Dabblers and Blowhards - A Criticism of PG

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

by smanek • 18 years ago

62 57 18 years ago

SwellJoe2• 18 years ago

I've always felt the painters connection was too tightly focused, though I think this essay (which is ancient, and would either be more true of pg's work today or less depending on how much you agree with it) goes overboard and manages to miss the point.

The bone that I do think can be picked with Hackers and Painters is that there just aren't very many hackers who are also painters. In fact, I only know one: pg. I know literally dozens of hackers who are musicians and four who are writers (oh, wait...pg makes it five). It seems to me that if the two categories of people were so alike, there would be significant overlap, but there is very little that I'm aware of. If you take "creative, systematic, and challenging pursuits" as a whole, however, you begin to see a lot more overlap (and again, musicians overlap a lot with hackers, moreso than any other "creative, systematic, and challenging pursuit").

Maybe because I'm a musician and a hacker (by some definition of "musician" and "hacker") I'm seeing all of these connections in the same way that pg, who is a painter and a hacker, sees connections between his two loves. It all makes sense when you're looking at your own likes and dislikes, but nobody else will really understand exactly what you see in your hobbies.

pg8• 18 years ago

Interesting question. Probably one reason there are a lot more hacker/musicians than hacker/painters is that there are a lot more musicians than painters. Painting is not exactly a flourishing field at the moment. But there are a significant number of hackers who are good at graphic design.

The thing I was saying hackers and painters had in common was that they're both makers. As opposed to the idea prevalent when I was in college, that programming was applied math. I believe it was in protest against this idea that Knuth called his books The Art of Computer Programming.

wheels• 18 years ago

As a hacker / musician and one who's tried my hand at painting, at least painting as it exists in culture at the moment tends to be less analytical than current approaches to music (which are very analytical). I think the balance might be shifted if we were looking at painting in for instance the Bauhaus movement, or classical painting.

That said, as someone who's also pretty serious about music and hacking, while there are similarities in being able to work from an idea and bring that to realization, there are gaps in that programming is functional; music needn't be. In that I see programming as closer to architecture than to painting or music.

SwellJoe2• 18 years ago

But there are a significant number of hackers who are good at graphic design.

Righteous argument. If painting, as an art form, has been replaced by graphic design, then clearly there is significant overlap, and probably on the same order as musicians. I don't know how much I believe "painters", as a class, have become "designers", since almost none of the painters I knew in high school (I went to a school for fine arts, so I knew a lot of painters) have since become digital artists, but that may be just a sign of my age...I was among the last generation of kids that didn't grow up using computers daily.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I think the primary problem is that "painters" is too specific...though it makes for a better title than "Hackers and People Who Make Art of Some Kind". When you open it up to include designers and other visual artists, musicians (like Knuth, who has a massive pipe organ in his house and plays it beautifully), and writers, the overlap becomes very nearly 100%. Every hacker of note that I can think of off the top of my head has at least one of these as a hobby, particularly if you allow "visual arts" to include things like robotics, DIY electronics with an artistic purpose, 3D modeling, etc. As you've said, hackers are makers, and it often spills over into other kinds of production.

zach• 18 years ago

I enrolled in a design class once. I figured graphic design would be a good place to start with as far as artistic fundamentals. Not knowing what I was getting into, I took Design I at ArtCenter at Night, because, of course, I wanted the best fundamentals.

Instead I learned that gouache is really, really hard to use to make flat, even-colored swatches which satisfy the professional painter who you have for a teacher, particularly if you've not painted beyond watercolors in elementary school.

It was fun, but suffice it to say that I am still very much a hacker; a painter, not so much. In any case, as a result of that experience, I gained a new level of empathic understanding for non-hackers dealing with technology. It was very much like an Excel macro programmer being dropped into a course on compilers at Stanford.

kashif• 18 years ago

Not just makers but 'conceivers'. To take an idea and express it in some form is artistic expression. And that perhaps is the similarity. Also, I think emotion(passion) has a part to play because the similarity exists at an emotional level not at 'process' level.

r70002• 18 years ago

> there are a lot more hacker/musicians than hacker/painters

This is very true. I have spent a lot of time with visual artists discussing why their field no longer seems to be of general interest.

tptacek12• 18 years ago

But graphic design, as most people (not Escher) mean it, is significantly different from painting. Serious graphic design is functional in a way that painting isn't. It's as much architecture as art.

If you had written an essay called "Hackers and Graphic Designers", the rebuttal we're discussing wouldn't have been written.

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

Music is also much more portable, and much cheaper. I used to paint before I left home, but I've never had the space to assemble a studio since. Without a studio, I can't just start working when the urge strikes me. By comparison, when I have my guitar or keyboard with me I probably play an hour or so a day. It's kind of like how, with a separate 'internet computer', you mostly don't go online by accident. The problem is that you need to doodle to make something as a painter or musician (or hacker).

The only time I've painted since involved jury rigging an easel out of a basement gym at the Princeton graduate college. I could take a class, but they're expensive.

LPTS• 18 years ago

You should read a book called The Genesis of Artistic Creativity, by Michael Fitzgerald. The thing that you are talking about that many great hackers and painters have in common is a high functioning subtype of aspergers syndrome. The personality traits and drive to create you admire are manifestations of an "Autistic Superego" outlined by Fitzgerald in his book.

Thinking in images is a skill that relies on a mechanical-mathematical mind. In painters, they use this skill to paint, in hackers, they use it to architect complicated systems which they hold in their heads while they code. In both these cases, it's the same neurological mechanism underlying the ability you admire.

Your insight that painters and hackers is fundementally correct, and also deeper then 98% of what I have read about the hacker culture. If you want to explore it deeper, from a psychological and sociological point of view, reading Fitzgerald's book is the place to start.

shaunxcode• 18 years ago

what about "Hackers and Graffiti Artists"? That would make also make sense on a lot of levels depending on your definition of graffiti and hacking.

narag2• 18 years ago

>here just aren't very many hackers who are also painters.

I'd raise the hand for, as you say, "for some definition of" hacker, painter, writer and musician. And for any of slacker :-) I only program now, though.

Edit: oops! half the commentary disappeared before. I was going to say that painting (and composing music and writing) is really alike to programming, IMHO at least. I haven't read Paul Graham's book so I don't know if it has the same things that I feel alike. But the fact that there is a visible result and that result must "work" and the means are mostly a thought product, it's all the same. And there are also other similarities of the joy that I feel when doing any of these things that I couldn't express easily.

You would think that what means that the result "works" is different, that it's easier to have objetive measure of a working program than a "working painting". In fact it's not very clear in most companies. If the sales dept. can fool one customer to buy some crap (or undone) software for a fortune, that'd be "working". Not better than "art market".

bootload• 18 years ago

"... I've always felt the painters connection was too tightly focused, though I think this essay (which is ancient, and would either be more true of pg's work today or less depending on how much you agree with it) goes overboard and manages to miss the point ..."

I don't think the hacker/painter correlation is far off the mark. We might not know of many painters who can hack but I think the idea might better be illustrated by someone who could be best described as a "Hacker" in his day.

Leonardo.

Leonardo had lots of attributes you could ascribe to modern day Hackers:

- inately curious (how else would you work out how the human heart valves worked or the observation that the hardening and constriction of the minute capillaries in old people (compared to young babies) has something to do with death. Something that modern science had to re-discover.

- wrote excessively in notebook diaries on ideas and creations he was working on. (I've seen a sample of these diaries as part of the Royal Library collection. Images of cross sections from human skulls to yet to be born in-eutero.)

- sketched out his ideas as a combination of pictures and words (using silverpoint on vellum: a prepared animal hide covered with ground up animal bones and glue. then built upon these prior ideas as finished works)

- emperical in outlook and willing to try new ideas: that is he observed what worked and not just theorised or accepted common wisdom. A good example of this can be found in the paint composition of "The Last Supper". Leonardo decided "fresco" didn't allow him to express his painterly style, shunned the conventional and tried "fresco" over "gesso" (gypsum). In this case it failed miserably. But this ability to experiment also allowed Leonardo to master oils. The results of this stable medium you can see today in "La Gioconda" in the Louvre in Paris.

- exhibited unnatural powers of concentration (shunning food, rest and drink for instance during the painting of "The Last Supper".)

- mastery of numerous different technologies

The key bit that most people might not realise is that for Leonardo, painting was his technological multiplier. Leonardo expressed his sketches as drawings and words and presented finished ideas in paint. It is through the act of painting that we recognise the most famous painting of the Renaissance. I think the key to understanding the relationship between hackers and painters is that the expression of the intangible thought through art is what matters. Painting and drawing of ideas is to Leonardo as Macs are to modern day hackers. The product might be different but in the end both, modern Hacker and Leonardo as painter create new, seemingly intangible things from pure thought. I'm not surprised pg went to study in Florence. What does surprise me is why it took so long to realise that it was not the location that elevated Leonardo but the "tech revolution" of the time, painting.

timr• 18 years ago

Aha...I knew I'd read this before! It's linked in the article from this post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143148

which spawned a large comment thread that's probably worth referencing here.

timcederman• 18 years ago

From the article - you can't say hackers figure out both "what" and "how" in most cases. Usually there is a designer and/or usability expert who figures out what.

IsaacSchlueter4• 18 years ago

I don't think he did say that -- rather that in the best case, they do both.

zasz2• 18 years ago

I draw a little bit, and I couldn't see anything wrong with pg stating the following:

"Most painters start with a blurry sketch and gradually refine it."

Unless the author or some other great painter manages to get it perfectly right from the very first stroke? I only draw, I don't paint, but I can definitely see similarities between going through iterations and drafts in programming and art.

narag2• 18 years ago

That's indeed the way current painters work. I think what the author says is that it wasn't when oil paint was invented.

zasz2• 18 years ago

Yes, but the only refutation I think he has is this little footnote saying that underneath the layer of paint is a super-precise line drawing. I would be incredulous to hear that super-precise line drawing was not a refinement of a blurrier one that just set out the basic idea.

sapphirecat• 18 years ago

Is the author of that "criticism" trying to parody what they see in PG's writing? It could just as easily be self-referential.

r70002• 18 years ago

I immediately assumed the analogy was meant to portray hackers as 'makers', artisans etc. in order to broaden the readers perception of what a hacker was or could be. I was immediately interested in finding out where the author was going to take the idea and was pleasantly surprised. An analogy is used to quickly open up the reader's mind and prepare them to think about something in a new way. Was this one perfect? None are. Did it work? Yes.

This article, on the other hand, is merely one in a long line of internet articles that purposely refuse to get the point of what they are criticizing.

On a personal note. I read H&P while taking breaks from driving on a cross-Canada trip. My original driving partner is a painter. He had to drop out and a hacker friend took his place and brought along the book. I thought it was amusing at the time and told him the title would have been more appropriate before the change.

tdavis• 18 years ago

I find it hard to believe this isn't a bit of participatory narcissism considering he goes to great lengths to point out how often artists get laid. Which also couldn't possibly be an overly-broad generalization. Although he gets a point for the use of "weenis."

Pot: Kettle, you are black, sir!

tptacek12• 18 years ago

It's parody. He's simultaneously pointing out the grandiosity of Graham's allusions, taking the piss out of them by comparison, and mirroring Graham's style to do it.

It's a really nice piece of writing, and it's even more fun if you read it with a copy of Hackers and Painters next to it to spot the references.

erdos2• 18 years ago

The author misses the point that PG's essays are not intended to be understood literally, but as literature, to be appreciated on an aesthetic level only.

tptacek12• 18 years ago

Did any of you catch the Minnaert recommendation, for "Light and Color In The Outdoors", the author's notion of a strong work about the connection between programming and art? I bought a used copy for Erin, and it was pretty awesome. Did any of you read it? What did you think?

Dabblers and Blowhards - A Criticism of PG

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