I can tell by the title what it's all about. Paul's essays are always like this.
Also everything should be a startup working towards a VC exit.
I read it as a warning that PG skews his arguments to prove some narrow points and you should be careful when applying them to your life, so you don't waste years chasing improbable goals. Plenty failed start-ups exemplify this.
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[0] - 'dang described it long ago as behaving as if there was a great hash table in the sky, mapping a person's name to the simplest and most well-known fault of them, and as if commenters were somehow obliged to dereference that hash table every time some person's name is mentioned.
Eh. I think of it as a warning that younger us (or -at least- younger me) would have very, very, very much appreciated when we were first reading the essays.
Yeah, _you_ have had these realizations about how less-profound-than-they-seem the essays are, and _you_ have read the essay(s). But, like, the essays keep popping up... why not also keep mentioning that they're not as profound as they seem? There's _always_ going to be someone who's reading the essays for the first time, so why discourage folks from providing the new reader the opportunity to read valid criticism of the essays developed over the years?
Maciej? He's writing about how we shouldn't go to Mars these days. He's and excellent and very entertaining writer and I am sure he has plenty to teach me but I'd rather listen to PG. My focus is limited and I'd rather follow someone who already helped me get ahead and showed me what the possibilities truly are instead of pushing his limits onto me.
Which, I, for one, also find 100% on the money. A lot of snakeoil has been sold by Musk, Bezos, and co about the matter.
But, please indulge me, I am curious: how is this mindset serving you? Are you a happy person? Are you a balanced person? Are you a successful person? Do you have everything you need? How long have you been thinking like that? What would it take to change your mind?
Thanks for your answers.
Do you think you come out as balanced and happy by doing this?
Do you regularly think anybody that thinks differently than you, or doesn't gulp down whatever snake-oil the "succesful" sell, is problematic, unhappy, unsuccesful, unbalanced, and should "change their mind"?
Do you think that only business guru admirers or grind culture entrepreneurs are "happy"? Do you think only techno-optimists dreaming of strongmen like Musk and Bezos giving them Mars colonies are "balanced"? (And do you think either groups are anywhere close to a balanced person, as opposed merely naive and happy-go-lucky victims of Californian Ideology?)
How long have you been thinking like that?
Since you are aggressively pushing yours onto others it would be interesting to know how they work for you. Sorry if it felt as an ad hominem attack, it was never my intention, I was just curios. My apologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
>Since you are aggressively pushing yours onto others it would be interesting to know how they work for you.
Well, it has worked fine thus far. So, there's that.
Not sure what kind of "belief system" you have deduced I have, based on that I'm against the hype of Mars missions, or I don't like VC-culture.
It hardly seems enough to deduce any general belief system, much less one that has wide consequences in personal life, as was implied. If anything, both sound more like common sense, or at least not being pro-hype or sucking up to the rich, than a belief system.
But I still interpret it as debiasing tool for those that aren't very familiar to PG's writing, so it's not really useless. After all, there must still be new HN users all the time, for which some things are worth repeating (just not too often).
“I read it as a warning that PG skews his arguments to prove some narrow points and you should be careful when applying them to your life, so you don't waste years chasing improbable goals”
They were being just as curt as nickpp. What they wrote was not as reasonable as your lines above, hence the response. From my pov, the main reason that you’re criticizing nickpp is because his opinion doesn’t match your own.
The irony here is that I’m more sympathetic to your viewpoint, but I’ll try to be constructive beyond just calling you out:
* These essays take a lot of work to write
* These essays are not hidden behind a paywall
* The essays capture the POV of a successful startup founder and more importantly a successful startup investor
* Does the advice apply to everyone? Probably not everyone 100%. I doubt many of his essays even apply to 25% of people, or even 10% depending on the topic.
* still, many people have profited off pg’s advice in some way
* If you don’t like pg’s essays, you don’t have to read them
* pg founded HN. Don’t be surprised to see people defending pg here.
So, my ...advice is for people to follow much more timeless wisdom which has worked great for billions, and not get into the cult of some rich/succesful or into cults of personality.
Optimism on the other hand and especially tech optimism is almost a slur nowadays. Very few voices support them, very few cheerleaders. And that is a shame - the whole world depends on these optimists. We need them to solve the problems facing our civilization. To have successful startups we need failed ones. Advances are not easy, they are damn hard and people willing to try are few and far in between and they need our support.
And finally in the last 20 years I met and interacted with hundreds (maybe thousands) of people in our field. The ones who TRIED - few successes but zero regrets. Even failures lead to positive outcomes in the end.
The only regrets and bitterness were predictably from the ones who for some reason or another were discouraged to try. They always have an excuse, some situation to point to that made them victims. But in the end it was a preexisting belief, an idea or opinion or mind virus that did the most damage to their you world-view.
Very few will lose trying to emulate a successful person. None will gain anything trying to follow coldtea's advice.
Not as much as the multi-trillion dollar industry for "how to make it big" advice, business and startup hussle culture, magic bullets and/or grind p0rn, and so on, all built on optimism, and aiming at an ever renewable supply of fresh naives.
So there is value in these essays. You don't have to see it or appreciate it but denigrating it just turns the question on you: who are you? what have you done? what do you have to show and teach us?
Likewise, it's possible for someone to manage a sports team, successfully I might add, even if they were never a top player in that sport. My point is, I don't need to be a billionaire or found a successful company to be able to critique Paul Graham's writing. I personally find it banal and would rather seek out writers who came up with novel ideas, like for example Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell to name a couple.