Not super relevant, but it's funny that the guy who has famously criticized credentialism [1] also thinks the best way to describe his artistic achievements is "studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti" [2].
This is called being pragmatic. pg is excellent at this.
If the rest of the world operates on credentialism, you either go with the flow and just play along, or refuse to acknowledge how the rest of the world works, and get caught up in a lot of stupid arguments.
It's important to understand, there's a cost to being unconventional. I think pg understands this better than most. Sometimes that cost is worth it. A lot of times though, it isn't.
Isn't pragmatism about choosing actions with a clear eye toward their practical effects? My perception is that if he can't even stick to his principles on credentialism when talking about a hobby, he either takes extreme care to shape others' opinions of his hobby or doesn't really personally buy anti-credentialism.
(I don't mean to pick on Paul Graham, but it's kind of hard to resist with all the essays.)
Maybe he has a clear eye toward the practical effect of mentioning his "painting credentials". To say he wasn't sticking to his principles, I think you would have to say he was allowing his own decisions to be unduly influenced by credentials, not just mentioning his own.
Mentioning facts about your education in your bio isn't the same as "describing your artistic achievements". You wouldn't buy one of his paintings because of where he studied and neither would he try to sell you one purely on those facts.
I personally have no idea what painting accomplishments exist and how much they mean, but I do have a vague idea of what RISD is, so that's more useful to me.
If you wanted to hire a painter, you would have an idea of what task you wanted to accomplish, and understanding that would allow you to compare painting accomplishments against your intended goal. If you want to hire a painter but don't know what you want them to do... that is not a recipe for commercial success!
No composers were world recognized in the Baroque era. How would they be? There were no recordings and no music publishing industry. Bach was not well-known as a composer until after his death because he worked as a church organist as opposed to traveling and staging concerts. His employer St Thomas Church didn't release his composition until 1850. He was certainly well-regarded in Germany as an organist though.
I did not say "world recognized", I said recognized as world-class.
I believe his church was disappointed that they didn't get Purcell, when he was first hired. I may well have that wrong - it's a vague memory.
My point was that experts don't necessarily do a good job of recognizing which other experts are great quickly. It can take a long, long time for the best to rise to the top.
> disappointed that they didn't get Purcell [...] a vague memory
Right idea, some details wrong. It was Telemann they wanted, and it wasn't his first job but his last, at Leipzig.
Bach was actually their third choice, after Telemann and Christoph Graupner. (Who? I've never heard any of his music either. I hear tell it's actually rather good.)
(Also relevant: they weren't exactly hiring a composer; they needed someone to compose and conduct and teach and organize. Telemann was in fact a very fine composer, but it's entirely possible that that wasn't why they wanted him more than they wanted Bach: they may e.g. have thought he would be easier to get on with, and they may have been right.)
Why would someone in Bach's era needed to have recognized him as a world-class composer? If his music appealed to them personally they would know, and if they were a "record label," the fact that it wasn't popular at the time is all they would need to know.
My point was that Bach accomplished more than just about any composer before or since.
Some people put Mozart and Beethoven up there (I think he was better at his best and I believe more prolific generally, but YMMV).
The point is, though, that almost no one in history has rivaled Bach for his compositional feats, yet it took a hundred years after his death before people really started to realize that.
If that was true for him, I question whether it's realistic to count on human ability to recognize accomplishments as a useful metric.
If the rest of the world operates on credentialism, you either go with the flow and just play along, or refuse to acknowledge how the rest of the world works, and get caught up in a lot of stupid arguments.
It's important to understand, there's a cost to being unconventional. I think pg understands this better than most. Sometimes that cost is worth it. A lot of times though, it isn't.