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..

I simply can’t see how this can be right.

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?

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/

> 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.

Many of his critics mention his connection to HN, discuss his earlier essays, and so on.

Fair point.