Graham, Paul

#meritocracy #inequality #socioeconomics Our Lot in Life Not recognizing your blessings feeds into the dark side of capitalism and meritocracy: success is a choice, and that those who haven’t achieved success are not unlucky, but unworthy. I’m relatively lucky. I don’t know how much of the techie hubris that I bear. I have unresolved feelings about meritocracy and fairness. Race is usually used as a proxy for bridging the gap, e....

Mental Attitude While Learning Distinguish Mere Facts From Conclusions or Opinions Discriminate between mere statements of facts, necessary conclusions which follow therefrom, and mere opinions which they seem to render reasonable. There’s no need to perform an experiment to verify that the atomic weight of oxygen is 16. That the sum of the angles of a plane triangle equals two right angles is not a mere fact, but an inevitable truth....

The Importance of Clear Writing In science, tech, or management, you influence people by writing things for them to read. An essay helps you figure something out. Think of it as an idea graph - at each node, pick the most interesting related idea. Expressing your ideas also helps you form them. Writing them down forces you to think well. I’ve noticed this when composing a post to ask why my code is not working....

The Submarine. Paul Graham. www.paulgraham.com . Apr 1, 2005. Many people rely on social proof to form opinions; therein lies the power of PR. PR firms are not dishonest for they need good reputation with news outlets. But PR firms serve overworked reporters with selective truths. The firms feed the same story to different publications at once. Readers see similar stories in multiple places and assume a new trend has come....

Life is Short. Paul Graham. www.paulgraham.com . Jan 1, 2016. Some of it is our own fault (e.g. arguing online). Some of it is forced by circumstances that we choose to endure (e.g. unnecessary meetings at work) Choosing a bullshit minimizing path is error-prone. Your priorities change over time. Periodically evaluate where you are. It helps to have measurable aspects of your life.

How to Get Startup Ideas Err on the side of having competitors, but make sure that you have a thesis that everyone else is overlooking, e.g. Google wasn’t averse to users leaving google.com ASAP. The Startup Idea Matrix, ( B2B Edition , B2C Edition ) is a good start for knowing who to google. Big companies tend to be slow at changing their approach....