

Paul Graham - from social shyness to patronizing - babul
http://techiteasy.org/2008/06/03/paul-graham-from-social-shyness-to-patronizing/

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omouse
The point of an essay (at least pg's style of essay) is to explore a subject
and, to a lesser extent, to incite others to explore the subject and their own
feelings about it as well.

Unfortunately, the writer here decides not to explore his own feelings fully
and his points are made in a few sentences without details or evidence,

 _"The bits on London or Paris are terribly naïve and missing the point.
Whoever is using the word hip for London or art for Paris can only have a
vague understanding of what he is talking about"_

This smells like an ad-hominem

 _"Looking into Paul’s ferocious defiance towards school and corporate
culture, it is easy to imagine Paul being a rather shy person, who would
rather jump in the ocean than being part of anything looking like a team."_

Lack of substance really hurts this blog post.

~~~
biohacker42
But that essay style, say the most truth with least number of words, also
incites people to disagree. The way they do may not always add valuable
information, but it is still fun to read. You can not tell me you did not
enjoy:

 _Also remark that in painting, many of the women whose pants you are trying
to get into aren’t even wearing pants to begin with. Your job as a painter
consists of staring at naked women, for as long as you wish, and this day in
and day out through the course of a many-decades-long career. Not even rock
musicians have been as successful in reducing the process to its fundamental,
exhilirating essence._

Just the fact that PG provoked the above is wonderful.

~~~
pg
Incidentally, believing that live models would be titillating is a classic
sign of a noob. That idea is left over from Victorian times, when the mere
idea of a naked woman was exciting. In actual fact, live models are generally
pretty unattractive. Someone who wanted to stare at women would do way better,
nowadays, at any beach.

~~~
PieSquared
Congrats, pg, I think you may be the first person to ever have applied 'noob'
to painting. :)

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131072
I have to say, I was partly inspired to attend art school (and study painting)
by 'Hackers and Painters'. After all, it's an O'Reilly book. I am an
archetypal hacker personality even if my achievements are modest. Computer
architecture is as natural to me as breathing, whereas I could barely draw a
crude stick figure. I realise MBTI has limitations but I am solidly in the
realm of INTP/INTJ.

Anecdotes are not data, but let me tell you - by any measure of personality
types I have ever seen, hackers and painters are as close to different species
as you can get that can still produce offspring. 'Painters' thought processes
and modes of creativity are so alien to those of a 'hacker' that I have no
idea how the world does not descend into chaos with so many of those types
populating it. I say this after spending many endless days in the company of
'painters' (especially if you include the tutors, many of whom had painting
careers).

In fact the experience was shaking enough to make me reconsider my once
strongly-held belief in universal suffrage. I gave it a year of full time
effort and then threw in the towel. Of course, I am assuming that 'painting
students' don't change dramatically by the time they become 'painters'.

Also, regarding the marvellous statement about spending all day with women who
aren't wearing any pants - I'll leave what that en'tails' every 28 days up to
you to figure out - if that doesn't get through to you then let's just say the
novelty wears off.

Paul, if you are reading this, your thesis is bollocks. Thanks for nothing.

~~~
pg
Don't judge painters by art students. They're quite different groups. The link
between art students and painters is nothing like the one between, say,
medical students and doctors. Most art students (painting majors especially)
don't end up as artists, and quite a lot of artists spent little or no time in
art school. IIRC, Picasso went for one semester and Van Gogh didn't go to art
school at all. Calder studied engineering.

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jrockway
I don't mindlessly follow everything pg says or does, but I do think the
author is totally off base here.

Basically, I don't think you can "get" the hacker/painter parallel unless you
really _are_ a hacker. When I am in the right mood and sit down to code
something, it is not me typing stuff and watching letters appear on the
screen. It is not me transforming the state of the computer's memory. It is
ideas flowing from my brain and becoming a creation. It's creative. (I don't
paint, but music and coding go well together. When you hit upon the perfect
melody, it just feels good. Programming is exactly the same for me.)

I don't want this post to be about me, but I do want to say that pg is not
alone in thinking that programming is creative.

If all you do is write "select * from foo" into your PHP pages, though, and
read "Hackers and Painters", you'll probably dislike it. That's because you're
not hacking, you're code monkeying. There is plenty of money to be made by
monkeying, but don't confuse it with art.

~~~
silentbicycle
I think the hacker / painter connection is a bit overstated, partially due to
the entanglement of a couple separate points. One of the major parallels that
PG draws between hacking and painting is that some languages (most notably
Lisp, though it's just as true of Forth and Smalltalk, as well as newer
languages like Python, Ruby, OCaml, Haskell, etc.) are very flexible and well-
suited to iterative development, and that this completely changes the
character of programming with them. Similarly, he describes the difference
between painting with tempera vs. sketching and oil paints, which allow more
experimentation and changes in plan. (I'm not a painter, so I'm taking this at
face value.)

While this is a useful analogy, it doesn't really say anything specifically
unique to hackers and _painters_ , vs. other creative types in general; it's
more a statement about how working with malleable mediums affects the creative
process. Many of his points about painting could be easily adapted to other
creative pursuits: Hacking and cooking * , hacking and composing, hacking and
writing, etc. His points fit most strongly when relating hacking to other
"maker" fields, in a general sense. Due to his background, he refers to
"Hackers and Painters", but the connection seems tenuous in writing. (Also,
not many people actually paint, so the examples may not be very accessible.)
Consequently, some people have missed his underlying point (that hacking is a
creative thing, not something purely theoretical and logical) and, for
example, dismissed his references to painting as an attempt to rub off some
its glamor on programming. _Hackers and Makers_ would be a better fit for his
message.

* For example, consider the difference between making a stir-fry, with all its chopping required in advance, to a stew that can be progressively tasted, maybe have a dash more pepper or tomato added, let it simmer longer, etc.

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yelsgib
Most of the comments I've seen in response to this post are either that "the
author was wrong" or "the author didn't give enough evidence." I think that
you are completely missing the point of what this guy Cecil wrote.

His point was that pg's essays on philosophy/art made him cringe. Ok? That's
his whole deal. He goes on and tries to explain why, but I think that what is
really valuable here is that Cecil (who I'm assuming is an artist) is
expressing a point of view which has largely gone unstated.

To be honest, reading Cecil's post made me feel better in some way. I don't
know anything about art, but I have been thinking about philosophy for
freaking forever and I have to say that PG's essays often make me cringe when
he traipses into topics which he really -does- seem naive about. Note I said
"seem." I don't have examples offhand because I haven't read one of his
articles for weeks. Also, the point of -this- post is not at -all- to talk
about PG, it is to talk about my understanding of Cecil's post[1].

I think that in general my aversion to internet discussion comes from the fact
that people seem to spend approximately 1 second understanding each other and
20 minutes formulating counter-arguments to what they are
assuming/hallucinating their "opponents" -meant- (not said). They often miss
the -point- of what others are trying to say (and yes, I recognize the massive
potential hypocrisy in meta-meta-criticism). Have some heart.

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

[1] I think that I could, in fact, explain why they make me cringe. (I assume
that Cecil could, too, actually - I assume he could sit down next to you, read
through them with you, and whenever you saw him cringing you could ask him why
- I don't think he's making up the fact that he cringed.) I could go back and
re-read his essays and write up long responses explaining what classic
philosophical and logical errors he is making (most of which have to do with
assuming context/over-generalization/etc.), but the problem is that his errors
are very deep. His errors (like so many people's errors) have to do with his
big complicated worldview - to reveal them would take a book. And frankly, I
don't care - it's much more interesting and fulfilling to respond to someone
who's really spent their whole life "thinking" about deep philosophical
problems (Chomsky, Foucault, Nagle, Graeber, etc.)

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mstoehr
The author might have done well to read pg's essay on disagreement since his
attacks were mostly vague (I too agree that the characterization of London and
Paris could have been better supported), and the attacks were executed merely
by bringing up an example point and then not attacking it. On the point of
cities, I think that there is good economic evidence (not cited by pg) that
Cambridge and Boston are very much an intellectual center because some of the
greatest universities of the world and they are leaders in terms of patents
and scientific citations (from "Who's Your City" by Richard Florida).

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davidmathers
I stopped reading as soon as I saw "jumped the shark". For me that's an auto-
fail.

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astrec
Wow.

In a world where philosophy was reserved for 'philosophers', art for
'artists', hacking for 'programmers' and business for 'businessmen' the
hapless inhabitants would be sleeping the open and picking berries.

Thankfully this ain't 'that' world.

~~~
yelsgib
It takes many years to learn to play a violin. Violining is reserved for
"violinists." You are confusing -description- with -prescription-.

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rw
Repost.

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newton
fanboys, don't click it!

