What to Do

https://paulgraham.com/do.html

by npalli • 1 year ago

274 236 1 year ago

paulgraham.com

gnuser• 1 year ago

Working on it. :)

Looking forward to showing HN one day.

cloogshicer2• 1 year ago

you should at least make sure that the new things you make don't net harm people or the world.

How?

Is the internet a net positive or net negative thing? How about Social Media? Is it maybe even more complex such that we can't tally up positive/negative "points" and a term like "net positive" doesn't even make sense for these things?

QuadmasterXLII• 1 year ago

Ok, but don’t make an algorithm for a sports gambling app that notices when people are struggling to quit and targets them with promotions.

FloorEgg5• 1 year ago

It's a hard question to answer but not impossible.

Here's a bit of an oversimplification: - is what you made useful to anyone? If it's not, no one will use it so it doesn't matter. - does what you made help people be more productive or less productive? - does it help improve people's health or degrade it? - does it give people what they want in the short term at the cost of harming them in the long term? - does it help some people while actively harming others? - does it help people but harm the environment or other creatures?

Etc.

Most failure comes from not getting past the first question. These are easy questions to ask but very hard to answer. Most startup founders make up answers and then go nowhere and waste a bunch of time/money. Even smart people doing their best fall into this trap. Our system isn't good at developing people to be good at empathizing at scale. When people try to empathize at scale they over-generalize to the point of near meaninglessness.

asadotzler3• 1 year ago

You will make nothing so grand as a platform used by billions so that's all irrelevant.

If you make, say, an ovulation app designed to feed user data to companies so they can fire pregnant workers before the company is required to give leave or other benefits, that's bad. Get it? You are not so incapable of distinguishing these things as you feign here. Pretending that everything is a neutral tool that might be misused for bad is child-like. Stop doing that.

yamrzou• 1 year ago

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.”

— Paul Virilio

handfuloflight2• 1 year ago

"Make good new things" overlooks a critical tension: that goodness itself remains contested territory. The most transformative innovations reveal that creation's power cuts both ways. The printing press spread knowledge and literacy but also enabled propaganda wars and religious conflicts. Nuclear fission powers cities with clean energy but also destroyed Hiroshima & Nagasaki and created existential risk. The internet connects billions across continents while weakening community bonds and fragmenting our shared reality. Each breakthrough that advances humanity also challenges our moral certainties.

This suggests we need a fourth principle: "Cultivate discernment about goodness." Not merely as an afterthought, but as an essential companion to creation. Such discernment acknowledges that innovation contains both medicine and poison in the same vessel—and that our capacity to create has outpaced our ability to foresee consequences. And perhaps equally important is recognizing that meaningful contribution isn't always about creating anew, but often about cultivating what already exists: preserving, interpreting, and transmitting knowledge and practices in ways that transform both the cultivator and what is cultivated.

Yet Graham's framing—"What should one do?"—contains a deeper limitation. It positions ethics as an individual pursuit in an age where our greatest challenges are fundamentally collective. "What should one do?" seems personal, but in our connected world, doesn't the answer depend increasingly on what seven billion others are doing? When more people than ever can create or cultivate, our challenge becomes coordinating this massive, parallel work toward flourishing rather than conflict and destruction.

These principles aren't merely personal guideposts but the architecture for civilization's operating system. They point toward our central challenge: how to organize creativity and cultivation at planetary scale; how to balance the brilliant chaos of individual and organizational impetus with the steady hand of collective welfare. This balance requires new forms of governance that can channel our pursuits toward shared flourishing—neither controlling too tightly nor letting things run wild. It calls for institutions that learn and adapt as quickly as the world changes. And it asks us to embrace both freedom of pursuit and responsibility to others, seeing them as two sides of the same coin in a world where what you bring forth may shape my future.

The question isn't just what should I do, but what should we become?

cloogshicer2• 1 year ago

Beautifully put. Thank you.

beepbooptheory• 1 year ago

Totally agreed. While not bad, this all expresses a somewhat familiar loneliness in the world from a successful tech guy like pg. I think it just happens here:

The most impressive thing humans can do is to think. It may be the most impressive thing that can be done.

Something like this has been a marker for humanism since Pico della Mirandolla's famous "Oration on the Dignity of Man," for sure, if not Aristotle before that. But there is another viewpoint and set of frameworks that privileges the sociality and capacity for working together of humans. Isn't it, at least arguably, more impressive what we can build only together, rather than what any one of us has thought up at a given time? Ideas feel destined, individuals are products of their time; if I am not going to manifest some creative idea, it seems inevitable someone else will eventually. With the individual, it could always be otherwise, e.g., all the Einsteins who die in sweatshops, etc.

But what could not be otherwise is the brute force and cunning of people in general. Its much easier to replace a single CEO than it is an entire workforce.

I am not trying to be too damning, there are certainly worse formulations out there, and perhaps this is all a matter of emphasis. I also don't expect a guy like Paul Graham to be anything other than this kind of individualist; there is some necessary investment into the ego in order to live in the world he does, its fine. There is just the tinge of disappointment for me that this is still where we are at, when the world has such a surplus of ideas and deficit in solidarity.

danaris• 1 year ago

The printing press spread knowledge and literacy but also enabled propaganda wars and religious conflicts.

Not just that: it overturned existing power structures.

In particular, it democratized information in a never-before-seen way, and opened the door to universal literacy.

To many, many people, these in themselves would have seemed like the opposite of "good things". Even today, there are a great many people who believe strongly in the importance of top-down power structures and restricted information flow—and back in Gutenberg's day, there would have been many more, if only because that was what was common then.

And I believe this only enhances your primary point—that we need to "cultivate discernment about goodness". We need to not merely think about what is good for us, but what is good for all, and be honest with ourselves about those things.

wcfrobert2• 1 year ago

All new inventions have tendencies to overturn existing power structure (i.e. disrupt the status quo). It's probably why certain cultures disincentivize innovation and spurn entrepreneurs.

But I think creative destruction is a net good, and I'd argue that micro-dosing on revolutions is essential for dynamism and social mobility.

Koshcheiushko2• 1 year ago

This is clearly chatgpt generated.

balamatom5• 1 year ago

I don't think so. It's just in the kind of English that we are taught in order to become unable to be heard.

Even if it were GPT-generated, why do you say it as if that's a bad thing? I thought this forum was gushing about how great AI is!

InsideOutSanta• 1 year ago

Cultivate discernment about goodness

I love that. Once people realize how difficult it is to fully understand the ethical implications of one's actions, they often arrive at the defeatist conclusion that it simply doesn't matter, that there is no real difference between good and bad.

I love the idea of "cultivating discernment about goodness" because it produces agency and accountability.

voidhorse4• 1 year ago

pg's writing is so lazy. At best he engages with thinkers in a superficial way, further, he never expands his horizons beyond the typical cadre of classics, he says nothing of actual intellectual substance and worth, and if anything he legitimizes an uncritical stance toward the world (a sort of pseudo-intellectual neopositivism). I still think a poverty of exposure and experience in the history of philosophy and literature on the part of his audience is the only reason he gets any sort of readership.

bigyabai• 1 year ago

Yeah. I've never been particularly fond of the "traditional" computing essays by Stallman et. al, but compared to PG's essays they read like Tolkien.

bayarearefugee2• 1 year ago

I agree with you in the general case but I'd also add that this specific post is even worse than the usual stuff he writes.

It's a 1500 word essay that says absolutely nothing at all.

graycat2• 1 year ago

Maybe PG is "superficial". Hmm ... It may be that commonly drilling down as deep as can is not productive and, instead, there is some wisdom that commonly productive solutions are surprisingly simplistic, i.e., "superficial"?

sctb2• 1 year ago

To add to this: I think pg does drill down, but what he does more than most is make the effort to bring those insights back up.

booleandilemma4• 1 year ago

Can you recommend a writer you like? Have you written anything?

bayarearefugee2• 1 year ago

"Have you done XYZ?" is such a lame counter to criticism of someone else doing XYZ badly.

You don't have to have made a movie to recognize a bad movie.

You don't have to have built a car to recognize a poorly designed car.

You don't have to have written a song to recognize unlistenable garbage.

voidhorse4• 1 year ago

I can recommend several. If pg's essays have some amount of appeal to you, you are probably potentially interested in philosophy, here are just a few people who have authored works of far greater eloquence, depth, and significance than anything paul graham has ever written:

Wittgenstein, Rousseau, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, Ryle, Montaigne, Maggie Nelson, Didion, Bertrand Russel, Jean Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Niklas Luhmann, Norbert Wiener, Hienz von Forester, Hans Georg Gadamer, Juergen Habermas, Rebeca Solnit...

And these are just the few people that came to mind off the cuff. If I bothered to look I could probably give you more.

These tech luminaries act as though no philosophy or significant social analysis or cultural criticism has happened in the west since Plato and Cicero, but it's simply...entirely untrue. There's a wealth of deep, enriching philosophical heritage to explore, and I think these bozos don't engage with it because they are either too lazy (much easier to read translations of the classics) too disingenuous (much easier to base your sophistry on material that is so old as to not be contested) , or too self righteous (they already possess the one truth birthed directly by the divine cells of their brains because they like the lisp programming language and worked at yahoo, so why bother to interact with the thought of others in a serious way?) to bother. Not to mention, they don't dare engage with the highly complex dedicated academic studies of the classics anyway. I doubt pg has done little more than read a modern translation of Cicero. Probably not even Leob, probably Penguin Random House. But hey, those ignorant of the gold vein will happily lop up pewter.

dragonwriter• 1 year ago

I still think a poverty of exposure and experience in the history of philosophy and literature on the part of his audience is the only reason he gets any sort of readership.

That and people who hero-worship him for his role in YC and some of his other previous business and/or technical work and assume everything he does is valuable because of that.

Madmallard• 1 year ago

I personally don't think technology for the most part is good for society. It makes nature boring and predictable and life less interesting as a whole if this is true, but I don't think we even understand the degree to which technology is just ruining life for the future. We don't have adaptations to deal with anything and adaptations take tens of thousands of years if not way more to occur. The romantic thought is that technology can help us solve the problems that come up as a result of itself, but I'm less optimistic there just because of how things have been going. It seems like human nature and us not being good at understanding large complex systems as a species results in the malignant actors and developments taking root and metastasizing over time.

- global warming - antibiotic resistance - environmental contamination - food quality diminishing - explosive increase in chronic disease, especially in young people - extinction of most other species - fertility problems - declining birth rates - poly-pharmacy becoming normal - now things related to energy consumption with AI and cryptocurrency - huge decline in social behaviors across the population

Just seems like for every new advancement we're making new chronic issues that are barely incentivized at all for being managed and alleviated

pvg• 1 year ago

At the beginning of the 1800s, half of people's children died. We literally beat fucking Thanos for children. That's not a 'romantic thought'.

georgemcbay• 1 year ago

The wheel is technology, metallurgy is technology, irrigation is technology.

Technology is vital to a functioning society.

There's certainly more debate to be had whether various bits of modern technology are net positive or net negative, but even still I personally believe modern technology is mostly neutral to very good for humanity in a vacuum and it is other forces like modern capitalism that bend it toward being harmful.

eg. Social media is very clearly having a net negative impact on modern society, but I don't believe that would still be true if it wasn't driven by algorithms created to maximize ad revenue above all other concerns.

And obviously there is some inherent coupling of modern technology and capitalism that isn't avoidable, but I don't think capitalism on its own is wholly bad, its the slavish cult-like worship of it as the only way to do things that causes it to be so destructive.

fatherzine• 1 year ago

life is a game of balance in the sweet band between uninhabitable extremes. technology obeys the same law. both too little, and too much, are deadly.

risyachka• 1 year ago

The issue is not technology but how and where it is applied.

Tens and tens of billions are spent to generate cute pics instead of same tech applied to radiology, diseases cure, etc.

a2code• 1 year ago

The most impressive thing humans can do is to think. And the best kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has thought well, is to make good new things. ... but making good new things is a should in the sense that this is how to live to one's full potential.

I urge you not to take these opinions as facts. Originality is admirable, but it is not "your potential", "proof of great thoughts", or "the most impressive thing you can do".

The answer to the question: What to do? is not "Make new things", but rather begins with a simple question: In what context?

The idea of dividing people into two categories: 1) those who "take care of people and the world", and those who 2) "make good new things", is harmful.

graycat2• 1 year ago

Do? Make money enough to support self and family and then have a good family.

Understand people. With all the talk in the news about the current Disney Snow White, got out the DVD for the old Disney Cinderella: Yup, have learned enough about people to see that the many plot events are not just incidental for the drama but examples of deep fundamentals about people. In particular understand what's important for good family formation.

Understand human societies, e.g., cultures, religions, economies, politics, war and peace.

Understand academics: E.g., a lot of academics that has done research that results in good tools to enable "Make good new things" has deep contempt for doing that.

Understand, say, math, physical science, biology, medical science, nature, technology, fine arts.

sitkack3• 1 year ago

Is Paul giving himself a pass for the companies he funds?

booleandilemma4• 1 year ago

I read it more like he's considering what to throw his money at, and it sounds like he wants to throw his money at companies that make good new things.

sitkack3• 1 year ago

But then he doesn't really define good, makes an odd comparison to a now acclaimed pulp fiction author and then says we can only really know what is good after the fact.

Leaning on "new" so hard as part of the "good" just reduces to, "Make new-new things that aren't by every objective measure bad and see if it works out in hindsight".

It would be helpful if we understood what good and bad mean to him.

thrance• 1 year ago

With his multiple endorsements of MAGA I fear his definition of "good" is severley warped. Is ensuring the poor don't die of preventable diseases good? Not to this guy.

mhb• 1 year ago

Any second thoughts about Flock (YC17) or others?

jodrellblank• 1 year ago

("making things rather than, say, making critical observations about things other people have made. Those are ideas too, and sometimes valuable ones, but it's easy to trick oneself into believing they're more valuable than they are. Criticism seems sophisticated")

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/07/20

"thoughts by a billionaire. self-praising. spiritually enriching. sophisticated. 'high' value"

"thoughts by a commoner. critical. base. self-deluding juvenile hack work. 'low' value"

"thoughts by a billionaire about how critics are delusional and self-important. Sophisticated irony. philosophically challenging. 'high' value"

"suppose I say the author is giving himself a pass for the companies he funds?"

"sophomoric. intellectually sterile. 'low' value"

sitkack3• 1 year ago

Great comic.

Reminds me of my own "ai art", The Marlboro Man riding a chrome blow up dog.

"sophomoric. intellectually sterile. 'low' value"

hsshhshshjk• 1 year ago

Is making music something "good and new"? Art?

sctb2• 1 year ago

Explicitly yes:

I mean new things in a very general sense. Newton's physics was a good new thing. Indeed, the first version of this principle was to have good new ideas. But that didn't seem general enough: it didn't include making art or music, for example, except insofar as they embody new ideas.

thinkingemote2• 1 year ago

Art should be, yes. Unfortunately a lot of visual art being produced from art schools and shown in museums / galleries are forms of criticism. The article mentions crticism as not being a good new thing. The message they seek to convey is more of a priority than the creation of a Good Thing. (In reality modern art is a mixture of varying degrees of criticism and creation)

This is partly because modern conceptual art is about concepts so it's very easy for it to be overtaken by a political or critical message as the concept.

brody_hamer• 1 year ago

What more can a person do than eat, drink, and take joy in their work?

euvin• 1 year ago

That raises the question of what work they should pursue.

whatrocks• 1 year ago

Somewhat similar to my answer (borrowed from children's publisher Klutz Press): "Create wonderful things, be good, have fun"

https://charlieharrington.com/create-wonderful-things-be-goo...

oleggromov• 1 year ago

This is a great inspiring story and wonderful books. Thank you! Trying to find them now.

ofrzeta• 1 year ago

There's a book about knots by Klutz that was featured here. Comes with string(s) attached.

Ambix• 1 year ago

Wow, so cool retro designed blog there! For those who kinda liked window system of first Mac generations :)

mylidlpony• 1 year ago

you should at least make sure that the new things you make don't net harm people or the world

That's rich coming from pg. Is he really in a position to dispense this valuable advice? Did he ever look back at his contributions to this world through this prism? Does he consider the impacts of friends he has, platforms he uses and promotes, posts he writes, on lives of other people? Does he think just withdrawing from new decisions made by (the thing) is enough to wash his hands from all the negative impacts such decisions cause? People tend to attribute good outcomes to their own contributions and hand wave bad ones to forces outside their control, and this article is a great case in point for this phenomena.

tim333• 1 year ago

I don't think pg does net harm. Obviously funding hundreds of start ups you might think some iffy but overall it seems positive?

mellosouls2• 1 year ago

In lieu of explanation I'm guessing the flagging is knee-jerk anti-PG stuff.

Disappointing response.

sidcool3• 1 year ago

Why are people anti-PG?

mellosouls2• 1 year ago

I don't know except I get the impression from reading responses to him over time that he represents something frustrating to some people here and on X.

an0malous• 1 year ago

[flagged]

trymas• 1 year ago

Someone should correct me if I am wrong, but AFAIK - PG stands behind current shift in USA’s status quo. That is, support of MAGA, Trump, DOGE, techno takeover of USA, that vague idea of of converting USA into totalitarian corporate city states controlled by billionaire techno class.

Though last one shouldn’t be surprising as it was endorsed by YC 10+ years ago.

Hence - people are now much more critical of him.

dredmorbius• 1 year ago

Idlewords has devoted an entire essay to the topic, "Dabblers And Blowhards" (2005). As a callout quote, and one immediately preceding a long list of specific issues with pg in his own essay Maciej Cegłowski is critiquing:

It's no surprise, then, that a computer programmer would want to bask in some of the peripheral coolness that comes with painting, especially when he has an axe to grind about his own work being 'mere engineering'. Yet while this might be charming or quirky in the abstract, it gets seriously annoying when real facts start getting butchered...

<https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm>

From a flagged subthread here, several prior criticisms on HN:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515252

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43526888

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43527106

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515723

(From: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43529517>.)

drweevil• 1 year ago

Not the first time I find myself wishing there was some explanation about the flagging.

dang8• 1 year ago

The explanation is basically always the same: users flagged it.

Why? Who can say? One would have to ask them, and that wouldn't work anyhow.

echoangle• 1 year ago

Well you could have a dropdown with reasons when flagging, and hope that people select the real reason they are flagging it.

luckylion• 1 year ago

I did not flag this, but I've flagged stuff before that I don't want to see more of on HN because it feels like it would ruin what I enjoy. If I need "Person did X - What happened next will surprise you", I'd go to reddit, so I'll flag that type of low-quality content.

I don't know why people flagged this, but I often had the impression that PG's content ends up on the front page because he's PG, not because it's particularly interesting or noteworthy. Maybe the people flagging it feel similar.

archagon• 1 year ago

Until I hear a vote of no confidence from Paul for YC’s current leadership, I have no interest in anything he has to say. After all, Elon Musk — the guy cheerfully and illegally dismantling the federal government, who called my friends “parasites” for taking benefits and apparently wants to see witnesses against the president executed, who enthusiastically supports far-right populist parties like the AfD and makes suspiciously Nazi-looking salutes on stage — is still invited to YC’s AI Startup School. Garry Tan, it seems, has no problem with any of this. I’m sure he relishes a new world order where he sits on the board of Yarvin’s fever dream government.

Want to do something good, Paul? Do everything in your power to stem the bleed of encroaching fascism and neo-reactionaryism. Put your reputation and wallet on the line. Be a leader. Otherwise, you’re just posting platitudes while one of the world’s great democracies dies an agonizing death by the hands of your peers.

sam_lowry_• 1 year ago

Reminded me instantly of the 1845 text Who Is to Blame? [1] and the 1863 follow-up What Is to Be Done? [2] that defined progressive thought in Russian until the 1917 revolution.

But this text is so escapist... I am ashamed to have read it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Is_to_Blame%3F

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F_(novel)

sidcool3• 1 year ago

Why is this flagged? Disagreements can be expressed in comments. Weird to be honest.

nineplay• 1 year ago

I’m starting to wonder if posters are flagging everything in response to the clear political censorship going on. If everything is flagged than nothing is flagged.

bananapub• 1 year ago

[flagged]

sph• 1 year ago

Nothing like your embarrassment when you find out this very website is owned by YC.

Protests are usually found outside the gates, not in the lounge while sipping on the complimentary coffee.

dang8• 1 year ago

I appreciate your intentions but can you please not break the site guidelines the way you've been doing in this thread? It just makes things worse.

aptj• 1 year ago

Hey guys, while some of the criticism in the comments is pretty sound, keep in mind that genuine authors (and PG too) write first of all to entertain themselves, as a way to have a more clear reflection on their thinking. And they publish to learn from readers' responses.

smt88• 1 year ago

I don't understand the point of your comment.

Are you saying we shouldn't take his seriously? We shouldn't take him literally? We should give him a pass for writing axiomatic drivel with nothing concrete or thoughtful in it?

amriksohata• 1 year ago

Find a higher purpose

coolThingsFirst• 1 year ago

Every single essay is the same from this guy.

Make something amazing is not an insight.

tediousgraffit12• 1 year ago

This. No one, not even the very wicked, get up in the morning and think 'Im going to go make some old, bad stuff, because I'd like to decrease the amount of The Good in the world.' This article reads like the height of narcissistic navel-gazing, with absolutely zero nontrivial insight.

kubb• 1 year ago

Shallow platitudes for nerds? I’ll inject them straight into my veins if the guy dealing has enough money. I mean is a successful tech entrepreneur and visionary.

praptak2• 1 year ago

I disagree that creating new things should be prioritised[0]. There's too many things already and the most pressing problems have solutions which are not new, just hard to apply for political reasons.

[0] Saying "prioritised" instead of "good", because "creating good new things" is tautologically, uninterestingly "good".

mooktakim2• 1 year ago

Not everyone can create new things, or create new things all the time. The rest of the time they can make better use of existing things

praptak2• 1 year ago

That too, but my disagreement is more fundamental: even if you can create good new things, there are probably[0] better things to do with your resources than creating them.

[0] This is a small escape hatch for "what if one can only create new things" or "actual cure for cancer".

spongebobstoes• 1 year ago

If something is difficult/impossible to apply for political reasons, maybe something new can make it easier/possible.

It might be a new philosophy, message, movement, technology, space, gathering, poem, or otherwise.

If something is so hard to do, for political reasons, it might be time to try something new. The goal might be the same, but maybe a new approach will yield better results.

colonCapitalDee• 1 year ago

Political problems can be solved with technical solutions. Take the problem of food insecurity in third-world countries as an example. It's a hard problem to solve because transporting food overland via unpaved roads through politically unstable areas is expensive and dangerous. Long-term, using highly-productive first-world agribusiness to feed the third-world will fail, because no matter how cheaply agribusiness can produce food the transportation costs will make the whole enterprise cost prohibitive. This is a political problem: we can easily produce enough food to feed the entire world, but we can't get that food to the places where it is most needed due to political instability. But it's a political problem with an engineering solution. If the tools and techniques needed to efficiently grow food are cheap and widely available, farmers in politically unstable areas can simply grow their own food without a dependence on far away agribusiness. GMO crops crafted for nutritional value and hardiness, easily accessible guides on farming best practices, weather forecasting, irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides, financial markets to hedge against risk, cheap tools and machinery; these are all unsolved or partially solved problems. Whenever someone comes up with a "good new thing" that improves the SOTA in terms of value per dollar in one of these areas, we get closer to solving the political problem of global food security.

If political realities prevent us from solving problems, then we can either change the political realities or create new solutions. Individuals generally can't change political realities, but they can create good new things that work around them. So it is good advice.

Kbelicius• 1 year ago

This is a political problem: we can easily produce enough food to feed the entire world, but we can't get that food to the places where it is most needed due to political instability. But it's a political problem with an engineering solution.

There isn't really a technical solution to the problem of political instability.

If the tools and techniques needed to efficiently grow food are cheap and widely available, farmers in politically unstable areas can simply grow their own food without a dependence on far away agribusiness.

You posit political instability as a problem but your solution doesn't address it. Thinking that, in a politically unstable environment, it would be simple to grow food if only you had better tools and techniques is naive. If the political environment was stable people would be able to feed themselves even without newest tools and techniques.

jstanley2• 1 year ago

There's too many things already

In what sense?

History hasn't finished. There's more things today than there were yesterday, and there will be more things tomorrow than there are today.

If you stop making new things because you think there's already enough things, you're just confining yourself to the world as it exists today. Do you think the world has finished? Do you think it can't be improved?

If you want to build the world of tomorrow you're going to have to make some of the things that exist tomorrow that don't exist today.

And once you've accepted that you need to make new things, I don't think it's much of a leap to accept that it's good to make good new things.

smokel2• 1 year ago

For most of history the question "What should one do?" got much the same answer everywhere

This is so not true, that I'd like to point the author, and people who think in a similar vein, to a very enjoyable podcast on the history of philosophy, namely the "History of Philosophy without any Gaps" [1].

Hopefully this will persuade you that there are many ways to think about what to do with the life that was given to you. Pick two random Greek philosophers and they would probably take opposing standpoints. And if Confucius might say that you should be wise, I guess that Lao Tse would promptly disagree.

Our Western culture has largely been shaped by Christian values, yet when I observe the ideas of the obscenely wealthy, I can only lament how little those values seem to be understood or embodied.

[1] https://historyofphilosophy.net/

James_K• 1 year ago

PG seems to love making grand statements like this regarding things about which he has little knowledge.

abtinf• 1 year ago

The author has a phd in philosophy.

smokel2• 1 year ago

This comment is a bit puzzling to me.

The author of the podcast does indeed have a PhD in philosophy, but Paul Graham does not. The latter holds a PhD in computer science.

d4v3• 1 year ago

I found myself thinking about something similar recently. It had to do with the Optifye.ai fiasco, and the difference between solving problems / creating things for the 'common man' vs. for the 'ruling class'. I think I much prefer the former.

abc-1• 1 year ago

[flagged]

dang8• 1 year ago

"Don't be snarky."

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tlogan• 1 year ago

I think the issue with saying “make good new things” is that things themselves aren’t inherently good or bad—they’re just things. It’s the person who makes them that can be good or bad.

I have a saying (among others from my dad) that captures a similar idea: “Make things, and be good.”

ulbu• 1 year ago

a dish from made bad food is bad food. a program that deletes your important data is a bad program.

so no: things relate to each other and in this relation, they can be objectively bad (bad to the object subjected to its effects). Things don't exist without the effects their existence exerts. Rephrased: the question of their goodness is, commonly, a question of fitness.

tediousgraffit12• 1 year ago

That just pushes the question off a step; a chair fit for sitting isn't fit for sleeping, etc. Fitness assumes a purpose.

allie1• 1 year ago

I think it’s good in the sense of things that are positively affecting others’ lives.

FloorEgg5• 1 year ago

Things can be good or bad when put in a value system context. There is tremendous overlap between everyone's value system, it just doesn't feel this way because the majority of most people's attention is on where they don't overlap.

A loaf of bread is good for a person who is starving, but less good to someone with celiac disease. A bowl or rice is more good to a starving person with celiac than a loaf of bread, etc.

ChrisMarshallNY9• 1 year ago

One should help people, and take care of the world. Those two are obvious.

From what I encounter, almost daily, I don't think everyone is on the same page, on that; especially amongst folks of means.

I have seen people without a pot to piss in, treat others -even complete strangers- with respect, love, caring, and patience, and folks with a lot of money, treat others most barbarously; especially when they consider those "others," to be folks that don't have the capability to hit back or stand up for themselves.

As to what I do, I've been working to provide free software development to organizations that help each other, for a long time. It's usually worked out, but it is definitely a labor of love. The rewards aren't especially concrete. I'll never get an award, never make any money at it, and many of the folks that I have helped, have been fairly curt in their response.

I do it anyway.

copperx2• 1 year ago

I am really curious about your ethos here. It seems to me there's nothing for you in it. either psychologal, social, or financially.

Is it more like a calling? a spiritual consolation?

dartos2• 1 year ago

it is definitely a labor of love

Some people do things because they like doing those things…

conductr• 1 year ago

Service to others is certainly something that fills people’s cups and sometimes the best way to serve is to offer your expertise in whatever domain it may be.

onemoresoop3• 1 year ago

Do the things that reflect the world you want to live in. If you inspire others they may inspire others and it could grow into something bigger, one day you could find yourself living in that world.

ChrisMarshallNY9• 1 year ago

Long story.

I’m a longtime member of an organization that is about helping others. It’s not something that I go into detail about, at the level of press, radio or films.

Also, selfishly, I really enjoy this kind of work; especially at a craftsman level. It’s nice to have an excuse to do it.

hazn• 1 year ago

I do believe that personal narrative place a huge role here. I know of a poll, in which over 80% of the people believed they’re going to end up in heaven.

most people believe they do good and care about other people.

unclad5968• 1 year ago

If we're talking about Christianity, the bible says all you need is to believe that when Jesus died your sins against God were forgiven. It doesn't say anything about going to heaven or hell based on how good you were. In fact, it explicity says that going to heaven is not based on "works".

MrMcCall6• 1 year ago

That's why being brutally truthful with yourself is essential in learning how to love others so as to actually become a good person.

The worst lies we tell are most often the ones we tell ourselves.

It's just like the low-achieving over-confident folks of Dunning-Kruger: they don't really care about the truth, they're satisfied just believing they're an expert. The real experts take a far different tac, one of humility and intense, honest work.

"Nothing is more important than compassion and only the truth is its equal."

whiplash451• 1 year ago

And why would that be a problem or impossible?

Maybe 80% of the people are good people and 0.1% of people are responsible for most of the world’s misery.

bko3• 1 year ago

I'm one of those people that doesn't think we should try to "take care of the world". I prefer the older, time tested answer of what to do:

You should be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest

As noted in the essay, this idea of "taking care of the world" is relatively new. PG claims it's because only now we can take care of the world, but I think it's just a naive idea that doesn't stand the test of time. I'm sure its not novel idea, and many others had thought of it and tried to implement some version of it in their society. But because it hasn't become cannon in any group or culture, it's a bad idea in that it doesn't produce human flourishing. Whereas ideas around wisdom, bravery, honesty, etc have replicated throughout cultures and led to everything we cherish

The idea is that you cannot take care of the world if you can't take care of yourself. So at first you must be these things. Ironically the most empathetic people I have met that purport to care most about "the world" are often the most dysfunctional people - substance abuse, medications, no strong family ties, anxiety, neuroticism, etc. These aren't people we should try to emulate.

Only when you have your house in order can you attempt to help others. Start with the people immediately around you. People you know and love and that know and love you. If you've ever dealt with a family member with a serious problem, you'll see how difficult for you to help them. Now imagine helping a friend, then casual acquaintance, then stranger finally a stranger on the other side of the world.

We should have humility as to what kind of impact we can have on the world and look inward to those around us where we can have the most impact. Otherwise you might as well wipe out hundreds of thousands of people and spend trillions of dollars spreading democracy in the middle east.

ChrisMarshallNY9• 1 year ago

I like the "police your area" approach.

"I was in the Air Force a while, and they had what they call 'policing the area,' and I think that’s a pretty good thing to go by. If everyone just takes care of their own area, then we won’t have any problems. Be here. Be present. Wherever you are, be there. And look around you, and see what needs to be changed."

-Willie Nelson

cmdli2• 1 year ago

Some of the people who have done the worst things in history have been well put together people. The man who is ruthless and puts himself before everything oftentimes ends up successful, wealthy, and with plenty of resources to take care of himself and the people he chooses. Does that make him a good person?

One of the most important, time-tested values is one of responsibility and honor. That means doing the right thing with the power that you do have, both by yourself and by others, even if it hurts you. We each are responsible for the environment (natural and man-made) that we inhabit, and to that extent it is our duty to help others and ourselves.

We have been given many, many resources at our disposal, and we bear the responsibility to use them well. Too often in our society we shirk that responsibility with the excuse "well, its not our problem".

gnramires• 1 year ago

I've repeatedly made the case for something similar. But I don't think the argument should be "Taking care of yourself, in any case, yields better outcome, even for others, than prioritizing the common good. So the fundamental principle should be putting yourself first.". First, it's not always true that taking care of yourself is always the best -- sacrifice does exist and is important.

If you as say a father always put your own wellbeing (or some other definition of self-interest) first, then you're going to be a pretty lousy father. But you shouldn't ignore yourself. It's all about striking a balance, and in the end this balance simply aims toward the common good.

It doesn't make sense to say that because sometimes a naive, "greedy" strive toward the common good doesn't work then the principle is false.

You can carve real basis for the common good and other metaphysical principles. One such basis is that, metaphysically, the supreme valuation of the self is on very shaky ground. The self, although very important conceptually, doesn't stand up as an ultimate metaphysical basis, because we are really dynamic results of a whole network of interactions that includes not only whatever happens in our brains, but the whole cosmos -- there's no absolute boundary between yourself and others, and everything is always fundamentally changing. You from today is different from yesterday, and significantly different from many years ago. The common good is much more metaphysically defensible. That's why most metaphysical traditions (religions, usually) almost universally put the common good (sometimes enacted by God) above all else -- it really makes the most sense imo[1]. Again, you shouldn't be naive about it, and in practice and in most cases it makes sense to first take basic care of yourself, "keeping your house", and then go help others, but this is more a guideline, heuristic and reminder (specially important to give for radical altruists, but common sense for most people I think).

But really if yourself is your actual fundamental priority, I think you will act very poorly. Although even in that case there are good strategic reasons to be cooperative (people thinking you are evil or egoistical will already turn around many people and compromise relationships and cooperation opportunities).

[1] If you don't buy this metaphysical formulation, there's an (I believe) ultimately equivalent formulation that may be easier to accept: the fact that you "Could exist/could have been born as another person". If in some metaphysical sense you could have been born as that poor person that needs assistance, doesn't it make sense to help her, which logically implies that if you were in their shoes you would be helped?

YZF• 1 year ago

Totally agree.

This is something I think a lot of "do-gooders" miss. We're only in a position to do better because we took care of ourselves. It's a prerequisite. The flip side of that is taking do good (for the planet, for society e.g.) to an extreme where that becomes the only focus while letting everything else go south. We can take care of the planet only if we have the economical means to do so. We can help others only because we have enough to be able to do so. Environmentalism taken to the extreme says we should dismantle our economy because because it destroys the planet, however in the process of dismantling our economy we are taking away all the tools we have as well. If we're all poor the environment is going to do worse. People will go back to burning wood to keep themselves warm instead of e.g. using solar or nuclear power. We can have freedom only by having a culture and environment where that doesn't equate to chaos. Taken to an extreme "freedom" is chaos.

The other way of putting this is the well known saying: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

mjlawson• 1 year ago

It's rather telling that you group substance abuse together with rather common and generally benign human conditions such as anxiety and neuroticism, and I find that your rather heavy-handed generalizations of people's capacity to help others based on their conditions and indeed their trauma dilutes your point.

It's as if you wish us to say, "I've figured everything out, let me show you the way." I don't find that particularly reassuring, and it's not exactly the kind of humility that I think you want to convey.

If your bar to helping others is ending all suffering within yourself, then I'm afraid we're all going to be living a very lonely existence if we followed your lead.

Now, I think your larger point is that folks in crisis should tend to that crisis, which I think anyone who has taken a plane ride would understand. Apply the mask on yourself first. But to extend that analogy, you can have a broken hand, or even a broken heart and still be able to help your neighbor.

grafmax• 1 year ago

Our inability to come together to act for collective good has led to many evils including poisoning our environment - which could very well be the undoing of us all.

The stakes for quietism are high.

Carrok• 1 year ago

[flagged]

nine_k• 1 year ago

I see no contradiction, but rather an expansion. Serving public interest is taking care of the world. But helping your neighbor is also taking care of the world. Being kind to your children, and to your parents, and your friends, and strangers is also taking care of the world around you.

The definition you quote is basically the late Stoic definition of virtue. While very decent, it's notably pre-Christian.

DeathArrow4• 1 year ago

I'm one of those people that doesn't think we should try to "take care of the world". I prefer the older, time tested answer of what to do:
> You should be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest

I completely agree.

Being "wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest" is something related to you, something that you can change about you, something that you can choose to be without producing harm.

"Taking care of the world" is not about you and your actions anymore. It's about the others. It's the path of resentful ideologues, revolutionaries and murderers.

Robespierre, Lenin, Mao, Marx, Kim Ir-Sen, Pol Pot tried to "take care of the world."

Should they tried to "be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest" and leave the world be, the world would have been in a much better place.

pitkali• 1 year ago

But because it hasn't become cannon in any group or culture, it's a bad idea in that it doesn't produce human flourishing.

I am not convinced that's certain. At best, we can tell that those cultures were outcompeted by others, but the healthy human cells are outcompeted by cancer as well. Additionally, I'd say that throughout most of the human history taking care of the world in the modern sense was not an existential matter because we had much more room for error.

rlupi• 1 year ago

Note that Paul is wrong when he says that "take care of the world" wasn't part of the time tested answer.

Ancient populations like the Romans had the concept of numens, deus loci, and gods of nature that were responsible for the world, were venerated and people who devoted them to these deities did their part to help the world. Being a good host (i.e. the rapport with the Other) was also always a key duty, so much that it is Zeus/Jupiter who presided to it.

It was always part of the farmer's job to take care of nature and their fields. It was part of the nobility jobs to develop their territories. It is only in modern times, with mechanized agriculture and nation states, that these personal duties got lost. Also, if we widen our attention to include aboriginal people, taking care of the world is quite central to their world view.

BriggyDwiggs423• 1 year ago

Often the people who see the problems are those whose houses have been put out of order by them, in fact there’s a strong correlation. Why would you be interested in positive change if you’re already doing well?

codr7• 1 year ago

True! If you need help, go to the poor.

People who have everything they need will make up a story where you deserve your troubles to avoid facing their own vulnerability.

smeeth• 1 year ago

It’s not just that people disagree on whether or not to do these things, it’s also that they disagree on what helps people/the world.

An evangelical and an atheist will probably disagree about the helpfulness of spreading the gospel, for example.

userulluipeste• 1 year ago

«I have seen people without a pot to piss in, treat others -even complete strangers- with respect, love, caring, and patience, and folks with a lot of money, treat others most barbarously; especially when they consider those "others," to be folks that don't have the capability to hit back or stand up for themselves.»

It's easy to assign what you just described to character traits that the given people happen to have regardless of their economical stance. Yet, thinking about it a bit, being nice when poor is just a life strategy that makes sense. Not only that one's precarious situation (of any kind) attracts a lot of vulnerability, it also attracts a lot of dependency on pretty much everyone's good grace. Being anything but nice by default means undermining one's success. There is not much to gain by being hostile when poor. When one gets to be rich (in relation to others) however, the game changes. People want things and it makes sense to direct their attention and energy on other people that (ideally) do have what they want or (at least) may assist them with getting what they want. And, many people would like to cut corners and resort to dirty tricks in doing so. It's not that hard to imagine what that rich folk has to face in relation with other ambitious and not so scrupulous individuals, what a winning strategy in this case would look like, and why it makes sense to become the default behavior.

ChrisMarshallNY9• 1 year ago

That sounds like a fair observation. Probably has a lot of merit.

The other thing about folks without means, is that they know what it’s like, to have needs. A lot of folks with means, are pretty used to having the skids greased, and not needing stuff from others.

I think humans are social animals, and we’re generally wired for empathy. When we can see, in others, that which we see in ourselves, it helps us to feel more connected.

I’m not a particularly competitive person. That’s actually a deliberate posture. When I “win” something, that means someone else loses, and I’m not so comfortable with that.

The reasons partly have to do with being raised overseas, and experiencing grinding poverty in others. It really made a mark on me.

trollbridge• 1 year ago

One of the most unpleasant things one can experience is being in a fine restaurant or at a high-end hotel, and observe a guest being rude or outright cruel to a waiter for no reason other than that "I can get away with doing this". Often to a very excellent waiter providing top-notch service.

oefnak• 1 year ago

What a world you live in if that's the worst.

DeathArrow4• 1 year ago

I have seen people without a pot to piss in, treat others -even complete strangers- with respect, love, caring, and patience, and folks with a lot of money, treat others most barbarously; especially when they consider those "others," to be folks that don't have the capability to hit back or stand up for themselves.

This is a thousands years old apparent dichotomy between rich evil people and good poor people.

But the reality is not like that. Rich can be good and poor can be evil. The same person can be good in some moments and evil in others.

Depicting the world in only two colors, black and white, paints a false image of the reality.

I know people hate complexity, but we shouldn't try to oversimplify things.

anon_e-moose• 1 year ago

I have seen = at least one exists.

Refute that...

You could also say that power corrupts, money brings power therefore money corrupts.

You'd only really get an answer looking at trends and statistics. In my personal experience, people who have been through hardship develop empathy. They can become rich afterwards or stay poor, but most people tend to keep that empathy.

wcfrobert2• 1 year ago

"Criticism seems sophisticated, and making new things often seems awkward, especially at first; and yet it's precisely those first steps that are most rare and valuable."

This is what makes silicon valley is so amazing. It's filled with those who want to make good new things, who aren't afraid of looking awkward. This type of culture is actually quite weird. In most other places, you'd be dissuaded by conventional wisdom, or "who-do-you-think-you-are-isms".

KPGv22• 1 year ago

It's filled with those who want to make good new things

It's crazy you think this is even remotely unique to SV. Broad swaths of the country (referred to as "flyover" by coastal people) are fully employed in the production of new things that are essential to the survival of the human race.

Just, for some reason, you think "new things" is just bleep bloop and not moo oink.

asadotzler3• 1 year ago

Maybe 25 years ago. Hardly today. Today it's Big Tech, hardly different from Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Finance, etc.

KPGv22• 1 year ago

[flagged]

aoanevdus• 1 year ago

Why even go through the effort of making a criticism when you can satisfy the urge simply by pointing and implying one exists?

dang8• 1 year ago

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

giardini• 1 year ago

A good idea and one that Elon Musk tries to do. But he chose to go into politics too. Now his every move (even every past move) seems to be under scrutiny and politicized. Of course, this isn't the first time this has happened, but it is unfortunate that human behavior today is so.

jebarker2• 1 year ago

I don't believe you can choose to make good (whatever that means) things. You can certainly choose not to try, but choosing to try and believing you'll succeed is a recipe for disappointment in my opinion. All you can do is make a sincere effort at whatever you choose to do and the world will decide if it's good or not.

onemoresoop3• 1 year ago

You can use it as a guiding principle and go about your life.

asadotzler3• 1 year ago

You can choose NOT to make things you know are bad and you can choose to try to make things that are good.

Disappointment is irrelevant. It's the choice that matters in the context of this article and discussion and pretending that there is no choice is cowardice.

jebarker2• 1 year ago

Which of my four uses of choose/choosing made you think I was pretending there was no choice? My point is that the choice is to try and do something as best you can, but you can't choose whether it'll be received as a "good thing", that's out of your hands.

onemoresoop3• 1 year ago

I find this essay quite bland, inane even.

sfpotter• 1 year ago

I find that with Paul Graham's writing, once you stop and think about what he's saying, almost nothing he says holds up under scrutiny. He's basically just a propagandist for VC-backed startups and a certain concomitant worldview.

skeeter20202• 1 year ago

20 years old in a few days; still relevant: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Read his entire body of work if you want deep thought, thorough research and definitive opinions.

dachworker• 1 year ago

I think people are being a bit too negative and maybe that is because they are not used to pg's style of slogans in baby talk. I think the gist of what pg is saying is that you should have some agency and initiative and not spend your whole life being the side character in other people's stories. This serves two purposes. First of all, it maximizes your chances of gaining wealth, power and influence. And secondly if you care to make the world a better place, it also increases your chances of having an impact.

The novelty is important, because, tautologically, if your are just copying others, you are still a side character in their story. However, I do not think this should be read as, "create the next unicorn startup". I think it is rather a principle to live by. Like for example, if you have three job offers, go for the one that allows you to build something new, rather than the one where your task is to manage a legacy product. Or for example, let's say you move to a new city and you are a bit disappointed with the activities that are available for your kids. You can either try to convince your kids to attend the available activities or you can try to organize a new after school club.

bloomingeek• 1 year ago

What to Do- besides the help others and care of the world, plan for your future retirement, most don't. Seek education by reading as much as you can. Stay interested in your family. Desperately seek out beauty. Cultivate your sense of humor, even if it's a little snarky. Be who you want to be, as long as it won't hurt anyone, including yourself. (I'm afraid too many of us are afraid to stand out today, group mentality, on the whole, is toxic and can lead to "us vs them" stupidity.)

What not to do (just as important)- Suck. Be nosy, passive aggressive, judgmental or hateful. Allow yourself to be duped because you're to lazy to seek out information.

pugio• 1 year ago

(No implied critique of the actual essay) but when I saw that title from PG, I was really hoping it would address the 2025 question "What should one do now?"

At a time when it seems like so many pursuits or activities or things to make are overshadowed by " but won't there be a model in the next 6 months that can just do this itself?", not to mention all the other present world uncertainties...

Well, it would be nice to hear more thought as to how to focus one's energies.

(I have my own thoughts on this of course, but what I'm really advocating / hoping for is more strong takes on the question.)

jstanley2• 1 year ago

"but won't there be a model in the next 6 months that can just do this itself?"

Then you've got 6 months to cement your place in history as one of the last humans ever to have accomplished that thing before AI could do it. Hurry!

(More generally, even if you don't care about AI: if you think you might want to do something, then depending on your age you've got maybe 50 years to do it before you've squandered your opportunity. Hurry!)

sidcool3• 1 year ago

Glad this has been unflagged. It's a boring essay, with nothing of substance said, but that doesn't make it worth flagging.

FloorEgg5• 1 year ago

I've found many of pg's essays very illuminating, but a few of the more recent ones seem less well thought out. Maybe I've just learned a lot over the last decade and it's me who has changed, or maybe his process has changed.

The first thought I had after reading the thesis of the essay is that some people don't make new things but instead maintain important things. I'm more of a builder and if wager pg considers himself one, and I assume the majority of authentic HN users are builders. However I suspect the majority of people are maintainers.

Nurses, electricians, emergency dispatchers, firefighters, mechanics, etc.

We all depend on many complex systems working in order for our lives to not fall apart. Our homes, electricity, running water, soap manufacturing, etc. Choosing to be someone who makes sure these systems keep working is a good thing to do and deserves respect and appreciation. Someday AI may do all this stuff, but someday AI may build all the new things too...

So my response to this specific essay: PG, your answer is incomplete and biased towards your own values. ikigai does a better job of answering this question already, why not build on it? Also thanks for your writing, don't stop.

My biased answer to the question: - do lots of different things and stay curious, and with enough time, effort and luck you will find something you're good at, enjoy, the world wants, and will reward you with all the resources you need and then some. Just keep doing different things and being curious until you get there.

One last thought: Is PG publishing less robust essays in hopes that people will be more compelled to comment and discuss them, bringing together the best ideas on the topic? Something like "the best way to get a question answered on the internet is to post the wrong answer" or however that goes...

pedalpete• 1 year ago

I had completely the same thought. No everyone is a creator, and we don't want to bias the world into everyone being a creator, or a scientist, or an engineer.

Today, I feel we have far too much of a focus on "business" and all my nieces and nephew are studying some sort of business focus in their university degrees. I feel it such a waste. If everyone in the world learns to only make businesses (ignoring that a degree is not required for that), who is going to build. If everyone becomes a maker, who is going to support all the non-maker roles.

There are many people for whom their job is not their craft. They're focus - much as PGs now is, is the raising of their family, guiding their children to become good people, showing love, etc etc.

Some may argue this is "making", but that's maybe a different argument.

Your last thought is an interesting one, I hadn't heard the quote before.

whilenot-dev2• 1 year ago

I'm more of a builder and if wager pg considers himself one, and I assume the majority of authentic HN users are builders. However I suspect the majority of people are maintainers.

A dichotomy like "builder"/"maintainer" just doesn't make sense to me anymore.

Let's take software as example:

- Is someone that pushes their project from version 1.2.1 to 1.4.7 a "builder"?

- Are Linux contributors "builders"?

- Is someone porting CLI Y to rust a "builder"?

- Is someone that wraps a GenAI LLM into a web app a "builder"?

- Is someone in offensive security a "builder" of something?

...or let's ask it differently:

- Is performance optimization "maintenance"?

- Is the fix that prevents a user of your software from accomplishing their task "maintenance"?

- Is the work on a solid infrastructure, one that brings your time to resolution (TTR) closer to zero, the work of a "maintainer"?

- Is a dependency upgrade in your project the work of a "maintainer"?

Everybody builds and maintains all the time, and every artifact once built is in need of maintenance. Technological advancements will always be a collective effort through some form of feedback. Whether you're (re-)building something frequently [0] or advancing through maintenance [1], both are just categories of equal practice.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/how-japan-makes-houses...

[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-maintenance-race/

FloorEgg5• 1 year ago

I agree that there are roles with lots of maintenance and building in them, and you shared a lot of good examples. I also know of roles where a person does almost entirely maintenance type work or entirely building type work.

To me the distinction is whether you are restoring functionality that previously worked and then stopped, or are you creating new functionality. I would also extend the notion of functionality to include what people perceive as value. So new art that makes someone feel something would be creation. A therapist that helps someone restore their emotional wellbeing is maintenance.

My subjective anecdotal observations are that some people seem more wired for maintenance and some more wired for building and like with any attribute some are wired for both or neither. They are independent attributes that are not mutually exclusive.

So I disagree that there is no distinction, but I agree they are not mutually exclusive.

All this is kind of beside my original point though, which is that it seems like PG left maintenance out of his proposed value system.

FloorEgg5• 1 year ago

With more time to think about this, and after rereading your comment I'm providing a new answer. Every example you listed I would consider building.

You only listed examples that relate to creating software. I'm sure the PG essay didn't mean to restrict all possibilities of what people could do to just creating software.

On one end the distinction is clear to me.

A security guard maintains the security of a facility. A nurse maintains the health and well being of patients. A janitor maintains the cleanliness of a facility.

Once you start bringing repairs into the scope of maintenance I can understand the distinction being blurry. I'd draw the line where a repair restores functionality to a previous state without any material improvments (to functionality or longevity). If there is a material improvments to the previously optimal state it's augmentation and therefore building.

bob1029• 1 year ago

On the other hand, if you make something amazing, you'll often be helping people or the world even if you didn't mean to. Newton was driven by curiosity and ambition, not by any practical effect his work might have, and yet the practical effect of his work has been enormous. And this seems the rule rather than the exception. So if you think you can make something amazing, you should probably just go ahead and do it.

I dislike the way this is framed and I think the rule/exception are inverted. Certainly, building the jet engine or microprocessor is a big uplift on all boats, but the chances you pull one of these out of the hat are pretty low.

I spent a good chunk of my career attempting to build things that I thought were amazing. It took a lot of drama and disappointment to discover that helping other people means meeting them where they are at right now, not where I want them to be.

nashashmi• 1 year ago

Yeah , the missing ingredient here is “SERVE PEOPLE”. That needs a market familiarity .

pj_mukh• 1 year ago

This maybe a little reductionist. To bring the jet engine and/or microprocessor to a point where it could uplift all boats took probably millions of people. You can choose to be one of those people and you'd be working on something amazing. You don't have to be the originator, the follow-on supporters are just as important.

fulafel• 1 year ago

The jet engine is now a big contributor to the climate catastrophe[1] and one that lacks a low carbon replacement in the needed timeframe. In 100 years I'd wager it's seen more like a villain in history.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions

SquibblesRedux• 1 year ago

I can say what not to do -- Do not ever work to strip others of their free will.

paulryanrogers• 1 year ago

Could bankrolling cryptocoin and AI businesses ever cause people to lose their freedom?

Asking for a friend

TheAlchemist• 1 year ago

Side question - why do all PG essays are formatted in a such a narrow text column ?

indigoabstract• 1 year ago

Just a guess, but I think it's because that's how web sites were in the '90s. People had pretty low res screens back then.

jgord• 1 year ago

People should just choose to have wealthier parents, then they have more options from which to chose what to do - breed dogs, travel, get a degree in a totally useless but culturally enriching subject, make some great garage music, tinker with inventing or explore some arcane area of math, have kids, read voraciously, write a bad game or operating system etc.

It seems these sorts of things happened more in the 1980s, when we had lower inequality - middle class post-teens could pretend to study while actually learning something in their free time.

Now students are burdened with debt before they even get started, and have too many part time gig jobs to attend lectures, or mope around the campus having random conversations that challenge their ideas.

luhsprwhk• 1 year ago

"Make good new things" is the thesis, which is about as vague as the rest of the article. The other one is "good people make good things" which is just naive. Examples: too many to name but since this is a science forum, James Watson and John Von Neumann.

A "good" motivation doesn’t guarantee a good outcome, nor does a bad outcome ensure a good one.

NalNezumi• 1 year ago

I kinda disagree with PG on this one.

What we should do is not "make good new things" but "maintain things that work and improve upon it".

We have too many people that WANT to make new things. Ideally good, but when so many people value NEW things we obfuscate what good means.

Maintaining thing that works includes everything: it makes you learn something,(how can you maintain something you don't understand?) often structured and you stand on a giants shoulder. Since it have been maintained so far, most likely it's also valuable. But also, most likely it can be improved upon.

I think PGs essay here actually go against his previous post of "Great Work". In this essay he mention art needs to be new/unique but usually art (and fashion) is cyclic; they reuse and rehash old ideas all the time. And even in science, such as Einstein and Newton, they usually just IMPROVE on the existing understanding, although in a major way.

Is newness essential? Not really in the modern attention based economy of 2025. Newness chasers are often similar to clout chasers. More noise there and you'll end up surrounding yourself with style over substance kind of people.

tiffanyh• 1 year ago

Meta comment but … I find the title of “What to do” vs. “What should one do” (topic first sentence) to mean two slightly different things.

crossroadsguy• 1 year ago

Who reads his blog posts like these? Okay, I'd try to frame it this way - who does he write his blog posts for? No, I am not trying to say he mustn't, but I am just curious because it's hn and he is, like what, founder of hn or creator or so (?); and whenever one of his blog posts is posted here, it gains a lot of traction. I find them really sterile, trite, and filled with basic abstracts and attempted philosophy. Oh, by the way people love to call it "essays" here, not blog posts - oh no, no - "essays" it is. I see brilliant blog posts posted here on hn and they don't even make more than few comments which can be counted on a single palm (palm as if on human hand, not the device) and then his posts just get comments after comments. What intrigues me is a lot of those comments are just trying to guesstimate, assume, interpret on his behalf what he tried to say - like when you stare at an art piece in a museum, which is just three straight lines and a dot on an otherwise blank canvas, you hear someone explain to someone else few feet away - how that art captures the sublime, infinity, futility of life, and concision, among other heavy worded things, at the same time.

So, these posts err.. essays.. of his are pieces of abstract textual art that arrive here to be interpreted by commenters and also for admiration and mandatory vc adulation (maybe)?

Or maybe since he is rich now and is influential in making other people rich, lots of them actually, he gets to post whatever it is and also gets to make them gain traction. Yeah, this makes sense. Of course.

Or maybe I am from the crowd that doesn't understand modern art of making money at all; obviously.

fud1012• 1 year ago

i'd rather never see another PG post if possible but unfortunately he is very prolific..

neilv• 1 year ago

My impression (as an observer since before YC started) is that some of PG's early writings were very influential on the startup scene -- separate from his obviously very influential doings through YC over the years.

Nowadays, I skim PG articles when they hit HN, for maybe roughly 3 reasons:

1. To see if there's anything interesting to me.

2. Curiosity about what the writing says about him, or what he might be doing. (Why did he choose this topic, how is he thinking, what messages is he trying to send, why, does this hint at some other actions he's taking with his influence and resources, etc.)

3. As background for skimming HN comments. (Mainly, what's the gist of the sentiment of various HN demographics, when prompted by the PG post. Lately, I think my intent is mostly hopeful or curious, not seeking out something to be angry about.)

thimkerbell• 1 year ago

Give an example of a great post that got too little notice, please.

overfeed• 1 year ago

Who reads his blog posts like these?

I skim them to figure out which direction the wind is blowing for our technocrat overlords. The last article of his I read a few weeks ago was completely mask-off, also around the same time as the Zuckerberg "bring back masculine energy" interview. This essay feels softened, almost hedging in the same vein as the "How do you do, fellow kids?" meme.

Billionaires are interesting people, and I can't help but wonder how the next decade will be for them and the countries where they hold the bulk of their wealth.

gizmo• 1 year ago

pg doesn't want to be known for his wealth or business acumen. He wants to be known as a serious thinker. He wants to write essays that stand the test of time. Just like he wanted to create the "100 year programming language" (it turned out his vision was lisp with shorter function names).

He's not doing this for clout or internet points. He's not just writing whatever. pg works very hard on his writing and some of his earlier stuff is excellent. Maybe his next essay will be a banger. Or maybe pg doesn't have any good essays in him anymore. In any case, I respect his willingness to keep at it despite how widely his essays get mocked. It's not easy to put yourself out there.

tacker2000• 1 year ago

I agree with you. Not entirely sure what value this post brings of his brings.

“Create something new”… ok great insight, thanks PG, I guess this is some big strategic plan to increase the number YC applicants?

It really reads like some abstract art form that one is staring at and has to figure out the “deeper” meaning of. The problem is, there is no deep meaning there.

fairity• 1 year ago

Years ago, I was lying in the grass, having a conversation with a fellow founder, when he noted how, on most days, he would forget to eat lunch because he was so engrossed with his work. I thought to myself, That's ridiculous. Everyone notices when they're hungry. This was just a thinly veiled brag about his work ethic.

Nowadays, I find myself skipping lunch every other day - out of forgetfulness.

aatd86• 1 year ago

One should remain curious and improve.

dfabulich• 1 year ago

It seems strange that pg identifies "make good new things" as a "third thing" alongside helping people and taking care of the world.

Intuitively, I'd have thought "making good new things" would be a tactic to helping people and/or taking care of the world.

If I ask him "What new good thing should I make?" surely his answer has to be, "Make something people want," right??

I'm not even sure the new things are "good" unless people want them, or if new things aren't making the world better in some way.

pg notes in the last paragraph that there's "often" a lot of overlap between making good new things, helping people, and helping the world, but it seems like even pg is forgetting his own motto…?

pdonis4• 1 year ago

"you should at least make sure that the new things you make don't net harm people or the world."

How well has Y Combinator done at upholding this principle with the companies it funds?

hackernewds• 1 year ago

it has done very well IMHO

aryehof• 1 year ago

I think what to do is a more personal thing, from which one takes care of others and the world:-

Smile, be kind and have compassion, don't judge others unfairly, do what is good and right, say only good things of others, and don't remain silent or inactive in the face of true injustice or cruelty. Respect all life. This is the human challenge and journey.

To this I would also add in these difficult times… Understand that much of what we are told is opinion rather than fact. Our own formed opinions and views based on them should be considered potentially unreliable and should be questioned.

fud1012• 1 year ago

I wonder if PG feels a pang of regret since he joined the cause to elect Trump 2.0. Does he think his anti wokeness contributions helped make the world a better place? Thanks for making the world better PG.

fedeb95• 1 year ago

While making a good thing is easy, avoiding harm is way more difficult. My impression.

DeathArrow4• 1 year ago

"Make good new things."

But what are the good new things? The new part is pretty clear, as in something that wasn't done before. But what does the adjective "good" mean when applied to "new things"?

The author says you should make sure "new things you make don't net harm people or the world."

I'd argue that the world has no meaning without people, so not "net harming people" is what he can mean. But how can one know if things will produce net harm or not? I think we can even quantify after the fact if discovering gunpowder or dynamite is producing net harm or not. We can't decide if discovery of nuclear fission and nuclear fusion is producing a net harm or not.

Of course, for some "things" it's easy to say if they produce a net harm or not, i.e. producing a biological weapon or a vaccine.

And what if the result of our struggle, be it a scientific endeavor or not, while "new" and certainty not harmful doesn't produce any impact whatsoever? Maybe we come up with something that will be usable in a few years, a few decades, e few hundreds of years years or never.

So, should be there an impact? Shouldn't we strive to produce something that is not only not harmful but useful?

I think that we should give some more thought about the "good" part.

nvader• 1 year ago

I sometimes think about Thomas Midgeley, inventory of leaded petrol, chlorofluorocarbons, and the traction device that ultimately ended up killing him in a hospital bed.

Animats• 1 year ago

Something that's positive-sum, not zero-sum.

qznc• 1 year ago

The kind of people who make good new things don't need rules to keep them honest.

Seriously? People have done horrible things in the name of "progress". For example, shipping slaves from another continent to make good new things.

lo_zamoyski• 1 year ago

Such questions were part of a classical education, and in the past, no person with a university degree would not have had at least a basic speculative grasp of the subject. To respond, I would first want to make a few distinctions, as the language in the essay is muddled. I distinguish between three classes of acts that human beings can perform, namely, theoria, praxis, and poiesis.

1. theoria concerns acts that aim at knowledge, understanding, and wisdom; the aim is truth for its own sake

2. praxis concerns acts performed for their own sake; these are the primary subject of ethics, the practical philosophy

3. poiesis concerns acts of production where the end is distinct from the act that produces it as an effect

Paul claims that "[t]he most impressive thing humans can do is to think. It may be the most impressive thing that can be done". I agree that "thinking", or precisely the capacity for intentionality, abstraction of concepts, and the ability to reason about them (to which I would add the capacity to choose between apprehended alternatives) is, indeed, the most impressive and indeed most distinctive thing human beings are capable of. These constitute our rationality. However, what is the highest expression of this capacity? Paul claims that "the best kind of thinking, or more precisely the best proof that one has thought well, is to make good new things". This is confusing, as "the best kind of thinking" and "the best proof one has thought well" are talking about two different things. It's not clear what exactly the point here is in relation to the prior claim. Are we talking about the best kind of thinking or the best proof of having though well? And what about it?

"So what should one do? One should help people, and take care of the world. Those two are obvious. [...] Taking care of people and the world are shoulds in the sense that they're one's duty, but making good new things is a should in the sense that this is how to live to one's full potential."

Paul says such things are "duties" and that they are "obvious". Perhaps they are, in some sense, or perhaps these are hazy cultural attitudes he has absorbed that may not be obvious elsewhere, whether true or not. But what is the basis for such duties? What is their explanation? What is the basis of the good? Of morality? Of the normative (the "shoulds")?

The reason I harp on this point is because had Paul had a basic grasp of something like virtue ethics, he would have found that human nature is the foundation and basis for the objective good and thus for objective morality. He would have found the key that could systematically reconcile and explain and relate all these seemingly arbitrary "shoulds" he lists. He would have a basis for evaluating the place of theoria, praxis, and poiesis in the context of human nature, the good life, and the end of human life (its ultimate good).

We could then answer questions like "what is the best expression of human rationality?" Is it production as in poiesis? Or praxis? Or perhaps theoria? I claim it is theoria, and this does nothing to diminish the importance and the good of praxis or poiesis. They simply are not the highest expression of human rationality. They play supporting roles methodologically (and this is where Paul's comment about "proof of one has thought well" can enter the discussion), but they are not the end.

"There was a long stretch where in some parts of the world the answer became "Serve God," but in practice it was still considered good to be wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just, uphold tradition, and serve the public interest. [...] for example by saying, as some Christians have, that it's one's duty to make the most of one's God-given gifts. But this seems one of those casuistries people invented to evade the stern requirements of religion: you could spend time studying math instead of praying or performing acts of charity because otherwise you were rejecting a gift God had given you."

Why is "serving God" construed as distinct from "wise, brave, honest, temperate, and just" and so on? Why can't these be part of what it means to "serve God"? Why are we setting them in opposition as if they were in competition with one another rather than one and the same thing? Apparently, Paul is unaware of the parable of the talents in Matthew's gospel, or the five tasks given Mankind in Genesis by which Mankind better participates in the life of the Trinity, let alone the metaphysical "obviousness" of this being the case. The demonstrated grasp of "religion" in general (if we may even speak of it in general in any meaningful way) and "Christianity" in particular leave much to be desired, to put it mildly. I feel as if I'm reading the superficial tropes of a lazy observer rather than a sound grasp of the basics.

If anything, as Stanley Jaki among others argue, the reason why we saw an explosion of sustained scientific progress and techne in the West is because it follows from Christian principles, like the notion that all of the created order is inherently and totally intelligible (I would claim best expressed in John 1:1); that human beings are capable of grasping this intelligible reality (rooted, I would say, in the Imago Dei); the notion of the logos spermatikos; the distinction between creator (first causality) and created (second causality); the notion that human beings are "co-creators" (or "sub-creators", to use Tolkien's term) cooperating with God in the work of creation; and so on. These provide strong motivations to pursue this kind of work in a sustained and intense fashion. If you don't believe that the world is rational, that human beings can understand it, that it is somehow evil to investigate it, that religious texts are the only source of human knowledge (or even epistemically primary), that such texts can contradict truths known by unaided reason, that effort is futile and pointless, then you're not going to accomplish much.

"But there's nothing in it about taking care of the world or making new things, and that's a bit worrying, because it seems like this question should be a timeless one. [...] Obviously people only started to care about that once it became clear we could ruin it."

Obviously? I seem to recall Genesis giving men the authority of stewardship over the earth. I don't think the ancients doubted they could ruin the earth (ask a farmer), even if they did not know the scale at which we could eventually do so, but then this is not a matter of having or lacking said care, but a matter of prudential application of care.

"The traditional answers were answers to a slightly different question. They were answers to the question of how to be, rather than what to do."

Doing is act and being is act. Doing has as its ultimate end being, or else it is unintelligible. They are not opposed.

"Archimedes knew that he was the first to prove that a sphere has 2/3 the volume of the smallest enclosing cylinder and was very pleased about it. But you don't find ancient writers urging their readers to emulate him. They regarded him more as a prodigy than a model. [...] his contemporaries would have found it strange to treat as a distinct group, because the vein of people making new things ran at right angles to the social hierarchy."

I don't know what this means. He maintained relations with other scholars. Some scholars and philosophers ran their own schools (Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, etc), some did not.

theGnuMe3• 1 year ago

I'd like to see his notes on Raymond Chandler and why he considers him one of the best writers. Or why does anyone? I guess that would be an essay on literary criticism.

What is interesting is if you read Chandler's Wikipedia entry it has a quote on how he talked about pulp fiction being formulaic and attempts to break free of the formula were trounced but if you didn't try you'd have been a hopeless hack.

This is fascinating in comparison that PGs formulism appears to be a self-styled self-help (?) essay. Is PG stuck or trying to break free? He certainly has an audience. To what quality should we ascribe his writing?

What to Do

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