
Rarely Asked Questions - vishal0123
http://paulgraham.com/raq.html
======
brvs
Oh my god are developers pompous.

So, the problem with Hegel is that he didn't study LISP and startups enough to
understand his own thought. If only he were alive to ask for Paul Graham's
help!

OK my turn! I'm going to post on a social sciences website that Paul Graham
doesn't really understand LISP because he hasn't studied... uh, Slavoj Zizek
enough.

~~~
rdl
(Somewhat tangential) Is Slavoj Zizek a "real philosopher", or a troll? I
found him through a reference to qanda someone had posted here, and I'm pretty
sure it's a troll.

~~~
rdouble
He does have a PhD in Philosophy from a university in Slovenia. However, he's
generally lumped in with the post-*-ist critical theory crowd. When he does
his inexplicably popular academic guest lectures he's sponsored by the
cultural studies department, not the philosophy department (unless it's a
philosophy department with a non-analytical bent, like the New School).

He is definitely a troll, though. That's kind of his thing. I think he would
even agree with that label.

[http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/03/why-we-
sl...](http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/03/why-we-slober-over-
slavoj-žižek-or-how-to-be-incomprehensible-and-relevant-at-the-)

------
Helpful_Bunny
I'm not going to insult one of the patrons of these pages, however, I do note:

 _Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp
(Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (O'Reilly, 2004). He has an AB
from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting
at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence._

 _What I learned from trying to study philosophy is that the place to look is
in other fields. If you understand math or history or aeronautical engineering
very well, the most abstract of the things you know are what philosophy is
supposed to be teaching._

It depends what type of Philosophy you're studying. Formal Logic: I can see
the argument that with a strong Mathematical background & CS, you've already
learned (most) of the tricks (although, this largely misses the point that
most of the great Mathematicians of the 20th C also dabbled in the Philosophy
of Logic - famously Gödel etc).

The _other_ kind of Philosophy inhabits the same mental space as Art (ahhh,
Florence!). This is a common issue with American Nationals, as American (and
to some degree, British) philosophy is mired in Behaviorism, Philosophy of the
Mind (which does make me cry a little inside when they don't keep up with
neuroscience or even know anything about Complex Systems Theory) and other
schools.

Ethics and Morality? Reaching those Creative spaces of the Sublime and so
forth? Aesthetics? All fields I assumed the author would be interested in,
given his Artistic leanings, and all fields that Philosophy is very useful to
read on.

And, as a friendly note: I'm not sure _aeronautical engineering_ can teach you
much on that, barring of course: if you build it wrong, Death is _certainly_
going to be the Horizon you hit.

~~~
eshvk
> Philosophy of the Mind (which does make me cry a little inside when they
> don't keep up with neuroscience or even know anything about Complex Systems
> Theory)

Can you explain more on this? I understand more neuroscience/complex systems
than I do philosophy; back in school, I became skeptical of the meaningfulness
of the research done in complex systems. I would be curious as to what you
think it can contribute to philosophy.

~~~
Helpful_Bunny
I'm unsure of how technical to make this, or what your background is, however:

Let's take a "classic" of Dennett's[1], against the "brain in a vat"[2]; from
what you know about _feedback loops_ or _dynamical systems_ would the
proposition of imagining a 'brain in a vat' ever make sense to you? (Note:
it's not merely a Matrix style imagining, you have to _prove_ it's not
happening - you may well consider this a pointless experiment, of course).

I suspect not. That is to say, if you learned about Complex Systems prior to
reading the debate over 'brain in a vat', the entire argument would probably
strike you as absurd (I may be projecting here, feel free to say otherwise).
This is where I presume Paul is coming from: _" Well obviously no, what a
waste of time"_. However, proving it _logically_ is precisely what a lot of
Philosophers have spent time doing (as opposed to wiring the brain up, not
something that was technically possible until very recently). There's value in
the logic of it, and the thought, _because it is such a common human
misconception_ (that the mind / consciousness is separate to the body, or the
world or the universe).

Does that make sense?

[1][http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.ht...](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness.html)
[2][http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/#H5](http://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/#H5)

~~~
samth
I think you'll find that (a) Dennett knows a lot of things you're assuming he
doesn't, (b) that whether a brain in a vat is plausible is not easily answered
by appeal to complex systems theory, and (c) that the role of thought
experiments in philosophy is more complicated than you make it out.

Also, the link to TED is broken.

~~~
Helpful_Bunny
Well, thank you for the hostile tone.

a) I in no way critiqued Dennett - in fact, you'll notice that my last
statement about how mind / consciousness is _not_ separate to the body, or the
world or the universe is _explicitly his position_ (of course, he is deeper
than that, but at the level of my response, it was clearly in line with his
thought).

b) That was the point: how you failed to understand that I was making a
Category case I'm not sure. We are, after all, responding to the accusation
that "No philosophy is worth reading". I was making an argument of how a
Scientific / STEM background _might_ make philosophy seem "pointless", and was
taking the position of the argument, not my own, and attempting to answer it
gently (it's called empathy, dear, learn some).

c) You've totally misunderstood my entire argument, and as such I think it
embarrassing on your behalf that you've been so confrontational.

I'll disengage - you failed to understand what was being said, you failed to
acknowledge that I was uncertain of how technical to make the argument, so
pitched it at a Ted Talk level, and you were rude. Not interested,
_especially_ if you cannot understand the point being made.

I have fixed the link, however.

------
elorant
_Why don 't more painters have hacking jobs?_

Most painters I know are Luddites. Especially well-established ones. They
think that resisting technology gives them some kind of higher moral ground
point of view. They believe that technology sucks people into an alternate
reality where they lose contact with the real world and thus become
insensitive to the problems of modern societies.

~~~
spitx
I'd love to pick up a book that deals with this issue: why and when painters -
and more generally artists - have come to adopt this anti-technological
outlook.

Was it a fear that the pervasiveness of technology would make their craft(s)
obsolete?

This sort of thinking is rife even within artistic circles.

Artists whose medium is photography are like the ugly lepers of the visual art
world.

I find this anti-technological bent in modern Western cultural life
particularly unsettling.

Don't take what I'm saying to an extreme; I have nothing against consumable
art in its many forms.

However I think the cultural life of cities in the West - in its various forms
(art, theatre, cinema, classical music, architecture) are ruled by cohorts who
wholly constitute the anti-technological fringe.

They live for abstraction and something about that makes them virulently anti-
technological.

Suggest a book or essay that addresses this issue in great depth.

~~~
_delirium
I don't think artists as a whole have a particular aversion to technology,
unless you specifically define art to exclude all the technologically
influenced art, in which case it becomes true by construction.

There are huge areas of art based on strong engagement with technology, and
art/tech crossover types who write code and build stuff as part of making
their artworks are the norm in those. Areas like new-media art,
electroacoustic music, cybernetic sculpture, etc. basically require crossover,
and they are definitely more vibrant scenes these days than oil-paint-on-
canvas is. This journal's been around since 1968:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_%28journal%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_%28journal%29).
Some miscellaneous people whose work is interesting in that vein: Julian
Oliver, Roy Ascott, Toshio Iwai, Edward Ihnatowicz, Nam June Paik, Cory
Arcangel. More examples (tilted towards recent stuff) can be found in this
online database: [http://rhizome.org/artbase/](http://rhizome.org/artbase/)

Computer-music is particularly well established, with 5-6 journals and
numerous conferences and exhibitions, as well as centers like IRCAM and CCRMA.
I think actually if you take well-known post-WW2 composers, a substantial
proportion come out of the tech-crossover angle, folks like Steve Reich (tape
loops) and Iannis Xenakis (digital synthesis, granular synthesis).

Of course, there are areas of art that don't care about technology either. And
they're somewhat overrepresented in the establishment "cultural life of cities
in the West", because that tends to take a very conservative, backwards-
looking view. It's all about upper-middle-class people taking in high culture
as it existed in the 1920s and earlier: classical music, paintings from the
great masters, Renaissance sculpture, the standard repertoire of operas, etc.

~~~
spitx
The areas of composite art you mention hardly have a fraction of the sweeping
brushstroke of influence and the ability to impress upon society, certain
mores and affectations that the more established forms of art (that you refer
to in the last line) have.

It is by no means an exaggeration to say that most people who patronize art in
cities and wealthy donors who lavish large sums on money on museums, opera
venues, orchestras and various other ventures that promote art, probably have
never heard of the crossover types you mention.

Hence it is fair to say that these newer art forms barely register in terms of
their influence on the popular mood of the culture of a city much less a
nation.

It is no secret that berating the ills of technology is Hollywood's favorite
past time.

From Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Terminator to the recent Prometheus and a
million flicks between them portray in no ambiguous terms the banes of
unchecked technological advancements.

Ignore that for a moment.

The scuttling of technology, even when it could greatly aid and enable a
better experience, can be seen in sports as well.

FIFA is a notorious luddite. They act as if the soccer gods will strike with
lightning if they so much use an instant-replay.

The overlords at the French Open won't even touch Hawkeye with a ten foot
pole. Players have to resort to pointing to where the ball left an impression
on the clay to argue for a point that could decide their fate.

I only know of the NHL that embraces an uncommonly high amount of technology
to make better ruling decisions. Every goal of every game is reviewed remotely
in Toronto just to be sure. Offside calls and a host of other decisions are
still handled by a couple of on-ice referees.

All said this technology-hating nonsense and the morons who advocate such
superstitious dogma are everywhere.

I pray for the day when this bullshit will be called for what it really is - a
form of a hate crime, an intolerance of reason and utility.

------
stiff
I think the problem with philosophy is that language and words only go this
far and we humans get tired fast when just thinking hard inside our heads
without any interaction with the external world and no real-world problem to
solve. I believe it was the book "The Three Pillars of Zen" that illustrated
this effect by comparing the posture of Rodins Thinker [1] with the posture of
a meditator [2]. So not only do we run circles around our own concepts that
are most likely grounded in the unconscious, but we also get very tired,
irritated and depressed from it, that's at least my experience.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker)
[2] [http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud/cob/img/buddha.jpg](http://www.sacred-
texts.com/bud/cob/img/buddha.jpg)

~~~
spitx
Perhaps I haven't followed you to a T.

What specific problems or arguments in philosophy are not easily
illustratable, using plain language?

I do understand that some thoughts and experiences of the human order may not
be easily captured or made intelligible by language.

I guess you could slot the experience of a color-blind person in that
category. Especially in the past when testable apparatuses have not yet been
developed to even diagnose that such a medical condition does indeed exist.

However I fail to understand why most philosophical arguments cannot be made
intelligible to laymen.

René Descartes' "Brain In The Vat" argument is quite easily comprehendable.

It is my opinion (and very often found to be true) that most obtuse arguments
(philosophical or otherwise) are indeed "highly technical stuff that doesn't
matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't
fully understand."

In fact I think PG is being charitable. I wonder if the "highly technical
stuff" that doesn't lend itself to the peer review of more than a handful of
scholars is even valid and credible in the first place.

I know that I am going down the slippery slope of If-I-and-most-non-scholarly-
people-of-above-average-intelligence-cannot-grasp-an-argument-then-it-must-be-
patently-invalid-and-thus-hogwash.

However at times I wonder if it is indeed possible that the scholarship of
even a fraction of the world's most esteemed scholars (in various fields)
actually has some validity and truth value associated with it.

Since nearly all of it is produced in academia and thus only subjected to the
scrutiny of academic peers.

I wonder if it is just a nice formal product of a large volume of essentially
meaningless cogitation that passed the consensus of equally unworthy peers.

This has to be true especially in the more arcane disciplines where there is
little oversight or cross-disciplinary activity.

I'm sure there is a name for this phenomenon. Something on the lines of
"legitimacy by consensus".

~~~
stiff
I simply get very tired very quickly when reading philosophy, not because I
find the arguments difficult but because those works never seem to get to any
conclusion regarding the problems being considered and there is anyway no way
to validate what is being said with the external world or apply it to
anything. It's a bit like closing your self in a room and talking to yourself
for prolonged amounts of time, there is something unhealthy to the human
psyche and from observing other people I see that the more someone
contemplates things like "meaning of life" the more unhappy they become. Now
with this observation in mind I try to come up with some explanation of this
phenomena.

Imagine a neuroscientist watching a person contemplating a so-called
philosophical problem, like "what is beauty?". You have a part of your brain
that is responsible for language and discourse and inner dialogue and most
likely a completely separate part that is capable of the emotions you
experience when seeing what you personally call beauty. Now that language part
is capable of creating a great number of the most wild hypothesis about what
beauty is, but the part that really perceives beauty and creates the
associated emotions operates completely unconsciously so you have no chance to
capture with your conscious self what beauty "really" is to you. So all this
"philosophizing" is just your brain chatting random things somewhat related to
the concept of "beauty", but there is no purpose to it, no conclusion, no
validation and all this you could just experience some beauty somewhere
instead.

------
micheljansen
For those interested in a broad account of history that does not try to
explain _what_ happened, but _why_ things happen, I highly recommend Jared
Diamond's _" Guns, Germs and Steel"_[1]. It resonates well with the hacker's
desire to understand what makes the world tick :)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel)

------
graue
Regarding adding macros to Python, the new language Julia, which is fairly
Python-like in appearance, has them:
[http://julialang.org/](http://julialang.org/)

Like Lisp, Julia is completely homoiconic. Zach Allaun at Hacker School,
formerly a Clojure guy, has been doing lots of cool stuff with its macros,
like this one to make tail-call optimization available (not natively a feature
of Julia): [http://blog.zachallaun.com/post/jumping-
julia](http://blog.zachallaun.com/post/jumping-julia)

The infix syntax serves to make Julia macros a bit uglier and more complex
than Lisp ones, but they still provide the same power.

Edit: Here's a link to the Julia docs on metaprogramming:
[http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/metaprogramming/](http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/manual/metaprogramming/)

------
RivieraKid
_But it would be hard to do that without creating a notation for parse trees;
and once you do, your language has become a skin on Lisp, in much the same way
that in OS X, the Mac OS became a skin on Unix._

TIL Julia is a skin on Lisp.

 _It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of
accident report than to teach you anything useful._

Couldn't agree more, ancient philosophy (and most of contemporary philosophy)
is a complete waste of time.

~~~
KenoFischer
> TIL Julia is a skin on Lisp.

It actually is more so than you might imagine. If you have julia installed try
`julia --lisp` ;).

------
jfdimark
My favourite history book that I've recently read:

Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography - amazing work of scope,
depth and human understanding.

I also studied philosophy as a degree and agree there are no really great
introductions. I finished my degree somewhat disengaged with the subject and
haven't pursued it seriously since. My favourite book though was John Rawls' A
Theory of Justice.

------
anonymous
> Can you add macros to python

Yes [https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy](https://github.com/lihaoyi/macropy)

------
joshuaellinger
It is not exactly a history book but Guns, Germs, and Steel should be on the
reading list. It starts at the dawn of modern humans and explains a lot about
how the world is organized.

It started with a simple question from a New Guinea native to an
anthropologist of European descent: "Why do you guys have all the loot?"

Hint -- it's not because of smarts.

------
jobigoud
One issue I've found with studying history piecewise like this (basically how
history is taught in school…) is that you don't get a good global picture of
an era. What was happening in China at the time of the Roman Empire ?

~~~
prof_hobart
Is getting a good global picture a particularly high priority in most
historical studies, particularly more ancient civilisations?

There's little if any overlap between the two (unless you're thinking of
things like the effect of steppe tribes moving from the east into Europe), so
I'm not sure you'd get a better understanding of either Roman or Chinese
history by treating them as a single story.

If you are personally particularly interested in that, isn't the answer to
simply read both a book about Rome and one about China from a similar time
period?

------
brudgers
<More Riffs on PG on Philosophy>

Philosophy is wasted on the young. The great tragedy of Socrates death is that
the democracy had a point. If it's any consolation, Socrates was not just a
man, Socrates was old.

Academic Philosophy is not as interesting as LISP. Don't hold that against
them, for millennia philosophers have suffered ignorance of the lambda
calculus. The current fascination with Brainfuck is but a passing paradigm.

DSL's show Wittgenstein wrong about private languages. This would prove to
Wittgenstein on his own terms that he had misused language and accidentally
slipped into philosophy.

C. S. Pierce was a working scientist. He shipped his side project. When the
academics got ahold of it, we got psychology. The PHB is a side-effect.

When philosophy gets back to basics and focuses on thinking clearly, a LISP
will be part of the curriculum. Arc as a 100 year language is a dip-shit exit.

------
drinchev
I like "RAQ" acronym. I've always hated "Nerd Stuff", "Technical Questions"
and similar titles on pages that answer not so popular questions.

------
Jd
Riffs:

<<Why don't more painters have hacking jobs?>>

I think pg is right in highlighting age here. Generally speaking you need to
get started young. Beyond this, there is a natural synchronicity in all "arts"
when engaged at a high level, which is why the renaissance produced true
"renaissance men." The trick is to start early but resist the all too common
impulse to mediocrity in the context of specialization -- pg's association
with elite institutions certainly helps here.

<<What should I read to learn more about history?>>

I find pg slightly misguided here. One of the world's best historians was my
former advisor (Martin van Creveld), and his technique was to find a subject
that he could fall in love with and immerse himself in it passionately for a
year or two (ultimately however long it took him to write a book about that
subject). I think a strong passion for a particular subject can make up for
the otherwise dense and uninteresting material. Looking for books that make
things "exciting" is a recipe for an understanding of history that is as
piecemeal as one's own reading habits.

<<Couldn't you add something equivalent to Lisp macros to languages like Perl
or Python?>>

Yes, of course. One could also quote the apocryphal McCarthy / Norwig story
here.

<<How can I avoid turning into a pointy-haired boss?>>

Starts off generally correct and "startups" are certainly one solution to this
problem, but I'm not sure they are the only solution. For instance, this
basically assumes that your startup can exist as a flat organizational
structure with only hyper-intelligent and interesting people. But what if,
heaven forbid, you need to add a customer service division?

The truth is that really smart people generally don't want to be middle
managers in large firms. The work isn't that interesting, and the compensation
is to a certain degree adjusted more highly to compensate people for walking
around in suits and clucking their tongues all day. Rather than pointing
finger with the negative stereotype ("pointy-haired boss"), I think it is more
appropriate to think of these people as corporate trash men, compensated more
highly because of a generally undesirable job (after all, managing Dilbert and
Dogbert probably isn't a recipe for life long engagement).

<<I'm about to become a teacher. How can I be a good one?>>

Agree. Probably a lot that could be added here about how to engage personally
with students, although this goes beyond mere "teaching" to "mentorship"

<<Two startups want to hire me. Which should I choose?>>

Perhaps strangely, I generally disagree with the principle that you should go
with the startup that is more likely to succeed. I think you should find the
subject that you are personally most passionate about and pursue it with all
the passion you have. Since you give a sh*t (a rather rare things these days),
you will naturally become very good at that particularly area. Only then find
startups in your particular area of interest. They should all want to hire
you. Then, of course, you will pick the one that matches your passion, which
should be the one that is executing most successfully towards their stated
goal.

<<How can I become really good at Lisp programming?>>

I'm not very good at Lisp...

<<What philosophy books would you recommend?>>

Very tricky topic and a bit "recursive," in that pg references "what
philosophy is supposed to be teaching" without defining it -- this in itself
obviously a "philosophical" question.

Also, it's not at all clear from the response what pg has actually read. There
are quite obviously a lot of genres of philosophy. Some of them, even if you
consider them complete nonsense (like books of canon law derived from dogmatic
theological principles), are extraordinarily useful to read if you care about
understanding the progress of history, inclusive of why dogmatic patterns of
thinking about particular subjects dominate at many period in time.

That said, I think everyone should at the very least have a basic knowledge of
the Socratic dialogues, which are an excellent process in stimulating the mind
and evaluating one's own presuppositions -- the approach of the majority of
people is anything but the "examined life," and the only process of moving
beyond the basic assumptions of a particular age is to examine them in the
light of reason.

<<I want to start a startup, but I don't know how to program. How long will it
take to learn?>>

Generally agree with pg, but I think the plethora of online learning aids
means that it is better to learn the fundamentals on your own or in a week
long course (i.e. how to build your first rails app), then "apprentice"
yourself at a very low wage until you grasp the fundamentals. Also, I don't
think this is a question merely of "smarts" but of an engineering/builder
disposition, which some people simply don't have. I don't think "answering
phones" is going to help you get that disposition.

This actually leads to a general critique of pg's "philosophy." Startups may
be a very good solution to some problems, but are are certainly not a panacea
for all problems. Ipso facto, it is important to more carefully define the
problem scope and characteristics before defining the solution.

