8 ms·

Powerful Thoughts From Paul Graham

110 points by lispython 13y ago

verbalist 13y ago
I think this is wrong: >53. If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I’d take the first option. | It’s absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty.
- pluies_public 13y ago
  This is one of these situations where the first (pg's) choice is rationally better, but has also been shown to result in higher chances of low self-esteem and depression. It's very hard to shake off the feeling of being "among the lowest", even though in absolute terms you're perfectly well-off.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    It's not not necessarily irrational, it just seems that way because the hypothetical is artificially simplified. In the real world, relative wealth imbalances lead to power imbalances, which have global ramifications. This is the heart of the current American malaise. Americans don't feel wronged because their standard of living is so terrible (it's not). They feel wronged because they feel that the rich have leveraged their wealth in a way that captures a disproportionate share of new wealth creation--wealth their labor is ultimately responsible for creating.
- saosebastiao 13y ago
  While humans may, in general, side with you, I think it is sad that a favorable comparison with others could make one more happy than a healthy and poverty free life.
- escherba 13y ago
  The point pg is trying to make is that seeking relative material wealth with respect to others is akin to seeking pure status/power without having to do the work required to get it. It is all too easy to move to Costa Rica or wherever and live like a king for $10 a day.
  - msellout 13y ago
    Costa Rica isn't so cheap anymore, BTW.
navait 13y ago
"Why Nerds are Unpopular" was always my least favorite of the pg essays. The thought "Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart" is arrogant. I don't think nerdiness implicitly makes the things you do more important or smarter. Being bullied in school is undeniably wrong and hurtful, but claiming it's evidence of your intelligence or that you're above social "games" is silly. Even nerds bully, and seek some form of status the essay claims nerds aren't. And is it really true? It's certainly possible to be well liked and smart, and I don't think intelligence implies that you lack social skills. It's more true that certain levles of nerdiness causes a lack of social skills.
- pekk 13y ago
  Weren't a nerd in school, then, were you?
  - irishcoffee 13y ago
    Some of the most popular people I knew in high school went on to full rides at Stanford, Harvard, UNC, and the like. Being a "nerd" means what? Because it has no correlation to intelligence, and is purely a social label, generally self-inflected/self-assumed. Edit: public high school
    - JacksonGariety 13y ago
      Going to Stanford or Harvard certainly doesn't make you a "nerd". Quite the opposite in fact.
      - unalone 13y ago
        Hahaha, what?
      - irishcoffee 13y ago
        That was my point. =))
    - 13y ago
krichman 13y ago
> But I have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another. This is a smokescreen. I believe it too, that one person could be 100 times as productive as one other. But what the salaries are saying is that one CEO is more productive than all those 100 people below him put together. I think 100x productivity is more standard deviations than that seems to represent. Everyone, just admit that the CEO's are paid for having contacts in the right places. They aren't outperforming 100 engineers all day every day or even most days. The notion that salaries are some measurement of productivity is complete hokum. Nor do I buy 54, the idea that rich people create more wealth for society from by-products, like Henry Ford gifting us with the automobile. I don't think it's correlated. Yes we have some by-products that improve our lives, but we also have Wal-Marts lowering the quality of products nationwide and RIAA lowering the quality of free speech nationwide. So it's not as if rich people lead directly to benefits for society and they could just as easily push the other way. Being wealthy isn't like being some video game paladin, it's just another form of concentrated power.
- karamazov 13y ago
  > I believe it too, that one person could be 100 times as productive as one other. But what the salaries are saying is that one CEO is more productive than all those 100 people below him put together. We're not interested in the case where one person is 100x more productive than another because the second person is watching youtube. If the CEO is 100x more productive than the average person working for her, then she is, in fact, more productive than 100 of the people working under her put together. That's exactly what that statement means. And, anyway, whether or not the CEO is 100x more productive, her output is worth 100x more. How do we know? Because that's what she's being paid. Is she being paid for her contacts? It doesn't matter, so long as she's steering the company in the right direction. You're implying that "having contacts in the right places" is corruption, but it's not; knowing what to build and who to sell it to is a big part of running a company. CEO's don't spend their time conniving in smoke-filled rooms, they spend it trying to push their company forward. Rich people don't get that way without providing something people want. Wal-Mart may or may not be lowering the quality of products nationwide, but what they're demonstrably doing is providing goods to people at great prices that let them generate a lot of profit. That's something people want, whether or not you agree with them. The RIAA, on the other hand, is a symptom of the power of the music industry - and the way the music industry got to have so much power, and so much money, is by providing music that people wanted to listen to enough that they paid for it.
seanlinehan 13y ago
Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:p2hVKwhxvVEJ:www.rosshudgens.com/thoughts-from-paul-graham/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:p2hVKwh...
wongwf82 13y ago
> most people who “can draw” like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it While I agree with this, it seems that there is a stage where drawing could be part of you easier. Just like someone can learn how to play guitar more easily when they're young vs when they're over 20. Having said that, I also find that it is much easier to learn how to draw now than ever before. YouTube made it so much easier for people to share skills. So I could learn a certain technique with a certain tool much easier these days than in the 90's.
Tichy 13y ago
Any solutions to the problem of schools in sight? I dread the day when I'll have to send my kid off to school. Obviously I'll look at different schools, but I doubt that I'll find many interesting ones. I don't want to waste years of my kids life.
- randomsearch 13y ago
  Try reading "The One World Schoolhouse" by Salman Khan.
nos4A2 13y ago
Wonderful list, I agree with a lot of things, but "And as for the schools, they were just holding pins within this fake school. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done." I don't think this is true, this assumes that if an adult were not working he\she would devote time to their kids (and hence learning would be better). I think (from personal experience) school is a place where a lot can be learnt, and that system is important. Another one "Good Bad Attitude – Like Americans, hackers win by breaking rules." This only works when a very strong framework of rules exist that most people abide by, so when a hacker breaks few of those, being a minority, the system persists, or changes gradually. However if you look at a system like China or India, everybody is a hacker (in the sense everyone tries to find the shortest way to do something) and that leads to broken systems overall.
- squozzer 13y ago
  You may be arguing China and India in reverse. Everybody is a hacker there because even those in charge of the systems (e.g. police) are hacking so it becomes a matter of survival.
tome 13y ago
Is the image supposed to look like The Last Supper?
- ohwp 13y ago
  I think it is. Those are the disciples of PG. I'm not sure if I find the image a little scary...
huhtenberg 13y ago
Sorry, lost me at this - > Nerds [...] want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. I don't know a single nerd who wants to be smart. You certainly get a huge kick out of learning new things, but becoming smarter is not a goal.
- sergiosgc 13y ago
  It is a goal, in some fashion. I don't think geeks are after the smart badge per-se, but most are after proficiency at whatever they create and that is another definition of smart.
- thedufer 13y ago
  > You certainly get a huge kick out of learning new things, but becoming smarter is not a goal. I think it's clear that you're using a different definition of smart than pg, because the way he uses it that quote is a nothing more than a contradiction.
agentultra 13y ago
> Sed Itious • 8 hours ago − > Let's remember that what Graham preaches as Axioms are his > political and social truths, as much as he'd love to claim > them as Truths. > For example, (38) is a point based on an assumption that History is the history of the 20th century. There were extremely powerful and long lived countries with despicable civil rights. Currently China's getting more and more powerful and is hardly a beacon of civil rights. > (31) is a point most used to excuse the abuse of minorities, for example through racism. It's inconvenient to not have the usual privilege to mistreat those with less power and money than you, truly an unacceptable burden created to limit those free, rich, privileged spirits like Graham. How dare society, the government (fill in the anti-genius malevolent force of your choice). > As for Graham's idol Jefferson, and quoting that slave holder regarding rights and limited government, can we remember that Jefferson's ideological followers fought a abattoir of a civil war to uphold their concept of civil rights as property rights above the rights of others (that is slavery). The libertarianism Graham finds so attractive will sell the civil rights of a poorer person at the alter of the property rights of those with more economic power. > What I'd like to understand is why tedious ex-nerds like Graham feel an irresistible urge to proselytize Ayn Randian blather. If he's at peace with his success, what is up with the insufferable sanctimoniousness? Feels like a giant dose of bubbling narcissism. Best comment from the article, saved for posterity here.
- Pwnguinz 13y ago
  The criticism of #38 is misplaced. Historically, powerful and rich nations were ones with progressive (for its time) civil policies. Greeks were powerful, until corruption set in. When Rome was a Republic, it was powerful. When any one individual tried to become the emperor, it begun its slow decay. It's not something that occurs over night. What PG is saying that, all else being equal, the richer nation will be more prosperous. There are going to be unaccountable natural advantage a particular region will have (Middle East), that no matter how corrupt, it will be prosperous so long as it has what the rest of the world wants. Currently, China is getting more and more powerful, and at the same time the government is implementing and exploring more liberal policies towards civil rights. This is pretty telling. The criticism of #31 doesn't make sense. How does PG's statement (or thought process) excuse racism? I'll copy and paste PG's statement here: I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side barely has the upper hand. That’s where you’ll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.
philwelch 13y ago
How did this blogspam get upvoted? If we want to discuss vintage pg essays we can, but breaking a series of essays into a few dozen bullet points while stripping out the reasoning in between does violence to them. If you're only capable of thinking in bullet points, please do the rest of us a favor and don't inflict your mental disability on the rest of us.
sublimit 13y ago
I liked these quotes and was surprised to see the negative response. Sed Itious' comment seems to attack Graham on a personal level, like for being a "tedious ex-nerd" or having "bubbling narcissism", even linking him to racism somehow. Is all this about some issue with Paul Graham's personality that I'm not aware of, or did people sincerely not relate to the quotes? They don't seem that different from the inspirational soundbytes usually upvoted here.
gideons 13y ago
At the end of the day PG is a smart dude and a wealthy dude, but he's not a philosopher or great thinker on social interaction. His essays barely rise above the level of Rush lyrics and angst-y teenage poetry. Use him for inspiration but don't take his BS too seriously.
PixelPusher 13y ago
Why would listen to these silly points, he doesn't produce anything himself. He is no nerd and has no business judging other nerds. He's an investor who's gotten lucky and been around smart people. He's nothing special and I would never take any of his points seriously. I've had a few exchanges w/ him via email and he just quotes silly sayings and has no real substance in him.
metaphorm 13y ago
Paul Graham is a very insightful man, except on matters of salary, compensation, and individual productivity. In this respect he seems blinded by his own success and probably infected with at least some small part of the greed sickness.

110 points by lispython 13y ago

I think this is wrong: >53. If I had a choice of living in a society where I was materially much better off than I am now, but was among the poorest, or in one where I was the richest, but much worse off than I am now, I’d take the first option. | It’s absolute poverty you want to avoid, not relative poverty.

pluies_public 13y ago
This is one of these situations where the first (pg's) choice is rationally better, but has also been shown to result in higher chances of low self-esteem and depression. It's very hard to shake off the feeling of being "among the lowest", even though in absolute terms you're perfectly well-off.
- rayiner 13y ago
  It's not not necessarily irrational, it just seems that way because the hypothetical is artificially simplified. In the real world, relative wealth imbalances lead to power imbalances, which have global ramifications. This is the heart of the current American malaise. Americans don't feel wronged because their standard of living is so terrible (it's not). They feel wronged because they feel that the rich have leveraged their wealth in a way that captures a disproportionate share of new wealth creation--wealth their labor is ultimately responsible for creating.
saosebastiao 13y ago
While humans may, in general, side with you, I think it is sad that a favorable comparison with others could make one more happy than a healthy and poverty free life.
escherba 13y ago
The point pg is trying to make is that seeking relative material wealth with respect to others is akin to seeking pure status/power without having to do the work required to get it. It is all too easy to move to Costa Rica or wherever and live like a king for $10 a day.
- msellout 13y ago
  Costa Rica isn't so cheap anymore, BTW.

navait 13y ago

"Why Nerds are Unpopular" was always my least favorite of the pg essays. The thought "Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart" is arrogant. I don't think nerdiness implicitly makes the things you do more important or smarter. Being bullied in school is undeniably wrong and hurtful, but claiming it's evidence of your intelligence or that you're above social "games" is silly. Even nerds bully, and seek some form of status the essay claims nerds aren't. And is it really true? It's certainly possible to be well liked and smart, and I don't think intelligence implies that you lack social skills. It's more true that certain levles of nerdiness causes a lack of social skills.

pekk 13y ago
Weren't a nerd in school, then, were you?
- irishcoffee 13y ago
  Some of the most popular people I knew in high school went on to full rides at Stanford, Harvard, UNC, and the like. Being a "nerd" means what? Because it has no correlation to intelligence, and is purely a social label, generally self-inflected/self-assumed. Edit: public high school
  - JacksonGariety 13y ago
    Going to Stanford or Harvard certainly doesn't make you a "nerd". Quite the opposite in fact.
    - unalone 13y ago
      Hahaha, what?
    - irishcoffee 13y ago
      That was my point. =))
  - 13y ago

krichman 13y ago

> But I have no trouble imagining that one person could be 100 times as productive as another. This is a smokescreen. I believe it too, that one person could be 100 times as productive as one other. But what the salaries are saying is that one CEO is more productive than all those 100 people below him put together. I think 100x productivity is more standard deviations than that seems to represent. Everyone, just admit that the CEO's are paid for having contacts in the right places. They aren't outperforming 100 engineers all day every day or even most days. The notion that salaries are some measurement of productivity is complete hokum. Nor do I buy 54, the idea that rich people create more wealth for society from by-products, like Henry Ford gifting us with the automobile. I don't think it's correlated. Yes we have some by-products that improve our lives, but we also have Wal-Marts lowering the quality of products nationwide and RIAA lowering the quality of free speech nationwide. So it's not as if rich people lead directly to benefits for society and they could just as easily push the other way. Being wealthy isn't like being some video game paladin, it's just another form of concentrated power.

karamazov 13y ago
> I believe it too, that one person could be 100 times as productive as one other. But what the salaries are saying is that one CEO is more productive than all those 100 people below him put together. We're not interested in the case where one person is 100x more productive than another because the second person is watching youtube. If the CEO is 100x more productive than the average person working for her, then she is, in fact, more productive than 100 of the people working under her put together. That's exactly what that statement means. And, anyway, whether or not the CEO is 100x more productive, her output is worth 100x more. How do we know? Because that's what she's being paid. Is she being paid for her contacts? It doesn't matter, so long as she's steering the company in the right direction. You're implying that "having contacts in the right places" is corruption, but it's not; knowing what to build and who to sell it to is a big part of running a company. CEO's don't spend their time conniving in smoke-filled rooms, they spend it trying to push their company forward. Rich people don't get that way without providing something people want. Wal-Mart may or may not be lowering the quality of products nationwide, but what they're demonstrably doing is providing goods to people at great prices that let them generate a lot of profit. That's something people want, whether or not you agree with them. The RIAA, on the other hand, is a symptom of the power of the music industry - and the way the music industry got to have so much power, and so much money, is by providing music that people wanted to listen to enough that they paid for it.

seanlinehan 13y ago

Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:p2hVKwhxvVEJ:www.rosshudgens.com/thoughts-from-paul-graham/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:p2hVKwh...

wongwf82 13y ago

> most people who “can draw” like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it While I agree with this, it seems that there is a stage where drawing could be part of you easier. Just like someone can learn how to play guitar more easily when they're young vs when they're over 20. Having said that, I also find that it is much easier to learn how to draw now than ever before. YouTube made it so much easier for people to share skills. So I could learn a certain technique with a certain tool much easier these days than in the 90's.

Tichy 13y ago

Any solutions to the problem of schools in sight? I dread the day when I'll have to send my kid off to school. Obviously I'll look at different schools, but I doubt that I'll find many interesting ones. I don't want to waste years of my kids life.

randomsearch 13y ago
Try reading "The One World Schoolhouse" by Salman Khan.

nos4A2 13y ago

Wonderful list, I agree with a lot of things, but "And as for the schools, they were just holding pins within this fake school. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done." I don't think this is true, this assumes that if an adult were not working he\she would devote time to their kids (and hence learning would be better). I think (from personal experience) school is a place where a lot can be learnt, and that system is important. Another one "Good Bad Attitude – Like Americans, hackers win by breaking rules." This only works when a very strong framework of rules exist that most people abide by, so when a hacker breaks few of those, being a minority, the system persists, or changes gradually. However if you look at a system like China or India, everybody is a hacker (in the sense everyone tries to find the shortest way to do something) and that leads to broken systems overall.

squozzer 13y ago
You may be arguing China and India in reverse. Everybody is a hacker there because even those in charge of the systems (e.g. police) are hacking so it becomes a matter of survival.

tome 13y ago

Is the image supposed to look like The Last Supper?

ohwp 13y ago
I think it is. Those are the disciples of PG. I'm not sure if I find the image a little scary...

huhtenberg 13y ago

Sorry, lost me at this - > Nerds [...] want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. I don't know a single nerd who wants to be smart. You certainly get a huge kick out of learning new things, but becoming smarter is not a goal.

sergiosgc 13y ago
It is a goal, in some fashion. I don't think geeks are after the smart badge per-se, but most are after proficiency at whatever they create and that is another definition of smart.
thedufer 13y ago
> You certainly get a huge kick out of learning new things, but becoming smarter is not a goal. I think it's clear that you're using a different definition of smart than pg, because the way he uses it that quote is a nothing more than a contradiction.

agentultra 13y ago

> Sed Itious • 8 hours ago − > Let's remember that what Graham preaches as Axioms are his > political and social truths, as much as he'd love to claim > them as Truths. > For example, (38) is a point based on an assumption that History is the history of the 20th century. There were extremely powerful and long lived countries with despicable civil rights. Currently China's getting more and more powerful and is hardly a beacon of civil rights. > (31) is a point most used to excuse the abuse of minorities, for example through racism. It's inconvenient to not have the usual privilege to mistreat those with less power and money than you, truly an unacceptable burden created to limit those free, rich, privileged spirits like Graham. How dare society, the government (fill in the anti-genius malevolent force of your choice). > As for Graham's idol Jefferson, and quoting that slave holder regarding rights and limited government, can we remember that Jefferson's ideological followers fought a abattoir of a civil war to uphold their concept of civil rights as property rights above the rights of others (that is slavery). The libertarianism Graham finds so attractive will sell the civil rights of a poorer person at the alter of the property rights of those with more economic power. > What I'd like to understand is why tedious ex-nerds like Graham feel an irresistible urge to proselytize Ayn Randian blather. If he's at peace with his success, what is up with the insufferable sanctimoniousness? Feels like a giant dose of bubbling narcissism. Best comment from the article, saved for posterity here.

Pwnguinz 13y ago
The criticism of #38 is misplaced. Historically, powerful and rich nations were ones with progressive (for its time) civil policies. Greeks were powerful, until corruption set in. When Rome was a Republic, it was powerful. When any one individual tried to become the emperor, it begun its slow decay. It's not something that occurs over night. What PG is saying that, all else being equal, the richer nation will be more prosperous. There are going to be unaccountable natural advantage a particular region will have (Middle East), that no matter how corrupt, it will be prosperous so long as it has what the rest of the world wants. Currently, China is getting more and more powerful, and at the same time the government is implementing and exploring more liberal policies towards civil rights. This is pretty telling. The criticism of #31 doesn't make sense. How does PG's statement (or thought process) excuse racism? I'll copy and paste PG's statement here: I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side barely has the upper hand. That’s where you’ll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.

philwelch 13y ago

How did this blogspam get upvoted? If we want to discuss vintage pg essays we can, but breaking a series of essays into a few dozen bullet points while stripping out the reasoning in between does violence to them. If you're only capable of thinking in bullet points, please do the rest of us a favor and don't inflict your mental disability on the rest of us.

sublimit 13y ago

I liked these quotes and was surprised to see the negative response. Sed Itious' comment seems to attack Graham on a personal level, like for being a "tedious ex-nerd" or having "bubbling narcissism", even linking him to racism somehow. Is all this about some issue with Paul Graham's personality that I'm not aware of, or did people sincerely not relate to the quotes? They don't seem that different from the inspirational soundbytes usually upvoted here.

gideons 13y ago

At the end of the day PG is a smart dude and a wealthy dude, but he's not a philosopher or great thinker on social interaction. His essays barely rise above the level of Rush lyrics and angst-y teenage poetry. Use him for inspiration but don't take his BS too seriously.

PixelPusher 13y ago

Why would listen to these silly points, he doesn't produce anything himself. He is no nerd and has no business judging other nerds. He's an investor who's gotten lucky and been around smart people. He's nothing special and I would never take any of his points seriously. I've had a few exchanges w/ him via email and he just quotes silly sayings and has no real substance in him.

metaphorm 13y ago

Paul Graham is a very insightful man, except on matters of salary, compensation, and individual productivity. In this respect he seems blinded by his own success and probably infected with at least some small part of the greed sickness.