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--> Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it � that the earth moves. [1]
. They say improper things for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas: convention has less hold over them. --> It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.
Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.
It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will find ridiculous. What someone coming back to visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.
Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think what think things you don't dare say out loud.
What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for. [2]
Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.
Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb works well. A lot of the statements people got in trouble for seem harmless now. So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today. Do we have no Galileos? Not likely.
To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but might it also be true?
This won't get us all the answers, though. What if no one happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How can we find these too?
Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
If we could look into the future it would be obvious which of our taboos they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do something almost as good: we can look into the past. Another way to figure out what we're getting wrong is to look at what used to be acceptable and is now unthinkable.
Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get to social questions, many changes are just fashion. The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines.
We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems. People in past times were much like us. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe.
So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. [4] Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true?
You don't have to look into the past to find big differences. In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and what isn't. So you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against ours as well. (The best way to do that is to visit them.)
Of course, if they have time machines in the future they'll probably have a separate reference manual just for Cambridge. This has always been a fussy place, a town of i dotters and t crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same conversation. And that suggests another way to find taboos. Look for prigs, and see what's inside their heads.
Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give them of the world is not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds, but sanitized as well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to think. [6]
You can see this on a small scale in the matter of dirty words. A lot of my friends are starting to have children now, and they're all trying not to use words like "fuck" and "shit" within baby's hearing, lest baby start using these words too. But these words are part of the language, and adults use them all the time. So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of the language by not using them. Why do they do this? Because they don't think it's fitting that kids should use the whole language. We like children to seem innocent. [7]
Most adults, likewise, deliberately give kids a misleading view of the world. One of the most obvious examples is Santa Claus. We think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. I myself think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. But one wonders, do we tell them this stuff for their sake, or for ours?
I'm not arguing for or against this idea here. It is probably inevitable that parents should want to dress up their kids' minds in cute little baby outfits. I'll probably do it myself. The important thing for our purposes is that, as a result, a well brought-up teenage kid's brain is a more or less complete collection of all our taboos � and in mint condition, because they're untainted by experience. Whatever we think that will later turn out to be ridiculous, it's almost certainly inside that head.
How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don't matter � just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can't say.
I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say: to look at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own time.
Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary fashions are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone imitates the whim of some influential person. The fashion for broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth century Europe began because Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot. The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to.
The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas.
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle.
I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.
Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It's easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.
We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.
I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not. And just as there is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is nothing so wrong as the principles of the most recently defeated opponent.
Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberately go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?
I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under rocks as a kid: plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious about anything that's forbidden. Let me see and decide for myself.
Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being mistaken. If, like other eras, we believe things that will later seem ridiculous, I want to know what they are so that I, at least, can avoid believing them.
Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.
Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural selection, for example. It's so simple. Why didn't anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him of being an atheist.
In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able to question assumptions. The m.o. of scientists, or at least of the good ones, is precisely that: look for places where conventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart the cracks and see what's underneath. That's where new theories come from.
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look under rocks. [10]
Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in physics. Or it could be because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, and this makes scientists bolder. (Or it could be that, because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a good politician.)
Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress.
It's not only in the sciences that heresy pays off. In any competitive field, you can by seeing things that others daren't. And in every field there are probably heresies few dare utter. Within the US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share. Yet the cause is so obvious that any observant outsider could explain it in a second: they make bad cars. And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands � something you'd buy a car despite, not because of. Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspect no one dares say this. [11] Otherwise these companies would have tried to fix the problem.
Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.
When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.
Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.
The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.
When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking. This was wise advice. Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. But I think the difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of degree. Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete distraction.
I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics [12], or that pro-Israel groups are "compiling dossiers" on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses [13], or about people being sued for violating the DMCA [14], part of me wants to say, "All right, you bastards, bring it on." The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky. [15]
The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.
I don't think we need the so much as the Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you don't agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but not to be too specific about what you disagree with. Zealots will try to draw you out, but you don't have to answer them. If they try to force you to treat a question on their terms by asking "are you with us or against us?" you can always just answer "neither".
Better still, answer "I haven't decided." That's what Larry Summers did when a group tried to put him in this position. Explaining himself later, he said "I don't do litmus tests." [16] A lot of the questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. There is no prize for getting the answer quickly.
If the anti-yellowists seem to be getting out of hand and you want to fight back, there are ways to do it without getting yourself accused of being a yellowist. Like skirmishers in an ancient army, you want to avoid directly engaging the main body of the enemy's troops. Better to harass them with arrows from a distance.
One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion. The spread of the term "political correctness" meant the beginning of the end of political correctness, because it enabled one to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of any of the specific heresies it sought to suppress.
Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, "The Crucible," about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller's metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the committee are often described as a "witch-hunt."
Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in kind to jokes. They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink. Victorian prudishness, for example, seems to have been defeated mainly by treating it as a joke. Likewise its reincarnation as political correctness. "I am glad that I managed to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote, "but looking back I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the situation deserved." [17]
A Dutch friend says I should use Holland as an example of a tolerant society. It's true they have a long tradition of comparative open-mindedness. For centuries the low countries were the place to go to say things you couldn't say anywhere else, and this helped to make the region a center of scholarship and industry (which have been closely tied for longer than most people realize). Descartes, though claimed by the French, did much of his thinking in Holland.
And yet, I wonder. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. There's so much you can't do there; is there really nothing you can't say?
Certainly the fact that they value open-mindedness is no guarantee. Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid "wrong" as judgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like "negative" or "destructive".)
When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember, it's the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn't work otherwise. Fashion doesn't seem like fashion to someone in the grip of it. It just seems like the right thing to do. It's only by looking from a distance that we see oscillations in people's idea of the right thing to do, and can identify them as fashions.
Time gives us such distance for free. Indeed, the arrival of new fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they seem so ridiculous by contrast. From one end of a pendulum's swing, the other end seems especially far away.
To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what it's doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. Web filters for children and employees often ban sites containing pornography, violence, and hate speech. What counts as pornography and violence? And what, exactly, is "hate speech?" This sounds like a phrase out of
Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.
Especially if you hear yourself using them. It's not just the mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch your own thoughts from a distance. That's not a radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between children and adults. When a child gets angry because he's tired, he doesn't know what's happening. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say "never mind, I'm just tired." I don't see why one couldn't, by a similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions.
You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly. But it's harder, because now you're working against social customs instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society's bad moods.
How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why?
to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond and Bob van der Zwaan for reading drafts of this essay, and to Lisa Randall, Jackie McDonough, Ryan Stanley and Joel Rainey for conversations about heresy. Needless to say they bear no blame for opinions expressed in it, and especially for opinions expressed in it.
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 The Daily GrahamYour daily dose of paul graham. Add your email to be sent a random passage from one of Paul Graham's great essays every day. This uses the Instagraham Graham-As-A-Service (PGAAS) platform. Made by Isaac Diamond. Thanks to Michael Shi. Facts BuddyFast, factual, free, paul graham essay, bio, wikipedia, age, blog, wife, and net worth. Ann EXPERTS 0 Paul Graham Bio | WikiPaul Graham is a popular English computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, investor, and author who is well known due to his work on the programming language Lisp, his previous startup Viaweb (afterward renamed Yahoo! Store), co-founding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News. Paul is the author of many computer programming books, such as: On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp, and Hackers & Painters. Technology journalist Steven Levy has described Paul as a “hacker philosopher”. In 1996, Paul and Robert Morris created Viaweb and recruited Trevor Blackwell shortly after. The two believed that Viaweb was the first application service provider. Viaweb’s software, written mostly in Common Lisp, permitted users to make their own Internet stores. During the summer of 1998, after Jerry Yang received a strong recommendation from Ali Partovi, Viaweb was marketed to Yahoo! for 455,000 shares of Yahoo! stock, estimated at $49.6 million. Following the acquisition, the product became Yahoo! Store. Paul Graham AgePaul was born on November 13, 1964 , in Weymouth, Dorset, England. He is 59 years old . Paul celebrates his birthday on November 13, every year. Paul Graham HeightHe is a man of average stature. Paul stands at a height of 5 ft 7 in ( Approx. 1.7m ).  Paul Graham FamilyHe was born in Weymouth, Dorset, England, to his parents. He and his family moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1968. Paul gained interest in science and mathematics from his dad who was a nuclear physicist. He has British-American nationality. Paul Graham WifePaul is married to his wife Jessica Livingston a founding partner of the seed stage venture firm Y Combinator and author. The two married in 2008. Since late 2016, the two have resided in the United Kingdom. Paul and his wife Jessica Livingston have two children. Before founding Y Combinator, Jessica served as the VP of marketing at Adams Harkness Financial Group. Paul Graham EducationHe studied at Gateway High School. Paul earned a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Cornell University (1986). Later on, Paul joined Harvard University and received Master of Science (1988) and Doctor of Philosophy (1990) degrees in computer science. Paul has also studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design as well as at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. Paul Graham Essay | Essays | Best Essays | Essays PdfFrom 1993 until 2020, Paul published 188 essays on his website, totaling some 500k words, or about 1000 pages. A collection of Paul’s essays has been published as Hackers & Painters by O’Reilly Media, which includes a talk on the growth of Viaweb and what Paul perceives to be the advantages of Lisp to programming it. In 2001, Paul reported that he was working on a new dialect of Lisp called Arc. Arc was released on 29 January 2008. Over the years since, Paul has written several essays describing features or goals of the language, as well as some internal projects at Y Combinator have been written in Arc, most recognizable as the Hacker News web forum and news aggregator program. Paul Graham BlogHe is the founder of Y Combinator. Along with Tim Urban, Seth Godin, and Derek Sivers, these are true artists of the blog format. Paul Graham Y Combinator | Y CombinatorIn 2005, following giving a talk at the Harvard Computer Society afterward published as How to Start a Startup, Paul together with Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris began Y Combinator to provide seed funding to a large number of startups, particularly those started by younger, more technically oriented creators. Y Combinator has presently invested in over 1300 startups, such as Reddit, Twitch (formerly Justin. tv), Xobni, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Stripe. BusinessWeek included him in the 2008 edition of its annual feature, The 25 Most Influential People on the Web. In response to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Paul reported in late 2011 that no representatives of any company supporting it would be invited to Y Combinator’s Demo Day events. In February 2014, Paul quit his day-to-day role at Y Combinator. Paul Graham DrillingAt Paul Graham Drilling, they drill to 13,500 feet and best servicing to 18,000 feet for Natural Gas, Oil, Geothermal, Natural Gas Storage, Injection, Carbon Sequestration, and Compressed Air Storage. Paul Graham Book | Hackers And Painters | PaintingsIn 2004, Paul published his book titled Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age which has a collection of his essays discussing hacking, programming languages, start-up companies, and many other technological issues. This book’s title is also the name of one of those essays. Paul Graham On LispHe is the author of the book On Lisp: Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp which was published in 1993. The book is about macro programming in Common Lisp and is now out of print but can be freely downloaded as a PDF file. Paul Graham Startup Ideas | StartupIn an article from Forbes, Paul defines the term startup by stating that a startup is a company designed to scale very quickly. startup is the focus on growth, unconstrained by geography, which differentiates startups from small businesses. There are various startup types and how they scale including Small business startups, indie companies with small teams, Buyable startups, and Scalable startups. Paul Graham How To Do What You LoveHis essay How To Do What You Love incorporates several pieces of informative advice with the main point of “do what you love.” Paul wrote this essay to inform and entertain his readers about the benefits of finding an occupation that can be loved for the rest of one’s life so as to succeed in that job. Paul Graham Default AliveAs it was disclosed before, default dead or default alive is the concept described first by Paul, a co-founder of a technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005 under the name Y Combinator. As per Paul, half of the startup founders don’t know whether they are default dead or default alive, because they are not used to asking this question. Paul Graham Elon MuskElon Musk a Twitter CEO got roasted in April 2023 by venture capitalist Paul who shared a list of global unicorn companies making the rounds on social media that were comprised mostly of software ventures, with a known lack of manufacturing and other heavy industries in the mix. “Making physical stuff is hard,” Paul argued. “But don’t let that deter you if that’s what you’re interested in.” Paul Graham Quotes– “Startups are very counterintuitive.” – “Even in college classes, most of the work you do is as artificial as running laps.” – “The best way to convince investors is to start a startup that’s actually doing well, meaning growing fast & then simply tell investors so.” – “The way to make your startup grow, is to make something users really love.” – “The dangerous thing is, that faking does work to some extent with investors.” – “Stop looking for the trick.” – “Startups are all consuming. If you start a startup, it will take over your life to a degree that you cannot imagine.” – “Do not start a startup in college.” Paul Graham WebsiteHis website is paulgraham.com. Paul posts his essays on his personal website. Paul Graham Net WorthHe gets his wealth from his work as a computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, investor, and author. Therefore, Paul has accumulated a decent fortune over the years. Paul’s net worth is $2.5 billion. How Old Is Paul GrahamPaul is a 59-year-old who was born on November 13, 1964 , in Weymouth, Dorset, England. Paul celebrates his birthday on November 13, every year. How Tall Is Paul GrahamPaul is a man of average stature who stands at a height of 5 ft 7 in ( Approx. 1.7m ). Who Is Paul GrahamHe is a computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, investor, and author who considers a hypothetical Blub programmer. Paul was born in England, where he and his family maintain permanent residence. However, Paul is also a citizen of the United States, where he studied, lived, and served until 2016. Paul Graham Social Media AccountTwitter – @paulg Copyright © 2024 | WordPress Theme by MH Themes Get the Reddit appI read and summarized all of paul graham's 200+ essays. Here's the summary on my site: https://www.jaakkoj.com/blog/graham It's over 10,000 words long, so I also made a Google Docs version, in case that's easier to navigate: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16fj-veqvD7pQBWhdnM6REHl4zIe75z3bec0HIzTEtWM/edit?usp=sharing It's all free - hope you find it useful! Paul Graham has had a big influence on me so I hope this introduction/summary inspires folks to read his essays. Let me know if there's something I can do to make the post more useful. By continuing, you agree to our User Agreement and acknowledge that you understand the Privacy Policy . Enter the 6-digit code from your authenticator appYou’ve set up two-factor authentication for this account. 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Repository files navigationGraham essays collection.  "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late". Check out the releases page for the latest build, updated daily. Download the complete collection of +200 essays from Paul Graham website and export them in EPUB , and Markdown for easy AFK reading. It turned out to be a whooping +500k words. I used the RSS originally made by Aaron Swartz shared by PG himself, feedparser , html2text , htmldate and Unidecode libraries for data cleaning and acquisition. Dependencies for MacOSOn macOS you need brew in order to install the dependencies listed in the Makefile. Run the Makefile in the root directory using: Current EssaysHere's a list of the current essays included, and an EPUB . If you have any ideas, suggestions, curses or feedback in order to improve the code, please don't hesitate in opening an issue or PR. They'll be very welcomed! Contributors 6- Python 73.5%
- Makefile 26.5%
Summaries of Paul Graham's essaysSee the originals here . - After The Ladder
- An Alternative Theory of Unions
- Cities and Ambition
- How to Do What You Love
- How to Get Startup Ideas
- How to Make Wealth
- How to Start a Startup
- Inequality and Risk
- Is It Worth Being Wise?
- It's Charisma, Stupid
- Schlep Blindness
- Startup = Growth
- Taste for Makers
- The Age of the Essay
- The Python Paradox
- Two Kinds of Judgement
- Undergraduation
- What You Can't Say
- What You'll Wish You'd Known
- Why Nerds are Unpopular
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
- Why Startup Hubs Work
- Writing and Speaking
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COMMENTS
The economic boost from the "Eras' tour, her ability to bring joy to fan's lives, and her fairytale romance with Travis Kelce are some of the reasons that Taylor Swift is the best thing to happen ...
The Age of the Essay: The Python Paradox: Great Hackers: Mind the Gap: How to Make Wealth: The Word "Hacker" What You Can't Say: Filters that Fight Back: Hackers and Painters: If Lisp is So Great: The Hundred-Year Language: Why Nerds are Unpopular: Better Bayesian Filtering: Design and Research: A Plan for Spam: Revenge of the Nerds ...
Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one. Mods
The Best Essay. March 2024. Despite its title this isn't meant to be the best essay. My goal here is to figure out what the best essay would be like. It would be well-written, but you can write well about any topic. What made it special would be what it was about. Obviously some topics would be better than others.
A student's guide to startups. Paul Graham. The pros and cons of starting a startup in (or soon after) college. Pros: stamina, poverty, rootlessness, colleagues, ignorance. Cons: building stuff that looks like class projects.
The first step is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a natural aptitude for, that you have a deep interest in, and that offers scope to do great work. In practice you don't have to worry much about the third criterion.
Moral fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often because some group doesn't want us to. The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas.
This is a third party project, independent from Paul Graham and produced by Wondercraft (https://www.wondercraft.ai/)Full episode of last essay and more:Spot...
There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard. [ 1]
Audio reading of Paul Graham's September 2012 essay - Startup = GrowthPLEASE GIVE US FEEDBACK IN THE COMMENTS- What other content would you like audio listen...
Novelty and Heresy. 43. The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius. 44. General and Surprising. 45. Charisma / Power. 46. The Risk of Discovery.
Hey Everyone, Hope you're doing well. I wanted to share my favorite essays of Paul Graham. I believe listening and reading advice from experienced people is a way of encoding success into your brain. In a sense, our brains let us code almost anything. Counterintuitively, reading does not seem like a part of this encoding because we forgot ...
The answer is, the first component of importance: the number of people who care about what you write. If you narrow the topic sufficiently, you can probably find something you're an expert on. Write about that to start with. If you only have ten readers who care, that's fine. You're helping them, and you're writing.
Top essays by Paul Graham (massivetimesaver.com) 25 points by alexjv89 on Apr 24, 2018 ... Same here. I find that essay enormously helpful for evaluating one's current living situation and planning your future. Also, it provides a great way for explaining to others why you live where you live. ... I often disagreed with Paul (especially on ...
1. I've been a reader of Paul Graham's essays since around sophomore year of college. Back then it was tremendously infrequent (and lacking depth), but this past year, it has been quite the ...
Your daily dose of Paul Graham. Add your email to be sent a random passage from one of Paul Graham's great essays every day. This uses the Instagraham Graham-As-A-Service (PGAAS) platform. Made by Isaac Diamond. Thanks to Michael Shi. The Daily Graham.
I'm gathering all of Paul Graham's essays in a neat format and narrating them with AI. This way, you can listen to them in your spare time and get inspired.
Paul Graham Essay | Essays | Best Essays | Essays Pdf. From 1993 until 2020, Paul published 188 essays on his website, totaling some 500k words, or about 1000 pages. A collection of Paul's essays has been published as Hackers & Painters by O'Reilly Media, which includes a talk on the growth of Viaweb and what Paul perceives to be the ...
Paul Graham has had a big influence on me so I hope this introduction/summary inspires folks to read his essays. Let me know if there's something I can do to make the post more useful. Share Add a Comment
Check out the releases page for the latest build, updated daily.. Download the complete collection of +200 essays from Paul Graham website and export them in EPUB, and Markdown for easy AFK reading. It turned out to be a whooping +500k words. I used the RSS originally made by Aaron Swartz shared by PG himself, feedparser, html2text, htmldate and Unidecode libraries for data cleaning and ...
Summaries of Paul Graham's essays. See the originals here.. Summaries. After The Ladder; An Alternative Theory of Unions; Cities and Ambition
P.S Been spending the last few hours reading through Paul Graham 101 and loving it! My favourite insights so far are: See startups as a path to wealth over a small period of time. E.g 4x years, so need to work hard in 4 years, rather than work slowly in a 40 year job.
Paul Graham (/ ɡ r æ m /; born November 13, 1964) [3] is an English-American computer scientist, writer, entrepreneur and investor.His work has included the programming language Arc, the startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), co-founding the startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.. He is the author of the computer programming books On Lisp ...
Paul Graham: Essays - Volume 1, 1993-2005. Paul Graham. ... Excellent collection of what I would call modern-day, or maybe practical, philosophical essays. Graham must spend a lot of time thinking which, when coupled with real-world experience and a developed writing style, makes for entertaining and insightful reading. ...