Paul Graham – from social shyness to patronizing
Hi ! it’s Cecil here. (A copy of this post is also available on heavy mental)
I’ve been quite upset lately by a few essays from every blogger’s darling : Paul Graham. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any problem with Paul Graham writings about start-up (there or there or there) or Lisp : his background speaks for itself, and one will hardly find any blogger offering more insight regarding these topics.
How art can be good (ouch !)
The problem appears when he leaves his area of expertise. At that point his peremptory voice, fed by his success in IT business, starts to sound a bit annoying. I already have been quite surprised when I read the one about art. Our relationship to art in all its forms has been one of the main subjects of my thoughts for the last 20 years. The bottom line is rather hard to swallow “listen boys and girls, I’ve studied art in Florence and I found out, so I’m gonna tell you How Art Can Be Good and when it just cant“. I really felt uncomfortable about it : the essay was rather childish and narrow-minded, at time to some embarassing extent. Same with philosophy : just by reading the title you dont feel like reading any further.
I was just as uncomfortable reading lies and kids : it reads as if he doesn’t have any, or they just are abstract incarnations of the child concept. Then there is this essay on school and teenage popularity concerns, where basically junior high school is presented as the worst place on earth, and it is compared to prison and, worse, Manhattan society wives .
Paul just jumped the shark with the last one on Cities.
As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What makes it true is that it’s more preposterous to claim about anywhere else
Thinking about a intellectual capital of the world is useless. Especially if the conclusion is the place where the author lives. The bits on London or Paris are terribly naïve and missing the point. Whoever is using the word hip for London or art for Paris can only have a vague understanding of what he is talking about. In addition, big blocks of human culture are completely overlooked here : how about Tokyo ? Shanghaï ?
Hackers are not Painters (thanks God!)
So far I didn’t really feel like blogging anything about that since Paul still is referenced on a regular basis on some of my favorite blogs. But the above is just preposterous indeed. So I have been looking around and via Coding Horror I found this brilliant and sooooooooooo funny post on Idle Words about the famous Hackers and Painters essay. Best parts :
To which I’d add, what hackers and painters don’t have in common is everything else. The fatuousness of the parallel becomes obvious if you think for five seconds about what computer programmers and painters actually do. Computer programmers cause a machine to perform a sequence of transformations on electronically stored data. Painters apply colored goo to cloth using animal hairs tied to a stick.
The reason Graham’s essay isn’t entitled “Hackers and Pastry Chefs” is not because there is something that unites painters and programmers into a secret brotherhood, but because Paul Graham likes to cultivate the arty aura that comes from working in the visual arts
Also remark that in painting, many of the women whose pants you are trying to get into aren’t even wearing pants to begin with. Your job as a painter consists of staring at naked women, for as long as you wish, and this day in and day out through the course of a many-decades-long career. Not even rock musicians have been as successful in reducing the process to its fundamental, exhilirating essence.
But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.
Looking into Paul’s ferocious defiance towards school and corporate culture, it is easy to imagine Paul being a rather shy person, who would rather jump in the ocean than being part of anything looking like a team. I believe that his study of Art and Philosophy probably have been for him an attempt to gain back some of the popularity he has not been enjoying as a nerd in junior high school. Whatever the reason behind these choice, it still proves an amazing strive to learn such strict disciplines.
Writing a blog post ranting about something is one thing. Writing essays and coming up with theories engraved in marble is another one.
Great mind drowning
Computer science (including the related business) is a rather young discipline ; as such, a discipline you can embrace within a lifetime. Which is not the case of art and philosophy. I believe this is why his pattern of thoughts fall flat when he tries to tackle these disciplines.
Reason is surely not the main engine behind artistic creation, who, besides, has no functional purpose whatsoever. There is no way you can cover in a comprehensive manner a Philosophy topic, like you would a programming language or an operating system. This is quite embarassing to see Paul’s great mind whenever it comes to produce valuable sense and unwavering reasoning in IT business, drowning like it does in other areas.
Hackers definitely are neither artist nor philosopher. And reading these essays on the topic, I have the feeling this is not such bad news.
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Entrepreneurship, Europe, Internet, USA, user-generated content
Very good, Cecil! I came across Paul Graham’s cities-article and wondered how he could come up with such conclusions. At least he did some travelling in Europe…
The thing about Paul Graham, and everyone basically, is that he has an agenda. For Graham it’s Y!Combinator, to which he sends a message:
Be smart (Cambridge)
Be the best (Mona Lisa)
Don’t fear the giants (his “Microsoft is weak” post)
etc.
Just like a father, who tells his children to not touch the hot pan because the devil will bite them, realism is perhaps not on the top of his mind when he tries to educate and motivate people.
Matthias, well, I wouldn’t mind living in Berkeley if PG says it’s the place for me…
But hey, this is internet and everyone is entitled to express their opinions. I guess you’re right Vincent, that one thing that could explain his message is to see it having differnet agenda than “realism” (or accuracy, I don’t know what people expect from him, in fact).
The thing about Cambridge is also that he’s not wrong. You could say a lot of things about cities like London, NYC, Paris, but not only that people are intelligent.
Cambridge is a small place with a tradition for intellectual excellence. There are few places in this world that qualify as such. And I can only think of the ones that host the best universities (and not much else), Harvard, Oxford, etc., some of which are focussed on a particular kind of smart, while Cambridge, I don’t know, may be focussed on many kinds of smart.
I’m not saying he’s right or wrong i’m saying he’s patronizing.
He’s been successful in the IT industry so he tells you how to be. Fair enough. As far as I know he has not been in Art, philosophy or sociology.
So his patronizing tone become quite embarassing when he tries to tackle these areas.
On the Cities topic, it’s quite strange to have this addressed by someone who has patently social difficulties (school, corporate culture, etc …). Eavesdropping to get the vibe of the city is pretty symptomatic.
One can say what s/he wants on the internet, that’s true. But between ranting on something on a post blog and engraving immutable truth into bloating essay, there’s a huge difference.
Lastly I’m 100% behind Idle Words post here : PG agenda with these essays is to pretend he’s a cool, international and arty bloke. If he actually was, he would not try to persuade everyone around (including himself) he is. Think Hugh McLeod.
I think, if Mr. G. had renamed his essay to “universities,” he could’ve saved himself some criticism as their IQs are clearly measurable. Call 1 city more intelligent than others, and you risk insulting the other 3158+. That said, even city IQs are measurable, I imagine.
“the essay was rather childish and narrow-minded”
If you have arguments, just present them. Name-calling is just wasting our time.
Well, you were successful at establishing ONE thing:
techiteasy.org sure as hell ain’t the intellectual capital of anything.
Here’s a hint: if you think PG is wrong, SHOW HOW HE’S WRONG. Name calling and whining about being “patronizing” don’t do anything.
Awww, look! A link was posted to Hacker News and a bunch of PG wannabe fanboys have shown up to defend their hero! “Give us proof!” they say. I guess that they read in a PG essay that this is the critical point in essay writing! Here’s a secret: art is not mathematics, there is no “proof”, it is all consensus and experience and aesthetics and talent. Those of us who have been on the culture bus for a few decades just cringe when we read his essays about subjects far outside his domain of expertise. I guess the “proof” is that those of us who have been working in this area for a long time think his culture writing is silly. Remember Bush talking about “the internets”? That’s what PG sounds like to us, that he knows a little and is trying to sound like he understands it in depth. In contrast his writing about technology and technology business is excellent. He should stick to writing about what he knows.
You’re certainly entitled to disagree with anything PG or anyone else thinks, I just don’t see what there is to be “upset” or “annoyed” about.
He’s just a guy who thinks a lot about stuff, and sometimes likes to put his thoughts into lengthy discussion pieces and put them out there for other people to think about if they choose to. That’s not patronising, it’s contributing to public discussion and helping himself and others to form more robust opinions.
As it turns out, his writings strongly resonate for a lot of, well, geeks like him.
Whilst evoking entertaining thoughts of how the world would be if everyone were to limit their discussions to some tightly defined “area of expertise”, your piece does nothing to advance any debate.
And Fran, so it is that the cultural elites most jealously guard their turf.
“It is all consensus” you say.
What a neat little insight into what is so wrong with your group-think world.
I wouldn’t call me a “wannabe” or “fanboy”. I like to think I’d defend anybody you called names, without even apparent cause.
Fran: I tried reading this article with a mind towards culture, but then it looks even worse. When the response to a “Here’s what I think, and here’s why” essay is mere name-calling, it’s hard to imagine any light in which that will look good.
(Are we supposed to say “Oh, some experts on the internet think his arguments are childish and annoying. They must be right! Even though they can’t point out any flaws.”?)
If you need to “work” in “culture” for “a few decades” to be able to see why a reasonable-looking argument is bunk, and the best response one can summon is name-calling, that looks symptomatic of a field that *needs* such iconoclastic people.
I’m not saying everything has to be science and logic, and I’m not saying PG’s essays are without flaw. There are good critiques of them; this is not one of them.
While I don’t always agree with Paul Graham’s point of view and some of his essays tend to rub me the wrong way from time to time, I would hardly say that he speaks out of his areas of expertise very often. First, most of his articles are related to either Computer Science topics or Startups, both topics of which I’m sure he is well suited to talk about given his academic background and his experience with Viaweb and Y Combinator. Second, even those articles that do not directly deal with either of the aforementioned topics tend to have an underlying purpose that can be directly linked back to either one–think of these essays as allegory. Finally, I noticed that the example you gave of Graham talking out of his area of expertise is in the essay in which he speaks about How Art Can Be Good. Well, I’m not sure if you’re aware of his background or not, but he did study painting at two of the most prestigious schools in the world (the Rhode Island School of Design and the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence) so I would guess that his background most likely makes him more suited to speak on this topic than yours would give you license to criticize him on it.