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What to Do

(paulgraham.com)
274 points npalli | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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voidhorse ◴[] No.43515252[source]
pg's writing is so lazy. At best he engages with thinkers in a superficial way, further, he never expands his horizons beyond the typical cadre of classics, he says nothing of actual intellectual substance and worth, and if anything he legitimizes an uncritical stance toward the world (a sort of pseudo-intellectual neopositivism). I still think a poverty of exposure and experience in the history of philosophy and literature on the part of his audience is the only reason he gets any sort of readership.
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booleandilemma ◴[] No.43515568[source]
Can you recommend a writer you like? Have you written anything?
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voidhorse ◴[] No.43521374[source]
I can recommend several. If pg's essays have some amount of appeal to you, you are probably potentially interested in philosophy, here are just a few people who have authored works of far greater eloquence, depth, and significance than anything paul graham has ever written:

Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, Ryle, Montaigne, Maggie Nelson, Didion, Bertrand Russel, Jean Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Niklas Luhmann, Norbert Wiener, Hienz von Forester, Hans Georg Gadamer, Juergen Habermas, Rebeca Solnit...

And these are just the few people that came to mind off the cuff. If I bothered to look I could probably give you more.

These tech luminaries act as though no philosophy or significant social analysis or cultural criticism has happened in the west since Plato and Cicero, but it's simply...entirely untrue. There's a wealth of deep, enriching philosophical heritage to explore, and I think these bozos don't engage with it because they are either too lazy (much easier to read translations of the classics) too disingenuous (much easier to base your sophistry on material that is so old as to not be contested) , or too self righteous (they already possess the one truth birthed directly by the divine cells of their brains because they like the lisp programming language and worked at yahoo, so why bother to interact with the thought of others in a serious way?) to bother. Not to mention, they don't dare engage with the highly complex dedicated academic studies of the classics anyway. I doubt pg has done little more than read a modern translation of Cicero. Probably not even Leob, probably Penguin Random House. But hey, those ignorant of the gold vein will happily lop up pewter.

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1. booleandilemma ◴[] No.43523874{3}[source]
Thanks for that list. I've read about a third of Plato's dialogues (penguin classics, lol) but I'm still at the beginning of my philosophical journey. After I finish Plato I'll start reading the works of modern philosophers. There are many on your list I haven't even heard of.

Regarding pg, I think what happens is when people get rich they think that gives them deep philosophical insight into things. It's not just tech people, I think the same thing happened to Ray Dalio, for instance.