some advice about what you need to do to feel free, what would you say? (I’m curious if you’ve made progress towards answering the question, or if it’s as elusive as it sounds.)
10 is too early for the "what would you tell yourself" question. At 10 you don't yet have a self that can be retroactively told things to. I suppose I would say "it's all ok and you're ok and it's all happening for a reason".
To my 15 year-old self and later, I would say: it's not going to be anything like you expect, so trust what happens and try not to resist.
Basically, all of pg's writings are also just cobbled together from other sources and only become notable because he's a rich, successful person.
If you "think for yourself" when confronted with a problem like this (a problem at least three millennia old! People have been arguing about effective writing for a long time), you'll inevitably retrace some steps—good steps—of smart thinkers that have gone before you. But you won't be able to think deeply! PG, like some many smart people who embark on criticism, don't imagine the responses-to-their-response (which are, historically, also by clever and independent thinkers), and the third order responses, and so on.
This essay is shallow because it has no reference to, and no argument against, the generations of writers who thought "perhaps complexity or even obscurity has an essential and unavoidable place in our writing" and wrote persuasively to advocate for the need complexity in writing.
This (like so many of PG's essays about things that aren't programming), is armchair philosophy about a contentious and deep topic that doesn't consider the very real problems of writing. PG (by virtue of his position) doesn't have to, and therefore cannot, steelman his arguments. While you're right that this essay isn't in any way "dumb", unfortunately the comment you're responding to was right! This is pseudo-intellectualism.
pg has some decent takes on programming and one day decided that he might also have takes on things he knows far less about. These latter takes don't tend to be very good, which is unfortunate because he does actually manage to influence people.
He makes a point and talks about it. There doesn't appear to be an attempt to come off smarter than he is.
Looking at other comments in this thread, I get the impression that people have this ideal of an essay that looks like an academic paper, that starts with a literature review.
But that is not how writing and thought naturally flows.
People write like this to suck up to the right people who might help them get a job as an assistant professor somewhere, or tenure or maybe just cite their own papers in return.
I find it repulsive.
He's a keen observer and a good writer.
It is hilariously dismissive to label someone's own ideas as pseudo intellectual because you don't agree with them, and they aren't coming with a bibliography.
I haven't recognised this in his writing. Can you quote some of the pseudo intellectual philosophy-veneered sections?
>Can we scrutinize all your comments for subject matter expertise?
Absolutely.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...