Re: What You Can't Say

http://www.paulgraham.com/resay.html

by kf • 17 years ago

95 142 17 years ago

paulgraham.com

dennisgorelik2• 17 years ago

Why Paul's article doesn't have a date on it?

ynniv• 17 years ago

Archive.org goes back to 2004: http://web.archive.org/web/20040207184543/http://www.paulgra...

warwick• 17 years ago

It took me a couple re-readings of the first page or so, because I didn't understand that these were responses to some objections you got.

I spent several minutes trying to decide if French Literary profs might be able to publish physics journal articles in your scenario. I eventually decided they would be able to, since the physics journals would now be run by French Literary theorists.

dennisgorelik2• 17 years ago

That's a good point about publishing physics articles in physics journals ran by French Literature theorists :-)

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

As a physics journal editor you could publish articles by French lit. profs which would save their lives, but which any competent physicist would see were clearly bluffs, so wouldn't you be somewhat obliged to do so?

Tichy• 17 years ago

I am not that sure about the integrity of physics. Maybe with quantum physics, you can also get away with talking a lot of nonsense.

Edit: I don't claim that quantum physics is nonsense, just that in the name of quantum physics a lot of strange ideas have been put forward. My impression is that quantum physics is sound (mathematically), but I remain doubtful about "many worlds", for example.

kurtosis2• 17 years ago

I'm surprised that noone has mentioned the case of Igor and Grichka Bogdanov here. These were borderline literary theorists that actually did have a complete nonsense physics article published.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair

pfedor2• 17 years ago

How are they borderline literary theorists? One of them has a PhD in theoretical physics, the other one in mathematics.

trapper8• 17 years ago

Similar relationships exist in sport. Gymnasts can take up nearly any sport and excel. Swimmers can barely walk :)

Gymnasts are the physicists of movement.

forensic• 17 years ago

That's not because swimmers aren't physically fit though (physical fitness being the comparison to intelligence) it's because swimming is more specialized than gymnastics.

You really can't say gymnasts are more fit than swimmers, just that gymnastics is a more versatile sport so you learn a wider range of abilities.

trapper8• 17 years ago

It's nothing to do with fitness or being specialized. It's about "movement IQ" or "coordination capacity" for lack of a better term. Gymnasts typically have a huge talent reserve, and move to other sports and often dominate. It's why many national talent programs use gymnastics as their foundations. Swimming tends to attract the less talented for some reason, and these people don't adapt well to other sports.

To paraphrase pg: Take some swimmers and gymnasts and tell them they have to learn each others discipline or be executed. Who's the most worried?

Funny anecdote: a recent olympic swimming team failed to ride to the stadium in Beijing because most of them couldn't ride bikes.

xiaoma• 17 years ago

It sure didn't play out that way on my high school cross-country team. We had a gymnast who couldn't even manage a 25min 5k by the end of the season and three swimmers who beat that by a big margin in the very first meet.

A lot of gymnasts made good cheerleaders, though.

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

Cheerleading is another very physically demanding sport. A lot of cheerleaders could easily move into other sports and do very well.

Quarrelsome• 17 years ago

They can't dance for shit though. A gymnast moving into breaking stands out by a mile. It's as if they've left their clothes hanger inside their clothes.

kierank2• 17 years ago

Smart people might work on sexy projects like fighter planes and space rockets for ordinary wages, but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs.

I don't agree that this is the case. Many smart people don't see the need to be rewarded in a financially appropriate way. (Those that do make their way into finance or startups eventually). Look at institutes such as the CSIRO in Australia for science/technology in general or the BBC for broadcasting technology.

gaius2• 17 years ago

The BBC's a good example, how long have they been working on their own Dirac codec? That's taxpayer's money they're spending. Sure it probably makes a few geeks happy but remember - these geeks know fully well that if they tried to do that outside the safety of the BBC, they'd starve. At the end of the day, in the private sector you get stuff done because if you don't you don't eat.

thristian• 17 years ago

You seem to be implying that the BBC's Dirac work has produced no useful results; I would disagree. Sure, it's not the format-of-choice of BitTorrent users, and it hasn't cropped up in the endless discussions of the <video/> element in HTML5, but that doesn't mean it's vanished. A subset of Dirac colloquially called Dirac Pro has been standardised by the SMPTE as "VC-2" (Windows Media Video was VC-1):

    http://sonofid.blogspot.com/2008/02/vc-2-progress.html

...and there's a company selling professional video-encoding hardware using the Dirac Pro codec:

    http://www.numediatechnology.com/products.html

Wikipedia says "Dirac Pro was used internally by the BBC to transmit HDTV pictures at the Beijing Olympics in 2008":

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_%28codec%29

Create4• 17 years ago

you are missing that Beeb IT was "outsourced" to Siemens, which in turn has a patent-tech X agreement with MS: no place for free (as in freedom) vendor lockin-free tech here...

Create4• 17 years ago

you are missing that Beeb IT was "outsourced" to Siemens, which in turn has a patent-tech X agreement with MS: no place for free (as in freedom) vendor lockin-free tech here...

tezza• 17 years ago

Many smart people

I agree with you that many smart people work for ordinary wages. But the point seems to be to ask the question: is "many", enough to keep an economy growing optimally?

Great Depression[1] : 25% unemployment, thus roughly 75% employment.

Many people were employed, but were enough people in a job?

---

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression_in_the_United_... "Unemployment fell by two-thirds in Roosevelt's first term (from 25% to 9%, 1933 to 1937)"

blasdel• 17 years ago

There are largely two categories of "things you can't say", that by all "community standards" are obscene:

Prurience: http://www.asstr.org/files/Collections/Alt.Sex.Stories.Moder...

Politics: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/

vsync• 17 years ago

A little more warning than that might have been nice.

unalone7• 17 years ago

Dismissing socialism is as silly as dismissing capitalism would be. There is no simple answer to society: The best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of socialism there.

Similarly, perhaps Paul was criticized for his dismissal of French Literature professors because a lot of people realized what a stupid blanket statement he made. Just because it's easier to bullshit about literature doesn't mean the whole of literature is bullshit. That's like assuming that just because math is about simplistic formulas, the entirety of math is simple to comprehend.

I don't know much about French literature, but what I do know of it tells me that by learning about it, I'd be learning not just about literary theory but about French sociology, French history, and the feelings behind France at various moments in times. There's an incredible amount of information in literature. It's not a bug that it's subjective in nature and prone to debate. That's the feature.

chrispine• 17 years ago

But it wasn't a blanket statement (applying to all french lit profs equally). It was a generalization (a reference to the average intelligence of french lit profs).

It's meant to be understood in the same way that "men are taller than women" is meant to be understood; a counter-example will get you nowhere here.

joss82• 17 years ago

Even in a capitalist society, you need some socialist parts.

The best example would be the roads. Who paid for it ? Tax payers. End everyone is happier for it.

perokreco• 17 years ago

Actually in many more socialist countries, highways and some urban roads are payed by the people who use them. Better examples are military and police force.

tokenadult2• 17 years ago

Adam Smith gives the example of paying for roads by road tolls in his book The Wealth of Nations. In the United States, much of state and federal funding for highways is derived from a tax on gasoline and diesel vehicle fuel, to much the same effect. The ultimate incidence of ALL taxation is on consumers (and everyone is a consumer), as any competent economist will tell you. These forms of paying for roads are not socialism, by any definition of socialism that I have ever seen, but they are forms of taxation that allocate the cost of using the tax-supported, publicly available resource rather well.

philwelch2• 17 years ago

Socialism is an ambiguous word, but roads aren't a good example of any of them.

-Does socialism mean the workers own the company? Lots of perfectly capitalistic companies are actually socialist by that standard. I even know a company where the original founder has no equity anymore and everyone else has equity based upon seniority. What socialist would do better?

-Does socialism mean that the government owns the company? Amtrak, Fannie Mae, GM, AIG.... Hasn't been an amazing success so far.

-Does socialism mean that the government provides welfare? By that standard, Bismarck was a socialist. (But in reality, he was an old fashioned aristocrat who figured out you can snip socialism in the bud by using welfare to buy off its supporters.)

-Does socialism mean that the socialist party holds a monopoly on all commerce and politics? We, ah...tried that a few times and it didn't seem to work.

Roads? Most governments build roads, if only for their armies. You think Caesar was a socialist?

InclinedPlane4• 17 years ago

Socialism has killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century. I think it's fair to put it into the "doubtfully useful techniques" bin, where a higher standard of proof for usefulness is required to make use of anything that seems socialist.

Unfortunately, exactly the opposite is the case today. Free enterprise and competition is looked on skeptically, while socialism (multiply disproved and damned by the experience of history) is gleefully embraced and readily adopted with insufficient skepticism.

supermetroid• 17 years ago

Socialism has killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century.

I disagree completely. Implementing socialism in disenfranchised states is by far a more streamlined process than implementing any brand of capitalism. What killed "hundreds of millions of people" was the coupling of fragile citizenries with malicious and self-serving leaders, not the establishment of socialism. I see correlation, but no causation, and I find hasty dismissal of socialism as the "disproved and damned" counterpart of capitalism as completely flawed--especially in a society where the two have been working together (I'd say successfully) for quite some time.

count• 17 years ago

Facism and national socialism killed hundreds of millions - don't confuse dictatorial societies and their losses with socialism as an idea.

unalone7• 17 years ago

Capitalism has killed millions too, and not just an abstraction of it posing under the name. Capitalism makes human abuse profitable. The best way to restrain that abuse requires practices that are currently being attacked in Amerca for being socialistic.

byrneseyeview2• 17 years ago

There is no simple answer to society: The best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of socialism there.

Why would that be true? Aside from being the mid-point between two mutually contradictory opinions, what specifically makes you think that being a little bit of both is better than either? In the US, at least, the half-socialized sectors of the economy have been responsible for the biggest disasters -- S&Ls, Enron, and Lehman were all the result of smart capitalists exploiting dumb price controls.

Also! If you'd been writing this 80 years ago, would you have said "Dismissing democracy is as silly as dismissing fascism would be.... the best combination is a mixture of many things. There'll be hints of National Socialism there."

spazmaster• 17 years ago

If you live in Holland, that last point is pretty much a no-brainer. Politicians are constantly accusing each other of saying things that are 'not done'. We have our wannabe-Fortuyn (Geert Wilders) at the moment. Heck, a politician just stepped down for not adhering to 'the code' another sign we're not that tolerant. We're just tolerant about homosexuality and drugs.

stingraycharles• 17 years ago

The world mistakenly confuses us for a tolerant country: we're not. We're just indifferent.

rms• 17 years ago

This was in response to one of the replies here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956774 (showdead=on required to see)

Specifically, this response is what I wanted to bring up.

The fact that you can't say something doesn't mean it's true.

I believe this is implicit in "So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today." In an earlier version I made this point explicitly, but it seemed repetitive, so I cut it.

haon99• 17 years ago

Not to be a jerk, but "[Copernicus] was forced into it, because it was the only way to make the numbers come out right" just isn't correct.

Tycho Brahe's measurements showed that Ptolemy's model was more accurate than Copernicus's. The point still stands that Copernicus transcended his time, but he was really riding on the coattails of Ptolemy's genius. Ptolemy never gets enough credit...

stcredzero4• 17 years ago

Really, Copernicus' accomplishment was that his model worked very well yet left out a huge heap of epicycles. Heliocentric = fewer epicycles. That was Copernicus' contribution.

This pales in comparison to Kepler's "Equal areas in equal time." That observation is a very strong hint towards Newtonian mechanics and Calculus.

jimbokun4• 17 years ago

This makes me think of over-fitting in machine learning algorithms. The epicycles fit the data very well, but added a lot of parameters to the model. It makes me wonder if there is a bias/variance trade off for scientific models, but I don't know how to express the connection formally.

In machine learning algorithms, we hold out a dataset to test for over-fitting. We don't exactly have a spare universe to test our scientific models for over-fitting, but maybe if there were a second planetary system at the time to test against it would have been clear sooner that the "epicycles" model fit only this solar system from the vantage point of earth? Maybe you could "train" the model on some heavenly bodies, then test on others?

I'm pretty sure I'm making a fool of myself at this point and missing something obvious, and I'm hoping one or more of you will point that obvious thing out to me.

moss• 17 years ago

Actually, strictly speaking, Copernicus's system has more epicycles that Ptolemy's (or at least no fewer, depending on how you work out the details of it). Copernicus's big win is getting rid of the equant, easily the most mathematically ugly thing in the Ptolemaic system.

The equant has a planet moving in a circle around one point, but moving uniformly from the perspective of a different point--essentially a way to avoid the restriction to uniform circular motion. It's a cheap hack, and it's the flaw that drove Copernicus away from Ptolemy in the first place. Or anyway, it looks like a cheap hack, until Kepler comes along and realizes that it's hinting at, as you said, "equal areas in equal time".

So I guess what I mean to say is: yeah, Kepler's pretty awesome.

(Sorry, don't mind me. I just spent way too much time reading Ptolemy in college, and I have no reason to believe there will ever be another opportunity to apply that bit of my education.)

bartl• 17 years ago

For most of these points I don't even understand what he's trying to say.

jey• 17 years ago

Context: http://paulgraham.com/say.html

bumblebird• 17 years ago

Again, I am shrugging.

Whatever you say, someone will complain.

Sukotto• 17 years ago

I find this really annoying about Paul's otherwise insightful and interested articles. Namely that he assumes you know everything he's written and when and what it was called and that you know how to easily find it so you can understand the context.

Paul, would you PLEASE date your articles (and RFS for that matter) and link to whatever it is you're talking about?

alex_c• 17 years ago

What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?

Well, actually...

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

InclinedPlane4• 17 years ago

That's a funny link, but you really, really don't want to open up the "are physics or computer scientists smarter" debate, a lot of people here probably don't want to know the truth.

m0nty• 17 years ago

And also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hendrik_Sch%C3%B6n

"Jan Hendrik Schön (born 1970) is a German physicist who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs that were later discovered to be fraudulent.[1] Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics in 2001, the Braunschweig Prize in 2001 and the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002."

byrneseyeview2• 17 years ago

Note that this appears to be a scam conference. The people who pulled this prank were proving that the conference had bad reviewing practices, not that the study of physics does:

http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~jz/sci/

sfk3• 17 years ago

"There are indeed things you can't say in Holland.

Oops, yes, I forgot about the fate of Pim Fortuyn."

I live in the Netherlands (as opposed to "Holland"), and this poor rhetoric device beats everything I've read about the matter in terms of oversimplification and naivety.

plinkplonk2• 17 years ago

"and this poor rhetoric device beats everything I've read about the matter in terms of oversimplification and naivety."

It would be useful to the rest of us(who don't live in Holland) if you could explain why the "rhetoric device" is "poor", "oversimplified" and "naive" (vs a bald statement that it has all these qualities).

AndrewDucker• 17 years ago

Because the murder of one person says nothing about the attitudes towards freedom of speech across a whole country.

sfk3• 17 years ago

Fair enough. Long before he went into politics, Fortuyn, a columnist and frequent guest in talk shows, had always expressed opinions that were not politically correct. I do not remember him being ostracized for those opinions in any manner.

On the contrary, many people found him witty and refreshing. In fact he would be a prime example of a charismatic person getting away with saying things that other people would be called upon.

Naturally, many people disagreed with him. A single individual - possibly deranged - killed him. Both of these facts do not imply in any way that you cannot say certain things in the Netherlands.

JulianMorrison2• 17 years ago

French Lit is harder. Much harder per Kolmogorov complexity, but even if you're running it on monkeys, getting the right answer out to the limits of evidence would be a huge work of detective and archeological and historical study far beyond the source text. You would be attempting to reconstruct someone's mind from the outside in, with very fragmentary life-logs.

IOW, French lit only seems easy because academics aren't aiming to be right. They just want an informed guess. In physics, this is considered the start of an investigation, not the end product.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

Having had some training in classical lit. and [previously] gone out with a girl reading French Lit. at university I cant help but agree.

I expect a Physicist could write enough to fool a French Lit. magazine - but only superficially. I dont think they could write meaningfully on a subject.

I also know a few literary students who I suspect could write a sufficiently obtuse piece of work in, say, a month to fool some physicists. Again only superficially.

I think the fallacy Paul falls into is the thinking that French Lit. professors don't question what they read in the same way Physicists do. Unfortunately it's a stereotype that does bear out in some respects - but the top guys certainly do question everything. Indeed they will almost certainly disagree by default and go out of their way to find proof.

If you think you've seen scientists bitching and arguing you've never hung round with literature scholars :D

tokenadult2• 17 years ago

French lit only seems easy because academics aren't aiming to be right.

But that is the whole problem: whether or not the discipline aims to be right. I am very closely acquainted with a relative who has a Ph.D. in French literature, and he literally would rather die than attempt to earn even an undergraduate degree in physics.

anamax7• 17 years ago

> French Lit is harder.

What definition of "harder" are we using?

In physics, there's at least the illusion that there's a "correct" answer. If your theory predicts that a cubic meter of gold has less mass than a cubic meter of water, you've got a serious problem.

In literature, there is no "gold standard" to use as a referee or to consult in helping to make a decision.

JulianMorrison2• 17 years ago

To be 100% correct in literature you would need a time machine and a mind-reading device. To be the closest evidential approximation to correct, you would have to do your best to simulate these machines using every possibly accessible causal consequent of the relevant past remaining in the present. This is the "gold standard" but it would be technologically and financially implausible. Thus, "doing it right" is impossibly hard. Only "doing it wrong" is easy.

david9272• 17 years ago

physicists are smarter than professors of French Literature

I would tend to say the opposite. Paul, you're mixing up here what I would call "savantism" with intelligence. We know that there is no true definition of intelligence, but I think whatever the definition ends up being, it has to be based more on understanding than just knowledge and mechanizations within that knowledge. Who would be more afraid, in your scenario, between the physicist and a Cantonese scholar?

if [Finland] seems that much more socialist than the US, it is probably simply because they don't spend so much on their military

Exactly. So it's not about dismissing Socialism (especially since all modern countries operate on both Socialistic and Capitalistic principles), as much as making an argument as to what the upper tax bracket should be. And for that, I would look at companies that have tremendous bonus systems. (I won't exhibit the obvious.) Are they more productive? Do they take more risks? What are the benefits and consequences of those risks? Personally, I'm not as concerned about the marginal incentive between $10 million and $1 billion as I am that a society, as a whole, functions, and doesn't degenerate into something "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short".

wlievens• 17 years ago

It's not so much what the upper bracket should be, it's about what the threshold for the bracket needs to be!

In Belgium, the top bracket of 50% starts at about 32,000 euro's. In addition to that, there's a separate flat social security tax of 13%, meaning that my marginal tax rate is about 60% - with a mediocre salary.

Tuna-Fish• 17 years ago

> if [Finland] seems that much more socialist than the US, it is probably simply because they don't spend so much on their military

I just have to interject that even if Finland spends relatively little of money for it's defense, when you consider all costs the budget climbs quite high. What I'm obviously talking about is conscription, which Finland still has in use. Just how do you measure the cost of one year of the life of nearly the entire male population?

jstevens853• 17 years ago

What do academic economists actually have to say about the link between entrepreneurship and taxation? My impression is that new tech companies start in response to new technological opportunities and have little to do with marginal tax rates.

Hewlett Packard 1939 - Top Income Tax Rate 79%

Intel 1968 - 75%

Microsoft 1975 - 50%

Adobe 1982 - 50%

Google 1998 - 40%

falsestprophet• 17 years ago

Income tax rates are a red herring. In general, entrepreneurial activity is taxed as long term capital gains. You can see those rate are more attractive.

  Hewlett Packard 1939 - 63% (1 year holding) to 23% (10 year holding)
  Intel 1968 - 25%
  Microsoft 1975 - 20%
  Adobe 1982 - 20%
  Google 1998 - 20%

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax_in_the_United....

If at any point I experienced a tax rate of 98%, I imagine I would not be highly motivated to earn more money.

jstevens853• 17 years ago

Yet the Beatles continued to pump out more than one album a year. I think there are incentives other than money - fame, status, power, creativity, curiosity etc.

david9272• 17 years ago

You're shoehorning facts to fit your argument: I would be surprised if any single one of the founders of the companies mentioned above knew what the long term capital gains percentage was while they were innovating. The truth is: money is one of many motivators.

tayssir• 17 years ago

The New York Times has a handy little graphic about the link between federal subsidy/research and products which create a $1 billion industry: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/04/01/business/200504...

(The accompanying article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/technology/02darpa.html )

For more on how the system works, you can find a readable overview from sources ranging from Bill Gates Sr. to Noam Chomsky: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/url.cfm?ID=90058... http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticlePrint/8114

I'm not sure what pg means with "socialism." (Does this word mean that workplaces are run by the workers, an important concept within socialism? Or is it just something about higher taxes?) In any case, I probably don't agree with his argument that the profit motive is necessary for hard work, though I do believe that people who are their own bosses (self-managing workers) are likely much better for innovation than the alternative.

Create4• 17 years ago

but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs. Life in the Soviet Union would have been even poorer if they hadn't had American technologies to copy.

semiconductors: it wasn't e-commerce plumbing driving it, but fear from Sputnik and its consequences (mobile computing ...in Minutemen). That wasn't entrepreneurship (no risks taken on behalf of "entrepreneurs") at Bell either: state subsidized monopoly which was somewhat acknowledged a little later with the babies. The Valley had its paying customers before anything to "market" (see HP f[o]unding letter).

light bulbs: that's a dead horse kicked around too often.

plumbing of e-commerce: being in the right circle helps (No Such Ancestors). Btw. Minitel "3615" was there way before on scale with the actual plumbing (net and terminal used to sell services from the armchair countrywide [amazon/paypal/etc do not serve every country either]). Also from State Monopoly. The Kahns in the USA never ran any risks.

And life in Afghanistan is as poor as it was, America has copied the Soviet Union.

euroclydon3• 17 years ago

" If you doubt that, imagine what people in 1830 would think of our default educated east coast beliefs about, say, premarital sex, homosexuality, or the literal truth of the Bible."

Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson didn't believe the Bible to be literally correct. It's well documented. Jefferson even went as far as to create his own Bible, editing out most miracles, the resurrection, and immaculate conception.

jswinghammer• 17 years ago

We can be more general than that. It wasn't really until the fundamentalist movement that people felt inclined to defend the literal truth of the Bible. Catholics historically (going back to Augustine) have believed that parts of the Bible like the creation account in Genesis are allegorical rather than literal. They wouldn't have gone as far as Jefferson (obviously) but it's sort of a myth that Christians have always felt the need to defend the literal truth of everything in the Bible.

ericb• 17 years ago

Agreed--don't forget Thomas Paine. The whole "Christian Nation" thing peeves me.

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/thomas_paine/age_...

crystalis2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure that Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson count as "people in 1830" in the same way that the Salem Witch Trials might constitute "people in 1692". I'm also of the opinion that you should also account for the other two points, even if to say that you don't mean to refute them by refuting the third.

euroclydon3• 17 years ago

I am not trying to refute the other two points, I just quoted the whole sentence so it would make sense.

I would like to think that the 1700s and 1800s represented a golden age in American religiosity, where our political and cultural leaders were deeply spiritual, yet not biblical literalists. Now, it seems that dialog has broken down and we are in fractious camps. I'm sure I am just romanticizing the period though.

tvon• 17 years ago

Premarital sex and homosexuality have also been around for thousands of years, but I think it's safe to say what is generally accepted by the mainstream ("of our default educated east coast beliefs") would shock & awe the mainstream of the 1830s.

euroclydon3• 17 years ago

We can sort of account for pre-marital sex, since most fathers, irregardless of the century, don't like the idea of their daughters screwing around too much, but what they like even less is them getting pregnant prematurely. Society has invented solution for that latter.

diego• 17 years ago

Thought experiment: would this essay be at the top of HN if Paul Graham wasn't its author?

thras• 17 years ago

You can't say that.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

Of course not. Neither would "Things You Can't Say".

jimbokun4• 17 years ago

I remember that "Things You Can't Say" was picked up and discussed a lot by people with no connection to hacking or technology. Several political blogs made their list of predictions for ideas today that will be considered barbaric in the future, for example. I specifically remember Andrew Sullivan linking to it (my favorite political blogger).

wglb• 17 years ago

I disagree. I showed the original article to several friends of mine who are in no way hackers and had no idea who Paul was and they all felt that it was a very good, thoughtful article.

seanc• 17 years ago

The reason I forbid my children to use words like "fuck" and "shit" is not that I want them to seem innocent, but because these words are ill-mannered and contribute nothing to communication.

For me that's not why. I don't let my seven year old curse for the same reason I don't let her use power tools (yet). They require skill and can be a bit dangerous if you don't use them properly.

I suppose if I sat down and thought about it I could come up with an appropriate occasion for my seven year old to curse. But then to explain that corner case to her and expect her to manage it isn't worth the effort. And for my four year old it's simply not possible.

My kids will figure out these rules on their own, in due time.

pfedor2• 17 years ago

If you ask parents why kids shouldn't swear, the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like "it's inappropriate," while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations. -- (also from a Paul Graham's essay)

nvn1• 17 years ago

' while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations' - one or all of which might be correct?

tptacek3• 17 years ago

"If you ask parents why kids shouldn't [violate social norm X], the less educated ones usually reply with some question-begging answer like 'it's inappropriate', while the more educated ones come up with elaborate rationalizations."

I see no loss of meaning, but that's probably because there's so little meaning in the dismissive little excerpt you've chosen to deploy here.

My kids aren't allowed to swear either, for exactly the same reason that this commenter gave. People who think words can't be dangerous, especially for a 10 year old, seem likely to me to be leading sheltered and confined lives.

junklight• 17 years ago

my rule is simple - they can use the words when they understand (properly) what they mean.

Meanwhile we explain they are "grown up" words and they shouldn't use them. Like another poster above this seems to provoke outbursts of "ooh you shouldn't say that" from the children when we swear.

Mz• 17 years ago

I didn't actually forbid either of my sons from swearing.

I tended to swear like a sailor when I was younger. When my first child was 2 years old and used some four letter word he had heard from me, I took a few seconds to think about the fact that a) he was wired to mimic me, that was how he was learning to talk, so it would be cruel and counterproductive to punish him for doing so and b) my language wasn't going to be miraculously cleaned up overnight. So I turned to him and said "That's a bad word and I shouldn't use it either. I will let you know what the bad words are and when you forget, I will remind you not to use them and when I forget you can remind me not to use them."

So my two sons spent their childhood trying to clean up my language. My oldest never swore and by the age of 11 had an extremely obnoxious superiority complex about it, looking down on anyone who used such language as being too stupid to come up with a better means to express themselves. (This led to me giving him a lesson in reasons why such strong language is sometimes the only way to adequately express something.) My youngest, who is more strongly emotional (just like me) was still inclined to use faux-swear words (like "darn!") when he was frustrated or what not but really didn't take up swearing until his late teens.

This off-the-cuff policy that I thought up in mere seconds was so wildly successful in discouraging my kids from swearing that I spent a lot of time wondering why. I ultimately concluded that forbidding children from using swear words and reserving it for adult use makes cussing attractive as a power play. It's a way of grabbing power and announcing you are all grown up or as good as the adults or some such. But telling mom to clean up her mouth was a much more genuine exercise of power over me, way cooler than cussing could possibly be. So I effectively removed almost all temptation, except for the intriguing detail that my youngest still found something emotionally satisfying in strong language even without the allure of defiantly displaying some forbidden social power.

When they were school age, I would explain what a word meant and that using it at school (and some other social situations) was likely to cause fall-out they didn't want, but still did not forbid them from using "bad" language (including words that aren't swear words but are considered simply "rude"). They didn't want to be hassled by a teacher/other adults, so they watched their mouths -- not because I required it, but because it was in their own best interest to not attract trouble.

nzmsv• 17 years ago

It's too bad that the majority takes the moral fashions Paul talks about in these two articles so seriously. So, in the end, one can only discuss these topics with close friends, whose reaction you can be fairly sure about.

Case in point: someone's comment in a thread about suicide last night. Sure, it was offensive. And the karma drop that resulted was frightening. Which is exactly the point: if you state a certain opinion on certain subjects, the outcome is something entirely different from rational discussion.

dasht• 17 years ago

The funny thing about Sokal is not so much that he (supposedly) slipped a bogus paper past the editors, but rather in how so many people react to the event and take it as proof positive that the entire field is bogus or even that publishing that paper was a mistake of the editors.

The editors, by publishing the piece, were not saying "Aha! Brilliant reasoning in this text!" but rather "People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well."

What didn't happen after Sokal's paper was published? Years of earnest, tortured academic work by others commenting on it as if it were serious on its face.

The Wikipedia article on it gives some balance.

-t

jerf• 17 years ago

'"People in our field should see this submission. People in his field should, as well."'

This doesn't strike me as a good defense; in fact it seems to me to concede the point you think you're fighting. The editors think that people should see sheer nonsense? What are they doing, again? There's no justification for publishing sheer nonsense; there's an infinite supply of that, and precious few journal pages by comparison.

If they did not see some value in it, they would not have published it. Therefore, they did see some value in utter nonsense. Therefore, I am justified in treating them as people who see value in total nonsense. As a person interested in learning, these are not people I want to emulate or respect.

Re: What You Can't Say

Related Stories