pg and YC has more qualified investing experience than probably any other "experienced person" you could talk to. When you are doing a startup, it's generally a good idea to focus on innovating in your core area of expertise - which would be some combination of product/market/technology - and take the best practices of all the other areas, like financing.
I'm not talking about what PG or YC recommends with regards to investing.
I'm talking about the general idea that if anyone else said something like this and asked for blanket trust:
"you can't trust your intuition....rule number zero is: these rules exist for a reason"
Well those other people of course can't be trusted like PG and what they say doesn't matter as much. So if a person with 30 years in the taxi industry said to you "trust me these things are for a reason" and you saw he was as accomplished in what he did as PG would you just "trust him" or would you dig a little deeper?
Interesting but expected that I would get downvoted for stating an opinion on something I said "what this seems to be saying". In a classroom would a teacher takes points off for stating a thought like that?
Quite frankly I don't know why it's so necessary to walk on eggshells when stating a thought that seems to question what PG may say.
Much of "disrupt" goes against a pattern of previously accepted behavior that others have questioned.
But I sometimes feel that there is a definite emotionality involved when people hit the vote button and people jump to a quick conclusion depending on either the particular subject or the person who the commenter is making their thoughts known on. It seems that when discussing these "protected" individuals or subjects you have to take extra care to say things in a way to protect against downvotes. And sometimes that is just not worth the effort so you don't say anything.
I agree with everything you said, although, per my other comment, I think it was you who "jump[ed] to a quick conclusion" in this case. :)
These aren't universal, unqualified rules and I don't understand why you're trying to generalize them beyond fundraising. To use a different and perhaps silly example, I'd be more inclined to trust my intuition with respect to dog kennels than, say, medical or legal advice.
I think pg is saying that fundraising is more like medical or legal advice and less like dog kennels. He's not making a blanket statement about trusting people with prior experience.
If you want to make this more mathy, imagine there some function
I(s) = amount I should trust my intuition in situation s
You're arguing that since pg believes I(s_1) != I(s_2) (as evidenced by his previous writings) then pg must be contradicting himself. The correct line of reasoning is actually "If pg believes I(s_1) != I(s_2) then either pg is contradicting himself or I'm misunderstanding pg."
Given pg's generally fastidious nature with respect to these things, I'd say the prior odds of pg contradicting himself are much lower than you simply misunderstanding him. At the very least this is what most folks believe, so when you jump to the conclusion that pg is contradicting himself you come off as an uncharitable little troll. First stop on the troll tour: Downvote City. :D
Putting on my teacher hat for a second, when you smell a contradiction like that it's often a sign you're misunderstanding something. Rather than point out the apparent contradiction and go all j'accuse on the author, it's more useful to stop and ask yourself, "Assuming the author is intelligent enough to spot a contradiction like this, is there a way to understand what they wrote in a way that isn't contradictory?"
There's really no downside to doing this, even if there is a contradiction. At the very least you'll have developed a more robust argument. Often you'll end up with a way to express the author's argument more clearly than the author did in the first place, since you're probably not the only one confused in the same way. What's more, if there actually is a contradiction, folks will be more inclined to believe you when you demonstrate you've gone out of your way to try to understand the author.
"This is interesting and contradicts a bit of "disrupt" meme:"
If I was trying to rebut his point I would have stated that I thought he was wrong "and here is why" which is not what I did, did I?
With medical and legal advice by the way, it's highly likely that you if you talk to 10 professionals, (as the saying goes) you might very well get 10 different opinions.
"I'd say the prior odds of pg contradicting himself "
I didn't say PG contradicted himself at all. I said what he was saying contradicts the "disrupt" meme (if you want to call it that).
"Rather than point out the apparent contradiction and go all j'accuse on the author"
How does what I said in any way rise to the level of this:
>"You can't trust your intuitions. I'm going to give you a set of rules here that will get you through this process if anything will. At certain moments you'll be tempted to ignore them. So rule number zero is: these rules exist for a reason. You wouldn't need a rule to keep you going in one direction if there weren't powerful forces pushing you in another."
> What this seems to be saying (to young people) is "it's ok to ignore what other older more experienced people say (or what established practices are) and try to disrupt in those situations because the guidelines and experience they have is bogus but I am telling you that my rules are right so just trust me".
In particular, I took the "this" in "What this seems to be saying" to mean preceding paragraph you quoted from pg's essay and the quote following it to be a restatement of an argument pg was making in this essay or elsewhere. Since pg's essay didn't talk about the "disruption meme", include the words "disruption" or "meme", or have anything to do with advice outside a fundraising context, I had assumed you were referencing previous essays.
So, either the "this" in "What this seems to be saying" is referencing something else or you're responding to a position nobody in this conversation, including pg, has taken. Wanting to be charitable, I assumed you misread the essay or over-generalized its argument.
Now, I'm just confused. C'est la vie.