You've hit upon something that's always bothered me with this characterization of nerds. It's like if someone framed adult life by superimposing stereotypical high school nerd vs jock social dynamics onto it, and then went on to portray nerds as heroes.
In real life "nerds" are part of the same system. They are utterly conventional. You don't get to call yourself unconventional just because you deride sportsball and like computers.
This essay reminds me of an xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/610/. I think it would be too harsh to call him self-aggrandizing, but he does seem to dress up otherwise good insights about how to think critically with celebration of how unconventional this is.
It's like when Peter Thiel expanded one good insight about critically finding ideas from uncommon beliefs into an entire book.
Anyway we didn't know the guy too well, lots of getting-to-know you type stuff. The MMA fighter after a few hours mentions that he was really into Starcraft, Age of Empires, and other RPS.
You could have knocked me and my other friends over with a feather. This ripped "jock" likes Starcraft! Oh my god! We were so surprised and just went on and on about how impressed we were like idiots.
A year or two later one of my friends who was there (a little more balanced guy who played more sports and hung out with more varied groups of people) told me that he and the MMA fighter had been talking as we walked back from the bar. The MMA guy was apparently like "so I guess these guys have just never hung out with any athletes?" Turns out it isn't that abnormal for them to like cool and nerdy stuff.
Even though I felt pretty dumb, that was a good experience for me as a person. My whole life I've been a pretty accepting and nice person, and my intelligence has never really made me feel superior to other people. I guess to that point those qualities made me feel like I couldn't possibly be prejudiced or biased because hey, I don't actively hold any hostile or condescending beliefs. But that showed me that my own ignorance was sufficient for me to classify some guy I knew almost nothing about and put him in a box, a guy I liked perfectly well and never had a bad thought about. It's a tough thing to be aware of but I think has made me a little more skeptical and humble, which I'm glad for.
(It makes a lot of sense that pro athletes are in gaming, btw: it’s competitive and it’s something that can be done during long downtimes between training sessions, or lonely hotel nights away from home. If you follow any twitter feed of pros, from football to f1, sooner or later you’ll see plenty of posts about games.)
It's good to learn about black swans, else you might make the incorrect logical conclusion that swans are ALWAYS white. And more importantly learn that "black swans" is not only about swans. There can be sports-types who also like intellectual activity
> "black swans" is not only about swans. There can be sports-types who also like intellectual activity
The gp's experience taught that such sports-types are not black swans. It's not just that the stereotype had exceptions; it's that the stereotype wasn't even accurate at low granularity.
In this single case. This was the first and only sports-guy they had met that was interested in computer-games.
"stereotype had exceptions". Well not really, for these observers, at this point in time, the stereotype had ONE exception, this particular guy.
Personally I don't think it surprising at all that a sports-guy would be interested in computer games. They are games after all :-)
>>"so I guess these guys have just NEVER hung out with ANY athletes?" Turns out it ISN'T THAT ABNORMAL FOR THEM to like cool and nerdy stuff.
> There can be sports-types who also like intellectual activity
Quite a lot of them, to the point of such people not being exceptional black swans at all. That is what the MMA fighter commented on - the only way to be surprised over him playing computer games is that you dont talk to athletes at all.
The readers of Hacker News are a part of "nerd culture." The author of XKCD is part of "nerd culture" and makes comics out of themes that are common in "nerd culture." Popular themes are often a part of a post that becomes popular on Hacker News. Unsurprisingly, this theme was captured at some point by the nerd of XKCD, and now it is shared here.
It's like... we're all thinking alike (while reveling in how unique we are!)
One of the conventions he really adopts here is binary thinking. He's created an enormous false dichotomy, and then decided he and his in-group are 100% on the correct side of it. Another convention is the commanding, voice-of-God essay that has now finally answered an important question. As if things like this ever have one answer. And as you suggest, at this point he's promoting a "nerds >> normies" ideology that may have been novel in the mid-80s, but now seems hopelessly stale to this nerd.
And I think that leads him to write what is just a poor essay on the topic. These days good a chunk of the independence in my thinking comes from things like humility, self-awareness, and empathy. Maybe at 18 the best strategy for independent thinking is to ignore others. But somebody not much younger than Graham, the biggest threat to my clarity of thought is getting high on my own bullshit. It's getting locked into ideas and beliefs that are comfortable or convenient. It's that thinking myself independent of others is the only kind of independence needed.
Of course, I'm lucky in that since I'm not nearly as successful as Graham, I don't have the same kind of incentive to justify my success in terms of me being a unique, superior genius.
His orthodox of privilege was obviously a public lovers quarrel with Thiel (who was, around the same time, also ranting like a god-headed buffoon in essays to the tune of “the rubes need masters! villainous cackle” on blogs around the web).
They have little information advantage, except in the form of ephemeral financial capital. Human tradition states “rich person = extra special” so we rubberneck at them.
Beneath the pretentious veneer it’s contemporary businessmen. Let’s see them resolve longstanding issues in society and science.
Wagging business success in the face of people who weren’t born yet isn’t terribly novel and their real output isn’t that useful to the future.
How do you avoid making this claim? I think it’s to remember the the trap of fundamental attribution error. People are not always independent-minded or always conformist. They may think independently about some subjects and conform to conventional wisdom for others.
This provides more room for modesty - maybe I was able to think independently about some subject, that one time, or a few times, but certainly not consistently on all subjects. Having some experience might make it reasonable to write about it, with suitable caveats.
So, essays often start out with some kind of explanation of the author’s qualifications, sometimes written as a sort of half-apology to the reader for presuming to write as an expert when you are still learning.
We might also remember the lesson of counter-cultures, which is that rejecting mainstream beliefs more easily happens with the help of other people who believe differently. This makes it more difficult to tell where you stand, since everyone feels like they are being non-conformist in some way. When people are divided then it’s inevitable that you will disagree with some. (Nerd culture is a counter-culture that has become mainstream in some ways, though there are less popular aspects of it.)
Conventional wisdom is also relative to which culture you are talking about. That’s what culture is, an agglomeration of ideas about the best way to do thousands of different things. When you move to a different place, it’s quite possible to get caught between cultures inadvertently and not have any community that thinks quite like you do.
I think that is one reason to react against the essay, but not really.
My problem is fundamentally that it seems like, with the rise of VC worship (I really don't know what else to call it), people now take the pseudo-sociological observations of their VC heroes as fact or at least very close to fact.
Given that we're pretty incredibly shitty at social sciences, even when trying to do it rigorously, I don't understand why I would start giving strong weight to someone who is just pondering in a wall of text about sociological phenomenons/models that I have no reason to believe are how the world actually works.
If your first reaction reading this essay is "PG is trying to big himself up as an independent thinker", that tells me more about your attitude and mental state than about PG.
Forgive the cliche, but "great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people" is a decent heuristic, with good reason. Once you start seeing attempts to communicate as status contests automatically, you're not in a useful frame of mind for rational discourse any more.
This is to say that I reject the premise; your comment would put a chilling effect on frankly discussing other people, as though the only way to do so is through irrationality and gossip. People can critically discuss other people in an intelligent way without having "small minds", and you shouldn't attempt to infer a person's overall "mental state" from this kind of commentary, in my opinion.
That is a fair criticism. I still think there is a difference in degree between (A) reading a long, thoughtful article and responding with unkind speculations about the author, and (B) reading such speculation that has little content in it and responding in turn with unkind speculations about the comment's author; but only a difference of degree, not of kind, I admit.
> your comment would put a chilling effect on frankly discussing other people, as though the only way to do so is through irrationality and gossip.
The proverb I quoted would do that, sure, which is why it's explicitly marked as only a decent (not excellent) heuristic. There are honest, thoughtful ways to go about discussing and criticizing people. Speculations and borderline conspiracy theories are not among them.
It also doesn't apply here, because the grandparent comment is not trying to refute PG's argument, it's mounting an entirely orthogonal one. So yes, I do agree it's not directly discussing the content. But that's also pretty characteristic of most HN threads.
People on HN usually talk about the ideas they have which are evoked by the article. They do not as a rule engage in formal refutation or advocation of the article's core thesis, unless it's very technical in nature.
My interpretation of the quote has always been that discussing people means something along the lines of gossip, i.e. specific people. That being said I think there's a clear difference between simple gossip and critical discussion of others, which can be very intellectually elevated.
The essay is useful because has specific tactical points on how to think better: questioning whether a statement you hear is true, or watching how other people find their beliefs.
What do you think people should be doing more in the world? Or mental habits people should have?
She starts with describing two essential spirits, one being conservative and steady, the other one being progressive and unpredictable. It becomes clear these spirits both inhabit everyone in some way or another and society reflects that as a whole as well.
On a personal level, it gets complicated really fast. People as I know them usually cannot be categorized as easily into one or the other. Some people appear as unconventional and free thinkers, but are set in their ways in many areas, and vice versa. And then it also depends very much on the situation, the atmosphere and so on. Someone who appears timid at first, sometimes just needs a nudge to open up and go bonkers.
So I feel like the notion that you can divide people into these categories is very reductionist.
What I find useful however is balancing the creative/progressive aspect (or spirit) with the conservative/steady one, and not just balancing but letting them guide oneself them deliberately, dependent on context.
John Cleese did a inspirational and funny talk[2] about this subject, that I found quite useful, because he suggests a practical framework to nurture the creative side deliberately.
Similarly, there is this talk[3] from Rich Hickey that describes the notion of giving oneself enough time to think deeply about problems. It relates to the above in the sense that he also acknowledges passive/subconscious mechanisms of our mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltairine_de_Cleyre [1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/voltairine-de-cleyre... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
Reminds me a bit of the Catalonian characteristics of Seny (wisdom or sensibleness) and Rauxa (sudden determination or action):
https://web.archive.org/web/20201127171502/https://theanarch...
But I do get the sense that he's trying really hard to show how deep a thinker he is. (I'm not sure if this has always been the case, or it's a new thing.) His tweets are particularly cringey, but I still follow him because of the occasional nugget.
I don't want to veer too far into politics, but suffice to say, if the institutions of power in your society hold the same values as you, you aren't the "counterculture", no matter how much you claim to be.
Go back and read all his essays. You'll learn more than if you got your MBA. (I know. I've done both.)
Believe me, I'm not PG fan boy, but he doesn't have to do this and I hope he never stops.
PG has wrote some really great essays (the Submarine Article, anyone?). I've read all of them, some of them many times. But if I'm being completely honest, lately it feels like he's writing to write instead of writing because he has something genuinely new and insightful to say.
PG does have a good, prescriptive insight here: you should constantly question what the truth is in a manner of detached concern. You could more concisely call it dispassionate skepticism.
But take away all the dressing about conventionality and thinking in ways others don't, and drill down into that one idea. That would be a great essay.
You got it. There's some technical information for, you know, administering business, like doing CFO and COO, stuff but the main purpose for "famous" MBAs is to make friends you can do deals with.
Well, that and most companies are willing to pay you much more and put you much higher up on the totem pole if you've got an MBA.
> Believe me, I'm not PG fan boy
Sorry, but after that first sentence of course I'm not going to believe you.
The feeling I get essay after essay is that he's struggling to stay relevant. It's kind of sad to watch tbh.
Maybe it would have been more accurate for me to say "culturally relevant". He is increasingly seen by younger people, even engineering types, as out of touch and tone deaf. And too many of his recent essays feel like they are a reaction to that. So much patting himself on the back about how the crowds are wrong and he as such an independent thinker has got it right - and so little vulnerability. My gut tells me that he is trying a little too hard to convince himself and others.
He'd be a far better essayist if he were more like Johnny Cash at the end of his life and less like Liam Gallagher.
I think that "great man" theories of success are sort of dying out among newer generations. Perhaps I've met enough "great men" to realize how large of a factor luck is after a certain threshold point.
He maintained a significant following through essays and probably feels it still works.
In recent years conformists have gotten louder and louder, and more and more insistent that everyone should conform.
His recent essays are his reaction to that.
It would be a strategically bad response for someone of lesser stature, but in his place he can afford to weather the storm and it's valuable for the tiny, narrow target audience of this essay to hear.
You grew up in America and think that? Let me guess, you think that pushing for something like trans access to bathrooms is the "conformist" position.
Based on the values my parents told me to conform to, there's been a massive collapse of conformity in the last two decades.
But if you entertain it, it suggests that sudden shifts in culture (acceptance of gay marriage, for example) proceed along the boundaries of social groups, where people are influenced by both their closest friends and family and the prevailing external "field", until they "flip their poles" and align with the neighbouring domain, at which point it becomes more likely that their other friends and family will do the same, and so on.
Why? Sometimes those people of “lesser strature” are the ones who suffer worse outcomes from majority conformity.
For somebody praising non-conformity the idea of the superiority of the "independent thinker" is a pretty conventional idea. It dates in written form at least back to Plato's philosopher king [1]. You can guess the idea is a lot older than that. There does not seem to be a lot of evidence it leads to better overall outcomes than other, more inclusive approaches. Big successes in human affairs tend to involve getting a lot of people aligned around specific goals.
> Right now Silicon Valley VC thinking is the dominant ideology
Are you sure? Are you talking about the US? And even then it's probably true for only ~half of the states? Are you talking about the business world? The whole of EU seems to strongly disagree with SV VC thinking.
Edit: Why doesn't the EU replicate the success of US startups? You think EU policy makers don't understand what is needed for that? Or that there's not enough "talent"? I doubt it. I think it's a more or less conscious decision to avoid the US startup culture. It's a cultural thing.
The US is dominant in the Western business world, things that become popular business practices here get ported over to the EU.
I think it's pretty clear that if it is not dominant, it is sharply ascendant in the past 5 years. HN commentators and certain segments of Twitter basically worship at the feet of successful VCs.
For me it is absolutely surprising how conventional-minded he is on politics while giving this spiel.
That honor is already claimed by Sam Altman's blog.
*than
"Older White SV Billionaire living in England tells poor American minorities to stop complaining because their politics would lead to an economy with less innovation."
I don't think he is wrong. Some of these very progressive goals can have unintended consequence, but he isn't in a position where he can say those things due to his professional and personal expectations which he has to conform to.
Sounds backwards.
Then I arrived here in the comment section and discovered your refreshingly accurate comment; I knew, immediately, that I did not need to have my own “independent” thought, because you summarized my feelings perfectly.
I was put off by the essay so much; seeing your comment at the top gives me hope.
This point really undermines your argument. I see this kind of response a lot, particularly on the left to people like PG (who I have mixed opinions of) when they have the audacity to write about something they don't have qualifications in (such as economics), or when you just don't like what he's saying on an emotional level. "Oh he thinks he's so clever" is just a childish insult, you're not refuting his central point. You're also second guessing him.
> pretending to be a deep thinker:
This is just an insult. PG clearly reads more than most and is a thoughtful writer.
It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker:
> Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else?
I mean, taken outside of this being a PG essay I would assume this means stay away from SV, but I suspect that's not really the point.
> One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are.
This essay is an object lesson in how this leads to profoundly conventional thinking. This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world.
Right now Silicon Valley VC thinking is the dominant ideology, putting blinders on to what is considered convention isn't cultivating an independent mind, it's an assertion of the status quo.
> An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring.
I agree, but given how beloved rehashed versions of "aren't we the clever independent thinkers!" essays are here I think there is some empirical evidence to the contrary.