One gem in here that has not been high-lit by other commenters in this thread that stands out for me because that's one that I did figure out very early on in life (and this served me very well) is this one:

"As I've written before, one byproduct of technical progress is that things we like tend to become more addictive. Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions—to stand outside ourselves and ask "is this how I want to be spending my time?""

Please do ask yourself that question often, and if the answer is 'no' or 'maybe' then simply don't and save yourself a lot of grief and regret in the long run.

Ok. "20 or so" describes me. And things aren't going so well.

Out of uni, and life feels pretty empty. Family has fallen apart, friends are friends of convenience, work is very intense - perhaps too much - and everything is going into keeping going. The brave face, making sure I eat, making sure I run, cycle, climb.

The dreams I had even six months ago, feeling ever more impossible. The lure of things I found rewarding in the past - computer games, novels, reddit, hacker news, debating - proving substanceless, insufficient.

The games and the websites are addictive.

> is this how I want to be spending my time?

No. But the truth is I do not know how else to spend my time.

I feel like I should find another job. Move to a different city or country. But I don't know how to do these things. I do not know if these things will help. I have a feeling the problem is me.

So when I am trapped in an empty bed, in a house of people who 'get on', in a city that is ok. I read the novels, I play the games, and I click the links. I try and forget I am here, living in bullshit.

Remember that wasting time at 20 seems OK, wasting it at 30 will make you nervous, and if you're still doing it at 40, you'll wonder where all the time went. It really happens surprisingly fast - at 29, you feel young, but a short decade later, you'll fret about being "too old" (which is an illusion, but it takes a while to know that). Don't worry that you'll mess up your career or anything else by taking some time to do something adventurous. Pretty much whatever you do, you'll look back and thank yourself for stepping out rather than hunkering down.

BTW, as for "work is very intense" - it probably isn't worth it. I burnt out once after a few years of very intense, very committed work. I wasn't better off at the end of it and nobody says "thank you", not sincerely anyway. And after you leave, the waters close around you and it will be like you were never there. So if you're not enjoying it, maybe it's the kind of bullshit you can do without?

Wow that imagery is powerfully sad. Corporate culture and its structural constraints makes monsters of all of us.

I didn't mean it to be ;) I'm an optimist at heart, honestly, and I'm not sitting here feeling I've wasted my life or anything. But there are some things I wouldn't do again if I had my time again, and working hard for unappreciative, self-centred people is one of them.

That's a bit of a luxury, you don't always have that choice but on the whole I agree with the idea. I'd re-phrase it to don't work for assholes if you can avoid it. I'm fortunate enough now that this is a rare occurrence but even now every now and then a deal goes by that is financially too sweet to let go and I still take them. Last year this happened once, the previous 3 years not at all. So unless you're totally secure in your finances keep that door open a crack.

Good to see you on this side of the line after two heart surgeries.

If I could go back and tell myself something, or if I had kids to advise, this is the essence of it.

Once you've got your basic needs met, anything you do to enrich your character is going to make you a more compelling person. Don't squander your 20s and 30s. Take advantage of opportunities that present themselves, because it's a lot harder to cultivate new opportunities from scratch.

GP, if you can actually afford to pick up and try something new, you really ought to do it. It's so easy nowadays: pick a city and spend two weeks at an Airbnb. If you like it, stay longer, and if not, go back or go somewhere else.

Finally, when I was 27 and my first child arrived that phase ended, then it very much mattered if there was money on the table and life suddenly changed from being relatively free to being quite structured with a very high penalty on any inability to provide. I made a pretty conscious decision to stop following just what interested me but to chase the buck and with the knowledge gained in the preceding years that was quite easy.

Go see the world while the current phase lasts, sooner or later life will really trap you (compared to your situation atm) and then you're on the hook for many years before you will have some of this freedom back again. By then your body will be one that you can't compare to today (and I'm saying that as a reasonably fit person of 50+), your time will be spoken for at some regular interval and so on.

The right time to strike out into the world is now, don't worry overly about how you'll finance any or all of this, a few hundred in savings would be enough to broaden your horizon tremendously and that alone will give you an advantage over those that are rooted to their hometown.

This, by the way is what fuels my 'journeyman' projects that I try to do each year now, they're a link back to my past, basically not a new thing but a continuation. It's been incredibly rewarding to meet all these new people and to help them to achieve their dreams and contribute a little bit to solving their problems even if not a single cent ever changed hands. I very much look forward to doing another round of these this coming summer.

I am going to make a bold claim here. I hear this very often among people in the west. I here the same among people in India(I'm from India) who come from families who are rich, well supplied with resources. Perhaps its the saturation that a person reaches a point after a person reaches and experiences a sufficient degree of sufficiency.

>>I have a feeling the problem is me.

It is hard to convince your mind to prepare for a grand struggle, challenge or a mission- when none exists. The west(especially US) is already reached the pinnacle of what a developed nation could look like. Schools are free, Country wide road network is nothing like anywhere, Cities with opportunities all over the place, Infrastructure is simply amazing, you can take water out of any tap in the country and it will be clean, you have social security ... the list is endless.

On top of all this if your family is even from lower middle class, you are generally well provided for.

Your mind doesn't identify with any struggle or even acknowledge that one exists. This can for sure cause 'Why am I here' crisis. Like I said I see this same among a lot of friends in India, especially among people from rich families.

So the right response is to change your viewpoint to one where the problems you are confronted with match your abilities to solve them, in order to get better at this so that you can solve larger problems later on (and it helps that while you're doing this you also make contact with other people who will in turn become your real-life network).

This can take a while, but that's fine. Living in India or the West would not change much in this respect but for someone that grew up in the West to go to India would likely change their perspective on life and values tremendously, just like the reverse would happen if someone from India moved to the West for a while. They'd come back a different person, and would mature a large amount in a relatively short time.

Which dreams? Are the people who have achieved dreams like those that much more capable of you? One of my realizations is just how much less important intelligence is to drive. If you want something, oftentimes the difference is doing the work. Make sure it's a meaningful dream (e.g. not "get rich" which impacts happiness surprisingly little).

"I feel like I should find another job. Move to a different city or country. But I don't know how to do these things."

Are you more or less capable than the millions of people who find new jobs or move? You sound smart and educated. "Don't know how" seems like a pretty soft excuse. Everything has an "undo" button. Get a new job and it sucks? Well, you tried and learned some interesting things about yourself and the world-- go find another one. Move to a different city and find out that you don't love it? Well, you got to explore a cool place that wasn't for you, and maybe you met some interesting people. Move back or move to a new city.

But I can't help but feel like it's all wrong. Work hard for what? So you can amass enough money for when you're too old to work? That whole way of life seems counter to the "life is short" argument. Because of that, I find myself needing to constantly move on, ever searching for something truly fulfilling. Work seemed to fulfill me for 4 years or so, but I feel like I've achieved what I set out to achieve, and now it is hollow.

In many ways this is a solidification of a lot of what I have been thinking

Take leave or negotiate unpaid leave if you have to. Try just a weekend at first.

If you think you can't afford to travel, find travel you can afford. That might be domestic, camping, sleeping in the back of a car on a road trip, going to less-in-demand national parks. See and do something new.

For people who aren't yet parents, it compares a bit to the way your thinking about money matures when you get your first job. Suddenly a shirt equals two hours of labor instead of some abstract quantity of a theoretically finite resource. This triggers in many of us a quest to figure out income, so we can get the things we want. But even the affluent among us can't just throw more time at all the things they'd want to do.

But is life is too short to use your wealth and power to help solve the problem you acknowledge there is? That sounds like a weird idea. Most of PGs essays aren't controversial they are more informative. Why is life too short for that?

If anything PG is a thinker and a good one at it. He doesn't get everything right (who does) but he is a smart enough thinker to be able to develop his thinking.

You can read his essay in three ways.

1) Life is too short, I don't like writing essays about things that interest me anymore.

2) Life is too short, I just want to kick back and enjoy my family and the money I have.

3) Life is too short.

No matter how you turn it around I fail to see why he would give up writing something that he surely enjoys doing. Especially when you have the power to actually get people to take you serious. (Perhaps thats the problem?)

So why should life be too short for that? Only PG knows. But I think he is proving that either some of the "conspiracy theorists" in this thread are not wrong, or some of his critiques of his last couple of essays are not wrong either.

Ouch.

> I understand what it means when people say life is to short.

I'll bet, that's the kind of thing that will make this a background feeling almost continuously.

> But is life is too short to use your wealth and power to help solve the problem you acknowledge there is?

Well, PG is - in his own way - doing just that. He made quite a few people quite wealthy and he wasn't exactly obliged to do so. After all the first exit he had was one where he could have comfortably lived for the rest of his years without spending a single micro-second on the problems of others.

> That sounds like a weird idea.

It is, and I don't think that idea is actually present in this essay or any of the others. Horses for courses, PG is good at what he does and uses his wealth in the way he thinks best matches his skillset. Contrasted with say Zuckerbergs fairly hollow 'letter to my daughter' I frankly much prefer the PG variety, though of course I already had quite a different opinion about those two individuals before either of them wrote a line.

> Most of PGs essays aren't controversial they are more informative. Why is life too short for that?

He's not saying he won't write more essays. He's saying that he's going to be more in fire-and-forget mode, engaging the audience on his terms rather than feeling that he has to respond to each and every person out there with an axe to grind and an internet connection. I'd say more power to him.

So given that I won't go into the second part of your comment because I think you derailed somewhere right at the beginning making the rest not really relevant.

Hence the 'bullshit' line.

Other than that what other controversial essays have he written? Maybe one other?

Actually, don't "simply don't" because that's not a useful way to go about improving things. Learn how your brain works and what you can do to actively change the way it currently operates. You wouldn't expect a trainer at the gym to simply tell you "get stronger" and walk away. You need to learn how muscles work, what types of exercises to perform, how to perform them, and then you need to achieve consistency.

(I can only imagine how much sooner I would have achieved consistent happiness if my school teachers and parents would have refrained from simply demanding I "pay attention!" and instead taught me how.)

Anecdote: Thursday night I was going to the bathroom and dropped my phone in the toilet. Doneso - no amount of rice was saving that thing. Replacement can't get here til Monday. After that understandably frustrating experience my girlfriend made a point to call out that I pretty much didn't flinch over it all. Kinda laughed it off. For context, the learned behaviors I've owned since childhood typically goad me into punching a wall over such incidents.

It's a bit difficult to explain, but putting actual practices into play to alter the way you think/react/act feels to me like "unburdening" yourself. There was a great line in the book 10% Happier (great, easy read, no self-improvement BS) about the author wanting to call it "The Voice In My Head Is An Asshole" that kind of gets to the heart of it all, for me. We don't control ourselves! That's not how every day living is set up. If we could, then we'd never be sad or angry or stressed. It would be that simple; just tell yourself to be happy and you'd be happy. Such a simple concept but not something easily internalized.

The next step was to remove things from my life that cause stress and are not worth the effort because of the BS they involve. Whether that's just life situations or clients it has been very refreshing.

The next step was to kill a lot of tv/movies, and most of my free time internet usage.

Finally, I started steadily filling in the new time gainings with things I really care about and the personal sense of well-being and accomplishment has improved drastically.

So I have no intent of doing anything other than continuing to go down this road, I've gotten in better physical shape, better health, enjoy life more, have learned a new language, visited many new places, my stress level has dropped by at last 200%, its been a very positive journey so far.

You may lose friends because they may think you don't care enough about them since you don't call them frequently anymore (and emails do not work for everyone).

You are unreachable through the modern messengers because you refuse to waste time on a gazillion of them.

Other people update their friends through Facebook. If you opt for an alternative like email (async and focusing on message) then you may be weird for some.

Being focused is great and indeed makes wonders in productivity. Nevertheless, in most cases around 6 hours of quality mental work is the limit. The rest you have to do a lower mental effort activity. That means either writing boilerplate code, answering emails, meetings, reading hn but possibly not learning a new language or meeting new people.

Stress levels fell because you are in control of your life or so you feel since you have limited external signals. That may not be true but you can't be sure always since you have limited environmental feedback. Nevertheless, being ultra responsive means less control also for me (without getting too philosophical).

All in all, I agree with all the steps listed above. That does mean they are the path to enlightenment for everyone or without drawbacks.

Having mentioned that, I feel that for a similar strategy was net positive. Mostly because context switching has large costs and because our modern world makes money by distracting us (feeds us with us about superficial needs/lifestyle and forcing us to measure our sense of self on metrics based on narrow minded philosophies -- consumerism of info(/)products).

I'm not getting involved in the overall discussion, just wanted to highlight this gem. This is so true.

In a conversation about Netflix's announcement of worldwide availability the other day I put it this way - so much of the economy is based on cultivating and indulging in mindlessness.

If you cultivate mindfulness you see how pointless and wasteful so much of people's activities are.

> The next step was to kill a lot of tv/movies, and most of my free time internet usage.

So I actually figured out that TV was the devil in early high school and stopped watching it almost entirely. There are very particular shows that I will follow and if that show isn't playing, the TV is off.

I also don't watch movies to kill time. I pretty much only watch movies with friends or if it's a movie that I suspect will be thought provoking.

I'm still working on the internet distraction piece. I'd love to hear strategies for wasting less time on the internet.

> Finally, I started steadily filling in the new time gainings with things I really care about

I was very fortunate that I've had this mentality from the start. I pursue what interests me. Whatever that is. Don't care if it's weird, or if I'm the oddball. I just go for it. That has led me to have the most random diverse group of hobbies/skills/life pursuits. I'm a programmer. All-American football player (and national champion). Football coach. Gamer. I'm darn good at drawing/illustration. Pretty good cook as well. I like to sew. Now I'm in med school.

I look back at everything I've accomplished, the skills I've developed, the friends I've made along the way, and the future ahead of me, and I feel like I've had a full 25 years. Like I could die tomorrow and not be too upset about how I spent my time.

I often look at other people's lives and wonder who they would be if they simply went after the things they enjoyed.

It feels like trying to kick smoking. I have a list of stuff I want to do (fix up my motorbikes, finish my 'day van', get back in to DH mountain biking) and a list of stuff I do (video games, drink, NetFlix, Reddit), and I always seep back to the latter one.

Might give it another go soon, life is short after all.

But I didn't try to cut out those distractions and start a workout routine at the same time.

Also I didn't try to start anything else until the last goal had become kind of routine (like brushing your teeth in the morning).

There are still many things on my list to see and do and there's still stress in my life, but I feel with this method of one micro step at a time you slowly chip away in unnoticeable steps until now for me a little over a year later you've made a big noticeable dent.

oh yea, I finally quit smoking too :)

EDIT: most of my goals also had to do with eliminating stress. For instance, my "learning the language" was to just turn on the radio and listen to interesting talk shows in swedish and occasionally look up words, all which was very relaxing for me. My exercise is swimming which is super enjoyable for me and something I always look forward to (even when I didn't have the time to do it). I don't know what it would be like if you do not actually look forward to or enjoy your goals...

I ask because HN is my biggest time sync. It's the thing I grab whenever there is a moment of free time and even when their isn't. I type it into my browser without even thinking about it.

I banned it once with /etc/hosts and that lasted about 3 months or maybe it was 6. I'd still read on my phone but that wouldn't happen except out and about or at bathroom breaks.

Then at some point I turned it back on. When it got bad again I blocked it in /etc/hosts. But, it's available in a VM. I'd hoped that would be enough to discourage me but it's not. Instead my habit now is to launch the VM. It is slightly better than unblocked because I still type it into my main browser and the block keeps me off until I eventually use the VM

I'd guess I spent 2-4 hours a day on it. I woke up a 8:30 today. Other than a shower I've been on HN. It's 10:10

Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue talks about the concept of a tradition as forming a narrative backbone for a person's life and actions. Conversation is also crucial, and traditions can be seen as extended conversations. I suggest that Hacker News is a place where such a tradition is constructed and maintained. It gives rise to an "imagined community" [2] of this profession of startup development (which is tied into the tradition of open source hacking in interesting ways, sometimes conflicting).

In that sense browsing HN is not merely a bad habit. Maybe the negative tendency is to become a more passive participant, or just gossiping all day. Ideally the site would feed into a larger pattern of creative action, instead of only providing some click buzz relaxation. So we could think about how to use the conversation to give wind to our sails, so to speak—or just how to be more active in the actual tradition, not just the discussion surrounding it.

That's a big discussion and I've already spent an hour writing this comment, after deleting a long and boring explanation of the MacIntyre book's thesis... So I'll just say that Cal Newport's new book Deep Work was pretty inspiring for me, and it's a quick read.

I think you could formulate a dialectic where deep work and community conversation feed into each other. It's like how books are the deep artifacts that conversations can orient themselves around, and the books themselves are like concentrated results of sometimes decades-long conversations.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community

[3]: http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/

I think it's time for us to start questioning if we really "Want" to do these things so much (exercise) why we don't do them. Do we just want to have done them (it'd sure be nice if I had a nice bod, I should workout. I should learn 12 languages and 3 instruments too!)? Or do we think we want them? Or is there some perverse reason why our body keeps us from doing what we truly want to do in that moment?

Smaller shortcuts, like eating unhealthy to save some time, not showering everyday, shaving, to optimize my working time, was taking a toll on quality of life in the long term. Therefore I said to myself no shortcuts! This drastically increased my quality of life almost instantly as i take my time now to do "normal" things in life without rush. Actually enjoying it.

I also neglected working out and to do things I really like, always thinking I'll get to it once my startups takes off. Since I decided not to work after 6pm, I suddenly have a lot of free time which gave me the possibility to workout without feeling guilty and do other stuff I like.

I think I can further optimize by doing things like you described and will try some of them. Thanks for sharing.

It was hard to stop playing with a bunch of different projects and make myself focus on one single project, but in the end it has been extremely satisfying to finish what I start. I wish my father was still around to see what I've done, but I might never have finished anything without the lesson of his passing.

From 1Q84, Haruki Murakami

“Murakami is like a magician who explains what he’s doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves.” —The New York Times Book Review

The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.

A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.

As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.

A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.

[Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] “Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”

"So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly."

...

"But those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear for the future have a life that is very brief and troubled; when they have reached the end of it, the poor wretches perceive too late that for such a long while they have been busied in doing nothing. "

http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/seneca_younger/brev_e...

Sometimes meandering in the manner of Vonnegut means your mind has chance to work on other things in the background, and as a result of this it gives you inspiration, etc.

Slightly on topic: Something I realised lately is that a lot of the activities I do are nothing but stress relief. So to have time to do things I want to do (studying, etc) I attempt to limit stress as much as possible, and not add more stress to the pile by accosting myself for the occasional daydream, etc.

For one, from the essay:

> But different things matter to different people, and most have to learn what matters to them

And for two, Kurt is at odds with himself in that quote though his overall sentiment is correct. He says to "fart around" and then creates a straw-man with computers. What he really means to say (I think) is that life is about experiencing it and appreciating those experiences.

This certainly doesn't run contrary to what PG is saying. In fact, he's saying the same exact thing -- life is short, so find what you love and do it & love it.

But that makes me think on what actually matters. Doesn't everything we do in our free time matter? If it didn't, why would we do it?

And then we do things that don't matter all the time at work, PG used meetings an example. Usually, they don't matter, but we do them... it seems there's a bit of give and take. I suppose we could ignore some of the meetings but too many missed meetings might piss the boss off. Then we lose the income source and makes it really hard to do what matters.

This piece hit me pretty hard. My dad's in the hospital again, one of the many times over the years. I never know when might be the last. I live hundreds of miles away... it sucks.

The life of a human can be wrought with meaningless acts that have been given a lofty value in the human's head. One human says "This is meaningless!" while the other calls it holy. Many take this as a lesson to say that happiness is found by arbitrarily assigning value, but this -- and all idols -- will fail.

The great lesson of this world is to find yourself. This is necessary because the world is a dream; a very complicated but simple illusion. How does one escape illusions? Surely not by fighting with them, but by letting them go. This is why monks train so long to let go of attachment to the world and learn how to disconnect from it. The enlightenment that follows is but recognition of the real world -- what some would call "heaven" or "nirvana".

Different strokes for different folks, but the end-goal will always be the same for this world. The "last judgment" will be when the world has finally been judged truly and we relinquish from it and go back home. It might be many, many years away, but there are some of us whose only purpose is to accelerate the return.

Therefore, knowing that I have a purpose, responsibility, and finite time on this world, the equation for what has meaning to me is "Is my function aligned with my purpose?"

Repetition doesn’t create memories. New experiences do. Our perception of time is really driven by our perception of the unfamiliar, vivid and new. Of course, it turns out time slows down the most during life threatening experiences. [1] A safer way to slow down time is to travel. Travel is a new experience that can transport you out of your everyday routine to create memories with the ones you love.

https://medium.com/@bchesky/how-to-time-travel-b604096d5ed0#...

This is in stark contrast with 'I wish I spent more time with person X'.

When you live a simpler life, you have simpler pleasures.

When you live a high-brow life, all of a sudden you grasp at experiences because you're not sure when the next one is going to come around the corner.

Hence missing people, or feeling like you will never get to do X again.

When you enjoy the smell of 100 flowers, the absence of a couple doesn't inspire your mind into a frenzy of 'optimizing away the bs' because you know, when you're a multi-millionaire who doesn't have to work another day in his life, is it really spending time on bs that's the problem?

Maybe it's the bs ideas in the mind and in this essay :)

I love seeing the blue sky and clouds and I love just walking outside even if a bike ride or bus ride would be faster. I also want to not be late for work, and have enough time to finish my errands. I want to have comfort and pay off my student loans and see Europe before I turn 35 (had to move the goal posts, unfortunately). It comes down to balancing things.

Also, chatting with a sales clerk, really, experiencing life is not a "simple pleasure" for some people, me included. If I had all the "important things" but couldn't see a white cloud for the rest of my life, I would consider that a failed life. In the end, we all have what we call "important" and what we call "bullshit", and it does vary from person to person.

Vonnegut, like so many people, imagines computers can only suck the life out of things. I suppose we deserve that reputation, since so many of us write software that does.

It was something I only realised I could do through shitty things that happened over the last few years but working on it has given me a peace I've been missing a long time - I've found it's way too easy to get caught up in the day to day of keeping up with the field we are in, everything moves so quickly I started to feel like if I got off the bus I'd never be able to catch back up..but the thing is another bus usually turns up (if it's a UK bus it'll be late though..).

The computer is a neutral tool that can make good things better and bad things worse. Because still a relatively new invention, and undergoing constant, rapid change in how it affects culture and individual behavior (pocket computers! VR! etc!), we haven't quite figured out how to distinguish the two.

In some cases this means that we unexpectedly find a wonderful application that improves countless lives, and in some cases it means that we discover ways in which the use of a computer can affect us or society negatively.

Personally, I am generally in favor of change, in the broadest sense, even if sometimes it's bad, while paradoxically I myself don't deal well with changes. The thing I love about computers is that they are one of the biggest instruments of change, and yet in my interactions with computers they are wonderfully boring and predictable, in the end.

I have a theory that this is one aspect of computers that draws so many people like me to them. I have access to a vast world of experience, knowledge and people while using a tool that I control, usually from the comforts of my home. And using that same tool, in the same comfortable setting, I can create things that somehow affect (and ideally benefit) many people, through writing, coding, 'drawing', and most importantly the internet.

That said, of course going out into the world is still an activity that is important for happiness, at least for most people. But the fact that I live in a time where I can create, learn, consume, bond, and so on, with this one tool and an internet connection is something I'm very thankful for.

"Life's a journey, not a destination."

"A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong." -- from Civil Disobedience by Henry Thoreau

That something I have to do is learning to write shell scripts at the moment.

When you realize how short time really is you ruthlessly cut bullshit.

It is sad - and disgusting - to see this degree of arrogance in bluntly categorising those who use (or build) PCs (and not Macs) as indulging in bullshit!

I am happy that you have found a useful computer in Mac. At the same time, though, please realise that hundreds of millions of computer users choose otherwise too. And, please do not conclude that they have time for bullshit just because of that!

I guess you are both very young; I used to think eating was a waste of time in my 20s. I was dreaming of having a nutrition drip so I didn't have to waste time cooking or eating. But nothing beats cleaning or doing laundry imho.

> I'm pretty sure bullshit is relative.

On the other hand if you have more free time than money then buying a Mac would probably be not the best decision.

Context is important and I don't think OP was generalizing that every PC user is a fool. It's just not the right thing for him personally since he got kids and would rather spend time with them.

This seems perfectly justified and fine to me; I don't get why you're so upset by it.

Because harsh expressions are usually gratuitous. Because blanket assertions are usually wrong. And, because combining both is rude.

(This applies to parts of PG's essay as well!)

For instance, did you really need to say `Whoa whoa slow down' when you began your reply? Did that add value?

This never happened though. The parent simply stated they didn't have time for bullshit then said they purchase Macs so they don't have build PCs. He / she simply stated what they considered important. It was personal, there was no blanket assertions at all and it was in the same tone as the article so what was gratuitous in this context?

> For instance, did you really need to say `Whoa whoa slow down' when you began your reply? Did that add value?

I certainly did due to the outlandishness of what I replied to. It sounded two orders of magnitude harsher and more personal than I would have expected especially on HN.

You took the worst possible interpretation of the original comment and then took it, out of context, as a personal attack. Then you posted a very nasty reply. Then, when you got called on it, you claim rudeness on the other parties.

Think about that. Re-read the entire thread. Because you not only missed the point of the OC, you missed the point of the original essay.

1. I liked to do an activity before.

2. I don't do that activity any more, nor like it.

3. I am older, so I must be wiser (or else I wasted my time)

4. Therefore the old activity was bullshit all along. All hail my personal development.

Much easier to find more money than more time.

As DHH said in Twist interview: "If you're not working on your best idea right now, you're doing it wrong"

It takes me ~10 minutes to shop online and buy the parts I need to put together my own PC. When I receive it, it takes me an additional 15 minutes to unbox it, and put it all together. Then another 30 installing the OS and all the programs I will need.

That's less than an hour. Given the price difference between a Mac and a PC with the same exact equipment (same CPU, RAM, HD, etc), we're looking at ~$250 USD on the low end and ~$550 USD on the high end. Unless you're making $250 USD (or more) per hour, it's most definitely cheaper time-wise to build your own PC.

15 minutes to unbox probably doesn't include taking out the trash. :)

I'm a power user, so I need a lot of programs and setting them up properly usually takes 4-6 hours if not more. Just finding and installing proper driver for stuff like my Wacom tablet takes 30 minutes or so. Again, if you do this every day, then yes, it could be much faster. But I buy a new computer once in 4-5 years and really cannot bother to automate.

Last two times I got a new computer, it took me 2-3 days before I could work on them at full speed. It sure is worth more than $550. Not calculating the cost of stress if something does not work properly.

I have been using Linux for 7+ years and Mac for just over one year. The difference: Mac is mostly Plug and Play. Linux is often Plug and Pray. Hell, doing something simple like copy/paste on Linux still feels like a game of chance.

I love open-source and freedom, but as I got kids I became more pragmatic. The time is limited and I'd rather spend it on building stuff than figuring out some quirks in the operating system.

No, this isn't true at all. The first time you put together your own computer, sure, maybe, it may take a bit longer. But the next time and the time after that, it becomes quicker and quicker because you already know the basics. It only takes 10 minutes to see what new GPUs or CPUs have come out.

Hell, if you didn't know anything about PCs, it would only take 5 minutes to look up all the parts in the latest Mac and order them off newegg. You could build your own exact copy of the latest mac and the research time would be negligible since you already know what parts you need since they're listed right there on the Mac SPEC sheet. And you'd save yourself hundreds of dollars.

> Last two times I got a new computer, it took me 2-3 days before I could work on them at full speed.

My 64 year old senile-ish father without any background in PCs put together his own PC and had it up and running in less than 4 hours. I don't buy 2 days at all. That's either an exaggeration or an outright lie.

> I'm a power user

A power user that cannot put together his own PC in under 2 days? I'm not sure I buy that. It's like a MLB player not being able to hit a ball that's traveling over 65 MPH. Even the pitchers are well enough versed to get hits occasionally.

Your 64 year old senile-ish father probably uses one or two applications. I use over 50 different programs.

Also, I don't care about hardware at all. Last thing I remember is that there were Slot 1 and Slot A CPUs. I would need to research stuff before even figuring out which components are compatible. Perhaps it's all user-friendly now, but back in the day I recall always missing some cable or adapter to get stuff to work (like USB-PS2 converters for mouse or VGA-HDMI converters for monitors, etc.).

I care about building software. Hardware stuff is not something I need or want to deal with.

It would be like MLB player going to a baseball bat factory to make his own bat. He just wants a good bat. He doesn't care what wood is it made of, or what material is used for coating. He wants to pay for top-notch bat and concentrate on hitting the balls.

Is this assuming that one would be building a PC with only a few years in-between?

It’s been more than 8 years since I built a PC, having assembled three of them in the past. It would definitely take me more than 10 minutes to research hardware because, after being shielded from the hardware complexity after using a Mac for so long, I’d need to research to make sure my previous knowledge of how to build a PC are still applicable.

Sure, it wouldn’t take me 2 days, and if not a lot has changed since I last built one four hours seems doable. But if I was very unsure of myself somewhere in the middle is more realistic and probably a more accurate assumption of how long it would take someone research, order and assemble a PC.

Of course, with all of us being different humans with different experiences and different mindsets, YMMV.

I had an IBM laptop before I had a Mac. At least one major component had to be replaced every single year for the duration of the four years I had it. Keys broke. the screen was shite. Windows crashed constantly. I lost all my files multiple times. After having it for more than a year it ran as if someone had permanently applied the brakes and it was just grinding against them and no amount of service seemed to be able to fix this. I spent weeks searching for the specific charger I needed only for the company to ship the wrong one, then when I had to replace it a second time they no longer manufactured it so I had to buy one second hand. That machine was an utter sinkhole of money and time. I swore off Windows products that day and have not spent a dime on them since. Maybe things have gotten better since XP but I'm not about to risk it.

Now I have a Mac. I have had the same MBP for 6+ years and it has never once required service, it runs perfectly, has never lost data, and has been a charm to work with. Sure, it cost me 2x as much as the IBM but in cumulative costs that is nothing. I could easily see this laptop lasting me another year at least.

I am not saying you are wrong, just providing my experience in which the cost of ownership in money and time has in fact been lower.

I don't need to reinstall the OS or download an uninstaller to remove bloatware. I don't need to install antivirus (yeah, this one isn't required, but the reality is that there is much more malware targeting Windows). I don't need to wait for Windows Update to finish before my computer shuts down or boots up - these are particularly painful. I don't need to worry about programs scaling to a retina/high DPI display. I don't need to spend time reading articles about how Windows 10 is tracking me and how to prevent it. I don't need to worry about my laptop breaking, because if it does, I'm a genius bar appointment away from getting it fixed. If my Samsung laptop breaks, I need to ship the whole thing, likely wasting weeks.

Not everyone experiences these issues, but this is how it feels for me. I made a very gradual transition to OS X - owning PCs, building PCs, using OS X on my PCs for almost a decade, then finally buying a Retina Macbook Pro.

While some of your points are valid for *nix setups as well (in terms of hardware, etc.) you've implicitly made the assumption that the only alternative to OS X is Windows, which strikes me as somewhat off base in a place like HN.

And I think twice before starting new projects. Although, I still sometimes feel like twice is not enough.

It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else sees. And if thats the case, it's not something to be afraid of or to shut yourself off from.

Anyway good luck!

This essay strongly feels like rationalizing to oneself an unwillingness to engage with reasoned criticism (of which there was quite a bit). If pg wants to spend time with his kids, good for him, that's certainly going to be more fulfilling than arguing online. But throwing arguments over the fence and then proclaiming the desire to spend time with your kids genuinely does not seem fulfilling.

Since plenty of people reading Paul's essays are more than capable of figuring out the intent rather than taking pot-shots at the form in which that intent was cast I don't think given the choice between playing 'someone's wrong on the internet' and spending time with your kids there should even be a contest. On the other hand, action begets reaction and there isn't an essay that Paul wrote that did not have its share of discussion and picking apart so maybe simply accept that and totally ignore the responses?

Enjoy the time you have while you can, indeed, life is too short and I wished I could spend and had spent much more time with my kids. Before you know it they'll be borrowing your car keys and all those years that feel like they will last forever will have vanished.

Better make them count!

Oh well, live and learn :)

Also because most of his essays are very good, so this one was uncharacteristic and surprising.

To claim that being in the other 50% makes somebody "laughably wrong" or a "bully" is not a fair statement. (To say that there is "wide disagreement" is entirely reasonable, but to be fair one should also point out that there is also wide agreement)

This argument has been going on for centuries, with countless millions of people chipping in, without anybody really winning it. It is quite unlikely that this thread, or indeed this year, will be the place where somebody wins it. I think it is reasonable for PG to acknowledge this and bow out of the argument, and that's how I interpret what he's doing.

Life's too short to argue red vs blue.

Half the population does not agree with the stance given in the essay. This argument has not been made for centuries; it has not been made at all because it is wildly out of sync with reality.

I would agree it's very reasonable to bow out of it because life's too short if you are a millionaire; in that case the argument really doesn't effect you so why bother with it, it's just academic.

Also "bully pulpit" doesn't have anything to do with being a bully.

I would reiterate OP of this thread: I love PG's essays and I hope this one isn't a way of saying he is dissuaded by his readership challenging him on one that didn't quite hit the mark. We read them in the first place because they never cease to provoke thought.

So the fact that once upon a time red meant liberal, but no longer does, does not prove that economic conservatives have reducing economic inequality as a direct goal.

And of course that's false. The Democrats of the 1900s are conservative; the new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes? And Hoovervilles were created by socialist thought?

Virtually no Republicans have a stated goal or platform of reducing economic inequality. Pretty much every Democrat running for president does. To claim otherwise is also clearly untrue.

I suspect you are mixing up the fact that in American politics, conservatism (which is "red") consists of what Europeans would call liberalism (in fact the New Deal was part of the reason the definitions flipped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition).

The New Deal was economically liberal but socially conservative; I'm inclined to say that it _was_ an iconic conservative effort. In particular, it was what gave the country enough social cohesion to win WWII; and it was what made the South lose interest in a second attempt at secession. The Southern Agrarians had spent the 1920s building a new argument for an independent CSA; once the New Deal started up, they mostly switched to supporting the US.

No. The New Deal is the most liberal policy enacted in American history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority... with its base in liberal ideas, the white South, traditional Democrats, big city machines, and the newly empowered labor unions and ethnic minorities. The Republicans were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as an enemy of business and growth, and liberals accepting some of it and promising to make it more efficient... By 1936 the term "liberal" typically was used for supporters of the New Deal, and "conservative" for its opponents.

If you want examples of why this isn't a good idea, just read any politics thread on social media, and look for the point at which they inevitably degenerate into "no, that's not what you're saying".

Since it apparently wasn't clear enough from my earlier post: the argument that has been made for centuries is that the other side doesn't exist, is clearly wrong anyway, and nobody could possibly agree with them. The main problem with this argument is that the people who make it seem to have found somebody to argue with.

Also, I think the last 2 essays pretty much nailed it. If you found them "laughably wrong", it was likely due to the assumptions you brought with you to reading them, not due to any fallacies in the content itself.

Essayists should expect critiques. His argument was that technology is the creator of inequality and it can't be stopped. That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect. This is the capitalist thesis. It's not quite Randian but it's close enough that it comes across as one dimensional. In his defense he said we should focus on other drivers of inequality. However the counter to the capitalist thesis and the most direct way to address inequality is taxation.

This is the basic political argument that defines society.

Not quite. The argument was that technology is a lever that multiplies the differences in productivity between us, not that it is the creator of it.

>"That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect."

Businesses generally capture this wealth. PG has argued in many essays that start-ups are a great path for the most productive of workers to capture the value of their contributions rather than cede them to existing business areas.

>However the counter to the capitalist thesis the most direct way to address inequality is taxation

But is this really what we want? Do we want to broadly discourage all wealth creation at the same time? Or would it make more sense to focus on the non-productive drivers of inequality, rent-seeking behavior etc?

The essay suggested (quite accurately) that actual taxation rate doesn't change much due to tax avoidance issues. Even now, we have what appears to be a very progressive system on the surface. But due to its complexity and many, many loopholes, those with more income pay a lower rate than average in practice. Simply declaring a top tax rate of 90% wouldn't stop this and hasn't in the past.

How much human ingenuity is equivalent to the United States' railroad network? To the Three Gorges Dam? To the physical infrastructure of the Internet? Human ingenuity allows more effective use of capital, but the sheer fact of ownership of capital can often be more valuable.

Is this a given/has this been proven? I do not believe taxation (alone) discourages wealth creation. Otherwise certain high-tax countries would not be 'creating wealth' today.

What did he get wrong, specifically?

The gist of PG's essay was that inequality consists of some bad components ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential") and some good ones (e.g., people producing things of incredible value); that it's a complex phenomenon made up of multiple parts; that inequality is at least partially due to individual differences in drive and productivity; that technology amplifies these differences in productivity.

He is concerned that people do not recognize this, and believes they need to recognize this if they are going to fight the bad drivers of inequality effectively. He is concerned that people oversimplify the issue and assume that inequality is all bad, or intrinsically bad.

I think there was in fact wide disagreement, though.

[1]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/688044252744527875

This feels like the heart of that particular essay and displays a rather breathtaking misunderstanding of poverty, its causes and its inhabitants. This blames poor people for being poor.

How am I misreading this? I don't feel like I'm cherry-picking, I feel like I'm finding the theme of the text. If that's not it, then what is its theme? Its central idea?

From later in the same essay: "Louis Brandeis said 'We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.' That sounds plausible. But if I have to choose between ignoring him and ignoring an exponential curve that has been operating for thousands of years, I'll bet on the curve."

Again: this sounds like PG saying "In the choice between fostering political power in people at large and concentrating money in the hands of those who already have it, I'll choose the latter." What's there to misinterpret?

I thought this essay, without context, was very sweet. Life is too short. But read as a non-response to critics of the "Income Inequality" essay it takes on a callous tone.

> This blames poor people for being poor. How am I misreading this?

FWIW, I read it differently. I think Paul is saying that even if we had a world where everyone had a truly equal opportunity, in the sense of having similar (or at least adequate) childhood nutrition, intellectual stimulation, education, etc., there would still be variations in productivity between individuals that would result in different economic outcomes.

The second quote I read simply as saying that Paul doesn't think the tendency for wealth to concentrate can be stopped.

If you want to complain that Paul could have expressed himself better, I won't argue; I agree that was by far his worst written essay. And I suspect he is genuinely pained by the reaction it received. To whatever extent this new piece is specifically a response to that reaction, I think it's more hurt than callous.

That argument is still missing the point. Variations you will always have, but no guarantee that the same people would come out on top, unless you believe that the hardest workers happen to mostly come from well-financed backgrounds and caucasian gene pools. There are many people who work hard all their life and never make it out of the slums. Working hard is not a differentiator, it's what gets you a seat at the table. On the way up everyone works hard. Slackers don't even compete. The difference between those who make it to the top and those who don't is mostly not effort, it is opportunity, and good instincts to leverage that opportunity. In a truly fair world the people who came out on top would be an almost completely different set of people than those who are at the top today.

I feel like the criticism of the essay was not because of its content but its theme. It felt like a defense of the current system, whether taken narrowly as SV or broadly as global capitalism. This struck a nerve because most people in their gut know that the current system is fundamentally unfair and needs to be replaced by something better. It cannot be a good system that made it so that the set of people who own as much wealth as the poorest 3 billion all fit on a yacht, and not even a very big one. People got angry because they thought he was defending the way things are, even if his actual position was more nuanced.

[B]y helping startup founders I've been helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality is bad and should be decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders. No one should be.

I think this is ridiculous. Creating new millionaires is not increasing inequality. I don't know anyone who thinks that (not to say that Paul might not have run into a few people who think that way). The problem, as you say, is the profound concentration of wealth into the hands of a few multi-billionaires. I would say also, it's the fact that the middle class in the US is actually shrinking.

The fundamental way that the wealthy can help the middle class, while helping themselves at the same time, is by investing in new businesses that create jobs. This is precisely what YC is doing! This isn't increasing inequality but decreasing it. Not only are they creating jobs directly, they're also doing so indirectly, by teaching people -- even those who don't get into their program -- how to start startups.

Founders don't get rich unless they build a successful business. And again, I don't think anybody minds that they can get rich; after all, a lot of them then either start new businesses or become angel investors themselves. There's nothing wrong with any of this, quite the contrary, and if Paul really does run into people who think there is something wrong with it, this is what he should tell them.

I would go so far as to say that YC and its ilk are among the most creative, hopeful, positive things happening in the US economy today. Though I'm not involved with them directly -- I haven't even worked for a YC company -- I am very glad to have them here in the Valley, and I'm excited to see what they do in the coming years.

It's absolutely true that variation in productivity leads to a variation in income and it's also true technology acts as a lever and is increasing the variation in productivity between people.

At no point did PG say anything like what you claim it "sounds like" he is saying. The essay was an argument to attack rent-seeking, and other bad behaviors, but not the variation in productivity. It also argued that even if all rent-seeking were eliminated, there would still be variations in income because some people are far more productive than the average.

No. Productivity has nothing to do with income. You can be the most productive widget-maker in the factory. That doesn't mean you will make a lot of money.

Income inequality exists and has been growing because those at the top have been reaping the increases in productivity of those at the bottom. In fact that's the entire debate: employee productivity has massively increased since the 70s, but wages have not reflected this.

You are using a non economic definition of productivity, and he is using the economic one. In Economics, productivity is the value of what is produced, not the quantity.

Where you fall on pg's essay is defined by your answer to that question.

A an example of rent collecting would be if he used his wealth to lobby for a law requiring all start-ups to have a license which an organization he controlled granted (and charged for).

Angel investing and venture capital are jobs that are also prone to the Peter Principle. What makes them different than many other jobs, especially angel investing, is that the person has promoted themselves to their own level of incompetence. Just because some (maybe many) angel investors are incompetent and don't contribute to wealth creation does not mean that none do.

His essay focused on one particular lever, technology. His original lever was technology. Now he uses other levers, economic capital, social capital and experience to create wealth. Extracting value from economic capital alone is rent seeking. This is what banks do with loans. Providing economic capital with advise on how to most intelligently make the most of the capital goes beyond mere rent seeking and enters the realm of wealth creating activities.

No it doesn't. A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy. The portion you quoted makes this distinction clear: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources."

If we found a way to give everyone the same opportunities, there'd still be economic inequality. Is inequality what we should attack? It's probably better to attack the undesirable causes directly. The essay made this point clearly.

If it doesn't imply that poor people are lazy, then what does it imply? That the rich and poor are equally driven, and that something other than effort (luck, inherited wealth, etc) makes the rich rich and the poor poor?

He then weakens his claim even further, as quoted in the parent: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality" such that he admits doing something really productive is not the only source of inequality. So, there is really nothing in there that implies either of things you suggest.

"Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups. They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."

This is totally compatible with all poor people being in the second category, and no poor people being lazy (3rd and 4th categories).

(I disagree with his essay, but for different reasons than this.)

It really seems like one can either read PG's essay as a Randian screed or as poorly argued cant. I saw it as the former, but I can understand reading it as the latter.

Not quite. He's saying (in my reading) that even if you legislate away all the other sources of inequality (even to the point of wiping out all assets and giving each citizen an equal amount of cash to start anew), inequality would still arise due to differences in personal productivity / drive.

Seems true to me, although entirely irrelevant to the topic of real world inequality.

It really sounds like he believes this to be the cause of real world inequality, too:

"Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups. They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."

Slow down there. You can't just take the converse of any old statement.

PG is saying: IF ((starting equal) AND (differences in drive)) THEN (ending unequal).

You are saying that PG's statement is equivalent to: IF (now unequal) THEN ((earlier equal) AND (differences in drive)). Which translates to "Poor people are poor only because of laziness."

Furthermore, the quote you provide says: IF (rich now) THEN (probably driven earlier), which crucially says nothing at all about people who are not rich now.

That's as best as I can put it.

This is in the context of a hypothetical universe where "the only way left to get rich is to start startups." In that universe, PG asserts that the driven will do well, thereby creating inequality. Since we know inequality exists, some will have done less well, and "determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."

To go back to what you said earlier, this isn't directly relevant to real world inequality. But the essay posits this hypothetical world as a parabolic justification for economic inequality. The essay acknowledges that "few successful founders grew up desperately poor" but refuses to engage in any discussion of why. It will only examine a simplified universe, which allows the author to make implications about the real world and then hand wave any reactions away when others engage with those implications.

Huh? He said all the people at the top are not lazy. "All people at the bottom are lazy" doesn't follow from his statement.

What makes it a dirty rhetorical trick is, of course, that one can then reply to one's critics "ah, but I didn't explicitly say what you read into that".

1) Got rich and weren't driven.

2) Got rich and were driven.

3) Stayed poor and weren't driven.

4) Stayed poor but were driven.

pg statement says he's been exposed with group 2, which he highlighted. You seem to accuse him of implicitly highlighting group 3, and would prefer he implicitly (explicitly?) highlights group 4.

Is that the gist of the argument?

The statements "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven." and "Most people who are fairly driven tend to get rich." are not logically equivalent.

There really is severe suffering at the bottom of the economic scale here (SV/peninsula), and in my opinion it is the shared responsibility of those of us who have lots of options to figure out how we can help to relieve some of the suffering. However, I don't thing that needs to be the singular focus of every single discussion of economic inequlity, and I don't think it's productive to pan this essay for not really addressing that.

He did call those who disagree with Zuckerberg's letter envious losers, so how can you read something like the Inequality essay without that colouring it?

https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/paul-graham-is-still-askin...

@sama I think the reason you're surprised is that not being a loser yourself you underestimate the power of envy.

(in response to a tweet saying "It takes a lot for the internet to surprise me, but the general reaction to Zuck's letter did it")

As to the rest of your comment... I think you're reading something which takes an aggressive tone in promoting its argument, and mistaking that for a personal attack. There is quite a strong critique of the "startups create value" idea, beginning with the observation that they don't, really -- VCs confer value and legitimacy upon certain startups, and not on others. Which means that in a startup-based economy, such as the one pg argues for, pg and his friends would wield an enormous amount of power. In a true startup-based economy, VCs would literally be the central planners, signing off on which businesses can and can't be started (I mean, in theory someone in such an economy might privately have access to enough capital to get going without VCs, but the deck would still be heavily stacked against those people, and there aren't exactly a lot of them). And it is entirely fair game to question the motives of someone who has such a strong incentive to favor a true startup-based economy, which of course the essay does.

I don't see how he advocated a position that poor people deserve to be poor. He advocated a position where being rich is ok. These are two different things. It also focuses discussion on economics - eliminating mega-wealth should not be made priority, but the focus should be placed on poverty minimization.

He suggests that social mobility is highly correlated with non-laziness (whether expressed through hard work, not hard but smart work, natural curiosity, drive to tinker with stuff, or ability to deliver on a project started without letting the inertia set in).

That does not mean that poverty is correlated with laziness.

The only logical conclusion that follows is that laziness is not highly correlated with social mobility, e.g. people who are poor and lazy have not statistically been exposed to much social mobility.

The least lazy people participating in a ponzi scheme get more money?

Obviously not, so what you're assuming and/or implying is that life is fair, that the rich deserve their success and the poor are lazy, which is exactly the point people are arguing, so you're begging the question.

Debate isn't always about winning. Sometimes it can just be a back and forth exploration of an interesting subject area. But you have to treat it that way.

It's pretty hard to misinterpret a lot of the things he wrote, though.

Thinking about this long enough makes large-scale democracy very scary because it operates in the same terms on the same media.

I was going to expand this thought but when I thought what some of the responses might be, I thought, "Life is too short!" and left it as is :)

An essay is partly a matter of working out one's thoughts on some matter. But _posting_ an essay advances some point of view with a supporting argument, attacking the beliefs of others (e.g. Sanders was not named by pg, but could have been). That seems to be _arguing_ just as much as the additional step of responding to one's critics.

I suppose what makes the latter wearying is that it's hard to hear attacks on you personally, and tedious to respond to attacks which are loud but bad. But it still seems that we should (and usually do) value those who engage with their high quality critics.

It's amazing to watch how many young people get caught up in various online outrage missions. Hours spent browsing Twitter or Reddit to dive incredibly deep into some current news outrage is bull shit wasted time.

Get back to work and try to build something (if that's what you want). Or be with your family (if that's what you want). Or do whatever. But this stuff (including my post right now) is addicting.

Having lost my parents some time ago and having two kids I can concur with his sentiments fully and can confirm they are spot on.

The incentive to respond to acidic comments and trolls in online discourse is a pervasive feature of the medium - and it seldom creates any value. Thus it's a perfect example of useless bullshit. The discussions are usually ephemeral in nature - quickly forgotten - and not influential. This is not to say there are no influential discussions - but that at the heat of the moment most discussions feel more important than they really are.

Anyway I read his argument as "please ignore the tailing and focus on other things". This is at least my interpretation and if it's correct I agree. Jealousy never hurt any one. Extreme poverty, on the other hand, is quite detrimental to an individuals life.

The problem isn't merely the dishonesty of trying to make a person and/or their argument sound much worse than they are. It's the degrading effect it has on the rest of a discussion. Once bystanders see that it's ok to throw concern for the truth out the window and optimize for indignation, other standards drop as well. I don't know if it's true that sharks go crazy when they smell blood, but that's what this effect reminds me of. It seems to be worse these days, and the Principle of Charity might be a rampart against it.

When a commenter is convinced that a topic is very important, and that it's a moral imperative to change the minds of whoever opposes them, "zealot" is one way to describe this situation. It seems to be the underlying force behind all this bitterness.

Scrolling down in hopes of finding a reasonable comment is a recipe for disappointment. Worse, it adds fuel: Many of these comments are from people fed up with zealotry.

Ideally, the mean-spirited comments would be whisked away to the bottom of the thread, where they belong. But they're not offtopic so they can't be detached.

I've often wished for a way to view a thread without any nesting, i.e. like /newcomments but for one specific thread. That way I could at least come back later without having to scroll past the same tired meanness. It'd be a lot easier to spot the gems posted as replies.

You could as easily have said the same thing about HN at every point in its history, yet for all its weaknesses it has managed to survive as a semi-ok place for online discussion far longer than human nature, statistics, and every internet law would have predicted.

That didn't just happen by accident. To stave off inevitable decline has been the main intent behind the design of the site and all the work on it. So, bad as things sometimes appear and critical as everyone sometimes sounds, it's worth remembering that HN has a track record of finding new things that work—for a while—at slowing decay.

Making the Principle of Charity part of the guidelines implies that you'll ban people who specifically refuse to follow it. When I said "It probably won't work," I meant "Remember orange usernames, and how badly it fragmented the community? Just be careful." Dealing with these people by trying to apply social pressure might backfire, since they are very vocal and motivated by something other than curiosity.

It's entirely possible to come to a different interpretation of a text without having an ulterior motive.

This is not a hostile but a literal interpretation of the essay and is the same viewpoint advanced by Atlas Shrugged.

Close enough. But, like, is anyone really going to argue with this? With scare quotes, sure, OK, I guess there's an example of someone out there churning out widgets from their blood-diamond-financed widget factory, and that's more of a grey area, but without weird factors like this...yes, people ought to be entitled to what they create. There are valid arguments on definitions of that (patents, land use, etc.) but all of those are disputes on how to apply the main principle, not whether it is legitimate.

> He further argued that they're extra entitled to it because even if you eliminated all other sources of inequality, you couldn't stop them from creating more wealth for themselves: "creating wealth, as a source of economic inequality, is different from taking it

This is a straw man. He didn't argue that they're "extra entitled," he simply pre-empted the (reasonable) argument that not all the rich got rich in good ways.

But in any case: your description of his argument does not match the description I responded to:

“we rich people deserve to have 100x more than the poors because we’re pushing humanity forward”

Do you think the above is a hostile interpretation? I did, so I said so.

Also, please don't put things in quotation marks when they're not a quote, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609. It may seem a minor point, but it's an important one for intellectual honesty.

Since life is short, that’s it for me for this thread.

Yes, in the society and economy we are discussing this is a universally accepted principle.

Bob is a farmer. He has the same amount of land as his neighbor, but he works twice as hard, and grows twice the number of crops to sell in a year. He has twice the income. No one would reasonably claim that he's entitled to none of what he produced. Bob's greater productivity than his neighbor is a source of income inequality - he earns twice as much!

There is a mainstream view that society has the right to tax Bob's income, so he does not receive all of what he creates. That's the debate: how much is fair? Maybe it's fair for Bob to have twice the income of his neighbor, or maybe less than twice as much. Unless Bob gets the same as his neighbor, there's income inequality because of differences in productivity.

No farmer is going to singlehandedly earn a million times what his neighbor earns. However, because of technology, this is now possible in some industries. For example, Notch is a game designer, and he singlehandedly makes a game that sells 20 million copies. Notch now has a vast income that far exceeds the typical game designer. Is this bad? What is bad about 20 million people choosing to give Notch their money in exchange for his game? I don't see anything wrong or unjust about this.

PG's essay points out that income inequality is a complex phenomenon, with multiple causes, some that are good (small groups or individuals creating amazingly valuable things) and some that are bad ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential"). PG's essay from my perspective serves to make the point that perhaps not all income equality is bad, and that there deserves to be more thought on the topic of "how much is bad?" or "what causes of income inequality are bad?", instead of treating income inequality as a one-dimensional issue that is intrinsically bad.

From my perspective, PG's point is fair. Income inequality is not intrinsically bad: when people work hard, improve, and become more productive, they earn more, leading to income inequality. This incentive to improve and produce is good, in my opinion. Perhaps what we as a society should be tackling are bad problems like "kids with no chance of reaching their potential", rather than considering income inequality to be a problem ipso facto.

But in the real world we are not born equal and we do not have access to the same size of 'land'. There are differences, sometime vast in family wealth, property, health care, education and access to nearly 'n' number of resources. Bob may be born with the land and have 'n' amount of time and the luxury to think of things like productivity, wealth, interests, life while Tom may struggle his entire life just to survive or maybe work towards getting 1/10 of the land as his entire life goal.

Moving to the real world property taxes are not fixed on income. Income tax is an entirely different tax that Bob and Tom would pay based on their income irrespective of their land holdings. If Bob is more productive he would pay more tax but I am not sure income tax or 'simple productivity' as a concept is useful to understand or explain inequality and disparity in a world where everyone does not have the same piece of land.

This is exactly one of the main problem with the essay. He argues against a position only very very few people really have. But it goes further than that.

PG is right claiming that you can't stop how technology creates inequality. But he is wrong if he believe that this wealth is created purely from risk taking and hard work. Of course those who are wealthy mostly work hard, but so does everyone else.

But the real issue of course is that if we can't stop technology to keep pushing wealth for some into extremes and for others to keep stalling then the wealth created is mostly due to luck and access to the right people and some timing. Not unlike a Powerball ticket but just of being born into the right context.

And so if PG wanted to show he actually understood the issue. Instead of arguing against some straw man he could have spent some time on using his otherwise amazing ability, to think out of the box, to put forward some thoughts on how society could deal with this. Then he would have at least shown some understanding of the people he was talking about.

Instead he basically says. It's going to continue like this, but don't worry it's better than the alternatives and it's going to be good again.

Why would anyone who doesn't stand to benefit from this ever accept such a position?

I just don't see PG's thoughts as well developed here as they are in other areas and no amount of historical context is going to change that.

I'm not convinced that most of the aforementioned responses weren't motivated by that. So, given that almost anything pg will write/has written will get the same treatment, why would he play their game by bothering to defend himself?

In fact, there is a pureness to insulating yourself from the cacophony of opinions that you get online: someoen will always have an adversarial opinion and life really is too short to try to address any or even some of them.

If I was him, I would let my friends be my guide to when I'm talking out of ass, rather than randos on the internet.

Is that "bubbling"?

It sounds lame, but PG's essay is a stanza in a larger societal conversation, and conversations involve more than one person. To weigh in on one side invites response, especially if you're influential.

Unfortunately, most of the responses never made it much past identifying this confusion between the literal meaning of income inequality and what they meant, by saying we have "too much" income inequality. This is a tautology, and most responses failed to address the important question of "how much is too much?".

Most responses instead then focused on inventing or imagining a lot of things pg didn't say, things they thought he might be implying. pg responds by simplifying his essay, so that there is less stuff to read into it. People still try to read too much into it. pg gives up at responding to things he didn't say, no time for BS.

I think he added to the conversation a good point, that many people are sloppy when they refer to income inequality, and that it is not all bad, and that we need to be more precise when we talk about what the real problems are. However, people mostly ignored that...despite actually agreeing with what he actually said, they wanted to disagree with what they thought he said...

Let's say that Bob is a farmer, and (with the same land) can grow twice as many crops to sell in a year as his neighbor nearby. In this scenario, it seems entirely appropriate to me that Bob has greater income - that is, the income of Bob and his neighbor are unequal.

Let's say that Alice is a video game designer. Alice creates an incredibly popular game called Clash of Clans that has 20 million users and earns $1.5m in revenue per day. Bob the farmer quits his job and creates a video game instead, which only sells 10 copies, since while he's great at farming he's a bad video game designer. Is it surprising or bad that the incomes of Alice and Bob are unequal?

Do you work for a living? Let's say a coworker at your place of employment comes to work and does literally nothing, every day. Does he deserve the same income as you?

No, it is not bad that people earn different amounts when they're differently productive. This incentive toward productivity drives society forward. It would be incredibly demotivating to most of the world if people were not made better off through their own efforts to become more productive, effective, and driven. I doubt anyone would argue that all income inequality is bad - instead, as a peer comment points out, the actual debate is about how much is bad, or for what reasons.

The purpose of PG's essay was to point out that income inequality has multiple components and is a complex phenomenon. He observed that technology amplifies this difference in productivity (consider the example of Alice who can make a video game and sell 20 million copies with recurring revenue; being that much more productive as a video game designer is simply impossible as a farmer.)

I'm glad he pointed out this seemingly small detail. This took me a very long time to understand.

EDIT: It reminds me of another great post by Paul Buccheit. It's so important to have the 'heroes' of startup culture explicitly spell out these values:

> I worry that perhaps I'm communicating the wrong priorities. Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. What's most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves. If we "win", but have failed to do that, then we have lost. Winning is nothing.

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.fr/2012/03/eight-years-today.ht...

On the other hand, there's something about the following sidenote that is profoundly human but works quite the opposite of the painful shock implied in my first sentence:

> I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I get attacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me. And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!"

This is almost universally true. It is incredibly reassuring to know that even the greats struggle with this and antagonists pursue us through all walks of life. I'll admit, I've held back from publishing articles that all of my reviewers liked because I worried about the inevitable negative backlash that comes with standing for anything on the internet. Maybe one day I will publish. If so, this essay helped a great deal in getting me there.

Yet, we'd like to think of ourselves as less sensitive, perhaps because we implicitly compare ourselves to the "greats" (if only in belieiving they must have what it takes to achieve what we want to achieve). But, we somehow mythologize that they are above it all, which leads to the mistaken idea that perhaps we don't have what it takes after all.

This was timely for me. A reminder to get my head back in the game, let myself off the hook for feeling the negativity, but to keep pressing forward. Feeling it is not evidence that we are too weak or soft. On the contrary, it means that we care enough about our mission. It should then be worth the inevitable bruises we'll have to take from those who find comfort in the status quo we seek to challenge or who revel in simply demeaning others.

This is tangential to your point, but beware of sour grapes. It's an easy trap to fall into.

It was used against me at one point, someone invented a personal connection to pg that just so happened to hit all of the right nerves. He was trying to get me to quit my job to work for him. Almost worked, save for a stroke of luck (pg mentioning this guy had ~5% of the credentials he claimed). It's unbelievable just how many bullets I've dodged over the years...

(I'll throw in, with all humility, my philistine take on philosophy: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/09/geopolitics-for-individ.... It was inspired partly by Paul Graham's previous http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, which IMO is far superior.)

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