Fist-bumping while Rome burns
salon.com
salon.com
This article doesn't even go that far. It simply collects a bunch of totally unrelated vignettes --- the FDA regulating 23AM, the Goldieblox/Beastie Boys kerfluffle (how you know this is a crappy piece: it attempts to distill meaning from the Goldieblox "drama"), Lyft cars --- and delivers its message entirely through an insinuating title.
Good essays -- the ones most worth reading -- take examples that initially seem unrelated, and tie them together via a thread that the reader may not have considered before. For example, "thoughtless disruption" might be such a thread.
If you are willing to cherry-pick anecdotes and examples, one can make a case for almost anything, but if you are anchored to actual facts (ideally ones which are statistically valid) you provide a much closer mapping between your opinion and reality.
Perhaps we differ on what sort of texts count as essays, but I would note that many people on this site find Paul Graham's essays to be compelling, and in general his essays do not comprise a collection of disparate examples surprisingly linked through a common thread.
I think you need to go back and re-read the essays. They're almost exclusively composed of the assertion/example style of argumentation (which is not a dig; again, this is pretty much the canonical essay format), and I think you'd be hard-pressed to hold them to the standard of "statistical validity" (again, this is fine: we're talking about literature, not a math paper).
What's going on here is that you don't agree with the thesis of this piece, but you're unwilling to engage on the merits of the argument. It's much easier to just attack the form of the essay than to counter each example.
Secondly, I said ideally statistically valid. Good essays can be written without the use of statistically significant data properly interpreted, but the conclusions can only be as powerful as the evidence used to support them, as always. If Paul Graham's essays had included, for example, statistical data on the performance of startups that he has funded broken down by category I would consider them more highly informational.
What's going on here is that I think the level of insight and analysis that many people think is laudable in a written work, I consider shameful, and highly prone to bias and error. I never said I don't agree with the thesis of this piece (I have absolutely no dog in that fight). Perhaps you think I am the same person that you were originally responding to?
Empirical and statistical evidence is a delightful way to make a point, but what you "hard discipline" fetishists don't realize is that there are non-empirical "goods" that run our lives.
Narratives, thoughts, feelings, intuitions, broad non-empirical world views. There's a huge world of stuff out there to which statistics just don't apply, and they are all forms of knowledge. In the most basic way it's called rationalism, and it doesn't require any statistics or empirical evidence to make a point. In a more developed way it can be called post-modern knowledge concepts.
Basically, people who constantly talk about being "hard" are just dry humping modernity, something that smart people over 100 years ago realized was a collection of myths. The hard sciences sit on a foundation of warm gooey mud.
I never stated that there is some minimum level of evidential firmness below which evidence can't be considered, but I am absolutely establishing a continuum in which statistical evidence, properly interpreted, is higher than random collections of stories drawn from the author's life by convenience to prove his conclusion once the bottom line has already been decided.
I'm not a "hard discipline fetishist" if such a thing even exists, but anything which defies empiricism almost by definition can't have any impact on the material world. There are many areas wherein I agree that statistics is not currently applicable, and I implicitly acknowledged them in my post, although perhaps without sufficient emphasis.
As for postmodernism, ye shall know them by their fruits. The hard sciences have borne iPhones, cancer treatments, space flight, psychiatric treatment, and cetera.
Hah. Like religion? Like philosophy? The non-empirical world does and always has had a bigger impact on the material world than anything else.
Science itself--the methodology as a concept--is a non-empirical metaphysics that draws conclusions about truth concepts.
I think I only come to HN so I can feel smug when 20 year old millionaire entrepreneurs (this is my imagination talking) say dumb shit. Yes, the tech sector is destroying the world and making millions while I slog away in some underpaid ivory tower... but at least I know the first thing about science! (This is what I tell myself to avoid crying)
I just don't think it's a valid counterargument to attack the author for employing a standard essay structure, especially when he re-iterates the thesis in several different ways throughout the piece.
This is the youth of today protesting the status quo and Slate is dreadfully reactionary and conservative.
The thing that concerns me about SF Bay Area Startup Ecosystem is that it is def. neither a meritocracy nor a technocracy. (Those systems, properly implemented allow great new things to come into the world, without the side effect of king-creation.) Right now, California is dynastic. Dynastic money, flowing into the hands of people who adopt a dynastic culture, and creating the weak sort of creations that dynastic people end up creating. It makes people rich, and dynastic, one startup team at a time. That's a problem for the world! Once the bulk of the genius-level people now tied up working on dynastic projects or on online advertising/email delivery for some behemoth company wake up to the true nature of the reality and start operating in it as true creators things will start to actually get interesting and awesome.
In the mean time I'll enjoy the delicious beer, food, and weather. And Tahoe once there's enough snow.
There is a few choice sentences I'd like to rebut:
"And while there is much to dislike about how Silicon Valley is rewriting the rules based on little more than the authority of its own arrogance"
While I get the sentiment, the problem here is that blind appeal to authority of existing laws and figures is a well known civilization anti-pattern. It causes real problems in even the medium term. The "arrogance" judgement is also subjective, since it presupposes a mindset of "Silicon Valley" (which is hardly a singular entity) that may or may not be actually there.
"This is our emergent culture: an onslaught of newness, disrespectful of status quo, law and propriety. "
There is a lot to dislike about this sentence. First off is the negative judgement of 'newness' - we KNOW from neuropsychology that novel inputs to the brain are an essential ingredient to neural plasticity. New isn't just always new, but it's part of what it means to be young in the brain.
The second part of this sentence is problematic to me. This almost reads like the author is advocating that respect to the status quo, laws, and propriety is a major virtue. Again, this is another strong civilization anti-pattern (well the same one basically). If the author isn't saying this, then what is he saying?
Look I get it, change is scary. But the reality is we as a species have wedged ourselves into a weird place. We must proceed technologically to solve our problems. That is what Silicon Valley is about - moving tech and science forward to solve problems. Yeah not all problems seem essential (snapchat), but there is plenty of people who are doing way more interesting things. But also the pro-rationality, pro-new things, pro-science culture of the bay area is one worth extending and expanding. Because the alternative truly really is fist-bumping while rome burns. Certainly don't look at Wall Street to solve these problems for us.
In fact, you'll be happier if you don't.