Why attack someone for an opinion? I agree that pure cynicism is toxic online, and merely pointing out flaws without solutions can be worse than useless, but that message was not this.
I read it as a warning that PG skews his arguments to prove some narrow points and you should be careful when applying them to your life, so you don't waste years chasing improbable goals. Plenty failed start-ups exemplify this.
GP has a fair counterpoint. Yes, PG, like every pundit, is biased. Yes, many of us here read his essays in our younger, more naive years, and it took time to learn how they're not as seminal as we thought. But yes, pointing that out is also a meme at this point; it starts to feel like a hash-table dismissal[0], which is not very interesting or useful.
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[0] - 'dang described it long ago as behaving as if there was a great hash table in the sky, mapping a person's name to the simplest and most well-known fault of them, and as if commenters were somehow obliged to dereference that hash table every time some person's name is mentioned.
The hash-table response is a good one -- you're right.
But I still interpret it as debiasing tool for those that aren't very familiar to PG's writing, so it's not really useless. After all, there must still be new HN users all the time, for which some things are worth repeating (just not too often).
> But yes, pointing that out is also a meme at this point; it starts to feel like a hash-table dismissal...
Eh. I think of it as a warning that younger us (or -at least- younger me) would have very, very, very much appreciated when we were first reading the essays.
Yeah, _you_ have had these realizations about how less-profound-than-they-seem the essays are, and _you_ have read the essay(s). But, like, the essays keep popping up... why not also keep mentioning that they're not as profound as they seem? There's _always_ going to be someone who's reading the essays for the first time, so why discourage folks from providing the new reader the opportunity to read valid criticism of the essays developed over the years?
Fine, but that comment was not a proper criticism or a warning - it was a dismissal. Even having revised my opinions on pg and his writings, I find coldtea's summary to be unfair.
Loved that essay back in 2005, you know. PG and YC were just starting then, no? But, since then, I watched in awe what they built and how their work touches and improves my life every day.
Maciej? He's writing about how we shouldn't go to Mars these days. He's and excellent and very entertaining writer and I am sure he has plenty to teach me but I'd rather listen to PG. My focus is limited and I'd rather follow someone who already helped me get ahead and showed me what the possibilities truly are instead of pushing his limits onto me.
But, please indulge me, I am curious: how is this mindset serving you? Are you a happy person? Are you a balanced person? Are you a successful person? Do you have everything you need? How long have you been thinking like that? What would it take to change your mind?
How is turning an exchange about the merits of going to Mars or the quality of a VC-slash-startup-guru-blogger output into cheap psychologizing and ad hominems serving you?
Do you think you come out as balanced and happy by doing this?
Do you regularly think anybody that thinks differently than you, or doesn't gulp down whatever snake-oil the "succesful" sell, is problematic, unhappy, unsuccesful, unbalanced, and should "change their mind"?
Do you think that only business guru admirers or grind culture entrepreneurs are "happy"? Do you think only techno-optimists dreaming of strongmen like Musk and Bezos giving them Mars colonies are "balanced"? (And do you think either groups are anywhere close to a balanced person, as opposed merely naive and happy-go-lucky victims of Californian Ideology?)
Belief systems can all be attractive in theory but you can compare their merits by simply looking at the actual results in the life of people adopting them.
Since you are aggressively pushing yours onto others it would be interesting to know how they work for you. Sorry if it felt as an ad hominem attack, it was never my intention, I was just curios. My apologies.
>Belief systems can all be attractive in theory but you can compare their merits by simply looking at the actual results in the life of people adopting them.
>Since you are aggressively pushing yours onto others it would be interesting to know how they work for you.
Well, it has worked fine thus far. So, there's that.
Not sure what kind of "belief system" you have deduced I have, based on that I'm against the hype of Mars missions, or I don't like VC-culture.
It hardly seems enough to deduce any general belief system, much less one that has wide consequences in personal life, as was implied. If anything, both sound more like common sense, or at least not being pro-hype or sucking up to the rich, than a belief system.
Maybe you should ask the same question to SunghoYahng, the user who started this thread? That wasn’t very constructive either, and neither was coldtea’s response.
“I read it as a warning that PG skews his arguments to prove some narrow points and you should be careful when applying them to your life, so you don't waste years chasing improbable goals”
They were being just as curt as nickpp. What they wrote was not as reasonable as your lines above, hence the response. From my pov, the main reason that you’re criticizing nickpp is because his opinion doesn’t match your own.
The irony here is that I’m more sympathetic to your viewpoint, but I’ll try to be constructive beyond just calling you out:
* These essays take a lot of work to write
* These essays are not hidden behind a paywall
* The essays capture the POV of a successful startup founder and more importantly a successful startup investor
* Does the advice apply to everyone? Probably not everyone 100%. I doubt many of his essays even apply to 25% of people, or even 10% depending on the topic.
* still, many people have profited off pg’s advice in some way
* If you don’t like pg’s essays, you don’t have to read them
* pg founded HN. Don’t be surprised to see people defending pg here.
I read it as a warning that PG skews his arguments to prove some narrow points and you should be careful when applying them to your life, so you don't waste years chasing improbable goals. Plenty failed start-ups exemplify this.