Comment by threeseed
2 years ago
There’s an old adage about never meeting your heroes that applies well to PG.
Some of his daily takes were so embarrassing and insipid that it was hard to maintain respect. It’s funny because his long form posts which are often insightful were likely reviewed/edited by a third person. A concept he has actually said only exists in the modern commercial publishing era.
>were likely reviewed/edited by a third person
or else just had the benefit of more time to think about them. i certainly know i say some dumb stuff, but if i write it down and think about it for a week before saying it to anybody else, i'm going to censor like 90% of the stuff that comes out of my head.
That was always the dumbest criticism of Obama - that he took frequent pauses when speaking (the uuuuhs) and chose his words carefully - his critics used it against him where anyone with half of brain understood why. That being said, Trump essentially DDoS the art of the inartful / wrong / dumb, so maybe that was a better way to go. Who knows....
Very off topic, but... Most presidential speeches are written by a speech writer & displayed on the teleprompter, not ad libbed on the spot. The "uuuuhs" were an intentional mannerism.
> were likely reviewed/edited by a third person
You don't have to guess, he lists the names of every person who reviews his posts at the bottom of the posts.
It's very hard to be smart all the time, and you don't have to be stupid to be wrong.
what you have to do is correctly assess yourself, which is impossibly rare among people who made a bunch money
Especially amoung the people that will get in front of a crowd and shout "I'm rich, bitch!"
Doubly so when intersected with the crowd that publicly eschews earthly possessions.
Turns out hypocrites aren't self aware
Really like this comment -- dovetails nicely with Bill Gates "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose," and helps illuminate the fundamental problem: status insulates you from accountability, but without accountability you lose a crucial form of feedback essential in nearly everyone's ability to correctly assess themselves.
> There's an old adage about never meeting your heroes that applies well to PG.
I wonder how much of that is down to the person themselves (judging someone else, through the lense of whatever prejudices and biases) and not their heroes.
As they say from where I am: short of meeting true evil, there's no one worse than your own self.
I've met PG at a book signing and he was quite pleasant. I asked about when Arc would be released (this was a while back) and he laughed and joked about it. Really nice guy.
Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?
> Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?
I think you learn more about a person through Twitter than meeting them since for better or worse people drop the polite, professional veneer that normally associates face to face meetings.
It showcases (a) what concerns them so much they have to Tweet about it, (b) what their values are, (c) how they read situations, (d) how they treat people etc.
It's weirdly like you're watching them perform in some scientific experiment and seeing how they react to different stimuli.
But you go to far. "Meeting someone" is meeting that public veneer that they use when meeting new/random people. It is not spending a lot of time with them and getting to know them. It is about how first, in-person impressions match up against your expectations.
Do you think that meeting someone at his book signing equates to meeting him?
> Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?
That really is one of the worst parts of Twitter. The form of short-form drive interaction encourages some of the most pithy and dismissive conversations and leads to some really hostile interactions that often dispense with human decency.
(I mean, not restricted to Twitter, I've experienced it here, and on Mastodon, but Twitter really takes the cake.)
GP is calling pg dumb, not mean - your anecdote is compatible.
You cannot be both pleasant and dumb. Dumb people are inherently annoying.
Dude the other day he said "Automation is inductive proof that Marx is wrong"! A mistake you wouldn't make if you sniffed Marx's wikipedia page, let alone opened your eyes to read it.
pg deleted it and posted this response: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600122386346450944
(...after, hilariously, Matt Bruenig replied with a correction from ChatGPT - which is also deleted because he auto-deletes tweets.)
e: Reading the thread now, I love this reply from pg, who I've seen attack marxism, socialism, leftism, what-have-you, endlessly and smugly in the past:
> I freely admit I have only a superficial grasp of Marxist doctrine. I could no more debate the finer points of it with an actual Marxist than I could debate the finer points of church doctrine with a Jesuit. (Nor would I want to be able to do either.)
The finer points!!! Amazing. Something to keep in mind when the billionaires tell the ol' lefties to read econ 101!
That particular exchange really was one of the most embarrassing and ignorant ones I've seen on part of pg.
I hope he got a refund from the ghostwriter for that one.
Twitter now says paulg account suspended
Quoting the GP tweet to the one you linked:
> You still occasionally hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be rich, because their employees created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees.
Do you disagree with this, or just disagree that it’s in contradiction to Marx?
To start with, "don't deserve [...] because employees created all the value" is a straw man. Lots of other value Out There that they exploit that comes from other places than their employees' labor but also isn't "created" by the founder. Also lots of reasons people shouldn't be rich, whether or not they are founders and whether or not they "created" value.
Disagree that this is even the question. The role of "founder" is mostly tangential to the discussion - rather it's the "owner" that Marxists would argue don't deserve their wealth (and if it's the same person, you have to separate the roles in your head - the 'founder' role produce some irreplaceable value, while the 'owner' role is easily replaced.)
The fact that automation makes your firm exponentially more productive over time doesn't contradict Marx at all. That's just a premise he borrows from classical economics to then argue why that leads to bad stuff, in his view. It seems like maybe PG is taking issue with the labor theory of value or something? In which case... /shrug, that's ok, get in line with the rest of us?
What's really happening here though is PG isn't familiar with the discourse whatsoever, so he makes a weird scattered argument and smugly attributes some strawman opinion to Marxists, then gets mad at the reaction. Trying to make sense of it as if he knows what he's talking about just kinda leads to insanity.
e: I'm also not claiming to have some deep knowledge of Marxism at all... I've read like 1 or 2 chapters of Capital. It's just that, like I said above, you just have to have basic familiarity to realize PG speaks from his ass.
Something I explained to my children today: don’t tweet about things you explained to your children today apropos of nothing, it makes you sounds like a jackass
He actually wrote a blog post about how he writes. He sends drafts to people and heavily rewrites, sometimes over the course of weeks or months (IIRC).
So, yea, the agitated dad vibes get (dare I say) edited out in the process.
There’s another one: the medium is the message
PG still has an excellent batting average and is more insightful than not even on Twitter.
I feel that there's a fitting SMBC on this topic.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-01-29
So I notice a trend for people to take seem to take stabs at PG whenever he's brought up, and sometimes not seemingly even relevant to the article at hand.
I suppose you can only speak for yourself, but I find the words "insipid" and "embarrassing" particularly emotional / unscientific. Out of curiosity, what is there a connection to the article at hand or alternatively why do you feel it's important to spread awareness of his incompetence?
Just last month, he was passionately defending Elon Musk's decisions running Twitter, on Twitter, from all those annoying plebs who dared to speak their minds about it, not even having ran any companies themselves.
The topic of "the article at hand" is, inevitably, his incompetence.
Are you saying frustration is simply that he changed his mind on this issue then? And actually it sounds like you think he changed his mind in the right direction.
Was he rude to you personally or something?
Why would you think that science has anything to do with this?