I’ve just realized a potential connection upon remembering something from a different Paul Graham essay.
From this post:
Graham has a natural affinity for production-based strategies which allowed him to acquire various kinds of capital. He blinds himself to the existence of adversarial strategies, so he’s able to authentically claim to think that e.g. mean people fail….
Innocence is also open-mindedness. We want kids to be innocent so they can continue to learn. Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you’re going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you’re better off learning it last. Otherwise you won’t bother learning much more.
Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think they’ve deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don’t.
So he’s already written something similar out explicitly, at least. And juxtaposing those feels like it bends the framing away from the blind spot being a natural accident of affinity (which I don’t think is explicit in this post but which is how my mind tends to treat it by default). I’m not sure what to make of this, but it feels interesting.
I’ve just realized a potential connection upon remembering something from a different Paul Graham essay.
From this post:
From “Lies We Tell Kids”:
So he’s already written something similar out explicitly, at least. And juxtaposing those feels like it bends the framing away from the blind spot being a natural accident of affinity (which I don’t think is explicit in this post but which is how my mind tends to treat it by default). I’m not sure what to make of this, but it feels interesting.