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Comment by bokonist | Hacker News Reader

If I was pg, unless I was writing essays based directly on the YCombinator experience, I would write under a pseudonym. Once you achieve a certain level of fame, it is simply too dangerous and aggravating to write honestly under your own name. This has only gotten worse in the past few years with the rise of angry twitter and tumblr mobs. The world is full of people who wish to punch upwards and tear someone down of higher status. And then on the flip side you have too many groupies who will agree with you just because you are successful. Of course, maybe he already is writing and submitting essays under a pseudonym, we may never know ...

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There's too much of a benefit to his brand to not write. YC gets first pick of so many startups because people say, "I want to get advice from THIS guy"

As for the overall issue of "Talking your position" - everyone does it. Left and Right leaning economists get different research conclusions. You just have to be aware that it exists. And despite this, the advice from PG, Peter Theil, Marc A and others is different, despite them all being long startups.

Your second point needs more emphasis. Everybody has their own story, and it's always biased by their personal experiences and worldview. There's no such thing as a "fair and balanced" perspective, there are just people who pretend their perspective is balanced and end up introducing another sort of bias into it.

The article and some of the comments here seem to suggest that there's something more "authentic" about a piece when it comes from a subversive, low-power position. Why? What makes the perspective of someone in a position without power more authentic than the perspective of someone with it, other than the fact that it will probably resonate more with the personal experiences of many more people since power tends to be a pyramid with a much wider base than top?

The real answer is to carefully consider where the perspective of whomever is speaking is coming from, and identify how closely it aligns with where you are and want to go. The perspective of a billionaire on how hard it is to make ends meet, if you're living at the poverty threshold? Probably not that relevant. The perspective of a billionaire who started out poor on how he got to where he is? Probably pretty relevant.

>What makes the perspective of someone in a position without power more authentic than the perspective of someone with it...

Well someone not in a position of authority or power doesn't have to worry about losing said authority. If you tell too many uncomfortable truths or offend the wrong people, you may in certain instances loose some of your power. So it makes sense that the likely hood of getting an "authentic" story seems to get less and less as the person telling it rises in stature, power, authority.

Someone who's in a position of authority or power doesn't have to worry about gaining said authority, while someone who's not very often does. Rationally, the two situations are equivalent. (Psychologically they aren't; there's a cognitive bias that causes people to weight losses higher than gains, but there's also a cognitive bias in others that makes it easier to avoid losses than enact gains, so they roughly cancel out.) You can't draw significant conclusions either way along this dimension: the willingness to sacrifice authenticity for power is a mark of the security<=>insecurity axis, not power<=>powerlessness.

I don't know that those two axes are orthogonal. It seems like there is an asymmetry between gaining power and losing power. I think we can agree empirically (if not definitionaly) that there are fewer people with power / status. There are a lot of things besides not offending those others that keeps people in a position without power. If you know that these other factors are keeping you low status, then you have less incentive to pretend to be something you are not. But a single offensive comment can sometimes dislodge someone with power.

>What makes the perspective of someone in a position without power more authentic than the perspective of someone with it...

General conservatism. People who have something to lose, be it money, fame, power, prestige, credibility, etc., will always weigh the benefits of their actions against the cost of losing what they have.

And they should. People with power are taken more seriously. Guys like Buffet can move the markets just by talking. But I think sometimes people don't WANT that kind of power/leverage when they write; maybe they just want to explore ideas, write for entertainment, or something else without all the hassle and baggage that status brings.

> What makes the perspective of someone in a position without power more authentic?

The halo effect. [0]

Or to put it another way - cynical psychology.

0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

Well it depends on what pg wants doesn't it? If his priority with his writing is to continue leveraging the YC brand then he should certainly write under his own name. And there are dozens of other reasons to write under his own name such as being able to speak to people about all his work in person very easily.

On the other hand, depending on how PG views his writing oeuvre, if he wants to be taken seriously as an essayist outside of the domain of business advice I could see it being in his best interest to write under a pseudonym. For better or worse most people are going to see him as Paul Graham startup investor/former startup founder. If he wants people to take writer Paul Graham very seriously, like Paris Review seriously, it would probably help to divorce himself as an author from his business background.

You're then putting him in a situation that nobody has any reason to listen to him. Okay, sure, maybe over the years he can build another brand around his pseudonym as a domain exert in something else, but that struggle is potentially just as difficult.

Actually, left and right leaning economists are surprisingly unbiased. See the essay (based on data) "Economists Are Almost Inhumanly Impartial". It's as if the scientific method works.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/12/economists-are...

scientific method? economists? LOL

I'm not sure what the units are there in that graph, but when trying to scale the vertical and horizontal of the graph to have 1 unit vs 1 unit, it seems to have a larger looking slope to me. Still smaller than one though.

I may have made mistakes in resizing it though.

The X and Y axes do not have the same units, so scaling them this way is meaningless. The key point is that while there line has slope, the spread of the data is much larger.

I.e., the ideology of the study's author gives you very little information about the numerical values in the study.

Another source that disagrees...

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/economists-arent-as-nonp...

It is very hard to not introduce bias into social sciences. This is also why psychology and software engineering studies are hard to trust. It is more pervasive in economics when there are rewards to be linked to a given worldview. (You can make a lot of side money as an expert witness if you have written a lot of papers either solidly pro or against anti-trust legislation)

The source you're linking is mentioned in the first 3 words of the article he linked. The MotherJones.com article is a direct response to the article you linked.

While I see what you are saying, it strikes me as advice that would make him fade into, if not irrelevance, some kind of "Sages of Yesteryear" status. It's safe, but you don't generate good ideas by being safe. (I don't have anything against pseudonyms but they are hard to keep secret.)

Part of the point of writing essays is to explore ideas honestly, and honesty is often not safe. I hope he stays honest.

you don't generate good ideas by being safe

necessity as they say is the mother of invention. money is the mother of indolence and sloth. hence the essay. The issue about mixed motives is also tied in their somewhere, too. honesty comes more freely to those with nothing to lose. whilst those with everything to lose, have averything to gain from shading the truth. {etc}

A pseudonym like, say, Evan Miller?

pg has already done this in a very limited capacity. See: "Tara Ploughman"

yup ...I'm always on the lookout for TP

what makes you think he doesn't

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