
Things Paul Graham is wrong about - imgabe
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2010/10/five-things-paul-graham-is-wrong-about.html
======
pg
This seems like an almost deliberate misreading of what I've said:

1\. A couple quotes from the essay in which he claims I said efficiency
doesn't matter (<http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html>):

"And yet some applications will still demand speed."

"Efficiency is important, but I don't think that's the right way to get it."

2/3. He claims I said x, then at the end concedes I actually said -x. This
latter I "grudgingly conceded?" It was arguably the single biggest theme of
that talk, that the super-angels might have a winning model without getting
big hits.

4\. I said assholes are an instance of people who invest late, not that the
two are identical. (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809670>)

5\. I agree note-taking has benefits other than recording things. In fact I've
written about the phenomenon before. I just meant that people didn't have to
take notes to record what I said.

~~~
jseliger
_This seems like an almost deliberate misreading of what I've said:_

This seems like a very common problem on the Internet, perhaps even more so
than in the rest of life. Most of the HN comments I disagreed with on this
thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729501> regarding "How
Universities Work," an essay I wrote, concern misreadings.

The same thing happened regarding an essay about the movie _Avatar_. In fact,
it was so common that I wrote another essay examining the reaction to the
first: [http://jseliger.com/2009/12/30/trolls-comments-and-
slashdot-...](http://jseliger.com/2009/12/30/trolls-comments-and-slashdot-
thoughts-on-the-response-to-avatar/) .

I think one reason pg says things like, "I don't mean..." in his essays is
avoid this kind of thing as much as possible. I'm a grad student in English
and assign a couple of his essays to freshmen; the most common disagreements
they have are with things not actually said in the essay. A favorite question
I ask in class or on their journal entries: "Where do you see that?" The usual
answer turns out to be, "nowhere."

~~~
pg
A useful technique to head off such misunderstandings is to ask the person who
disagrees to pick out a particular sentence or passage they believe is false.

~~~
lisper
"But one thing that may save them to some extent is the uneven distribution of
startup outcomes: practically all the returns are concentrated in a few big
successes. The expected value of a startup is the percentage chance it's
Google." [It is your inclusion of this sentence that caused me to characterize
your change of heart about it as "grudging."]

"Most data structures exist because of speed. For example, many languages
today have both strings and lists. Semantically, strings are more or less a
subset of lists in which the elements are characters. So why do you need a
separate data type? You don't, really. Strings only exist for efficiency. But
it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language with hacks to make
programs run faster. Having strings in a language seems to be a case of
premature optimization." [Processing strings is a _huge_ part of today's
computing landscape. There are premature optimizations to be sure, but
efficient string processing isn't one of them IMHO.]

"But it was mysterious to me that the super-angels would quibble about
valuations. Did they not understand that the big returns come from a few big
successes, and that it therefore mattered far more which startups you picked
than how much you paid for them?" [The implication here is that because
picking the right companies matters _more_ , then it doesn't make sense to
"quibble" over valuations. But this is a false dichotomy. Picking the right
companies matters, of course. But valuation matters as well, and questioning a
~10M valuation for a company that has no revenue is not "quibbling."]

"... jerks who give you lines like "come back to me to fill out the round." [I
have no problem with advising founders to avoid wasting time on reluctant
investors. I do have a problem with impugning their motives and character.]

If you really want to engage in a debate about this I will hold up my end. But
to be perfectly honest, I'd just as soon see this bruhaha fade into obscurity.
It has already gotten much more attention that it deserves IMHO.

~~~
pg
1\. I explained later that expected value is not what matters, but rate of
return. (And obviously the sentence about Google, as phrased, is a joke. Taken
literally it would imply every other company had an expected value of zero. If
I believed that I would be wasting my time with YC.)

2\. Whether programs process strings and whether they're visible in your
source code are separate questions.

3\. That passage explains my thinking as I was figuring out the part I
explained next.

4\. There is definitely a subset of opportunistic investors whose motives and
character deserve to be impugned. As I said, it's a proper subset of those who
invest late.

~~~
lisper
> If I believed that I would be wasting my time with YC.

Not at all. YC gives you incredible leverage to diversify your portfolio,
making it that much more likely that you would have a piece of the next
Google.

> obviously the sentence about Google, as phrased, is a joke

It's clearly hyperbole, but there's a difference between hyperbole and a joke.
You've said many times you believe the outcome of early stage investing is
bimodal. In your Startup School talk you even made a point of saying you "did
the math" that led you to this conclusion. You said you didn't even start to
question this conclusion until you started writing the talk for the last
startup school. And this seems to be as close as you get to retreating from
that conclusion:

"So I think at least some super-angels are looking for companies that will get
bought. That's the only rational explanation for focusing on getting the right
valuations, instead of the right companies. And if so they'll be different to
deal with than VCs. They'll be tougher on valuations, but more accomodating if
you want to sell early."

This is the passage I referred to as "grudging acknowledgement." A non-
grudging acknowledgement would have gone something like this: "Because angels
do not operate under the same constraints that VC's do, it opens the door to
exit strategies that VC's are not able to undertake because of the constraints
they operate under. This has the potential to change everything, including the
current bi-modal distribution of outcomes, which is caused at least in part by
the fact that VC's have to hew to a schedule and can't reinvest proceeds from
early exits. So you as founders might be able to provide very nice ROI's for
your investors without really dramatic wins, as long as you can add value
quickly and reliably." Or something like that.

> Whether programs process strings and whether they're visible in your source
> code are separate questions.

Of course surface syntax and internal representations are separate issues. I
challenge the claim that "it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the
language with hacks to make programs run faster." The semantics of the
language determine, for example, whether strings are mutable, whether it's
possible to take the CDR of a string, whether taking the Nth element of a
string is an O(1) operation or an O(n) operation. "Cluttering up the semantics
with hacks to make program run faster" could save you a lot of money, and is
therefore not "lame." The chances that it _will_ save you a lot of money is
proportional to how successful you are.

> There is definitely a subset of opportunistic investors whose motives and
> character deserve to be impugned.

OK, but maybe you should draw the distinction a little more specifically,
particularly when your audience is a bunch of aspiring first-time founders. It
is very easy to interpret what you said as, "Anyone who gives you this line is
[very likely to be? almost certain to be?] a jerk."

------
jpwagner
"why [so-and-so] is wrong" is a great way to get your stuff read, but is so
typically devoid of content and full of misunderstanding that i've grown to
hate this type of post.

the author clearly seems to misunderstand that PG's "rules" are simply ways to
mentally lower the barriers to making something:

1\. efficiency doesn't matter...as the author says, it matters later. so then
get to work NOW

2\. the returns on angel investing are bimodal...again, the simplification is
used to motivate early stage startups to look for funding

3\. valuations don't matter...the author's counterexample is ridiculous. PG's
point is don't obsess if you're worth 14 mill or 16 mill, just get to work

4\. investors who don't want to be first movers are assholes...i suppose this
is the post the author wanted to write but didn't think it had enough content

5\. you don't have to take notes...all PG was saying was: I'm posting this
talk online. take notes if it helps you, you can think for yourself

~~~
deathflute
Well said. You basically wrote what I would have attempted to write. Taking
statements out of context is like overfitting the data and leads to poor
generalization.

------
poet
I didn't read past the first point because it's dead wrong. Paul is talking
about abstracting efficiency away into the compiler and presenting the
programmer with a more elegant interface. As an example, Paul notes that
strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler
should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case. Not only in
the author completely missing Paul's point (efficiently is unimportant at the
axiomatic level), the author is incorrectly applying the essay to business
operations instead of programming languages. In most businesses, programming
language speed is NOT the bottleneck of the operation.

~~~
raganwald
_I didn't read past the first point because it's dead wrong._

THAT statement is dead wrong. Or at least, in dead opposition to my approach
to learning. If someone says five things, and four are wrong but the last one
teaches me something new or gives me a new perspective on something I already
know...

Reading the four things cost me maybe two mintes. The last one cost me thirty
seconds to read, plus another couple of minutes to savour. The total
investment is maybe ten minutes and I learned something.

Of course, if I skip everyone who seems to be wrong right off the bat I'll
avoid some situations where all five are wrong. But I have something to help
me out with that: The post is on HN and some other nice people are voting it
up. So something must be right, why don't I navigate into the cave, around the
pit of vipers, past the deadfall, and onto the intellectual treasure?

And in fact, I read past your first statement and liked the rest. See how that
works?

;-)

~~~
poet
It's most certainly _not_ the approach I take to learning. It is, however, the
approach I take towards the conical "I disagree with Paul Graham" blog posts.
Why? Because everyone's a critic. If the critic in question doesn't
demonstrate a general understanding of the subject matter I do not invest my
time. In this case, it was a misreading of an essay, but it really could be
anything. I apply this approach to critics of all kinds. Do I apply this
approach to published essayists or programmers with well known software? Not
usually, because getting published or becoming well known is a sort of vetting
in itself. But a vetting process is certainly necessary for blog posts on
criticism or some random repository on Github. There just isn't enough time in
the day to dive into things that don't have a solid foundation. Why would I
read a 5000 line Ruby program whose initial functions are written poorly? At
best I'll end with one or two nice tricks and a large headache.

~~~
raganwald
Hey, I only disagreed with you so vehemently as a rhetorical device, to mirror
your own statement:-)

Your strategy for filtering information obviously works for you, and my guess
is that if you missed something good, it'll come back to you later when
someone you respects says "Hey, I know Raganwald is usually a waste of time,
but did you see X?"

So... Rock on! And yes, I enjoyed reading your comment and the reply to my
thoughts. Thanks for taking the time to post.

------
chrischen
> but the act of writing helps you remember what was said.

I hate it when people make this assumption because for me this is not true.
When I take notes I stop comprehending what is being said because the act of
transcribing becomes mechanical. I also write slow so I start to lag behind
what's being said. Is there any research for this because I would like to be a
test subject and prove them wrong.

~~~
meelash
The best way to take notes is to not do it during the class. Pay full
attention only to the teacher/speaker during the class/lecture and make a
conscious attempt to remember everything they said. _Immediately_ following,
get together with 3-5 like-minded friends and attempt to as a group write the
entire lecture from start to finish from memory. If no one can remember
something, skip it.

It takes a few weeks/months to develop your focus, attention span, and memory
enough to be able to get near 100% short-term retention, but you start to see
benefits almost immediately. And the long-term benefits to your memory and
focus can't be understated.

Also, it's really interesting how many other people are expressing that they
never took notes in college. I was famous for it in my college (my advisor
wrote a paragraph about it in grad school recommendations), whereas I always
thought it was common sense, seeing other people who spent the whole class
scribbling, but didn't really _understand_ a bit of what was actually taught.

~~~
llimllib
I preferred to scribble in the margins of my notebook during lectures; not
words or likenesses of anything in particular, but kind of Hugh Macleod-ish
pattern scribbles[1]. Some teachers really hated that I wasn't looking up at
them and thought I was being super disrespectful, which didn't make sense to
me since I was asking questions that clearly indicated I was paying attention.

[1]: [http://gapingvoid.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/10/rackspace-1...](http://gapingvoid.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/10/rackspace-1010-02j-5501.jpg)

~~~
meelash
Ah yes, I learned to do this as well with certain professors. I always found
the ME professors were impressed after the first lecture and could tell I was
paying attention. But with some others, it was a different story.

------
zachbeane
See also: <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/pgwrong>

------
jgershen
Actually, I think that with the possible exception of #2 (which can be debated
extensively) these are not "things that Paul Graham is wrong about". They are
"places where Paul Graham used hyperbole to make a point."

I disagree with PG on a number of issues, but this post completely missed the
point.

------
byrneseyeview
_The last round of YC companies was getting $10M valuations, an order of
magnitude over a few years ago, under the valuations-don't-matter mantra._

Are these the valuations that they're getting from YC, or from investors post-
YC? If post-YC, couldn't this be due largely to more of the companies being
Ramen Profitable? If they raise money after four months rather than three,
they've been growing (perhaps at an exponential rate) for 33% longer.

~~~
drusenko
It's a false comparison. No companies in my round (W07) or before that I'm
aware of got anywhere near as low as $1M valuations...

For the $500-800k raised that is still popular, "OK" was a $2M pre valuation
and "amazing" would have been $5M.

The $10M valuations today for $500-800k (if there are any) are definitely in
the "amazing" range, so it's somewhere around a 2x increase.

That could definitely be explained by a more mature set of companies, or
companies attacking larger problems.

~~~
jimbokun
Or better YC brand recognition?

------
mgrouchy
So really the name of this article should be "Five things that Paul Graham and
I don't Agree on", not as flashy a title, but probably more accurate.

~~~
dwwoelfel
A quote from pg:

"If you wanted to be that accurate, you could prepend 'I think' to every
statement in every essay written. That's implicit, except in proofs."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820952>

~~~
mgrouchy
Good point. I guess I was nitpicking.

------
scottkrager
"5. You don't have to take notes"

I agree with that one, I love taking notes at events and conferences. After a
one-day conference I'll end up with a few pages of notes, and when I get home
I type those into a few actionable items, bam!

~~~
jhawk28
There have been studies that have found the opposite. If you write things
down, you are more focused on writing/reading than actually listening to the
speaker. Its the repetition that actually helps you remember, so reading the
published notes afterwards or listening to the recording would be best.

------
Jun8
+1 not because I agree with everything but we have to have some dissenting
voices (event when they're a little simplistic, like this one) to make
progress.

~~~
lisper
Thanks.

------
csallen
_> > 2\. The returns on angel investing are bimodal_

You're misinterpreting PG's stance here. This only applies this to VCs and
super-angels, not to regular angel investors like yourself. VCs and SAs are
obligated to have a much larger return on their investments in order to make
the funds they raise a success. This is done via one or two big winners, so
they're hoping for 1000x.

 _> > 3\. Valuations don't matter_

Similarly, this is aimed at VCs and SAs, not you. And of course you have to
interpret the phrase as "Valuations don't matter [within reason]." Clearly you
can think of a high enough number where the valuations _should_ begin to
matter to these people, but the point is that they're not at those levels
right now.

 _> > I have a net negative return because of one spectacular failure (from
which I have learned a lot but that's another story)._

I'd love to read a blog post on that experience, and what made it different
from your other successful investments.

~~~
lisper
The short version: it was my very first private investment. I decided I should
diversify, get out of tech and into something more traditional and relatively
safe. So I decided to get into real estate. This was in 2006. You can guess
how that turned out.

------
yoak
Seriously, note-taking? I aspire to reach the point where my statement about
whether or not my audience should take notes is one of the top five things I'm
wrong about.

------
audionerd
Why stop at five??

~~~
lisper
Because I agree with Paul on almost everything else. And in fact, I should
have stopped at four. (Maybe I should have stopped at zero.)

~~~
ph0rque
I think you did well to write this article, although if you zoom out one or
two levels of abstraction, you would be in agreement on most, if not all
points.

~~~
lisper
Indeed. But that makes a pretty boring blog post.

~~~
lisper
To wit: [http://rondam.blogspot.com/2010/10/five-things-paul-
graham-i...](http://rondam.blogspot.com/2010/10/five-things-paul-graham-is-
right-about.html)

------
tlrobinson
"Taking notes serves not only to make a non-volatile record of what was said,
but the act of writing helps you remember what was said"

Maybe I was just a bad note taker, but whenever I took notes in college I
always ended up focusing more on writing the notes than paying attention to
what was being said and thinking critically about it.

~~~
andreshb
Happened to me too, I gave up on taking notes very early on. Whenever I did
take notes, I never went back to them. Plus, everything else was found in the
books/literature/online

------
qeorge
#3 seems particularly pedantic. I thought pg's argument was pretty clear:

Angel investing is like betting on long shots. You're arguing with the bookie
over whether the odds should be 95-to-1 or 100-to-1, when you should be
worrying about whether the horse can win the race at all.

------
JoeAltmaier
But if you take "Paul Graham" out of the article, and say "5 things that are
wrong", then its pretty much correct.

So perhaps the point was to debunk "misinterpretations" of these statements.
Unfortunately done as a personal commentary.

------
misterm
I think Paul is wrong about further stratifying the Lisp community.

------
hasenj
I have my own list of things I disagree with PG about, none of them was on
this list. Every one can make such a list, and if they did, then everything PG
ever said will end up on _somebody's_ list.

------
bhiggins
he's also wrong about when to use continuations

