Or when you’re doing research, where you’re supposed to be aware of… uhm… what other people have already tried and are trying…

If all you have is the words ‘Dunning-Kruger’, everything looks like superior and inferior people misunderstanding their place in the hierarchy.

“my essay is so deep it needed SEVEN people to read drafts of it to hone it to perfection”

Wait, you cant publish what people already know? I thought you just cant publish things journals dont care about. Wasnt the replication crisis in part because repeating research gets published if you get a positive result, but not a negative?

Same with startups, you dont need a bad idea, you need an idea that convinces venture capitalists to invest, no matter how stupid it is, or how impossible it will be to ever become profitable. The initial VC people can get their money back by convincing the follower VC people that the price will go up up, and all those pesky laws preventing profitability will be changed. And at a high level, value isnt ‘real’. (Musk is worth billions in stock, but as soon as he would sell all that stock the price would crash, or see also the bitcoin bullshit, where everybody is ignoring the enormous amount of satoshi bitcoins which have not moved in ages (worth ~20 billion USD at the current crazy levels)). It only becomes ‘real’ when you extract the value out of the system, with stocks you need others to buy those stocks, or be able to exchange your stocks for other things.

But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you’ll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to, and to think of more.

This explains so much neonazi shit.

Highschools

Also how old is Graham? Does he still have a highschool trauma? Ow god was Foucault right? [I actually don’t know what Foucault said about schools apart from saying they are prisons].

Also, I am very intelligent, if independent minded people are important, what does that say about people agreeing with you Paul? Anyway as this proves im smart, please invest in my startup, it automatically generates ideas by spidering the internet for comments that say ‘this is stupid’ and then makes a company and patents the idea the previous comment was reacting to, which independent contractors can then apply and work on for wages they internally compete for. All using machine learning and blockchain of course.

E: somebody else will have to do a post about just the high level of privilege this post (and the target audience) shows.

For bonus self-harm here’s the HN comments. At least there’s a few people calling things out.

jesus fucking christ at least “paul” “graham” used to have brevity going for him. you can’t make me read all of that.

Paul Graham’s writing seems to just generally be him not so subtly patting himself on the back and talking about how wonderfull he is.

What does Paul Graham do these days? I thought he retired from YCombinator so you can’t tell me he spends a month each on these recycled essays. I can’t even hate read it, I got halfway through and it’s just banal.

An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new.

Cue Statler and Waldorf - “you first!”

“Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities — all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.” - Theodore Roosevelt