Comment by vore | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vore | Hacker News Reader

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I don't really buy this idea of "thinking for yourself". We are nothing more than the product of our experiences: there are no axioms at the root of at any of our beliefs; fundamentally everything that goes through our heads is cobbled together from other sources that's cobbled together from other sources before that. And that's good! Because if we were attempting to derive everything from axioms that would be 1) impossible and 2) a total waste of time, because you're throwing away the collective knowledge of everyone who came before you.

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 right, the moment one uses language one is full of other-peopleness. But there's still a big difference between thinking for oneself (and claiming the right to think for oneself, which most of us won't) and not daring to. And also: not having the energy to. I mostly don't do it because I'm too lazy. Cowardice too, but laziness is more pleasant to admit to.

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.

It's very weird that you kept emphasizing "PG was like that before he got rich." You mentioned this point in both of your comments, but the ones you replied to didn't imply PG became like that after he got rich. None of them did.

Straw-manning is a telling sigh that you got defensive about PG, for some reason.

Interesting! but I'm not sure I follow. The GP, for example, connected PG's writing style with his "position as a wealthy VC". Pointing out that the writing style predates that seems relevant. No?

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 conflated because pg has an interest in paying young people low rates to work their butts off for a slim chance of success. He's a master of talking his book, and a lot of his blogs read like grist for the high-school to startup pipeline.

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!

I don't know about this. If what you're saying is true, strictly speaking, novel thought would be impossible. I think the whole game of thinking is picking a set of existing words and concepts you inherit and independently reasoning through/with them to arrive at novel or useful conclusions. The "thinking for yourself" part is all the thinking that goes on in the gap between the existing ideas and the reasoned conclusions you synthesize with them.

The irony, I was coming to write this very comment. But simply said, it's a logical idea.

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".

> I don't really buy this idea of "thinking for yourself". We are nothing more than the product of our experiences.

To think for oneself means to think based on one's experiences, not based on the thoughts of others.

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