[DoreenMichele]

This is a vapid personal attack on one person. This amounts to little more than gossip and mud-slinging and if the target were anyone but Paul Graham, it likely would have been flagged to death long ago.

The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets.

HN Guidelines say:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

I guess if you choose your target carefully, you can get around that rule by writing an entire blog post that fails to make any kind of real and substantive argument with anything in particular and merely calls him an "idiot" at length.

HN is no longer "turning into Reddit." Now it's turning into "People" magazine as long as the people you gossip about are tech people.

If you think Paul Graham is "out of touch," maybe you can work on an app that helps rich people solve the problem of finding themselves surrounded by a sea of either yes men sucking up to them or haters. I imagine that sucks the oxygen out of their intellectual life for quite a lot of successful people.

[lkrubner]

I’m worried that I will either overestimate or underestimate how much you’ve followed the conversation regarding brevity and programming. If I’m saying something you already know, please disregard my comment.

In other essays, Zach Tellman has made the point that Clojure is unique in that it’s syntax allows it’s written to form to almost exactly represent its AST tree. The comparison then is between Arc and Clojure and between Paul Graham and Rich Hickey. Both men wrote essays about programming which seemed to promise new ideas but Hickey delivered real innovations whereas we can now see that Graham was unable to deliver. And Graham’s failure is in part traceable to his inability to make explicit what he actually knows, or why he believes the things that he asserts.

The debate over how to make tacit knowledge explicit is important. The debate over what constitutes good programming is important to the whole tech industry. I’m astonished that you would think this essay was merely a matter of gossip.

It’s possible that Tellman should have repeated some of his earlier essays, to give more context to his remarks, but this is the Web, so he embedded hyperlinks to some of the previous discussions.

[billy_beef]

I fail to see how one article being posted signals the decline of this website into a gossip column

[DoreenMichele]

Of course, that assertion is hyperbole. The point being I don't think this really belongs here.

I'm someone who finds social stuff very interesting. I mostly don't like gossip rags and a lot of psychological studies are essentially useless garbage.

What value does this article really provide? Does it tell us where you can look out for Paul Graham's personal biases in order to get more value out of his writing? Does it propose better answers to anything in particular?

This amounts to jealousy or something and it reminds me of an old comic strip where the punch line was to the effect of "After 12 straight hours online this woman is going You People Need To Get A Life!"

[lkrubner]

Suppose a professor has a Very Great reputation, and another professor has an Ordinary Great reputation.

You take a class with each.

From the Very Great professor you get several maxims that don’t seem to actually help you, nor can you figure out how to apply them to your work.

From the Ordinary Great professor you get a bunch of advice that you can easily apply to your own work, and you feel that you’ve immediately improved in the subject.

Is it jealousy to then say the Very Great professor seems to have a reputation that exceeds his actual skill?

That’s how I read the comparison of Graham to Hickey.

It’s an important issue, especially if Very Great has a prominent position in the industry and is using that prominence in harmful ways.

[billy_beef]

I have to disagree here. The article is criticizing his work, his history of participation in a field, and his current commentary on politics. Yes, it discusses him as a subject, but not as a piece of gossip and strung-together ad hominem's. It is definitely critical of him, but mostly in his capacity as a commentor and his history of being incorrect. It's not second-rate tabloid stuff because of what dimension of him it's mostly considering.

[DoreenMichele]

Racism, sexism, personal attacks in intellectual circles -- such things all tend to work more or less the same way. Attack them in a way that has plausible deniability and is socially acceptable for some reason.

But if you look at the overall pattern of behavior, the real point is to attack or exclude a particular person or particular group of people.

Among other things I've had a college class in Social Psychology. I object to a gossipy piece of garbage getting so many upvotes on HN while bringing down the quality of discussion here.

If you find something meaty in his analysis of pg's work, then why don't you comment on that instead of arguing with me?

If my comments here are so off the mark, why do they have so much attention? This piece is failing to generate meaty discussion. It's mostly generating hot takes about Paul Graham and not commentary on the criticism of his work because the framing of the piece doesn't really fit with the idea that it's about criticizing his work.

If it were really about criticizing his work, what we should see here is debate about whether or not that criticism holds water. And I'm not really seeing that.

[lkrubner]

Your comments are drawing my attention because you’ve previously written a great deal on Hacker News that I agreed with and so I’m surprised that you have such a negative view of such an excellent essay.

[DoreenMichele]

It's not the essay I dislike. It's the level of conversation here on HN. It's mostly drama and my personal opinion is that the reason for that is primarily because of the style of the writing.

I've proposed a remedy: That someone -- anyone -- more knowledgeable than me about programming should leave a top level comment engaging with the actual meat of the article. There's no reason it can't be you.

Engaging further with my comments is not a remedy for what I feel the issue is. And engaging with my comments specifically because they are mine is just adding to the problem.

I commented on the matter because I've studied social phenomenon and I see a negative social pattern here and because I value HN for its high quality discussion. This article is mostly failing to foster good quality discussion. The primary focus has been on Paul Graham and not on something more substantive, like his writing, his ideas or his work.

After I left my remarks, people began leaving remarks that deny that this is an ad hominem attack on Paul Graham. That's problematic because it means the focus remains on Paul Graham. In discussing whether or not it is an ad hominem, the focus remains on pg, not on something more substantive.

It's a little like when I used to argue with someone and say "All you do is talk about you and I am not even a part of this discussion" and the reply was "I'm sorry. I'm a dirt bag. I'm a terrible person. I'm a lousy excuse for a human being." Like, I wasn't asking the person to attack themselves. I was asking them to include me in the discussion. Going from "Me. Me. Me." to "Negative things about me, me, me." doesn't fundamentally change the fact the topic is still "me."

It really shouldn't matter to you too much that it's me saying this -- unless it helps you figure out what my point really is. If you look at my comments and think to yourself "She has studied social phenomenon a lot more than she has studied programming and her observation is about quality of discussion here and I can see that" -- cool. Other than using what you know about me to help you understand my point, it shouldn't matter that I'm the author of the comment.

If you think that the substance of the article should be discussed, then go discuss it. If you think it's basically an ad hominem on Paul Graham, the best thing to do is ignore it.

I'm trying to step away from this discussion. Me being here is only deepening the issue that I dislike. It's not remedying it.

[neurotech1]

It's very telling that pg or other admins haven't flagged or removed this submission.

[tptacek]

pg has nothing to do with HN anymore, and hasn't for many years. Dan doesn't kill things that are critical of pg or YC.

(And DoreenMichele is quite wrong about this post; right or wrong, one thing it clearly is not is "vapid").

[DoreenMichele]

vapid: offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging.

I'm failing to see this generate meaty discussion here. I am currently seeing mostly lots of flagged to death or grayed out comments, likely because it's basically gossip and mud slinging and not really anything more than "Some guy has a bee in his bonnet about Paul Graham for some reason."

PS there's only one L in my name, not two.

[tptacek]

Among other things, it's a long and careful consideration of the different meanings of "brevity" in a programming language, and every paragraph is heavily cited. It clearly didn't speak to you, and that's fine, but you're wrong about it being vapid.

(Fixed the name thing, sorry about that).

[DoreenMichele]

Then maybe you can do something to help course correct the conversation here other than being dismissive of me, like leave a top level comment that will help people here focus on the parts of it you personally find meaty instead of on the excessively obvious framing of "Waah, I am basically jealous of this man."

[tptacek]

I didn't get "I am basically jealous of this man" from the article, like, at all.

[lkrubner]

“The irony is that the attention it gets here may end up accounting for the lion's share of exposure it gets.”

Anything that Zach Tellman writes is going to get attention simply because Tellman has a following that takes him seriously.