The summary of this essay appears to be that Paul Graham relies too much on his own intuition, but intuition can lead people astray- a lengthy discussion on the failure of PG's own Arc language is used to support this argument. And apparently his recent political/social commentary fails for the same reason. The author went as far as to call him "profoundly unserious public intellectual".
I'm not convinced that role of intuition is exactly similar in something as subjective as political commentary as in designing a programming language. Even more frustrating is that the author doesn't clarify what characteristics someone needs to have to become a "serious public intellectual". He clarifies what PG should have done for Arc (read a scientific paper), but there isn't any such specific criticism directed against PG's political essays.
The actual thrust of the argument seems so broad (i.e. reliance on intuition), this could be used to label almost anybody outside pol-sci academic circles a "profoundly unserious public intellectual" for commenting on politics.
I've had the same feeling for a long time. To be a Jaron Lanier-type public intellectual, you need to have some humility and curiousity. PG seems to think he's figured everything out already.
I haven't followed PG much either of late but it was recently brought to my attention by a coworker that he is now on the side of the 'bad guys'.
I'm all for substantial criticism and discussion, and am always desperately looking for it, but this (unequivocally political) essay unfortunately has all of the distinct hallmarks of the simplistic contemporary political discourse.
It takes a great many words to offer no substantial criticism of any of PG's recent thinking but rather hopes to indict his whole person (as an "unserious intellectual") based on a protracted and exhausting discussion of his naive ideas about programming from 20 years ago.
Who is a serious intellectual? What does that even mean? One thing I know is that serious thinking involves going through many ideas, many of them at risk of being naive or flawed, to sort out how to think about the world.
If an "unserious intellectual" is one that puts substantive ideas out into the aether, however flawed, however self-aggrandizing and, well, human, the messenger might be, then I'll take that over whatever you would call this essay. Everybody is wrong about everything, in part.
I propose a heuristic: if you're reading (or writing) anything whose thesis is "X is a bad person" (or "X is a ____", for that matter), perhaps you're participating in a religious game rather than a thinking game. There's no dialectic available after an essay like this, no opportunity for growth. There is just a like or upvote button -- with only the thought that if you press it you might just be on the right side of 'good'.
>A more serious analysis of brevity might define it as “the entropy of a parse tree recursively inlined/macroexpanded down to language primitives.” This suggests our focus ought to be on two questions: how compressible are our primitives, and how can we enable users to achieve something close to optimal compression? Since the first question has a relative measure (what’s the compression ratio for our expanded parse tree?), we could productively iterate on both better primitives and better tools for abstracting over them.
But Graham’s analysis of brevity, and indeed of all language design, was fundamentally unserious. He wasn’t interested in a rigorous definition of brevity, because the ultimate measure of a language’s quality was still his hacker’s radar. All of his essays, and Arc itself, were just spokes around that central hub. If his essays sometimes disagreed, or if Arc didn’t reflect his essays, it’s hardly surprising; their only connection was they all, in the moment, seemed right and true to Paul Graham[..]
I dont understand what the author means by 'brevity'. Is that the same as what one might call 'elegant code'? I prefer to use the term elegant. From the article, it seems to me that PG's prefers elegant code that is modular and neat. It is reflected in his essays and how he approaches subjects.
Code can be elegant and modular. People are complex. You can hack them, but you cant debug people.
Wow, "Dabblers and Blowhards" (essay) sure has aged well.
> to be at the top of your field, explicit knowledge is almost always required.
This is technically true. However the only thing separating someone at the top of the field from an average expert is intuition. Both has access to exactly the same explicit knowledge and any expert with years of experience will know most of it already.
For example, what is "good code"? Nobody has written a program that programmers agree can tell if your code is good or not. Yet "good code" is extremely important, making things composable and scaling up means we can make larger and less bug prone programs. It is one of the key things of a top programmer, yet the only way we can identify it is ask experts whether a piece of code is good or not, and they wont even agree. We know for a fact that different programmers writes code of vastly different quality, we just can't pinpoint what that quality is.
The problem with Paul Graham isn't that he rely too much on his intuition, the problem is that his intuition for programming language design isn't as good as his intuition for making programs or startups. Lisp isn't as great as he claims, Java is much greater than he thinks, he just has created a mental blocker keeping him from seeing this and therefore ensuring that he will never be great at designing languages, since that blocker keeps his intuition from doing its job.
This blog post reads like the author decided to dig up some epic dirt but went too hard in the spot where they found the first lukewarm morsel (Paul being wrong about Java) hoping to find more proglang failures instead of continuing the hunt.
Because it seems like a strikingly ho-hum collection of samples.
Paul certainly didn't pull a Hammock-Time Hickey with Arc. Arc was a low mileage side project that fizzled out. Like any engineer, he dicked around and built a mediocre forum on it but lost interest when it came to polish. He made some comments about libraries and brevity. Used bytestrings and not immutable maps. He wrote blog posts, some about Arc.
It's not like Paul is revered as a proglang designer, yet it reads like Zach is trying to build up a damning contradiction from sideshow scraps.
And 80% through the post is when Zach finally charges Paul with spinning the silk of YCombinator from perhaps overvalued essay clout. I mean, didn't those early investors know that bytestrings couldn't possibly have been the best way to future proof Paul's hobbylang for 100 years?
(Isn't the flag to plant here simply that Zach's tour of his least favorite Paul Graham blogs could be leaving out the things that did make Paul ascendent in the tech/biz space? That perhaps something even like Viaweb could make up for blogging a tech prediction that didn't pan out?)
Then the blog post ends a few paragraphs later but not before Zach decides to crank the aggro up from mouse's hiss to puppy's roar by drawing a just-so line between white supremacy and the blog post where Paul bemoans anti-intellectual conformity going on in uni campuses.
In other words, Zach dedicates paragraphs of his post to drive home a scandal as big as Paul's one-praise-too-many endorsement of brevity in 2002, yet Zach leaves the connection between white replacement theory and anything else he's uttered on the page as an exercise for the reader.
I get the feeling that Zach gives his true feelings and motivation away in one of his opening paragraphs:
> Recently, however, his writing has taken a reactionary turn which is hard to ignore. He’s written about the need to defend “moderates” from bullies on the “extreme left”, asserted that “the truth is to the right of the median” because “the left is culturally dominant,” and justified Coinbase’s policy to ban discussion of anything deemed “political” by saying that it “will push away some talent, yes, but not very talented talent.”
And then Zach spends the rest of the blog procrastinating ever getting around to it, something that could finally be taken seriously as a real disagreement.
----
Something feels very withheld about Zach's message which is surprising because I think Zach is such a good communicator on technical subjects (e.g. Elements of Clojure).
I'm not even sure what Zach wants the reader to think Zach feels about Paul. The whole comment above is me trying to meander a guess. Where does Zach actually put Paul on a scale from outright intellectual fraudster to just someone Zach avoids on Twitter? It's hard to interpret the blog post without even knowing that much.
How much is Zach provoked by obvious political disagreement? What really is his point about Hickey and Clojure? Just a passing comment that Hickey did the build-your-own-lisp better, or is it that Arc's failure should have pilfered every bit of credibility from Paul?
If Zach ever read this, I would encourage him to introduce the same honest ("what I think" -> "why I think it") clarity that makes his technical work so easy to read.
The problem with Paul Graham isn't that he's "not intellectual". It's that he pretends to be something he's not.
He's a business guy. He rolled a Natural 20 (or few) on the "where and when to be born" check... which is kind of 95% of what it takes to make money in capitalism (unless you're born rich). He's a decent technical writer. I tend to find his opinions on PL out-of-date and pedestrian— but I imagine mine are, too, because I'm a middle-aged ex-techie who left the industry in disgust.
For a contrast: Joe Rogan, whatever you think of him, doesn't pretend to be an intellectual or a brilliant guy. His schtick is that he's an average-ish guy with a lot of curiosity— not that he's a genius who has conversations with God on the regular. Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, embarrasses himself with shit takes well outside of his expertise. (His claim to fame is interpreting a reasonable Canadian law in an extremely unreasonable way.) Peterson's experiences as a therapist aren't to be discounted, but his opinions on politics and society and economics are utterly worthless.
Paul Graham's original Lisp books were very good. His "Billionaires are a Gift From God" schtick is a massive embarrassment. That's self-serving polemic, not intellectual discourse. Chomsky, he ain't.
Well I guess it was only a matter of time before people started making posts proclaiming that pg’s lack of conformism is problematic.
Not surprising to see that a thoughtful critique of HN's monarch garners such little attention, compared to when the cult leader himself drops some verbal turds for his acolytes to polish.
The author went as far as to call him "profoundly unserious public intellectual".
IQ-wise, Paul Graham is probably above 140— possibly well above 140— but that's not the same thing as being intellectual. No one who follows him will say that he's not intelligent.
Paul Graham is no Noam Chomsky. I think we can all agree on that. He's not even in the same category as "He Who Must Not Be Named" (whom I should probably shut up about, lest I risk being banned or accused of being him).
PG has nerd credibility because he got rich in technology and may or may not have had something to do with the Morris Worm. He's charismatic by nerd standards because he probably would break 165 on a GRE-V and because he's learned enough about how rich people talk and think to bridge the otherwise impassible chasm between money people and makers. He made a shit-ton of money by coming of age in the year we all wish we had come of age in; he made that an even bigger shit-ton of money (YC) by monetizing the reputation he earned by writing half-decent essays and knowing the right people.
Paul Graham is like Jordan Peterson. In his native field of expertise, he knows a few things and he can present them very well. When it comes to politics, his opinions are poorly-thought-out, self-serving, and generally worthless.
Who is a serious intellectual? What does that even mean? One thing I know is that serious thinking involves going through many ideas, many of them at risk of being naive or flawed, to sort out how to think about the world.
I could name one person but not only is he banned but I would probably be too if I mentioned him.
Getting to Paul Graham levels of wealth and influence is, in fact, very simple:
1. Be white and well-enough off that you know how to talk to rich people.
2. Be in technology on a US coast (West is better, East also works) during the late 1990s— an anomalous time and place with a level of opportunity that appears about once in 250 years.
3. Get really good at programming and use a "10x" programming language like Lisp.
#3 is actually optional, but it's the one people can control so it's the one you get the most fans if you talk about.
Paul Graham had good intentions, I think, but he indirectly contributed to something that ruined a lot of people's lives.
I was there in the mid-2000s. I used to read everything he wrote. I loved his Lisp books. I totally bought into what he was selling. I really admired the guy. He made greed morally acceptable and I was a confused kid. He said that in "the real world" all the petty drama that makes nerds unpopular would go away. (It ain't true. Unless you're in tech in the 1990s, the corporate world is worse than high school.) I considered applying for YC. Looking back, I'm glad I didn't. I know too many people who flew too close to a garbage fire in the Mountain View sky they thought was the sun and are still recovering, 5–10+ years later.
The fact is, I don't dislike Paul Graham. I think he got out of his depth. Y Combinator, though, is a sleazy institution with a record of ageism, atrocious founder quality— the number of YC-backed people who've turned out to be spousal abusers is shockingly high— and marketing-sans-substance. I actually think that most of YC's atrociousness happened in spite of PG's influence and probably set in after he was a major factor.
This essay smells like referred pain.
If the author has a good case, he should just debate PG directly on his Coinbase stance. Because it sure feels to me that that's the real issue here. All the rest of the snarkiness is motivated by a disagreement on THAT issue.
The author starts with a few political comments and then goes into another direction - programming languages. I was expecting a conclusion on the political comments, without finding it.
But, even if Paul Graham has been wrong about language design, it doesn't mean he's been wrong about current affairs or the importance of startups in the coming future.
If anything, his bets have been largely successful and by openly sharing his thoughts he attracts some criticism from the different minded folks, like the author of this essay, who's clearly a smart fellow.
I saw that piece from the NY Times about Coinbase and I feel that it's reactionary to the announcement from Coinbase about not mingling into politics, which I support btw, I don't like the politization of every aspect of our lives.
I've also heard a podcast with Brian Amrstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, and it's not hard to get to the conclusion that he's a great human being.
I may be wrong, but I distrust most of what the NY Times has been publishings in the past few years, particularly because of their focus on politization. I even feel repugnant by it. It feels like a stance that somebody that doesn't believe in progress would take. Somebody that blames others for his problems and thinks that humans are inherently evil. Usually nihilistic.
This is a vapid personal attack on one person. This amounts to little more than gossip and mud-slinging and if the target were anyone but Paul Graham, it likely would have been flagged to death long ago.
The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets.
HN Guidelines say:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I guess if you choose your target carefully, you can get around that rule by writing an entire blog post that fails to make any kind of real and substantive argument with anything in particular and merely calls him an "idiot" at length.
HN is no longer "turning into Reddit." Now it's turning into "People" magazine as long as the people you gossip about are tech people.
If you think Paul Graham is "out of touch," maybe you can work on an app that helps rich people solve the problem of finding themselves surrounded by a sea of either yes men sucking up to them or haters. I imagine that sucks the oxygen out of their intellectual life for quite a lot of successful people.
I wish I'd find it curious the extreme negativity toward the essay, but unfortunately it fits with my world view of people in general: they'll approve of things that concord with their own opinions and interpret everything through the prism of what they already believe.
The essay is labelled ad-hominem by many, even though it provides a cogent argument and multiple supporting facts. Of course, to take an example, the question of the enterpreneur as a luminary and an exploiter depends greatly on what you already believe. I happen to already think that Facebook, Google and co are exerting bad influence, holding and using information they collect about everyone to their own advantage. Others, like Uber, are easy to be thought as direct exploiters.
The attacks on Arc and Bel and succinctness are also argued with factual arguments. (Arguments that I happen to agree with; bias, bias...).
In the end, the essay posits a simple thing: that behind all the pseudo-theoretical posturing underlying PG essays, they are mere opinions pieces.