I earnestly think his writing has an overindulgent fandom here. Every single blog post rockets to the top and, in my opinion, they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or persuasion. He may write snappily, but is every single post worthy of Han's top slot?
Part of what I once said about why Def Leppard songs were meaningful to me:
A group of young men singing about love who also stood by their talented but now severely handicapped band member after he lost an arm is something that spoke to my soul. To me, these people had to know something more than pretty words. There had to be something deeper in their songs than just "sex, drugs and rock and roll."
Words never stand completely on their own. What they mean to people is shaped by context, history and reputation.
Hacker News wasn't always a space with 5 million unique visitors per month who mostly barely know each other. When I originally joined in 2009, it had a sense of community.
I never got to be one of the "insiders" in that community. I was a visitor looking in from the outside.
But it did exist and many of those people still come here, though their presence isn't obvious. I don't think you can tell who pg's friends are by who says what on Hacker News.
I've always respected the man, though he and I were never friends. I respected him because of how he comported himself here when he was in my mind just a moderator for a forum that I participated on, before he was big time famous and big time wealthy, when his wealth was measured in words starting with M, not B.
I don't read every single thing he writes and I never have. But I certainly take his words seriously when I do sometimes read them.
He has a PhD and he suggested to his girlfriend that the two of them should start a company together. That company is, of course, YC.
I feel like it gets little press as a "pro diversity" company, but it's a big company with a woman founder and that's true because of Paul Graham. It was not Jessica Livingston who came up with the idea.
It's sort of a stealth diversity thing and I generally don't say too much about that because I think that's the best way to do diversity and I don't want to ruin it by calling a lot of attention to it.
But we've had a pandemic all year and the entire world is cranky as all hell -- me included -- and it's just rubbing me the wrong way that people are so desperate to find a dog to kick these days. So I feel a need to give a bit of pushback here lately.
I mean, you're using a site which self-selects for his target demographic. He's the founder of a VC company which created the site your visiting and apparently his blog gets 15 million page views per year. I think it's just a numbers game, not fandom.
I'm not defending what he writes, but this posts are generally fun to read and think about. Sometimes I don't agree with him or find holes in his arguments, but there's usually a nugget of truth you can take away. They're just blog posts, he doesn't need to be infallible.
The occasional self-promotion from the people running the site is a price I'm willing to pay to use the site.
Yes. It’s because of who he is. If I wrote this post, it would not have the same meaning as if he wrote it.
I know that sounds counterintuitive, but the reason is that we know that PG has huge experience of and access to startup founders and seen their outcomes and has had a great deal of opportunity to formulate thoughts like like this on the basis of what he has seen.
I have experience of startups too. I could have written something like this, but it genuinely wouldn’t have been as meaningful coming from me, because I don’t have the same perspective as he does.
But what you are describing is just an appeal to authority.
It's quite possible that putting the assertions of the text in the context of this particular authority does give it more credibility, but I've also heard that same authority make some very poor assertions.
Just look at the objective criticism that some of the posts gather. Sometimes, there are really major, easily contradicted flaws in these texts.
You’re going to need to explain how you conclude that I am making an appeal to authority.
I didn’t say anything about the validity of his argument. Only that it means something different and more interesting given his experience, than it would coming from someone else.
Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us than when a random blogger is wrong.
> You’re going to need to explain how you conclude that I am making an appeal to authority.
Because of your phrasing: "Yes. It’s because of who he is."
> Even when he is wrong, it is more interesting to us than when a random blogger is wrong.
Relative to each other, perhaps.
However, is something wrong by PG more interesting than literally every other topic being discussed on HN, so that it "rockets to the top", to quote the comment you initially replied to.
In that phrase, “Yes. It’s because of who he is.”, I am not referring to the validity of his argument. I am explaining the fact that his posts receive a lot of attention.
There is simply no appeal to authority being made.
The rest of your comment isn’t clear, are you saying there is something wrong with people finding PG’s pieces interesting?
I think if your perspective has enabled you to know things you wouldn't have otherwise, _most_ of that should just come through from the writing. It should be possible for you to write in a way that's convincing independently of who you are.
A different person might not have been able to produce the same essay, but if the essay is the same, who the author is shouldn't matter too much (for a good essay).
Nope, I came to the same conclusion as your parent, when I wondered why every one of these threads for the last several years has been full of dismissal and criticism, and why the phrase "out of touch" gets flogged like a dead horse. I've been reading pg for 17 years, so I know who he is, what he's done, where he's coming from, his writing style... I can take his essays for what they are with all that context. Of course his opinions and perspective are what they are, because it's literally his life's work to identify potentially successful founders before they're successful.
Also, I don't suffer from that HN thing where nobody can simply consider an article, or do follow-up research themselves, without measurability, studies and citations, as if they're petrified they might become epistemically infected and be wrong about something that probably doesn't even impact their life in the slightest.
I have read PG essays for the last 4-5 something years. YC was never under my radar before that. The first time I saw ‘PG essays’, I was excited because I thought they meant PG Wodehouse who is my favourite author ever and I was excited that YC reads Wodehouse together.
Alas..that wasn’t the case. But I don’t regret the PG essays and have come to appreciate them over the years. I think it’s because I didn’t have any expectation about this person’s writing or prior knowledge about PG. But not knowing who Paul Graham was and reading them for the first time, I couldn’t figure out the enthusiasm around it. Maybe it was my disappointment that they weren’t by my PG. But over time, I have come to appreciate it.
These are what I call ‘through my lens’ writings. The words derive weight from the cult of personality. And the lens they see the world through..
What we know about PG’s experience is a huge prior that shapes how we interpret what he writes.
I think this probably explains some of the polarization we see in the comments - people who don’t know who he is see this as just a dumb blog post that seems to be getting too much karma. People who do, see it as insight from someone who is in a position to actually know something.
I'm not saying PG asserting some insight is the same as some random person asserting it: certainly PG has some prior we should take into account.
But I think good essays are ones where you don't need to really rely on that prior. A good essay is one that convinces you that what it's saying is true, instead of just asserting it and relying on the reputation of the author.
If an essay doesn't convince you directly, then:
a) the author just didn't take the time to provide an explanation
b) the explanation is too complex, or too difficult to materialize, it's something you just develop an intuition about
c) it can't convince you directly because it's not actually true
If you trust the author on the subject matter enough such that you're in a/b territory, then while I think an essay that explained more would be a better one, an essay that doesn't is still valuable.
But I think at least one concern is that we're actually in c territory. Especially with stuff like "picking winning companies", I'm hesitant to take things at face-value. It's such a complicated thing to predict, it's easy to succumb to survivorship bias. I'm not convinced that PG is just so good at it that things should be taken at face-value.
I think this is a very obvious no-true Scotsman fallacy around the notion of a ‘good’ essay, plus a straw man of what PG wrote: “just asserting something and relying on the reputation of the author”, and one of what I wrote: “that things should be take at face-value.”
It is fairly obvious that persuasive writing often convinces people of things which we are either not true, or meaningless.
It’s also fairly obvious that all authors perspectives are formed by experience, and that knowing about that experience is informative of how we interpret what they say. This is simply true of all human communications.
I can’t really see what you are trying to accomplish by insisting there is something called a ‘good’ essay, whose hallmark is it’s persuasiveness in the absence of knowledge about the author.
Certainly there are some sincere essays that do fulfill this criteria, but it’s what also exactly what a cult leader or marketing agency would be aiming to achieve with their writing.
I would make the case that being persuaded by an essay is an epistemically salient signal which can be thought of as a red flag that we may be being manipulated by someone we wouldn’t choose to be manipulated by.
When we experience it, the responsible thing to do is to inform ourselves more about the author and their experience rather than to lionize the piece of writing.
Re. strawman: maybe this is a good essay, but I was referencing Dumblydorr's assertion that if someone else had written this essay it would be considered mediocre/not make it to the top of HN, and your response that this is irrelevant, since the author _is_ in fact PG.
I'm not sure where the no-true Scottsman is?
> I can’t really see what you are trying to accomplish by insisting there is something called a ‘good’ essay, whose hallmark is it’s persuasiveness in the absence of knowledge about the author.
Really? This seems entirely non-controversial to me. It's more-or-less "don't judge a book by its cover". Maybe I was over-emphasizing _how_ important this is ("hallmark" is probably too strong), but all-else-equal, a text being able to rely on the arguments made within as opposed to who the author is seems positive. And I think there's _obviously_ metrics by which you can judge an essay's good-ness beyond its author.
[SSC][0] is a good example. I think he writes very interesting essays that captivate and convince people on their own. The only "reputation" he had when he started was that he was psychiatrist. Recently he's gotten a bit more popular, but still, his reputation is just "someone who writes good essays".
Are you suggesting it's dangerous that SSC writes good, convincing essays, despite the fact that he's not some well-known figure?
If you have no previous knowledge of a cult, getting convinced by their writing seems to be more about getting convinced by bad arguments than it is about attempting to consider arguments directly. And once you're already in a cult, I think it's a very common feature to have members rely only on the reputation of the cult leader without trying to think critically about the actual things they're saying.
Like, let's say someone gets indoctrinated into a cult. You could say "Yeah, see, if they had just discounted the cult leader due to their reputation instead of trying to actually read what they had to say, they wouldn't have gotten indoctrinated." I guess? But they could have also used more scrutiny in examining the arguments? And if the reader isn't using scrutiny to examine the arguments, why do we think they're going to make good decisions about whose reputation to trust?
> Are you suggesting it's dangerous that SSC writes good, convincing essays, despite the fact that he's not some well-known figure?
Of course not. What did I write that would suggest that?
> cult, getting convinced by their writing seems to be more about getting convinced by bad arguments than it is about attempting to consider arguments directly.
Your criterion for a ‘good’ essay was that it is convincing in the absence of knowledge of who the author is.
For someone who is persuaded, both SSC and the cult leader’s writings both meet this criterion.
How would you modify your criterion to distinguish the two?
> Of course not. What did I write that would suggest that?
> being persuaded by an essay is ... a red flag that we may be being manipulated by someone we wouldn’t choose to be manipulated by
I was persuaded by SSC essays, despite not knowing much about the author. Was that a red flag? Was it bad that I remained convinced by them despite not finding out much about what experiences in his background have shaped his perspective?
> How would you modify your criterion to distinguish the two?
The distinguishing factor is in what you should be persuaded by.
If a "cult leader" is able to convince you of something by presenting you with good arguments, maybe they aren't a cult leader/it's not crazy to believe whatever they're selling.
If someone's convinced of cultish notions because they were persuaded by bad arguments, I'd say the primary remediation is "don't be persuaded by bad arguments", not "don't listen to people unless you know who they are". I wouldn't say the second statement is terrible advice, but it's not the primary problem.
I beg someone out there, please run an experiment that reposts PG’s articles on Medium.com with a different author’s name. All things equal, I wouldn’t doubt that HN would start giving these posts a proper vote count.
But then again, some people are more equal than others. shrug
>they are usually short and lacking in citation, evidence, or persuasion
He’s not writing research papers. He’s just a thoughtful guy with a lot of experience sharing his ideas as concisely as possible. Part of the reason the posts are so interesting is because of the discussions they prompt - I wouldn’t mistake the level of interest on HN for everybody treating these as gospel.
On average, his writings are definitely more worthy of discussion than the newest JS framework or somebody doing something with old or underpowered hardware. Perhaps most of the once-top posts aren't as exciting as one would believe?
