Showing posts with label Paul Graham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Graham. Show all posts

Monday, January 13, 2025

Paul Graham's Problem With Woke





The Origins Of Wokeness by Paul Graham .... you know, that Paul Graham The word "prig" ..... A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others. ......... In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin's Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it's social justice. .......... why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began. .......... Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020......... An aggressively performative focus on social justice. ........ And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice. ......... What happened in the humanities and social sciences in the 1980s? ........ The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power. The students may have been talking a lot about women's liberation and black power, but it was not what they were being taught in their classes. Not yet. ........ A 1960s radical who got a job as a physics professor could still attend protests, but his political beliefs wouldn't affect his work. Whereas research in sociology and modern literature can be made as political as you like. ......... When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it. It was still not a thing when I started grad school in 1986. It was definitely a thing in 1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed to pervade campus life. ............ the 1960s radicals got tenure. They became the Establishment they'd protested against two decades before. Now they were in a position not just to speak out about their ideas, but to enforce them. ........... It wasn't simply a grass-roots student movement. It was faculty members encouraging students to attack other faculty members. In that respect it was like the Cultural Revolution. ............ Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase "people of color" is considered particularly enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. And why exactly one isn't supposed to use the word "negro" now, even though Martin Luther King used it constantly in his speeches. There are no underlying principles. You'd just have to give him a long list of rules to memorize. .............. their elaborateness made them an effective substitute for virtue. Whenever a society has a concept of heresy and orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than everyone who isn't. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people. ............. the result was a world in which good people who weren't up to date on current moral fashions were brought down by people whose characters would make you recoil in horror if you could see them. ............ Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex. But among the cultural elite these were the deadest of dead letters by the 1980s; if you were religious, or a virgin, this was something you tended to conceal rather than advertise. So the sort of people who enjoy being moral enforcers had become starved of things to enforce. A new set of rules was just what they'd been waiting for. .............. One thing I noticed at the time about the first phase of political correctness was that it was more popular with women than men. As many writers (perhaps most eloquently George Orwell) have observed, women seem more attracted than men to the idea of being moral enforcers. But there was another more specific reason women tended to be the enforcers of political correctness. There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment." Within universities the classic form of accusation was for a (female) student to say that a professor made her "feel uncomfortable." But the vagueness of this accusation allowed the radius of forbidden behavior to expand to include talking about heterodox ideas. Those make people uncomfortable too. ............ Was it sexist to propose that Darwin's greater male variability hypothesis might explain some variation in human performance? Sexist enough to get Larry Summers pushed out as president of Harvard, apparently. ................. Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same thing to political correctness............. And there had been an explosion in the number of university administrators, many of whose jobs involved enforcing various forms of political correctness. ........... In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia (which at the time was a neologism invented for the purpose). But between then and 2010 a lot of people had spent a lot of time trying to invent new kinds of -isms and -phobias and seeing which could be made to stick. ............. My guess is that it was due to the rise of social media, particularly Tumblr and Twitter, because one of the most distinctive features of the second wave of political correctness was the cancel mob: a mob of angry people uniting on social media to get someone ostracized or fired. Indeed this second wave of political correctness was originally called "cancel culture"; it didn't start to be called "wokeness" till the 2020s. ............... One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like being outraged. We're so used to this idea now that we take it for granted, but really it's pretty strange. Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do. ........... This tilt toward outrage wasn't due to wokeness. It's an inherent feature of social media, or at least this generation of it. But it did make social media the perfect mechanism for fanning the flames of wokeness. .......... Group chat apps were also critical, especially in the final step, cancellation. Imagine if a group of employees trying to get someone fired had to do it using only email. It would be hard to organize a mob. But

once you have group chat, mobs form naturally

. ............. When I grew up the papers of record seemed timeless, almost sacred institutions. Papers like the New York Times and Washington Post had immense prestige, partly because other sources of news were limited, but also because they did make some effort to be neutral. ............... Unfortunately it turned out that the paper of record was mostly an artifact of the constraints imposed by print. [8] When your market was determined by geography, you had to be neutral. But publishing online enabled — in fact probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained in business fell in the direction they'd already been leaning: left. On October 11, 2020 the New York Times announced that "The paper is in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives." Meanwhile journalists, of a sort, had arisen to serve the right as well. And so journalism, which in the previous era had been one of the great centralizing forces, now became one of the great polarizing ones. ................... there arose a new variety of journalism involving a loop through social media. Someone would say something controversial on social media. Within hours it would become a news story. Outraged readers would then post links to the story on social media, driving further arguments online. It was the cheapest source of clicks imaginable. You didn't have to maintain overseas news bureaus or pay for month-long investigations. All you had to do was watch Twitter for controversial remarks and repost them on your site, with some additional comments to inflame readers further. ................. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they weren't directly in the flow of the organization's work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it. .............. This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they're going to find it, because otherwise there's no justification for their existence. ............ the Black Lives Matter movement, which started in 2013 when a white man was acquitted after killing a black teenager in Florida. But this didn't launch wokeness; it was well underway by 2013. ............... the Me Too Movement, which took off in 2017 after the first news stories about Harvey Weinstein's history of raping women. It accelerated wokeness, but didn't play the same role in launching it that the 80s version did in launching political correctness. .............. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 also accelerated wokeness, particularly in the press, where outrage now meant traffic. Trump made the New York Times a lot of money: headlines during his first administration mentioned his name at about four times the rate of previous presidents. ...............

In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video. At this point the metaphorical fire became a literal one, as violent protests broke out across America. But in retrospect this turned out to be peak woke, or close to it. By every measure I've seen, wokeness peaked in 2020 or 2021.

................ Wokeness is sometimes described as a mind-virus. ......... What's true of individuals is even more true of organizations. Especially organizations without a powerful leader. Such organizations do everything based on "best practices." There's no higher authority; if some new "best practice" achieves critical mass, they must adopt it. And in this case the organization can't do what it usually does when it's uncertain: delay. It might be committing improprieties right now! So it's surprisingly easy for a small group of zealots to capture this type of organization by describing new improprieties it might be guilty of. ............. How does this kind of cycle ever end? Eventually it leads to disaster, and people start to say enough is enough. The excesses of 2020 made a lot of people say that. ............ Corporate CEOs, starting with Brian Armstrong, have openly rejected it. Universities, led by the University of Chicago and MIT, have explicitly confirmed their commitment to free speech. Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded ............. I'm not going to claim Trump's second victory in 2024 was a referendum on wokeness; I think he won, as presidential candidates always do, because he was more charismatic; but voters' disgust with wokeness must have helped. ................. And more importantly, how do we avoid a third outbreak? After all, it seemed to be dead once, but came back worse than ever. .......... Prigs are prigs by nature. They need rules to obey and enforce, and now that Darwin has cut off their traditional supply of rules, they're constantly hungry for new ones. All they need is someone to meet them halfway by defining a new way to be morally pure, and we'll see the same phenomenon again. ............. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. .......... And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion................. One shouldn't feel bad about not wanting to watch woke movies any more than one would feel bad about not wanting to listen to Christian rock. In my twenties I drove across America several times, listening to local radio stations. Occasionally I'd turn the dial and hear some new song. But the moment anyone mentioned Jesus I'd turn the dial again. Even the tiniest bit of being preached to was enough to make me lose interest. ............. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. ............ Here we're up against human nature. There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up. ........... Fortunately when the aggressively conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one thing that gives them away: they define new heresies to punish people for. So the best way to protect ourselves from future outbreaks of things like wokeness is to have powerful antibodies against the concept of heresy. ........... The woke ideology's conspicuous lack of interest in the working class is the tell-tale sign. Such fragments as are, er, left of the old left are anti-woke, and meanwhile the actual working class shifted to the populist right and gave us Trump. Trump and wokeness are cousins. ................. The middle-class origins of wokeness smoothed its way through the institutions because it had no interest in "seizing the means of production" (how quaint such phrases seem now), which would quickly have run up against hard state and corporate power. The fact that wokeness only expressed interest in other kinds of class (race, sex, etc) signalled compromise with existing power: give us power within your system and we'll bestow the resource we control — moral rectitude — upon you. As an ideological stalking horse for gaining control over discourse and institutions, this succeeded where a more ambitious revolutionary program would not have. ................ If a political movement had to start with physics students, it could never get off the ground; there would be too few of them, and they wouldn't have the time to spare. ........... The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases. .............. In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a hostile work environment could constitute sex discrimination, which in turn affected universities via Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person, but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of things that might not be said "with ladies present." ........................ I'm fairly confident that it would be possible to create new social media apps that were less driven by outrage, and an app of this type would have a good chance of stealing users from existing ones, because the smartest people would tend to migrate to it. .............. I have hopes that journalistic neutrality will return in some form. There is some market for unbiased news, and while it may be small, it's valuable. The rich and powerful want to know what's really going on; that's how they became rich and powerful. ............ As the acronym DEI goes out of fashion, many of these bureaucrats will try to go underground by changing their titles. It looks like "belonging" will be a popular option. .......... This is particularly annoying to me as a writer, because the new names are always worse. Any religious observance has to be inconvenient and slightly absurd; otherwise gentiles would do it too. So "slaves" becomes "enslaved individuals." But web search can show us the leading edge of moral growth in real time: if you search for "individuals experiencing slavery" you will as of this writing find five legit attempts to use the phrase, and you'll even find two for "individuals experiencing enslavement." .................. Organizations that do dubious things are particularly concerned with propriety, which is how you end up with absurdities like tobacco and oil companies having higher ESG ratings than Tesla. .................... Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying users. Paying users lean right on average, because people on the far left dislike Elon and don't want to give him money. Elon presumably knew this would happen. On the other hand, the people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted to. ............ a concept of original sin: privilege. Which means unlike Christianity's egalitarian version, people have varying degrees of it. An able-bodied straight white American male is born with such a load of sin that only by the most abject repentance can he be saved. .................. Wokeness also shares something rather funny with many actual versions of Christianity: like God, the people for whose sake wokeness purports to act are often revolted by the things done in their name. ......... I don't want to give the impression that it will be simple to roll back wokeness. There will be places where the fight inevitably gets messy — particularly within universities, which everyone has to share, yet which are are currently the most pervaded by wokeness of any institutions............. You can however get rid of aggressively conventional-minded people within an organization, and in many if not most organizations this would be an excellent idea. Even a handful of them can do a lot of damage. I bet you'd feel a noticeable improvement going from a handful to none.

It feels to me like I might have managed to skip the whole debate. And it has been a raging debate, obviously.

This feels like what Marxists might call a counter-revolution to the Black Lives Matter movement. Except there was no revolution. And this is not exactly a counter-revolution. But that a guy like Paul Graham should be oh so primmed about it, that tells me this defensiveness is no small matter. For the longest time I have thought of Paul Graham as a genuine innovator. He has merit. He was a starving artist. Then he build the iconic tech incubator. Hats off. Except, it seems, it is really, really foundational to him that he is a white male. That collective identity is so, so important to him. He might even be a "liberal" on social values. I once watched a YouTube video of him giving a talk at Stanford, where he made a joke about Sam Altman, which was meant to prove the point that Graham is not homophobic, at all, at all, at all.

One class I took at college taught me about the structure of sexism. One example. The objective data is, men do much of the talking. They suck up the oxygen in the room. But the joke is, you can't get women to close their mouth. This is so pervasive. It is everywhere. It is like social gravity.

You thank gravity. You can walk, you can stand. It is still you walking. But gravity makes it possible. For a lot of white men, structural racism and sexism seems to be that gravity. They can't imagine life without it.

Social justice is not the problem. But you are being too aggressive about it. Women talk too much.

Paul Graham is part of the backlash.

I think Paul Graham wants many, many more people to drop out of college. It would help his business. That seems to be his hidden agenda.



Note: I have been looking for a "definitive" article on wokeness by someone offended by it. Thank you Paul Graham for sharing. And to think this might end up in the pantheons of the tech startup world like many of his other essays. Now THAT is woke. Woke is supposed to mean "enlightened," not in the spiritual sense, but enlighhtened still.

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Thursday, November 28, 2024

A Tech Incubator for Today

Corporate Culture/Operating System
30-30-30-10: A More Thoughtful And Egalitarian Formula For Equity Distribution In Tech Startups For The Age Of Abundance

When the internet became mainstream, it was a revolutionary time. No one alive had experienced anything like it before. Business and innovation seemed to move at the speed of imagination. Much has happened in the past 30 years, but all of it is merely a prologue. The real breakthroughs are happening now and will continue in the near future.

Today, we see nearly ten "internet-sized" technologies advancing in parallel, reaching new heights year after year. Each is remarkable on its own, but what happens when these technologies intersect is almost impossible to predict. It's difficult to foresee which companies or industries will dominate even a decade from now, let alone further into the future.

There has never been a more thrilling time to be a tech entrepreneur than today.

Now is the time to be bold. Entrepreneurs willing to tackle the biggest problems and boldest challenges will go the farthest. The tools available today were unimaginable just a few years ago, creating unprecedented opportunities for innovation. This is the age of boundless potential.

When Y Combinator launched, Silicon Valley was the ideal location. When TechStars emerged, it made sense to establish it in multiple cities across the United States. But today, neither model would suffice. A tech incubator launched in this era must be instantly and inherently global.

This shift doesn’t negate the importance of geography. Meeting in person still holds unique value, and perhaps always will. However, the global model embraces all geographies. It doesn’t diminish the importance of talent but rather recognizes that talent is everywhere. It doesn’t undermine the value of capital but highlights how capital is rapidly forming worldwide. Those who fail to adapt will be left behind.

The world is moving rapidly toward an *Age of Abundance,* a vision prophesied in scriptures thousands of years ago. Tech entrepreneurship plays a leading role in this transformation. At its core, tech entrepreneurship is service on a massive scale delivered with extraordinary efficiency.

If I were selecting tech entrepreneurs to fund, I’d start with those daring enough to tackle the most complex, pressing problems. The days of creating a simple photo-sharing app and earning billions are over. Now is the time to confront the big challenges head-on.

A tech incubator founded today must prioritize entrepreneurs who aim to solve these "big, bad problems." It should offer them world-class support systems to turn their visions into reality. The opportunity to make a difference is everywhere—and the boldest will seize it.



आज के लिए एक तकनीकी इनक्यूबेटर



जब इंटरनेट मुख्यधारा में आया, तो वह एक क्रांतिकारी समय था। उस समय जीवित किसी ने भी ऐसा कुछ पहले कभी नहीं देखा था। व्यवसाय और नवाचार कल्पना की गति से आगे बढ़ते प्रतीत हो रहे थे। पिछले 30 वर्षों में बहुत कुछ हुआ है, लेकिन यह सब सिर्फ प्रस्तावना भर है। असली क्रांति अब हो रही है और निकट भविष्य में होगी।

आज, लगभग दस "इंटरनेट-सदृश" प्रौद्योगिकियाँ समानांतर रूप से प्रगति कर रही हैं और हर साल नई ऊंचाइयों पर पहुंच रही हैं। प्रत्येक अपने आप में अद्वितीय है, लेकिन जब ये प्रौद्योगिकियाँ आपस में जुड़ती हैं, तो जो होता है, उसकी कल्पना करना लगभग असंभव है। यह अनुमान लगाना कठिन है कि आने वाले दस वर्षों में कौन सी कंपनियाँ या उद्योग प्रमुख होंगे, और उससे भी आगे का अनुमान तो और भी मुश्किल है।

आज से बेहतर समय तकनीकी उद्यमी बनने के लिए कभी नहीं था।

अब वह समय है जब हमें साहसी बनना होगा। जो उद्यमी सबसे बड़ी समस्याओं और सबसे चुनौतीपूर्ण मुद्दों को हल करने का प्रयास करेंगे, वे सबसे आगे जाएंगे। आज उपलब्ध उपकरण कुछ साल पहले तक अकल्पनीय थे, जो नवाचार के लिए अभूतपूर्व अवसर प्रदान कर रहे हैं। यह असीम संभावनाओं का युग है।

जब वाई कॉम्बिनेटर लॉन्च हुआ, तो सिलिकॉन वैली इसके लिए आदर्श स्थान था। जब टेकस्टार्स शुरू हुआ, तो इसे अमेरिका के कई शहरों में फैलाना सही लगा। लेकिन आज, यह मॉडल पर्याप्त नहीं होगा। इस युग में लॉन्च किया गया एक तकनीकी इनक्यूबेटर तुरंत और स्वाभाविक रूप से वैश्विक होना चाहिए।

यह बदलाव भौगोलिकता के महत्व को कम नहीं करता। व्यक्तिगत रूप से मिलना आज भी अनूठा मूल्य रखता है और शायद हमेशा रखेगा। लेकिन वैश्विक मॉडल सभी क्षेत्रों को समाहित करता है। यह प्रतिभा के महत्व को कम नहीं करता, बल्कि यह मान्यता देता है कि प्रतिभा हर जगह है। यह पूंजी के मूल्य को कम नहीं करता, बल्कि दिखाता है कि पूंजी दुनिया भर में तेजी से विकसित हो रही है। जो इस बदलाव को नहीं अपनाएंगे, वे पीछे रह जाएंगे।

दुनिया तेजी से *प्रचुरता के युग* की ओर बढ़ रही है, जिसकी भविष्यवाणी हजारों साल पहले शास्त्रों में की गई थी। इस परिवर्तन में तकनीकी उद्यमिता की प्रमुख भूमिका है। अपने मूल में, तकनीकी उद्यमिता बड़े पैमाने पर सेवा है, जो अद्वितीय दक्षता के साथ प्रदान की जाती है।

यदि मुझे तकनीकी उद्यमियों को वित्तपोषित करने के लिए चुनना हो, तो मैं उन लोगों को प्राथमिकता दूंगा जो सबसे जटिल और महत्वपूर्ण समस्याओं को हल करने का साहस रखते हैं। वह समय गया जब एक साधारण फोटो-शेयरिंग ऐप बनाकर अरबों कमा लिए जाते थे। अब समय है कि बड़ी चुनौतियों का सामना किया जाए।

आज शुरू किया गया एक तकनीकी इनक्यूबेटर उन उद्यमियों को प्राथमिकता देगा जो इन "बड़ी, कठिन समस्याओं" को हल करना चाहते हैं। उन्हें विश्व-स्तरीय समर्थन प्रणालियाँ प्रदान की जाएंगी ताकि वे अपने दृष्टिकोण को वास्तविकता में बदल सकें। हर जगह अंतर लाने की संभावना है—और इसे सबसे साहसी लोग ही भुनाएंगे।

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Saturday, July 01, 2023

Paul Graham's Best Essay To Date



How to Do Great Work The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work. ........

Some kinds of work you end up doing may not even exist yet.

.......... pick something and get going. ....... some of the biggest discoveries come from noticing connections between different fields. .......... Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one day, it will probably be on a project of your own. It may be within some bigger project, but you'll be driving your part of it. .............. At 7 it may seem excitingly ambitious to build huge things out of Lego, then at 14 to teach yourself calculus, till at 21 you're starting to explore unanswered questions in physics. But always preserve excitingness. ............

There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work.

It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on. ......... What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for. ........... Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps. ........... Many discoveries have come from asking questions about things that everyone else took for granted. .......... Great work often has a tincture of strangeness. You see this from painting to math. ......... Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited about some possibility that everyone else ignores, and you have enough expertise to say precisely what they're all overlooking, that's as good a bet as you'll find. .........

Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.

........... It may not be possible to prove that you have to work hard to do great things, but the empirical evidence is on the scale of the evidence for mortality. ............ The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all. .......... The big prize is to discover a new fractal bud. You notice a crack in the surface of knowledge, pry it open, and there's a whole world inside. ......... when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own .......... When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions. .............. What mathematicians do, for example, is very different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need to give different types of work a chance to show you what they're like. But a field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn't, it's probably not for you. ............ One sign that you're suited for some kind of work is when you like even the parts that other people find tedious or frightening. ............ the most exciting story to write will be the one you want to read ............ Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy, but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts of obstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it does take a good deal of boldness. ................ The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. ....... I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. ...... You don't just put out your sail and get blown forward by inspiration. There are headwinds and currents and hidden shoals. So there's a technique to working, just as there is to sailing. ......... while you must work hard, it's possible to work too hard, and if you do that you'll find you get diminishing returns: fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health. The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for four or five hours a day. ........... Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, try to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in. You'll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted. ............... It will probably be harder to start working than to keep working. ......... When I'm reluctant to start work in the morning, I often trick myself by saying "I'll just read over what I've got so far." Five minutes later I've found something that seems mistaken or incomplete, and I'm off. ............. In many projects a lot of the best work happens in what was meant to be the final stage. ......... One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it............. Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. ............... Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing..............

If you do work that compounds, you'll get exponential growth.

........... Learning, for example, is an instance of this phenomenon: the more you learn about something, the easier it is to learn more. Growing an audience is another: the more fans you have, the more new fans they'll bring you. ................. The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve. But we can't grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponential growth in its early stages. .............. There's a kind of undirected thinking you do when walking or taking a shower or lying in bed that can be very powerful. By letting your mind wander a little, you'll often solve problems you were unable to solve by frontal attack. ............ if you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good. This observation has been made by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth thinking about why it's true. It could be because ambition is a phenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction — where almost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short. ............. In some ways it's easier to try to be the best than to try merely to be good. ........... just do the work and your identity will take care of itself. ............. If you're earnest you avoid not just affectation but a whole set of similar vices. ........... To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest? ........... Be aggressively willing to admit that you're mistaken. Once you've admitted you were mistaken about something, you're free. Till then you have to carry it. ........... any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good. That's one reason nerds have an advantage in doing great work: they expend little effort on seeming anything. In fact that's basically the definition of a nerd. ............ It's not learned; it's preserved from childhood. So hold onto it. Be the one who puts things out there rather than the one who sits back and offers sophisticated-sounding criticisms of them. ......... I doubt it would be possible to do great work without being earnest. It's so hard to do even if you are. You don't have enough margin for error to accommodate the distortions introduced by being affected, intellectually dishonest, orthodox, fashionable, or cool. ......... Mathematical elegance may sound like a mere metaphor, drawn from the arts. That's what I thought when I first heard the term "elegant" applied to a proof. But now I suspect it's conceptually prior — that the main ingredient in artistic elegance is mathematical elegance. At any rate it's a useful standard well beyond math. .................. some of the very best work will seem like it took comparatively little effort, because it was in a sense already there. It didn't have to be built, just seen. It's a very good sign when it's hard to say whether you're creating something or discovering it................ Try thinking of yourself as a mere conduit through which the ideas take their natural shape. ................ The best ideas have implications in many different areas. .............. If you express your ideas in the most general form, they'll be truer than you intended. .............. Original thinkers throw off new ideas about whatever they focus on, like an angle grinder throwing off sparks. They can't help it. ................. One of the most original thinkers I know decided to focus on dating after he got divorced. He knew roughly as much about dating as the average 15 year old, and the results were spectacularly colorful. But to see originality separated from expertise like that made its nature all the more clear................... Original ideas don't come from trying to have original ideas. They come from trying to build or understand something slightly too difficult. .......... Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you.

Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.

........... Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you'll often find you have new ideas there. ............ But you may not have to go far to get this benefit. Sometimes it's enough just to go for a walk. ............. It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas. ............ Be professionally curious about a few topics and idly curious about many more. .......... Curiosity is itself a kind of originality; it's roughly to questions what originality is to answers. And since questions at their best are a big component of answers, curiosity at its best is a creative force.............. Having new ideas is a strange game, because it usually consists of seeing things that were right under your nose. Once you've seen a new idea, it tends to seem obvious. Why did no one think of this before? ............. new ideas can be both obvious and yet hard to discover: they're easy to see after you do something hard. ................ To find new ideas you have to seize on signs of breakage instead of looking away. That's what Einstein did. He was able to see the wild implications of Maxwell's equations not so much because he was looking for new ideas as because he was stricter................ it took the greater part of a century for the heliocentric model to be generally accepted, even among astronomers, because it felt so wrong. ................ Often ideas that seem bad are bad. But ideas that are the right kind of crazy tend to be exciting; they're rich in implications; whereas ideas that are merely bad tend to be depressing. ................ The aggressively independent-minded are the naughty ones. Rules don't merely fail to stop them; breaking rules gives them additional energy. For this sort of person, delight at the sheer audacity of a project sometimes supplies enough activation energy to get it started. ............. in questions that really matter, only rule-breakers can be truly strict........... Every cherished but mistaken principle is surrounded by a dead zone of valuable ideas that are unexplored because they contradict it. ........... People who'd never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. ............. Originality in choosing problems seems to matter even more than originality in solving them. That's what distinguishes the people who discover whole new fields. So what might seem to be merely the initial step — deciding what to work on — is in a sense the key to the whole game. ............ People think big ideas are answers, but often the real insight was in the question. ............... Part of the reason we underrate questions is the way they're used in schools. In schools they tend to exist only briefly before being answered, like unstable particles. But a really good question can be much more than that. A really good question is a partial discovery. How do new species arise? Is the force that makes objects fall to earth the same as the one that keeps planets in their orbits? By even asking such questions you were already in excitingly novel territory. ................. Sometimes you carry a question for a long time. Great work often comes from returning to a question you first noticed years before — in your childhood, even — and couldn't stop thinking about. ............ the more puzzled you are, the better, so long as (a) the things you're puzzled about matter, and (b) no one else understands them either ............ It's a great thing to be rich in unanswered questions. And this is one of those situations where the rich get richer ............... Questions don't just lead to answers, but also to more questions................... Great things are almost always made in successive versions. You start with something small and evolve it, and the final version is both cleverer and more ambitious than anything you could have planned. ......... Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of the latter when young and keep some of the former when old. ............ The young often have them without realizing it. The biggest is probably time. The young have no idea how rich they are in time. The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in slightly frivolous ways: to learn about something you don't need to know about, just out of curiosity, or to try building something just because it would be cool, or to become freakishly good at something. ............ You arrive at adulthood with your head full of nonsense — bad habits you've acquired and false things you've been taught — and you won't be able to do great work till you clear away at least the nonsense in the way of whatever type of work you want to do. .......... Much of the nonsense left in your head is left there by schools. ..... schools have all sorts of strange qualities that warp our ideas about learning and thinking. ............. neither classes nor tests are intrinsic to learning; they're just artifacts of the way schools are usually designed. ............... If you're still in school, try thinking of your education as your project, and your teachers as working for you rather than vice versa. ................. In real life you have to figure out what the problems are, and you often don't know if they're soluble at all............

the worst thing schools do to you is train you to win by hacking the test. ..... You can't trick God.

.............. The way to beat the system is to focus on problems and solutions that others have overlooked, not to skimp on the work itself........... Don't think of yourself as dependent on some gatekeeper giving you a "big break." Even if this were true, the best way to get it would be to focus on doing good work rather than chasing influential people. .................. And don't take rejection by committees to heart. The qualities that impress admissions officers and prize committees are quite different from those required to do great work. The decisions of selection committees are only meaningful to the extent that they're part of a feedback loop, and very few are.......... Originality is the presence of new ideas, not the absence of old ones. .......... Some talented people are jerks, and this sometimes makes it seem to the inexperienced that being a jerk is part of being talented. It isn't; being talented is merely how they get away with it. ................ You can take ideas from quite distant fields if you let them be metaphors. .......... Most people who are very good at something are happy to talk about it with anyone who's genuinely interested. If they're really good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist's interest in it, and hobbyists always want to talk about their hobbies............... People within universities can't say so openly, but the quality of the work being done in different departments varies immensely. Some departments have people doing great work; others have in the past; others never have. ............... Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will. ............ the degree to which great work happens in clusters suggests that one's colleagues often make the difference between doing great work and not. ........... sufficiently good colleagues offer surprising insights. They can see and do things that you can't. ........... managing well takes aptitude and interest like any other kind of work. If you don't have them, there is no middle path: you must either force yourself to learn management as a second language, or avoid such projects .............. Husband your morale. It's the basis of everything when you're working on ambitious projects. You have to nurture and protect it like a living organism. ................ If you choose work that's pure, its very difficulties will serve as a refuge from the difficulties of everyday life. If this is escapism, it's a very productive form of it, and one that has been used by some of the greatest minds in history. ........... Morale compounds via work: high morale helps you do good work, which increases your morale and helps you do even better work. ........... One of the biggest mistakes ambitious people make is to allow setbacks to destroy their morale all at once, like a ballon bursting. ......... It's not necessarily a bad sign if work is a struggle, any more than it's a bad sign to be out of breath while running. It depends how fast you're running. So learn to distinguish good pain from bad. Good pain is a sign of effort; bad pain is a sign of damage. ............ a small but dedicated audience can be enough to sustain you. If a handful of people genuinely love what you're doing, that's enough. ......... The people you spend time with will also have a big effect on your morale. You'll find there are some who increase your energy and others who decrease it, and the effect someone has is not always what you'd expect. Seek out the people who increase your energy and avoid those who decrease it. Though of course if there's someone you need to take care of, that takes precedence. ................. Don't marry someone who doesn't understand that you need to work, or sees your work as competition for your attention. If you're ambitious, you need to work; it's almost like a medical condition; so someone who won't let you work either doesn't understand you, or does and doesn't care. ............. Ultimately morale is physical. You think with your body, so it's important to take care of it. That means exercising regularly, eating and sleeping well, and avoiding the more dangerous kinds of drugs. Running and walking are particularly good forms of exercise because they're good for thinking. ........... People who do great work are not necessarily happier than everyone else, but they're happier than they'd be if they didn't. In fact, if you're smart and ambitious, it's dangerous not to be productive. People who are smart and ambitious but don't achieve much tend to become bitter. ................... The prestige of a type of work is at best a trailing indicator and sometimes completely mistaken. ............. don't let competitors make you do anything much more specific than work harder. ......... Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to. ........... you can't command curiosity anyway. But you can nurture it and let it drive you.............. If you made it this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so you're already further along than you might realize, because the set of people willing to want to is small. .............. Can you find a kind of work where your ability and interest will combine to yield an explosion of new ideas? ............... Many more people could try to do great work than do. What holds them back is a combination of modesty and fear. It seems presumptuous to try to be Newton or Shakespeare. It also seems hard; surely if you tried something like that, you'd fail. Presumably the calculation is rarely explicit. Few people consciously decide not to try to do great work. But that's what's going on subconsciously; they shy away from the question. ............. A lot of standup comedy is based on noticing anomalies in everyday life. "Did you ever notice...?" New ideas come from doing this about nontrivial things. Which may help explain why people's reaction to a new idea is often the first half of laughing: Ha! ..................

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Sunday, April 02, 2023

Just Applied To Y Combinator

In 2010, Paul Graham and I were featured in the same BBC article.





How Y Combinator Started I don't think we've ever managed to remember our birthday on our birthday. ......... The VC fund was doing what now seems a comically familiar thing for a VC fund to do: taking a long time to make up their mind. ......... As we turned onto Walker Street we decided to do it. I agreed to put $100k into the new fund and Jessica agreed to quit her job to work for it. Over the next couple days I recruited Robert and Trevor, who put in another $50k each. So YC started with $200k. ........... The company wasn't called Y Combinator yet. At first we called it Cambridge Seed. ........ Initially we only had part of the idea. We were going to do seed funding with standardized terms. Before YC, seed funding was very haphazard. You'd get that first $10k from your friend's rich uncle. The deal terms were often a disaster; often neither the investor nor the founders nor the lawyer knew what the documents should look like. Facebook's early history as a Florida LLC shows how random things could be in those days. ........ We started Viaweb with $10k we got from our friend Julian Weber, the husband of Idelle Weber, whose painting class I took as a grad student at Harvard. Julian knew about business, but you would not describe him as a suit. ............ In return for $10k, getting us set up as a company, teaching us what business was about, and remaining calm in times of crisis, Julian got 10% of Viaweb. I remember thinking once what a good deal Julian got. ............ we wanted to learn how to be angel investors, and a summer program for undergrads seemed the fastest way to do it. No one takes summer jobs that seriously. The opportunity cost for a bunch of undergrads to spend a summer working on startups was low enough that we wouldn't feel guilty encouraging them to do it. ............. The structure of the YC cycle is still almost identical to what it was that first summer. ............ We never expected to make any money from that first batch. We thought of the money we were investing as a combination of an educational expense and a charitable donation. But the founders in the first batch turned out to be surprisingly good. And great people too. We're still friends with a lot of them today. ............ It's hard for people to realize now how inconsequential YC seemed at the time. .......... Jessica and I invented a term, "the Y Combinator effect," to describe the moment when the realization hit someone that YC was not totally lame. When people came to YC to speak at the dinners that first summer, they came in the spirit of someone coming to address a Boy Scout troop. By the time they left the building they were all saying some variant of "Wow, these companies might actually succeed." .......... it took a while for reputation to catch up with reality ....... That's one of the reasons we especially like funding ideas that might be dismissed as "toys" — because YC itself was dismissed as one initially. ........ The density of startup people in the Bay Area was so much greater than in Boston, and the weather was so nice. ........ Plus I didn't want someone else to copy us and describe it as the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. I wanted YC to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. So doing the winter batch in California seemed like one of those rare cases where the self-indulgent choice and the ambitious one were the same........ we didn't have time to get a building in Berkeley. We didn't have time to get our own building anywhere. The only way to get enough space in time was to convince Trevor to let us take over part of his (as it then seemed) giant building in Mountain View. .......

The first dinner in California, we had to warn all the founders not to touch the walls, because the paint was still wet.



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Thursday, November 17, 2022

Some Suggestions For Twitter

Twitter And Voice
Free Speech And Just Society
Should Elon Musk Be Owning All Of Twitter?
The Masses, Not Mars
Musk's 44 Billion Dollar Give To Foolish Fascism

My Twitter experience has not changed. Is that a problem? The guy from Mars took over. But my Twitter experience has not changed.

He is being criticized for having bought a 10 billion dollar company for 40 billion. I don't want to go into that. It is certainly a dip. But if it is a startup, it has nowhere to go but up. Although there are plenty of people saying this is his Waterloo. That is the New York Times hyperbola. It is a dramatic statement to make, but people like Paul Graham do not seem to be buying.

Since the early 2010s, I have looked at Twitter and thought, what a waste! So much potential, so little of it realized.

Could Musk be the break Twitter has needed? Or is this Musk's Truth Social?

I just had to say that. I don't believe it. I think Musk might be able to pull it off.

I quite like Twitter. I have an experience on Twitter that I do not have on any other social media platform. And so you are left wanting more.

What is it about Twitter? The brevity? The text? That 1% feel?

How about letting people verify for free? And instead of using government isued IDs letting people use biometric IDs provided by Twitter itself? A selfie? An iris scan? Fingerprint? And you get a checkmark? If not blue, then green. The bots don't have that.

If you can verify your name also with some sort of official ID, you get an additional checkmark. For free.

You could use an assumed name, but it would say so.

The ability to read 10 or 100 or 1,000 tweets at once. How do you read the sentiment?

Real time search engine. Twitter could be tops.

The Twitter archives are a wasteland. So unnecessary.

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