This essay (and the one it links to) provided tremendous insight to me as a HN reader and should not have been marked dead, even if it’s about PG. None of us are beyond reproach, even the founder of this site/company.
There might be a brief back & forth between users flag/vouch but yes, it seems to be getting shitcanned simply because it's about PG. With 22 upvotes currently, I would hope @dang can keep it on the front page for a while.
Users flagged it. Moderators didn't touch it or even see it.
We sometimes turn off flags when an article contains significant new information and can support a substantive discussion in the community, but this was not that.
Without taking sides on this, the rapid deletion and downvoting of this article is not a super great look for this community, even if it’s just a bunch of people who like PG and don’t like criticism of him.
Michael Church definitely has an axe to grind, and it’s certainly fair to complain about that. I personally think that he’d sway more people to his side of thinking with a less acerbic style, but that’s just me.
The issue is that a polemic against PG gets downvoted and removed, but Taleb’s polemic against Nate Silver doesn’t. It certainly makes it look like the subject of a polemic is more important than the tone or content of the article being posted for very specific people.
Thanks for the mirror (especially since the original was deleted).
For those that don't know the author, Michael O. Church has been banned on multiple platforms around the internet (HN, Wikipedia, Quora, and probably others). He also had an interesting tenure at Google. I believe the cause for the forum bans were about sock-puppet accounts, but he also just tends to annoy people.
His ability to annoy people seems to stem entirely or mostly from the fact that he writes about topics, like this one, that are uncomfortable for people to hear. Just to clarify for anyone thinking he goes around harassing people.
You don't need to overtly harass people to be deliberately abrasive and annoying.
A whole lot of this seems pseudo-honestly crafted just to troll.. e.g.
> So, let’s talk about this. No one gets bullied in American culture because he is smart; people get bullied because they are different. It is as true in elementary school as it is in high school. It is more true in the typical workplace than it is in high school.
Riight. Not all types of being different are equally celebrated, and high school and middle school are some of the most political and unkind places in our society. For a whole lot of us, leaving school did in fact make things better, but he just dismisses and invalidates this experience in a way that's loaded with vitriol and mockery.
Not for me, I don't like him for his extreme vitriol. He says he has no reason to dislike Paul Graham, but he clearly hates him with a passion for his views. Dissect and disagree with his views, no problem, but the extreme nature of Church's rhetoric makes me not take anything of his seriously. How can one be seeking truth, as he says the intellectual must do, with such blinding hatred?
Yeah, I wasn't familiar with the author before, but I more or less agreed with the contents of the article. I appreciate that Church recognized the unpopular nerd narrative in PG's essays. It always felt flat to me.
Been following mchurch for years now. A few coworkers attended classes of his and a spouse worked with mchurch for a period of time, so he's well known here.
While I agree with a lot of his goals, I very much disagree with his approach. His writing is very acidic and his past behavior is questionable. I also believe in incremental change whereas he seems to want revolutionary change. The problem with revolution is you never really know what you are going to get on the other side. Most revolutions end like Syria, not Tunisia.
So I very much disagree with this approach even though we mostly want the same thing.
In case you read the entire article before looking at the author, this is by mchurch so you should take everything it says with a huge crazy egotistical grain of salt. Personal vendettas and hyperbole abound.
I don't think it's true that all non-execute corporate jobs are meaningless, and I've worked at at least one company that mchurch has. Some jobs at some (many?) companies are actually slowly and methodically creating value for humanity at large, and many bosses I've had are not soulless whip-bearers but in fact also determined to make their lives mean something through their work.
That being said I think it does levy some specific good criticisms against PG and silicon valley. It's definitely true that PG has a conflict of interest in his postings, and that the narratives about society that he pushes also happen to be ones that he benefits financially from. It's very fair to compare his views to Ayn Rand's. And it's certainly true that tech and science reporting aren't held to nearly the same ethical standards that other types of reporting are.
Some good points and food for thought, but don't lose too much sleep over another mchurch rant.
>mchurch is basically resentful of anyone else successful
Doesn't sound like an illogical principle, if you start from the premise that society is unfair, and being succesful in it (as opposed in the abstract) means accepting and benefiting from an unfair society.
Not saying that this is the case or that I agree with this. But it's not an illogical position to have, nor an illogical axion that's not somewhat supported by empirical observation.
> ... he really doesn’t know what “the real world” is. He never experienced it. He raised venture capital in the 1990s when anyone could. He sold a bunch of Lisp code to Yahoo. Good for him. He got to experience what most of us wish was the real world, as the real world.
I expected to read a more focused breakdown of Paul Graham and why he isn't a public intellectual but instead the author claims PG is wrong on his views about society because of his own unique experiences within it. But then the author goes on to make the same broad generalizations for the rest of the essay.
> People end up in “regular” (non-executive) corporate jobs for a variety of reasons— low socioeconomic status of origin, wrong educational choices, and bad luck— but the system is set up to tell them it’s their fault. They’re told they should expect no better than these demeaning jobs because they “aren’t entrepreneurial”— whatever the fuck that means, because the private-sector apparatchiks who boss them around aren’t entrepreneurs— enough for a better spot.
People also end up in these "regular" corporate jobs from high socioeconomic status of origin as well. I also know many people who are from low socioeconomic status of origin who have escaped corporate jobs or avoided them entirely. The vocabulary used by this author seems to suggest that certain people are given corporate jobs against their will and they can never leave. In reality, people apply to jobs that they have the skills (but more likely the qualifications) to get so they can support themselves but they could always try to start their own small business or a company. My parents are both uneducated and from poor socioeconomic backgrounds yet were both very successful as small business owners and while it's fair to say the world today is not the same as it was back then, technology and online resources make it easier than ever to start a business. Not everything needs to be a venture or enterprise scale company either.
The point is that this author paints a picture where workers are just forced into cubicles against their will every day and forced to work 40 hours per week when they only have 5 hours of actual work to do (which is again, a massive generalization) when that's just not the case.
Apparently, some of the worst things that can be said about Paul Graham are that: (1) he is a centrist, (2) he got rich through his work, (3) he does not hold the US public education system in high regard, and (4) he advocated the use of, and was involved in trafficking Lisp code. About as eye-opening as it is shocking (i.e. in either case not much).
I think the article is suggesting that PG's writings are presenting a romanticized narrative of being an industrious entrepreneur for the purpose of encouraging young computer programmers to apply to Y Combinator.
Isn't that better than directly shipping those younglings into big corps? (And I'm not saying these two are the only options, but they seem to cover a lot of fresh grads. Also criticizing PG for thinking too highly of startup life is fair, but also maybe as useful as scolding the pope for thinking a bit too highly of faith.)
I think it might be for graduates like Alexandr Wang who went to good schools and have more or less lead comfortable lives. If someone's had a less privileged upbringing and a career in software enables them to improve their lot, maybe a big corp would help them more than the lottery ticket of a startup. I worry the romantic narrative PG presents clouds the risk involved in investing a portion of your life into a startup.
I think it's useful to criticize both the Pope and PG for situations like you mention. They have sizeable resources and influence and are deserving of a gadfly in the public sphere.
Agreed, I think constructive criticism is warranted. (The issues mentioned with inequality are very-very much deserve the effort and attention. And one way to do something about it is to have more market participants, and one way for that is to start new companies. So startups. Even if there are problems with the whole VC-funded never-monetized undercutting of real businesses which have positive "unit economy". At the same time it seems impossible in many markets to go up against the incumbents without such deep pockets - though maybe VC money just leads to useless uncaring greedy copycats. But that's is a different discussion.)
All in all, I simply don't think these verbal lashing-outs are at all helpful. They suck out the air from the very same topics that it hints at (ie. inequality).
The author so desperately tries to convince the reader that he doesn't personally dislike Paul Graham that it has the opposite effect.
For those who don't have time to read the article, the author argues that Paul Graham is a salesman (not an intellectual), and the product he's selling is capitalism. The author thinks capitalism is evil, and as a proponent of capitalism, Paul Graham is also evil.
The author's hatred is clearly born out of envy for those who are more traditionally successful. This doesn't necessarily mean his ideas are wrong, but it increases the likelihood that his views are one-sided. Skepticism is warranted.
Google search tagline reads: Though some might struggle to separate Paul Graham these days from the toxic sludge of Y Combinator and Hacker News— and, to Graham's ...
