Things Paul Graham is wrong about

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2010/10/five-things-paul-graham-is-wrong-about.html

by imgabe • 16 years ago

254 76 16 years ago

rondam.blogspot.com

"5. You don't have to take notes"

I agree with that one, I love taking notes at events and conferences. After a one-day conference I'll end up with a few pages of notes, and when I get home I type those into a few actionable items, bam!

jgershen2• 16 years ago

Except that's not something that PG says, in general. I think that in this case, he was pretty clearly saying "the talk will be online" in an idiomatic manner.

In my experience PG errs toward the side of putting too much emphasis on taking notes, honestly. (This is probably because he works better when he takes notes, and he's seen a lot of YC founders forget/ignore his advice when they don't write it down.)

j_baker• 16 years ago

Personally, I find notes are a distraction. Every time I try to take notes while someone is talking, I find myself more focused on writing things down than actually trying to comprehend what they're saying.

jhawk28• 16 years ago

There have been studies that have found the opposite. If you write things down, you are more focused on writing/reading than actually listening to the speaker. Its the repetition that actually helps you remember, so reading the published notes afterwards or listening to the recording would be best.

equivalence• 16 years ago

I'm sure many people do benefit from taking notes but I'm convinced that pg most likely wasn't dismissing note taking in general. I think he was more likely to be meaning you don't need to write down every word he says, akin to almost transcribing the talk - well this was my take on it anyway. Basically he was implying that the substance of the talk will appear in a later essay, which it did. To me, with this point in particular, the author of the article appears to be trying to find something (anything?) to take issue with, which in my opinion makes me value his other points a little less favourably.

csallen• 16 years ago

>> 2. The returns on angel investing are bimodal

You're misinterpreting PG's stance here. This only applies this to VCs and super-angels, not to regular angel investors like yourself. VCs and SAs are obligated to have a much larger return on their investments in order to make the funds they raise a success. This is done via one or two big winners, so they're hoping for 1000x.

>> 3. Valuations don't matter

Similarly, this is aimed at VCs and SAs, not you. And of course you have to interpret the phrase as "Valuations don't matter [within reason]." Clearly you can think of a high enough number where the valuations should begin to matter to these people, but the point is that they're not at those levels right now.

>> I have a net negative return because of one spectacular failure (from which I have learned a lot but that's another story).

I'd love to read a blog post on that experience, and what made it different from your other successful investments.

lisper10• 16 years ago

The short version: it was my very first private investment. I decided I should diversify, get out of tech and into something more traditional and relatively safe. So I decided to get into real estate. This was in 2006. You can guess how that turned out.

Jun8• 16 years ago

+1 not because I agree with everything but we have to have some dissenting voices (event when they're a little simplistic, like this one) to make progress.

lisper10• 16 years ago

Thanks.

poet3• 16 years ago

I didn't read past the first point because it's dead wrong. Paul is talking about abstracting efficiency away into the compiler and presenting the programmer with a more elegant interface. As an example, Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case. Not only in the author completely missing Paul's point (efficiently is unimportant at the axiomatic level), the author is incorrectly applying the essay to business operations instead of programming languages. In most businesses, programming language speed is NOT the bottleneck of the operation.

silentbicycle3• 16 years ago

> Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case.

The sort of operations commonly done on strings only have a small overlap with list operations, though. I'm all for orthogonality in a language when it's practical, but I'm not sure that one is a good trade-off.

Erlang does that, and aside from space issues (on 64-bit, a linked list of character code ints means 16 bytes per char, due to alignment), it's kind of awkward. While using pattern matching on individual chars is nice, in those cases it probably makes more sense to tokenize the strings into atoms/tuples via REs, and then pattern-match on those instead. Binaries can also be used as pseudo-strings, but to me it feels like two half-solutions. (And its shell's printing a list of ints as chars when they're printable 7-bit ASCII characters is a bit odd.) Having atoms (AKA symbols) helps, though.

Incidentally, Lua's strings are all immutable atoms. That's practical most of the time, but occasionally a major liability. Lua has the obvious option of just using a different string implementation via userdata when it's a problem, though, so it can make such a daring trade-off.

Of course, just saving strings as arrays with a \0 at the end is also pretty brittle.

drblast• 16 years ago

From what little I've used Haskell, the strings-as-list paradigm was exceptionally useful.

A lot of people also complain about the performance of strings in Haskell, so this is right where the tradeoff is today. Tomorrow it won't likely be an issue.

A really smart compiler should be able to optimize most of the inefficiency away; I'd bank on compilers improving fast enough to make seemingly inefficient things cost much less.

If I'm designing a language today for the future, I'd err on the side of usefulness.

jimbokun3• 16 years ago

"Paul notes that strings and lists really should just be represented as lists and the compiler should efficiently handle lists of characters as a special case."

Instead of "strings represented as lists", I think it is more useful to say "strings and lists implementing a common interface." For example, in Clojure, it is perfectly fine to treat a string as a sequence.

    > (doseq [ch "abc"]
        (println ch))
    a
    b
    c

mahmud• 16 years ago

Yeah, they're called sequences in CL, and they're even user-extensible (on sbcl at least.)

kscaldef2• 16 years ago

> In most businesses, programming language speed is NOT the bottleneck of the operation

You know, people love to say this, but in every company I've worked at (sample size 3), past the first year or so of operations, programming language / framework speed actually was a very significant concern for the business.

This may be self-selection; scaling and performance are two of my areas of specialization. However, whenever I'm on the job market, there doesn't seem to be any shortage of companies trying to hire people to help them handle their performance and scaling problems.

poet3• 16 years ago

It seems like you misunderstand my comment. The idea I'm getting at is that it's usually something else besides the programming that is the bottleneck, not that bottlenecks don't exist. You're going to hit architectural and database issues long before you hit Ruby's GC in most applications.

raganwald2• 16 years ago

I didn't read past the first point because it's dead wrong.

THAT statement is dead wrong. Or at least, in dead opposition to my approach to learning. If someone says five things, and four are wrong but the last one teaches me something new or gives me a new perspective on something I already know...

Reading the four things cost me maybe two mintes. The last one cost me thirty seconds to read, plus another couple of minutes to savour. The total investment is maybe ten minutes and I learned something.

Of course, if I skip everyone who seems to be wrong right off the bat I'll avoid some situations where all five are wrong. But I have something to help me out with that: The post is on HN and some other nice people are voting it up. So something must be right, why don't I navigate into the cave, around the pit of vipers, past the deadfall, and onto the intellectual treasure?

And in fact, I read past your first statement and liked the rest. See how that works?

;-)

poet3• 16 years ago

It's most certainly not the approach I take to learning. It is, however, the approach I take towards the conical "I disagree with Paul Graham" blog posts. Why? Because everyone's a critic. If the critic in question doesn't demonstrate a general understanding of the subject matter I do not invest my time. In this case, it was a misreading of an essay, but it really could be anything. I apply this approach to critics of all kinds. Do I apply this approach to published essayists or programmers with well known software? Not usually, because getting published or becoming well known is a sort of vetting in itself. But a vetting process is certainly necessary for blog posts on criticism or some random repository on Github. There just isn't enough time in the day to dive into things that don't have a solid foundation. Why would I read a 5000 line Ruby program whose initial functions are written poorly? At best I'll end with one or two nice tricks and a large headache.

audionerd• 16 years ago

Why stop at five??

lisper10• 16 years ago

Because I agree with Paul on almost everything else. And in fact, I should have stopped at four. (Maybe I should have stopped at zero.)

ph0rque• 16 years ago

I think you did well to write this article, although if you zoom out one or two levels of abstraction, you would be in agreement on most, if not all points.

mgrouchy2• 16 years ago

So really the name of this article should be "Five things that Paul Graham and I don't Agree on", not as flashy a title, but probably more accurate.

klochner• 16 years ago

So you expected the article to be devoid of opinion?

hugh3• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure that "Five things Paul Graham is wrong about" is pretty much the absolute optimal title for an HN linkbait post. The content is hardly important.

Five point list plus argumentative assertions plus picking a fight with pg? Absolute memetically engineered brilliance. Congratulations, Mr Rondam, whoever you are.

dwwoelfel• 16 years ago

A quote from pg:

"If you wanted to be that accurate, you could prepend 'I think' to every statement in every essay written. That's implicit, except in proofs."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820952

mgrouchy2• 16 years ago

Good point. I guess I was nitpicking.

jgershen2• 16 years ago

Actually, I think that with the possible exception of #2 (which can be debated extensively) these are not "things that Paul Graham is wrong about". They are "places where Paul Graham used hyperbole to make a point."

I disagree with PG on a number of issues, but this post completely missed the point.

jpwagner• 16 years ago

"why [so-and-so] is wrong" is a great way to get your stuff read, but is so typically devoid of content and full of misunderstanding that i've grown to hate this type of post.

the author clearly seems to misunderstand that PG's "rules" are simply ways to mentally lower the barriers to making something:

1. efficiency doesn't matter...as the author says, it matters later. so then get to work NOW

2. the returns on angel investing are bimodal...again, the simplification is used to motivate early stage startups to look for funding

3. valuations don't matter...the author's counterexample is ridiculous. PG's point is don't obsess if you're worth 14 mill or 16 mill, just get to work

4. investors who don't want to be first movers are assholes...i suppose this is the post the author wanted to write but didn't think it had enough content

5. you don't have to take notes...all PG was saying was: I'm posting this talk online. take notes if it helps you, you can think for yourself

deathflute• 16 years ago

Well said. You basically wrote what I would have attempted to write. Taking statements out of context is like overfitting the data and leads to poor generalization.

dpavlenkov• 16 years ago

Now I know what to put in the title to get my stuff read.

chrischen2• 16 years ago

> but the act of writing helps you remember what was said.

I hate it when people make this assumption because for me this is not true. When I take notes I stop comprehending what is being said because the act of transcribing becomes mechanical. I also write slow so I start to lag behind what's being said. Is there any research for this because I would like to be a test subject and prove them wrong.

drusenko2• 16 years ago

I agree completely with you, and presume that, as in most things, people are different.

I've personally found that intensely concentrating on what is said and actively engaging in thinking about it is the most effective way for me to not only remember what is said, but come up with interesting side-thoughts and insights about my own situation in the process.

Writing is just mechanical to me and prevents me from properly concentrating on what is said.

jamesbritt• 16 years ago

I've had the same problem in various situations, most notably my linear algebra class in college. After a few classes I realized that if I took notes I would lose track of what the teacher was saying; I had to shift my attention to the act of writing. he moved so fast that it was a choice of pay attention or take notes. I opted for "pay attention". While I could recall few details I did much better absorbing essential concepts and abstracts.

OTOH, at conferences I've been trying to close the laptop and take notes using pen and paper. I get more out of the talks this way, but it works because the information density is lower than my math course.

And I don't take a whole lot of notes, but try to jot down key points or things that might help trigger some recall later. I figure I can Google for stuff if all I have are some keywords written down, so I don't have to notate whole sentences.

lmkg• 16 years ago

There's a difference between taking notes and transcribing, and people who benefit from and proselytize taking notes tend to be very far from the transcribing end of the spectrum. People who are the most effective note-takers tend to synthesize what they're hearing and only write down key points. While the synthesized notes are smaller and therefore faster to write, the real benefit comes from the act of synthesis itself. It forces a level of understanding that the listener wouldn't be forced to attain were it not for taking the notes.

Sadly, there's very little emphasis on what it means to take good notes, or how to go about doing it. I suspect that good note-takers don't even realize that there's a difference between notes and transcripts, so when they promote note-taking as a study tool they neglect to mention a critical step. You probably could become a good note-taker with some practice, and would benefit from it, but if you're not still in school I doubt it would be worth your time.

chrischen2• 16 years ago

You're right there is a difference. But I have a problem taking in what I'm hearing unless I repeat it in my head a few times. I don't have enough real time computational power to physically write the stuff down and process what I'm hearing.

When I was forced to take notes I never actually transcribed, but in effect what I wrote down was practically transcribing because I could not keep the processing in real time to write down only the important points.

meelash2• 16 years ago

The best way to take notes is to not do it during the class. Pay full attention only to the teacher/speaker during the class/lecture and make a conscious attempt to remember everything they said. Immediately following, get together with 3-5 like-minded friends and attempt to as a group write the entire lecture from start to finish from memory. If no one can remember something, skip it.

It takes a few weeks/months to develop your focus, attention span, and memory enough to be able to get near 100% short-term retention, but you start to see benefits almost immediately. And the long-term benefits to your memory and focus can't be understated.

Also, it's really interesting how many other people are expressing that they never took notes in college. I was famous for it in my college (my advisor wrote a paragraph about it in grad school recommendations), whereas I always thought it was common sense, seeing other people who spent the whole class scribbling, but didn't really understand a bit of what was actually taught.

llimllib• 16 years ago

I preferred to scribble in the margins of my notebook during lectures; not words or likenesses of anything in particular, but kind of Hugh Macleod-ish pattern scribbles[1]. Some teachers really hated that I wasn't looking up at them and thought I was being super disrespectful, which didn't make sense to me since I was asking questions that clearly indicated I was paying attention.

[1] http://gapingvoid.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/rackspace-1...

alphaoverlord• 16 years ago

I think this kind of approach can only work in certain situations and modes of teaching. For biology or anything that requires more memorization than conceptualization, I think it is key to have a running tab of the topics/key points. This is especially key for fast speaking lecturers or topics that you are just being introduced to. I think your approach is really helpful in topics that are more conceptual. Math, CS, and logic are much better learned with full concentration.

That said, I think pre-studying and post-studying immediately before or after class is really, really helpful - regardless whether notes are taken. The only challenge is that it takes much more time and a lot of effort. This is another clear example of the relationship between effort and reward.

syllogism• 16 years ago

Yeah the key for me is to think about what's being said and question it or relate it to things I know. Integrate it into the knowledge network with as many links as possible. "Yes, of course, because...", or "Hmm, but doesn't this implication of this contradict the implications of this other thing"?

This way I have a path to the new information from old information, and I'm unlikely to forget it. For me at least, atoms of information are much harder to remember than connections. And they're much less useful, too.

pg3• 16 years ago

This seems like an almost deliberate misreading of what I've said:

1. A couple quotes from the essay in which he claims I said efficiency doesn't matter (http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html):

"And yet some applications will still demand speed."

"Efficiency is important, but I don't think that's the right way to get it."

2/3. He claims I said x, then at the end concedes I actually said -x. This latter I "grudgingly conceded?" It was arguably the single biggest theme of that talk, that the super-angels might have a winning model without getting big hits.

4. I said assholes are an instance of people who invest late, not that the two are identical. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809670)

5. I agree note-taking has benefits other than recording things. In fact I've written about the phenomenon before. I just meant that people didn't have to take notes to record what I said.

lisper10• 16 years ago

Couple of things for the record:

1. I may well have misunderstood or misrepresented what you've said. But it was not deliberate.

2. I concede that point #5 was unfair. It occurred to me as I was writing and watching the video, and I decided to add it on the spur of the moment. I should have thought about it more carefully. I've added an update to that effect.

Retric2• 16 years ago

I'd much rather have a 10x return in one year than a 100x return in three (or five or ten, which are more typical numbers).

The above is a stupid exaggeration. It only approximates the truth if your average return is more than 3x per year. (Ok, the 10 year example works if your expected safe ROI is 30% per year over 9 years also works, but good luck with that.)

jseliger• 16 years ago

This seems like an almost deliberate misreading of what I've said:

This seems like a very common problem on the Internet, perhaps even more so than in the rest of life. Most of the HN comments I disagreed with on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1729501 regarding "How Universities Work," an essay I wrote, concern misreadings.

The same thing happened regarding an essay about the movie Avatar. In fact, it was so common that I wrote another essay examining the reaction to the first: http://jseliger.com/2009/12/30/trolls-comments-and-slashdot-... .

I think one reason pg says things like, "I don't mean..." in his essays is avoid this kind of thing as much as possible. I'm a grad student in English and assign a couple of his essays to freshmen; the most common disagreements they have are with things not actually said in the essay. A favorite question I ask in class or on their journal entries: "Where do you see that?" The usual answer turns out to be, "nowhere."

jamesaguilar• 16 years ago

We want to be looked upon as smart and as having thoughts worth saying. One of the fast ways to do this is to beat another smart person in a rhetorical fight. But smart people are hard to beat in such fights because, being smart, they tend to think correct thoughts. Therefore we have a subconscious motivation to misread them and fight against what they did not say. This is the only way someone without extraordinarily high amounts of expertise and insight can "win" against Paul Graham in his primary domain of thought. There's a real social pressure for people who comment on other people's thoughts to create straw-man lookalikes of the thoughts rather than to address the thoughts themselves.

pg3• 16 years ago

A useful technique to head off such misunderstandings is to ask the person who disagrees to pick out a particular sentence or passage they believe is false.

netcan• 16 years ago

I know this point is moot anyway, but what would bother me more is the less obvious misreading like "Valuations don't matter.. Would you invest in a YC company at a ten billion dollar valuation?"

If you are under the impression that you a writing for an audience that want to understand what you mean, you can safely assume that you are talking about the realm of common scenarios. If you start feeling like you are writing for critics of this sort, you start to spell things out in a way that is, I think, worse writing.

zachbeane• 16 years ago

byrneseyeview• 16 years ago

The last round of YC companies was getting $10M valuations, an order of magnitude over a few years ago, under the valuations-don't-matter mantra.

Are these the valuations that they're getting from YC, or from investors post-YC? If post-YC, couldn't this be due largely to more of the companies being Ramen Profitable? If they raise money after four months rather than three, they've been growing (perhaps at an exponential rate) for 33% longer.

drusenko2• 16 years ago

It's a false comparison. No companies in my round (W07) or before that I'm aware of got anywhere near as low as $1M valuations...

For the $500-800k raised that is still popular, "OK" was a $2M pre valuation and "amazing" would have been $5M.

The $10M valuations today for $500-800k (if there are any) are definitely in the "amazing" range, so it's somewhere around a 2x increase.

That could definitely be explained by a more mature set of companies, or companies attacking larger problems.

jimbokun3• 16 years ago

Or better YC brand recognition?

JoeAltmaier• 16 years ago

But if you take "Paul Graham" out of the article, and say "5 things that are wrong", then its pretty much correct.

So perhaps the point was to debunk "misinterpretations" of these statements. Unfortunately done as a personal commentary.

hasenj• 16 years ago

I have my own list of things I disagree with PG about, none of them was on this list. Every one can make such a list, and if they did, then everything PG ever said will end up on somebody's list.

tlrobinson• 16 years ago

"Taking notes serves not only to make a non-volatile record of what was said, but the act of writing helps you remember what was said"

Maybe I was just a bad note taker, but whenever I took notes in college I always ended up focusing more on writing the notes than paying attention to what was being said and thinking critically about it.

andreshb• 16 years ago

Happened to me too, I gave up on taking notes very early on. Whenever I did take notes, I never went back to them. Plus, everything else was found in the books/literature/online

misterm• 16 years ago

I think Paul is wrong about further stratifying the Lisp community.

qeorge• 16 years ago

#3 seems particularly pedantic. I thought pg's argument was pretty clear:

Angel investing is like betting on long shots. You're arguing with the bookie over whether the odds should be 95-to-1 or 100-to-1, when you should be worrying about whether the horse can win the race at all.

yoak• 16 years ago

Seriously, note-taking? I aspire to reach the point where my statement about whether or not my audience should take notes is one of the top five things I'm wrong about.

bhiggins• 16 years ago

he's also wrong about when to use continuations

Things Paul Graham is wrong about

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