Comment by antithesizer
5 days ago
Paul Graham was never smart. He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Young people in need of guidance would do well to read the classics and disregard everyone with a pulse.
Paul Graham is one of the smartest people I've ever met, hands down, not a close call.
If I know propositional logic, one of two things follows: either (1) I've never met any smart people, or (2) you've jumped to a false conclusion.
Either way, you shouldn't be posting personal attacks to HN.
I'm assuming you're exaggerating for effect at least a little but with that caveat I couldn't agree more. CS Lewis has a great argument for this in his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation. Paraphrasing his argument: Time naturally filters out the nonsense and what we're left with are the books that are worth reading by virtue of the fact that they have stood the test of time. Truth or at least the closest we can get to it naturally bubbles up to the surface over time.
https://thecslewis-studygroup.org/the-c-s-lewis-study-group/...
Counterpoint: all the nonsense in millennia old religious texts that still wastes people's time to this day.
You must have spent a lot of time studying them to reach your conclusion.
Aye, but that nonsense benefits religious authorities and politicians, it has value to them, hence its staying power.
Taleb is a strong proponent of this as well. Related to the “Lindy Effect”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
This is horrible advice if you want to work on anything innovative. You don't have time to wait for things to bubble up. For example, physics textbooks from the early 1900s rarely use linear algebra, even if they're written well.
Point taken. I wouldn't recommend avoiding anything modern across the board and neither does CS Lewis. And innovation is great but I would guard against assuming that innovation is always positive and a step in the right direction even if not directly. It's also true that many old texts, religious or otherwise, contain timeless wisdom that can inform innovative efforts. And I'm not talking about old by many centuries either. For example, I think many of the hacker types that frequent HN and seek to build something innovative would probably benefit from reading some of Alan Turing's writings. On the other end of the spectrum, maybe Sam Altman could benefit from studying the story of the tower of Babel.
"He then received a Master of Science in 1988, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1990, both in computer science from Harvard University."
Anyone with a PhD Comp Sci from Harvard is automatically very smart in my mind, unless by "smart" you mean something else...
So I've been thinking about this recently and come to the conclusion that 'smart' and 'stupid' are just extremes of behaviour and capability.
That is, people have clever _moments_ - some more than others perhaps - but can equally have stupid ones. We convenientally flatten the statistics into a boolean.
For example, recently someone considered to have made a lot of smart decisions in his life has been found to have payed others to rank his character up in a video game so he can brag about it. Everyone has stupid moments.
He’s smart in Computer Science. I studied mathematics in graduate school. Lots of smart people in my class…in mathematics. What I’ve experienced since graduate school is people being smart in their area of expertise thinking that smartness automatically extends to other areas. Arrogance and stupidity shine brightest when such people write authoritatively on areas they haven’t actually studied in any real depth.
You have fallen for the classic blunder. Just because someone is smart in area X does not mean they have the same proficiency in Y.
Then explicitly say "PG should stick to topics in his domain", don't use a generic term that indicates low IQ...
So this is completely out of his ballpark, and he's commenting on it publicly? Seems pretty stupid to me
If pg spent any of his time talking about actual computer science topics instead of the dull pablum and oligarch apologia he outputs today, we’d all be better served.
> He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Agreed. People seem to think that success is deterministic, so following the advice of successful people will lead them to success, rather than there being any number of other factors that might make someone who might make choices with the highest chance of success end up not succeeding, or someone who might make choices that aren't actually that smart end up becoming successful in spite of that. The worst part of this is that it's not just the students who naively believe this, but the successful people themselves. When someone mistakenly thinks that their own success is solely attributable to your own superior intellect or work ethic, it's not surprising that they end up advocating for policies that treat people in unfortunate circumstances as being not worth trying to help.
Graham's early essays on, say, the ambitions of cities or hackers and painters, were interesting, original, were grounded in his personal experiences, and were focused in scope.
This latest mush makes extravagant claims about the evolution of society over the course over a 70 year period, seems shocked that news rooms might have style guides, and suggests that recent campus life can somehow be meaningfully be compared to the Cultural Revolution.
It observes many trends, perhaps some accurately, but observes everything superficially.
Pragmatically, what Graham suggests at the end is reasonable--pluralism combined with openness to the ideas of others about morality. I don't know that we needed 6000 words of vague dyspeptic musings to get there.
He has demonstrated the ability to write and think more clearly than this. It is reasonable for someone to observe this and be disappointed.
Both of you are attacking pg's character, yet he's done no wrong here.
> These new administrators could often be recognized by the word "inclusion" in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an "inclusive language guide."
As an LGBT Latino, I feel gross when people step up to "include" me. The "LatinX" thing is just sick, and the fake "pride" bullshit makes me feel unbelievably cheapened. Not all gays or bis are the same. I don't go around screaming "yass qween", listen to Beyonce, or watch Ru Paul. But we're token represented like that. I hate everything about it.
Superficial facets of my "identity" have been commoditized and weaponized. (I'd say "appropriated", but that'd only be the case if this wasn't a complete cartoon representation.)
I've been called a "fag" once in public for kissing a guy. Whatever.
My wife has been called cis-scum (despite the fact she's trans!), I've been made to write software to deny grants to whites and men [1], I've been told I can't recommend people for hire because they weren't "diverse", I've been taught by my company my important "LatinX heritage" and even got some swag for it, I've had a ton of completely irrelevant people make my "identity" into a battle ground, etc. etc etc. I can't count the number of times this surfaces in my life in an abrasive and intrusive way.
I felt more at home in the world before 2010 than in the world today that supposedly "embraces my diversity".
[1] Restaurant Revitalization Fund, look it up.
[dead]
He's smart about startups and tech but as soon as he starts to talk about politics or philosophy he gets very 2 dimensional very quickly.
In much the same way people who build useless startups never talk to any actual customers, Paul Graham wouldnt be seen dead with the types of 1970s black activists from Harlem who actually originated the term "woke" (to refer to e.g. police brutality).
Im sure he knows plenty of the rich, white moral posturers who run large corporations and pride themselves on making a rainbow version of their company's logo for use outside of middle eastern markets, though.