A great example are his 5-6 posts talking about how the most important facet of a programming language is its brevity (https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sex...). At no point does he cite any facts backing that up. Even when the brevity chasing language he created failed to gain traction, he didn’t see that as an indication to recheck his assumptions.
In other words, “feelings don’t care about your facts”. But hey, there’s a market for that sort of article. So who are we to judge?
Even this critical essay looks like it fails to meet its own standard.
A "profoundly unserious" writer which is "mired in intuition and incuriosity"? Nowhere in the post are these terms rigorously defined!
And look! The author accuses Graham of "tantalizing the reader by reducing complex problems down to singular, nebulous concepts" without mentioning principal component analysis! "Profoundly unserious", I say.
Anyway, pg himself has been clear about rejecting seriousness as a virtue multiple times. See this essay for instance http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html
Even then, the average HN comments section is highly sceptical of any claims in any post. The top comment is usually critiquing the link for one reason or another. For some reason, that wasn’t the case with PG articles. You’re only remarking about this now because HN is finally holding PG to the same standard that others are.
I haven't noticed a trend for comments on PG articles to be less critical. If anything I think I've noticed users feeling a need to be more critical (as I feel your comment illustrates).
It's OK to hold pg to a higher standard than others in terms of factually supporting his claims. Fine. Just be clear that you are doing so. It's fine to remind others not to take his word as gospel as well.
This is similar to the fact that experts are not always the best teachers, or that a rhetorically skilled speaker/writer is not necessarily a competent linguist or literary scientist, or how many great musicians know little about music theory.
Of course, you are correct that many, many other tech bloggers don't back up their claims either (most notoriously the "I did this thing once at company X, it worked ok, and now I'm preaching it as a new gospel (but it hasn't even been a year that we did this and we don't understand the long-term implications of it yet)" blog posts). I think this is in general a real shame because it leads to all the cargo culting madness that's so prevalent in the industry.
In PG's case, I find that most of his blog posts read like post hoc rationalisations based on sweeping generalisations (e.g. that you can be either "earnest" or jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a particularly false dichotomy). Which wouldn't nearly bother me as much if they weren't also often full of thinly veiled contempt for different kinds of people (e.g. people who are actually good at bringing people together). It sometimes reads to me as a sort of "I was bullied/excluded as a nerdy teenager and now I'm gonna show them how much better nerds are and why they will (or at least should) rule the world". In a world where we increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies making decisions that impact all of us, including people completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't think this is a very good position to take.
Fair point
>you can be either "earnest" or jovial and funny and not both strikes me as a particularly false dichotomy
I'm looking at the essay and I'm not seeing where it says this? Maybe I just forgot.
>people who are actually good at bringing people together
From the essay (in a footnote):
>It's interesting how many different ways there are not to be earnest: to be cleverly cynical, to be superficially brilliant, to be conspicuously virtuous, to be cool, to be sophisticated, to be orthodox, to be a snob, to bully, to pander, to be on the make. This pattern suggests that earnestness is not one end of a continuum, but a target one can fall short of in multiple dimensions.
The closest thing on the list to "bringing people together" in my mind would be being cool, which isn't very close IMO.
>In a world where we increasingly realise the dangers of big tech companies making decisions that impact all of us, including people completely outside of the original tech bubble, I don't think this is a very good position to take.
I don't trust the general population to make decisions either--see our current president for an example of what they can sometimes go for.
The typical reaction to PG essays on HN has been the exact same flavor of negative for many, many years now. Go back and read the comments on his previous submissions. PG himself even wrote an essay about uncharitable criticism and basically exited the site in 2015.
It's very surprising to me that anyone could think that, in 2020, it's new and original to bash PG articles on HN.
Whether any of this is really the cause of there being more startups in Scandinavia than elsewhere is something I'm not able to answer, but the earnestness is certainly present.
The downside is that Norwegians (or at least Norwegian institutions) can be distrustful of foreign academic qualifications; even those from a highly respected institution that is older than Norway, unless they have personal knowledge of it.
My personal experience is that life is simpler here than in my country of origin (UK); mostly things 'Just Work (tm)' and that might be why startups are more common.
Is this a downside, or has the rest of the word devalued its academic qualifications by lowering its standards, failing to seriously tackle cheating, and (relevant to postgraduate degrees and academic titles) prioritising novelty and sensation at the expense of rigour?
I've never seen the inside of a top UK or US university, so I can't be sure that they're churning out meaningless undergrad degrees, but they certainly seem to be complicit in these trends at the level of publishing and hiring/promotion/tenure.
It's too reductionist to take only the part "earnest, therefore startup". Sort of implying that if only other nations were also more earnest they'd also have startups and wealth, disregarding all the possibly good reasons that those other nations have not to be trusting/earnest.
But it's also too dismissive to say to this that it's "national stereotyping" therefore it immediately must be false and there can be no connection at all between earnestness/trust and startups in the case of Scandinavia.
When everybody is just like you, it leads to high trust, no us vs them mentality. Same is true in eg. South Korea and Japan.
Contrast this with their similarily northern neighbour Russia, which is basically the America of eastern europe. A nation resulting from a melting pot of ethnicitiess, languages, cultures (most current Russians are really assimilated from smaller native cultures, their great grandparents didn't identify as Russian). And the end result? Corruption. Everybody just tries to milk public funds as much as they can, and so forth.
It's hard to have very high trust levels when your own government and state are working against you and when your coworkers and neighbors can at any time rat you out for unpatriotic activities.
Denmark and Sweden have been at war with each other so many times you can't give an exact number as it becomes difficult to say when it's a prolonged war and when it's 2 seperate wars.
A simplified list: https://useless-denmarkfacts.tumblr.com/post/125179860721/al...
If I wanted a glib answer I'd attribute it to a combination of less feudalism and more Lutheranism, plus a bit of Hanseatic trading.
The lack of feudalism as a contrast to other nations and the excess of Lutheranism were mostly a long time ago as was the Hanseatic league. And while Scandinavia looks homogeneous to outsiders, especially to those from far away, the three countries have distinct characters and distinct histories. Part of how each behaves has to do with the climate and topology of each country as well as the accidents of history in recent centuries. At least one Danish king was famous for picking fights with his neighbours which is one reason why Denmark is so small, Sweden had a French king for a while which left its mark on the language and the structures of society. Norway for a long time was simply far away and difficult to travel in which means that decentralisation worked as there was almost no choice. Towns only 10 km apart on the map might have very distinct dialects because there is a mountain in the way meaning that it is a 100 km trip from one to the other.
The glib answers, as I suspect you were saying, are usually wrong or very partial (in both senses of the word).
I mean, sure, not completely, they definitely had some of their population deported by Nazis, but it wasn't such a major impact as elsewhere in Europe.
The WWII in Scandinavia was particularly bad, including the occupation of Norway and Denmark.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Weserübung
They did escape the contemporary ones the same way any other country in Europe did anyway.
But the king of Norway and members of the army escaped to London and directed the resistance from there.
Ask the Jews that owned the houses and nursing homes that were confiscated for the Lebensborn project and the kids that survived it (not many), what they think about it.
Others had it worse doesn't mean they escaped the war and its consequences.
If the eastern block is where you draw the line, you could argue that many parts of Europe escaped the war.
But it would be historically false.
Finland is somewhat exceptional among the Nordics as they were quite poor and had some shit to deal with from Russia (and Sweden) but managed to become rich and high trust.
They have been at war for 2 centuries like much of Europe.
Depending on who you ask, Ottomans were their allied or their enemies in Scandinavia, at times they have been both like Denmark allied of Ottomans against Russia that then switched side and sided with Russia that gave them land from Sweden.
https://i.redd.it/4r4yx17hf9a51.png
There were big differences between Scandinavian countries and they have been at war for a long time.
Denmark for example owned Ghana, like Belgium owned Congo.
They were richer than say Finland.
France has been involved in less wars during the same time span.
Another example: Spain and Portugal weren't bombed during WW2, they were not occupied, they stayed mostly neutral, but didn't develop an high trust society.
It must be something else.
Experience, perhaps?
As a French who lived a number of years in Scandinavia, it is day and night. It doesn't mean that people in those countries never cheat, but in France, the default attitude is cheating. Always. About everything and anything. Even when there is nothing to win and being straight or earnest would be much easier. It is exhausting.
> This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,”
Well, this assertion is equally true :-D
(Yet it would also come with being more or less "cool", which is opposite to what pg suggests, so I guess I have no idea ! XD)
https://jakubmarian.com/corruption-perceptions-index-of-euro...
Perhaps the particularly dry brand of Scandinavian pragmatic irony is lost on pg because pg is too earnest to notice that they’re on the other side of a zetetic event horizon.
And yeah, most of the time, brits are relatively bad cooks.
They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest, it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises.
Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers have Portuguese nationality.
I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia.
I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the facts are definitely not there.
If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with a very different idea of what being earnest means.
I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously. What makes Scandinavian countries any more or less earnest than, say, Germany or France? This seems no better than to say, “The French make great lovers,” or “The British are terrible cooks.” Absent any evidence to back them up, many such statements in PG’s essays seem to be an expression of his prejudices. The very least he could do is to provide some criterion the reader can use to test “earnestness” at the population scale.
In this case, I imagine that he started from “Scandinavia is the region with the highest number of startups per capita” and inferred that this must mean that they are more earnest, rather than going the other way around.