Paul Graham Interviewed By David Weinberger (Pretty Interesting)

http://media-cyber.law.harvard.edu/VideoBerkman/paul_graham_2006-11-08.mov

by mattjaynes • 19 years ago

21 33 19 years ago

media-cyber.law.harvard.edu

mattjaynes2• 19 years ago

The interviewer seems pretty clueless and confrontational, but PG handles it quite well and makes some great points.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2006/11/09/web-of-ideas-with-paul-graham-2/

extantproject• 19 years ago

Weinberg was confrontational. He seems only out to argue. Paul handled it well.

akkartik2• 19 years ago

I disagree. It is true that:

1. Video is a slow way to process information in the internet era.

2. Weinberger doesn't come off well. The frequent interruptions at the start are irritating. What starts out seeming like a talk turns into a debate between two people, and the change in format is jarring for a bit. And it is hard to understand what Weinberger is getting at. This might have to do with our disparate vocabularies, and the wide disparity in the worlds he and I live in.

In spite of these, W does have a point. It is non-trivial to separate the fashionable from the timeless in a thing of beauty. 'Space aliens' may require a human-like visual cortex to appreciate the Mona Lisa. Does that make it just a narrow fad as well, or is a visual cortex a protocol prerequisite to evaluating it? As I asked PG over email, where does fashion end and convention begin?

A lot of the ancient philosophical arguments are between polar opposites like these. Should we find out about the world with reason or the senses? Is mind or matter supreme? Is it ok to abort foetuses or not? We know that one can exaggerate anything to make a point, and yet it is easy to fall into the trap of ending up with an extreme viewpoint because one can't decide where to draw the line. Eventually we (will) figure out for each of these issues that there can be richer answers than the obvious black-or-white.

So beauty can be timeless, but also tightly bound to a context. It is not clear that all of the latter is bad. How to separate the two? Open question. Relativism is no worse than believing passionately in the wrong anwer.

---

So much for the academic debate; PG's outlook is more utilitarian[1]. The problem of building beautiful things is a hard one, and it makes more sense for a builder to 'flow timeless' rather than to follow fashions. The alternative may work too, but there's less percentage in it. This is perfectly reasonable, it's just not the same question W is grappling with. Both of them are right, they're just asking slightly different questions. They don't ever figure this out in the video, IMO.

BTW, I believe this conversation contributed to a PG essay: http://reddit.com/info/ufsk/comments/cugnx

[1] A utilitarian philosophy of aesthetics, heh.

cata• 19 years ago

can someone please make an edit of this video... the interviewer is killing me!!! I stopped watching after 3 minutes...

Tichy2• 19 years ago

Same here. Here is a business idea: write a software that automatically creates transcripts of online videos. I hate the YouTube culture (old fashioned guy who likes to read here).

jkush4• 19 years ago

Actually - that's pretty hard to do. What would probably be more "doable" is to take a transcript (done manually by a transcriptionist) and sync up the text with the video.

You could provide links in a transcript which when clicked take you to the part of the video in question, if you'd like to see it. You could also go the other way, and use a transcript to provide subtitles.

Any ideas on how to make this happen? My intial thought is to exploit pauses and breaks in the sound and map them to sentences, etc. Voice mapping would help too, so you could map a sentence to Paul Graham and another sentence to the interviewer.

What would be pretty cool (actually, REALLY cool now that I think about it) would be desiging a transcript markup language that could be married to a video. Has anyone done this? Why not?

juwo7• 19 years ago

use juwo - it can do this

mattjaynes2• 19 years ago

The students finally get to ask questions about 45 minutes in - then it gets a bit better. The interviewer does make it pretty painful to watch though ;)

bootload• 19 years ago

Of course you could not watch it [0] or download the mp3 [1].

Reference

[0] Virtual consoles are great for this, just switch to another console.

[1] mediaberkman, 'Web of Ideas with Paul Graham, 9, November 2006, 1Hr.19m"

http://media-cyber.law.harvard.edu/AudioBerkman/paul_graham_2006-11-08.mp3

juwo7• 19 years ago

use juwo!!!

jey2• 19 years ago

How? there isn't any link on juwo.com to the actual product.

juwo7• 19 years ago

It is released. Please see

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=14254

staunch• 19 years ago

Shouting at people to use your product may work, but I think long-term you're better off making something users want!!!

juwo7• 19 years ago

sorry, not shouting, simply excited (and frustrated, if I may add).

It is released. Please see

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=14254

champion• 19 years ago

I went to this talk back in Dec. and also found it a little painful. PG mentioned some interesting things about actually using Arc to build the YCombinator site (include this Reddit-like site). A lot of the rest of it approached the "what is beauty?" stratosphere where oxygen gets thin...

Goladus2• 19 years ago

Just to discuss a question that was skipped:

Romantic music (19th century) isn't always more complex than baroque music (early 18th century). Indeed, in many ways the transitions saw a decrease in certain kinds of complexity. Harmonic rhythm, that is the speed at which the underlying chord pattern changes, slowed down during the late 18th century. Tuning shifted from meantone to equal temperament. (More complex to implement, but results in a cleaner+simpler UI for musicians ;)

Also, there were advances in instrument design. In particular, the piano of the 19th century was much like a modern piano. Compared to the 18th century piano, it had a much more expressive power. Bach for example really could not write crescendos into his keyboard music. The keyboards of the time didn't do dynamics very well. He had organs and harpsichords and clavicords and such. In contrast, Brahms had the modern Piano.

Alex3917• 19 years ago

I have a proposed unifying theory that covers the beauty of both simplicity and excess.

Humans appreciate intelligence. Showing how much you can do with so little is one way to show intelligence. For example, if you can create a brilliant artistic masterpiece with only a single line then this is clearly a work of amazing intelligence. The other easy way to demonstrate intelligence is by doing the absolute most that you can with every resource you have available to you. This explains the beauty of things like H2G2, where the beauty comes from incorporating all of these random plot elements and linguistic tropes into these beautiful sentences and descriptions.

rms• 19 years ago

I made the interview! My team was one of the "We're doing X but easy to use" people. We didn't have a functioning demo but we did have graphical mockups of the design. I thought we nailed it, but apparently Paul didn't get it because we didn't have an animated demo. I've been kicking around an essay for a while about just how trivial easy-to-use design can be, it'll be on here eventually.

Goladus2• 19 years ago

A demo works. Explaining -how- you're going to make it easy to use might be useful as well.

Describe a real hypothetical user (three if possible) using the software. Describe in as much detail as possible, and then explain at some level how your technology will allow you to accomplish this.

RyanGWU82• 19 years ago

I thought the interview was pretty interesting. Good to see some critical thinking and conflict over one of PG's essays -- much more interesting than just a biographical interview or unnecessary flattery.

My favorite part:

"If you want to date a painting -- like in the sense of to identify its origin, not to have a relationship with it..."

Thanks for the clarification there... ;-)

akkartik2• 19 years ago

When something is built for a well-defined purpose it's much easier to judge how timeless its solutions are.

http://rodfrey.wordpress.com/2007/04/18/the-craftsmanship-of-code

Appreciating beauty in a specific medium requires knowing the 'language', the conventions of that medium.

http://www.tinkerx.com/index.php/2007/04/15/the-box-part-2-the-frame

kul• 19 years ago

I actually really enjoyed this. My first guess is that when we find something complex beautiful, it's because it is tapping into something innate (I would love to write about how music taste works). Also, I thought comment about "how easy something is to use" actually being a measure of how well it is made, is brilliant, which sometimes people don't get. Alas, it's 3.30am and I should sleep.

Paul Graham Interviewed By David Weinberger (Pretty Interesting)

Related Stories