I enjoy Graham’s essays and find many of them quite insightful, but they tend to be rather light on empirical evidence, which makes it hard to say how much of the insight is real.
For many of the things he writes about, we can take his clout and background as evidence that his insight is ‘real’. It doesn’t have to explained via careful science to be true. I think the fact that Paul Graham is saying something, for certain subjects, makes it highly likely to be very-mostly-correct. I’ll happily believe it to a high degree unless I have reason not to. I believe the evidence that they’re mostly-correct is that he wrote them, and the evidence that things he writes are mostly-correct is that they have been so in the past and that he’s intelligent and moreover consistently intelligent, so we have little expectation of a given essay suddenly floundering into bullshit.
His insight and way of thinking can be useful even if they are unreal. I mean—I’m sure every essay on that list makes points that can be argued to death or outright refuted by a sufficiently committed pedant. But they still have value. We think in heuristics anyway, for the most part, so it’s valuable to glean heuristics from smart people and to see how they think and how their heuristics work (or don’t work).
Empirical evidence would not really improve many of these essays. For one thing, filling an essay with detailed evidence that isn’t necessary for the reader to believe it would probably detract from the quality of the essay. And many of his points are opinions or perspectives. They shouldn’t or can’t be highly factual. They would become false if they were made hard-and-fast.
For many of the things he writes about, we can take his clout and background as evidence that his insight is ‘real’.
But that’s at most very weak evidence that his insight is real. Much of success is luck and networking, for example, and successful people are notoriously bad at disentangling various causes of their success properly, in favor of giving themselves more of the credit than warranted.
successful people are notoriously bad at disentangling various causes of their success properly, in favor of giving themselves more of the credit than warranted.
That’s not clear to me. It is common to hear successful people saying things along the lines of “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for X, Y, and Z”. In particular, I’m thinking of Linus Torvalds, whom I remember denying most of the credit for creating Linux. I’m sure there are many other examples. Overall, it’s hard to tell weather successful people in general overestimate or underestimate how much credit they deserve.
I enjoy Graham’s essays and find many of them quite insightful, but they tend to be rather light on empirical evidence, which makes it hard to say how much of the insight is real.
Several points:
For many of the things he writes about, we can take his clout and background as evidence that his insight is ‘real’. It doesn’t have to explained via careful science to be true. I think the fact that Paul Graham is saying something, for certain subjects, makes it highly likely to be very-mostly-correct. I’ll happily believe it to a high degree unless I have reason not to. I believe the evidence that they’re mostly-correct is that he wrote them, and the evidence that things he writes are mostly-correct is that they have been so in the past and that he’s intelligent and moreover consistently intelligent, so we have little expectation of a given essay suddenly floundering into bullshit.
His insight and way of thinking can be useful even if they are unreal. I mean—I’m sure every essay on that list makes points that can be argued to death or outright refuted by a sufficiently committed pedant. But they still have value. We think in heuristics anyway, for the most part, so it’s valuable to glean heuristics from smart people and to see how they think and how their heuristics work (or don’t work).
Empirical evidence would not really improve many of these essays. For one thing, filling an essay with detailed evidence that isn’t necessary for the reader to believe it would probably detract from the quality of the essay. And many of his points are opinions or perspectives. They shouldn’t or can’t be highly factual. They would become false if they were made hard-and-fast.
But that’s at most very weak evidence that his insight is real. Much of success is luck and networking, for example, and successful people are notoriously bad at disentangling various causes of their success properly, in favor of giving themselves more of the credit than warranted.
That’s not clear to me. It is common to hear successful people saying things along the lines of “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for X, Y, and Z”. In particular, I’m thinking of Linus Torvalds, whom I remember denying most of the credit for creating Linux. I’m sure there are many other examples. Overall, it’s hard to tell weather successful people in general overestimate or underestimate how much credit they deserve.