emmanuel81

The original title of Schopenhauer's “Art of Controversy” could be more accurately translated as “The Art of being always Right” (Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten). The reason why he described those stratagems was to prove his point: that the goal of a controversy is not finding the truth. According to him, it was like a fight where you just want to win.

PG advocates for controversies that help find the truth. Thus he makes a difference between fallacies and real arguments. To Schopenhauer, real arguments are actually fallacies, because mere humans have other goals than the truth. Ironically, in http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, PG followed Wittgenstein in that “most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language”. In a philosophical context, at least, this should lead to a similar conclusion as Schopenhauer's.

Now, whether the case of philosophy should be extended to the rest of controversies is an interesting question. My answer would be yes. I wonder what PG would say. The fun part is that, whatever he says, Schopenhauer will still be right (look: he doesn't care of the truth, he just wants to win the argument!). That's the whole fun of controversies about controversy...

Ok, let's prentend I didn't write the stupid suggestions (which i still find funny). The fact remains, this essay is basically a compilation of ideas already expressed by PG, who needs to know that some of his fans are disappointed... Mod it up, if you want good writing!

Yet another essay on startups, by PG... It appears that essays tend to be cheaper to make, as time goes on, too (thanks to, you know, copy/paste). I couldn't find any ideas here that hadn't been expressed elsewhere in your writings or wasn't self-evident. We want more crazy controversial stuff, like the last (brilliant) one on philosophy!

Ideas for new subjects:

- "google is dead";

- "how to fund painters";

- "all things considered, java rocks";

- "vaporware, or why I gave up arc";

- "return of the web 1.0"

There are plenty of weird ideas that only wait for PG to write clever stuff on them! Seriously, I don't know why people like FOWA, whoever that is, actually pay you to listen to the same old story...