Comment by rndmize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rndmize | Hacker News Reader

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While I agree (and would describe the issue as a kind of insularity), I find that PG's essays still have a fair amount of value – if I had to put some kind of measure on it, I'd say that for his older ones I found value in 80-90% of a given essay, while the more recent ones like this, it's closer to 40-50%. Using this one as an example, I disagree with many of the assertions in the first section, some in the second, and find the third to be quite solid.

In particular, his take on the nature/nurture aspect of thinking for yourself is something I disagree with. He specifically notes that he got a fair amount of fastidiousness about the truth from his father and cites high school as a bad place for independent-minded people due to social mechanics – both things that I feel point in the other direction.

I'd go so far as to say that most education systems beat the curiosity out of children with great effectiveness and encourage conformism, and given the lack of classes like philosophy and critical thinking, thinking for yourself has become something mostly passed from parents to children because the parents that have it find it important that their children learn it. I don't think there's anything stopping a great portion of the population learning to evaluate information they receive critically, or qualify the quality of their own knowledge – in fact I'd say it's not only possible but becoming essential, as these seeming once-a-generation satanic panics are beginning to tire me out.

Yeah, there's nature-nurture stuff going on, but there is also a strange inability to grapple with context shifts. What is “conventional” is changing, and an idea which seemed “independent” is no longer.

This is why Alan Kay’s talks about the same are nicer. He is explicit about “you find yourself in a pink world surrounded by pink things and then you have a blue thought which could take you out of the plane of your existence... but you have been to school, to church, you have othe things to do today, and so you squash it—it becomes a ker-splat. But every once in a while you have an unguarded moment, maybe in a shower or waking up, where those things don’t kick in quite so fast and instead your idea gets to suddenly expand for a bit, it becomes a ker-pow. The scientific term for these is ho-lee-shiiit.” It’s not something that is unavailable to others, it is a common human experience.

Then he defines something similar to pg’s idea, but more grounded in two preferences: are you more interested operationally in getting your tasks for today done, or are you more interested in an idea for its own sake even if it doesn't have pragmatic function? And are you intimidated by the reactions of your peers (to whom the blue thought seems insanity?) or do you not care what anyone thinks?

Finally, our inability to invent the future is generally traced to our funding sources. These sources prize innovation, producing an amazing version of whatever is already out there and really perfecting it, rather than discovery or invention, heading out in a risky direction where you don't know what the tasks are, and you just have a vague dream but no idea what challenges you are going to face. He usually mentions NSF proposals, the ones that are successful say here is what I'm going to do and here is how I will do it.

> are you more interested operationally in getting your tasks for today done, or are you more interested in an idea for its own sake even if it doesn't have pragmatic function

This is such a discriminatory way of thinking. For some of us, our "tasks for the day" are full of interest, complexities and possibilities. For a lot of us, our "tasks for the day" are repetitive, prescribed and uninteresting.

Please find a way to talk about people's individual psychology without making it contigent on their relationship to however they make a living.

> for his older ones I found value in 80-90% of a given essay, while the more recent ones like this, it's closer to 40-50%.

This is almost certainly a part of my reaction to PG's latter works; since the earlier stuff felt so spot-on to me at the time, there's an element of anticipation and disappointment when that resonance, once readily available, isn't there. And....that's _okay_. The earlier stuff still happened. I, and PG, and the world have all changed. Poo-tee-weet.

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