
Brown Political Review Interviews Paul Graham - davnicwil
http://brownpoliticalreview.org/2020/03/bpr-interviews-paul-graham/
======
davnicwil
> At the time I worried all of life might be a similarly pointless jumping
> through hoops, but fortunately in college I discovered there was a thin
> stream of people in the world who were interested in ideas and making new
> stuff, and I’ve tried to stay in that stream ever since

This really stood out to me - what an excellent articulation of the intrinsic
reason why founders want to be founders.

~~~
itronitron
It strikes me as rather pretentious for someone to think that the 'stream of
people that are interested in ideas and make new stuff' is _thin_

~~~
chairmanwow1
How is it at all pretentious. It’s a statement of fact. Most people are not
interested in innovating. Most entrepreneurs in the US are merely operating a
small business in a well-defined market (restaurants, construction , car
repair etc).

There is a very small group of people that are thinking about these ideas at a
higher level with enough conviction that they will act on it.

~~~
sanderjd
It is pretentious because being an entrepreneur who is interested in
innovation is not the only way to be interested in ideas and making new
things. It is placing this one kind of human endeavor on a pedestal above the
myriad others. Which is pretentious!

~~~
hombre_fatal
Meh, people who create things are always going to be a subset of the
population because it just takes more effort than the ring below it. And in my
experience, it's definitely a thin stream.

For all sorts of reasons, no doubt, but that's what it is. I didn't even meet
another developer in the wild who actually liked building things on his own
until I was in my late 20s and we became co-founders. And I went to a large
public university with a good comp sci department.

Not everyone is going to be a creator. Not sure what is so controversial about
this. Getting hostile over the word "thin" seems a bit silly since it's also
completely unquantified. And I wonder what your life circumstance is if you're
encountering more of a "thick" stream. Are you a hackathon event planner or
something?

~~~
sanderjd
Is it hostile to call an attitude pretentious? I don't think it is... Some
attitudes are pretentious.

What is pretentious about the quote that started this thread is the apparent
belief that the kinds of people that do the things we talk about and admire on
this site - building new kinds of software, starting growth-focused companies
- are the only people "that are interested in ideas and making new stuff". I
agree that there is a fairly thin stream of the building-software / starting-
companies hackers that you're thinking of, but I see huge numbers of people
from all walks of life being interested in ideas and creating things. Artists,
writers, journalists, directors, bureaucrats, other types of business people,
on and on and on. I think it is pretentious to look down our noses at pursuits
that are not our own, that's all.

Your comment about hackathon event planning is illustrative: hackathons are
honestly not at all where I would go to find the highest concentration of
people creating interesting new things.

------
spencerwgreene
Q: "What is the most promising startup idea you’ve heard that didn’t succeed?"

PG: "Maybe Pebble. It could have been the next Apple. But hardware startups
are a bitch. External factors can kill you in a way that doesn’t happen with
software, and you can’t do things as gradually as you can with software."

This answer stood out to me the most since many of the other questions are
answered somewhat in his essays already.

~~~
asadlionpk
I loved my Pebble. I wore the classic one till it broke. I wish they had
stayed around.

------
rdiddly
Interviewer: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

Graham: That the axiomatic approach John McCarthy used when defining Lisp is
the optimal way to design general-purpose programming languages.

Interviewer (silently): Oh my god what did I get myself into? Next question,
quick!

~~~
choonway
If I was the interviewer...

Me: Really? what metrics do you make that optimality claim on?

~~~
rdiddly
Yeah I was curious to have his answer explored further.

------
kick
Why do people always ask him the same questions? Is it the easiest way to get
an interview with him these days, promising that you'll clone previous
interviews?

Someone needs to sit him down and do nothing but ask about programming
languages for an hour or two at some point.

On the other hand, the question about his homepage was neat.

~~~
chrisco255
Yeah someone should do a Joe Rogan style interview with PG.

~~~
arman_ashrafian
I would like to see him on lex fridman's podcast

~~~
kick
Rogan and Fridman both ask very shallow questions. I want to see him get
grilled by someone familiar with the subject matter. Anything less gets
questions about the lowest common denominator.

~~~
chrisco255
How about Eric Weinstein? He asks great questions on The Portal.

~~~
kick
I find him lacking intellectual curiosity, although I've only had limited
exposure to him. Do you have something you'd recommend for a "deeper look"
into him or his work?

~~~
chrisco255
Sure, check out his YouTube channel:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/nobani88/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/nobani88/videos)

------
lifeisstillgood
>>> I could probably train someone in a day to narrow a pool of applicants
down to 50%, but I wouldn’t hope for more than that.

So that (and the 3% thing) interests me - I have always found myself on the
wrong side of someone else's line - aorry Paul you cant take that exam / goto
that university / get that job / build that software - and it riles me.

I wonder how often simply being told no, makes someone do it anyway and how
you spot that in a day.

------
everybodyknows
> I studied philosophy because of what it seemed to be. It seemed to promise a
> direct route to the most general truths.

I pursued this illusion for some time as well. Then the first 50-some pages of
Sartre's _Being and Nothingness_ started a turn toward my present view that
20th-century academic philosophy is on the whole little more than a
sophistical hustle.

~~~
claudiawerner
I wonder, then, how many experts in the discipline, and lay people (including
me) come away with exactly the opposite conclusion.

If you're going to fault Sartre and talk about 20th c. academic philosophy,
you may as well also fault Hegel or Nietzche or Marx for their 18th and 19th
c. philosophy, and then Heraclitus for his 4th century BC obscurities. Maybe
you only meant "continental" philosophy, but you'd probably need
metaphilosophy to argue the point as to what is genuine and a "sophistical
hustle".

Apparently the people who study Sartre come out with some pretty interesting
ideas[0]. It's a little tiring to hear people reading 50 pages of a French
philosopher known for his difficulty and concluding that 20th c. academic
philosophy is sophistry(?!)[1] A non-mathematician might just say the same
thing about Erdos. The fact that people feel comfortable making such sweeping
judgements on a wide-ranging and deep discipline is frankly shocking. You're
not alone, however; the gwern.net guy has done the same.

[0]
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/)

[1] Sartre mostly wrote books on philosophy, rather than publishing in
academic journals, alongside plays and novels. If you mean to talk about
"academic philosophy", Sartre is certainly not your best example. Neither
would Marx or Nietzche be good examples. Heidegger and Hegel maybe.

~~~
keiferski
> The fact that people feel comfortable making such sweeping judgements on a
> wide-ranging and deep discipline is frankly shocking. You're not alone,
> however; the gwern.net guy has done the same.

It's par for the course in tech, unfortunately. I think tech leadership in
particular would benefit from a rigorous education in ethics.

~~~
barry-cotter
> I think tech leadership in particular would benefit from a rigorous
> education in ethics.

I’m not aware of any evidence that education in ethics leads to more ethical
behavior though it obviously leads to being able to _discuss_ ethical problems
better. The evidence suggests ethicists steal more books than other
philosophers[1].

]1] Do ethicists steal more books? Eric Schwitzgebel

If explicit cognition about morality promotes moral behavior then one might
expect ethics professors to behave particularly well. However, professional
ethicists’ behavior has never been empirically studied. The present research
examined the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic
libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity.
Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort
likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy
were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books. Study
2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be
missing.

~~~
keiferski
This is such a hilarious bad study that I'm surprised anyone could link to it
seriously. The theft rate of ethics books are stolen from "top academic
libraries" is supposed to reflect on the overall effectiveness of ethical
education? Sorry, but this is an abuse of the term "scientific study."

~~~
barry-cotter
Do you have any evidence that learning about ethics leads to more ethical
behavior?

~~~
keiferski
This is an enormously complex question which depends on first answering
questions like what "learning about ethics" and "ethical behavior" mean.

In any case, this paper covers most of the objections you are raising and
answers them quite well, IMO:

[https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2202/1940-1639.1613](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.2202/1940-1639.1613)

------
hooande
Paul usually doesn't do this many interviews. is he about to publish another
book or something?

~~~
jp57
When I see anyone appearing over and over in a short span like this I assume
that their publicist is working hard to get them out there for some reason.
Like Liz Phair at the 25th anniversary of "Exile In Guyville", when she
surfaced out of nowhere and was all over everything for a few months.

We already know Paul knows the power of buying good PR:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

------
bitwize
> Earnestness. This seems a rather Victorian quality to care about, but the
> founders who end up doing the best are all earnest. They’re not starting a
> startup because it’s the cool thing to do, or to make a quick buck, but
> because it’s how they want to work.

Ironically, PG accidentally helped create today's phony Silly Valley culture,
because after YC's first few big wins with earnest founders, people started
smelling money, and gold-rushing douchebags colonized the nascent startup
scene in its infancy.

~~~
divbzero
Earnestness is difficult to fake indefinitely. At some point, you’ll either be
revealed or have acted for so long that you actually become earnest.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
It's pretty important being Earnest, and yes, if you pretend too long and too
hard to be Earnest in the end it will turn out you actually were Earnest all
along.

------
cool-RR
I love this guy's face so much.

