Expecto Reductio

March 8, 2021 8:40 AM

Aaron Timms on How to Become an Intellectual in Silicon Valley (The Baffler). "For any post you publish, a lengthy acknowledgment should list the mentors and colleagues who’ve read over drafts of your work and contributed feedback, all of whom should be Silicon Valley intellectuals in their own right. Altman’s Ratio states that the amount of text in a blog post to the amount of text in the post’s acknowledgments section should be exactly 1:1."
posted by adrianhon (59 comments total)

You will have noticed that all of these exemplars are men. From this data point, using inductive reasoning, it is possible to articulate an important lesson: to become a VC intellectual, try as much as possible to be male. This lesson can be represented graphically:

Paul Graham ∩ you ∩ Balaji Srinivasan

Note that there was no need to insert this graph into the text. But I did it anyway, and it’s exactly this kind of surprising and puckishly contrarian thinking you will need to master in order to prosper as a VC intellectual.

incredible
posted by Think_Long at 8:55 AM on March 8, 2021 [15 favorites]

This is funny.
posted by chavenet at 9:03 AM on March 8, 2021

And the ratio of unnecessary words to words necessary for novices to follow and use the ideas therein: 3 to 1.

Technical editor here. Wish I were paid by the word removed.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 9:16 AM on March 8, 2021 [9 favorites]

"(Beckett was a mid-twentieth century Jackie bag model and content marketer best remembered for his contributions to lean startup theory.)"

I laughed, I cried.

Serious question: is anyone in SV weaponizing these rhetorical tricks to make good things happen, somehow convincing the folks out there that it is imperative to implement socialism ASAP or else Roko's Bolsheviks will murder them?
posted by Maecenas at 9:17 AM on March 8, 2021 [20 favorites]

I'm sure my recruiters wouldn't appreciate it since it gets into "what are your personal politics?" territories, but I daydream of conducting my phone screens with just a series of "What your feelings about Paul Graham?" type questions. I feel that like would give me the best immediate picture into how viable a candidate would be.
posted by sideshow at 9:18 AM on March 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

This is so good and really captures the essence of the bullshit devil's advocate type thinking I see all too often.
posted by Hutch at 9:20 AM on March 8, 2021

This is so good.
posted by fedward at 9:35 AM on March 8, 2021

I am on the verge of creating a LinkedIn profile purely to spam this at every single individual that summarizes themselves as “business thinker” or “thought leader” or any variation thereof.
posted by aramaic at 9:36 AM on March 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Sent this to a nephew who takes every Sunday family chat as an opportunity to scare me about all the cryptocurrency opportunity I'm losing out on. If I still drank, the Elon Musk Drinking Game would be a thing for me and also I'd be a dead man with an obliterated liver by now.
posted by elkevelvet at 9:41 AM on March 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

Hey aramaic, can you add anyone who calls themself a "ninja"?
posted by PhineasGage at 9:55 AM on March 8, 2021 [14 favorites]

You know what really sucks? This stuff actually works. You can inspire worship by being completely full of shit. I know some of the worshipers. They are ready to build a sky-high pile of rocks so the pharaoh may live forever. Charismatic bullshit artists always find these people.

Superficially, it kinda seems like a good job. All you have to do is be full of shit. It makes one wonder if that's a way you could go for plunder. Yeah, I've considered it, and I concluded Fuck No. You may be king, but you're the king of shit mountain and you're all covered in shit.
posted by adept256 at 10:07 AM on March 8, 2021 [11 favorites]

I love the phrase “Roko’s Bolsheviks” so much that I remembered to like and subscribe.
posted by mhoye at 10:22 AM on March 8, 2021 [27 favorites]

Being poor, we can all agree, sucks; but you know what sucks even more? Losing the technology wars and becoming a dumping ground for the effluvia of the Asian hegemon, which is, you will argue, the only way any attempt to reduce income inequality will end.

This...this is good stuff.
posted by jquinby at 10:40 AM on March 8, 2021

aramaic: I am on the verge of creating a LinkedIn profile purely to spam this at every single individual that summarizes themselves as “business thinker” or “thought leader” or any variation thereof.

You say that like they'll recognize it as satire.
posted by clawsoon at 10:45 AM on March 8, 2021 [8 favorites]

You can inspire worship by being completely full of shit.

And money. To be Paul Graham, you need the money, or at least the promise of money. In fact, that is the only qualification.

Silicon Valley detests the poor, unless the poor can somehow be monetized.
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:55 AM on March 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

True story: one of my close personal friends became a successful silicon valley intellectual. Back in the very early days of the blog, I tried to read one of his (of fucking course "his") posts and I ... just... I was speechless. It was total drivel. And people were lapping it up. Like David Brooks but many times worse from being saturated with "Imma hack this engineer-style" smugness, you know? IDK, I let that friendship fade because of the realization that holy shit, he is literally That Guy.

Sample article.
posted by MiraK at 11:07 AM on March 8, 2021 [13 favorites]

Oh my this is brutal. I had managed to not know about Graham's "thought" "leadership" but good god. From TFA:

Paul Graham outlines the rest of the argument, which is now also your argument:

If you’re content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don’t invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, [and] dump their toxic waste on your territory.

Let’s summarize Graham’s Retrogression in a chart:

Income inequality —> Wealth tax —> More risk-averse society —> No startups —> China wins —> Surprise! Now you have been sold into sexual slavery
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:09 AM on March 8, 2021 [10 favorites]

MiraK: Sample article.

It sounds narcissistic, but if you’re not referencing your own work at least 10 times as often as you’re referencing others, you’re in trouble in the intrinsic navigation world. Instead of developing your own internal momentum and inertia, you are being buffeted by external forces, like a grain of pollen being subjected to the forces of Brownian motion.

posted by clawsoon at 11:15 AM on March 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

Instead of developing your own internal momentum and inertia, you are being buffeted by external forces, like a grain of pollen being subjected to the forces of Brownian motion.

"internal momentum and inertia", magnificent. It must have taken an extraordinary amount of superficial learning to come up with this extraordinarily superficial analogy for learning.
posted by mhoye at 11:21 AM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

"What your feelings about Paul Graham?"

If I replied, "Who?" would that count for me or against me?
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:27 AM on March 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

In either case, Mr.Encyclopedia, I'd like to invest in your startup. Can you send me a prospectus?
posted by jquinby at 11:27 AM on March 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

if you’re not referencing your own work at least 10 times as often as you’re referencing others, you’re in trouble in the intrinsic navigation world

I feel like the gist of this confused sentiment also relates to financial valuations. Stock buy backs, etc.

Any growth is now driven by either speculation (usually of a Ponzi variety) or self-driven inflation.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 11:29 AM on March 8, 2021

self-driven inflation.

The self-referencing thing made me think of smelling your own farts. Self-driven inflation is the term they may use.
posted by adept256 at 11:33 AM on March 8, 2021

Income inequality —> Wealth tax —> More risk-averse society —> No startups —> China wins —> Surprise! Now you have been sold into sexual slavery

Correction: only "your" women are sold into sex slavery.

This is all one needs to know about Paul Graham, I guess?
posted by sophrontic at 11:35 AM on March 8, 2021 [9 favorites]

Sample article.

He had an article that was posted to the blue recently, still open for commenting.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 11:35 AM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

In a world where mainstream thinkers often present climate change, the incompatibility of growth-driven economics with our planet’s ecological limits, or conflict between China and the United States as the greatest global threats, Balaji Srinivasan instead spent much of 2020 zeroing in on the real danger to humanity’s future: New York Times journalist Taylor Lorenz. To some, this looks like harassment. To those in the know, it’s a heroic stance against sensitivity to people’s feelings, which is orthogonal to the protection of free speech—a hall-of-fame contrarian move that you, as an aspiring VC intellectual, would do well to study in detail.

This whole essay is gold.
posted by benzenedream at 11:37 AM on March 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

mhoye: "internal momentum and inertia", magnificent. It must have taken an extraordinary amount of superficial learning to come up with this extraordinarily superficial analogy for learning.

It's not bad as a metaphor that someone who was pursuing a PhD in aerospace engineering would come up with to make sense of a life that didn't end up being about aerospace engineering. "Shit happened, I went with the flow, and things worked out," might be a pithier way to say it.

The bigger problem with the article is that it's basically giving "follow your heart and the money will follow" advice. In this case, "follow your strengths and the money (and your heart) will follow." That has worked great over the past couple of decades for people like the author who were good at math and computer science, but thinking that it's great general advice for everyone shows a limited imagination.
posted by clawsoon at 11:58 AM on March 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

paper chromatographologist: He had an article that was posted to the blue recently, still open for commenting.

A cursory glance through the comment section reveals: "this article took a lot of words to be mostly wrong." LOL
posted by MiraK at 12:05 PM on March 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

A cursory glance through the comment section reveals: "this article took a lot of words to be mostly wrong."

Here's my half-baked theory: What's attractive about a writer like this is that they still have a sense of wonder about the subject that they're stumbling into. It infuses their writing with the excitement of discovery that someone who has been an expert in a topic for a long time rarely has. Like this comment from caution live frogs about a salamander embryo video from the other day:

I was momentarily kind of confused as to why the movie was such a revelation, but then it occurred to me that not everyone here has spent years teaching developmental biology. It’s funny, but the process was just so obvious to me after all that time helping students learn to differentiate between things like body plan development via involution (salamander) vs. ingression (bird/mammal) that it was hard to take a step back and remember that this is not at all intuitive to people who have not spent time learning it.

The half-baked theory that I'm proposing in this comment is probably wrong, and someone who knows more about what makes writing interesting is probably rolling their eyes right now...
posted by clawsoon at 12:31 PM on March 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

Sample article.
posted by MiraK at 11:07 AM on March 8 [1 favorite +] [!]

particularly juicy markov chain or GPT-3 knockoff?

whatever it is, I want in! I need to immanentize my lean cryptocurrency-backed testicle trading platform, and I need gritty copy ASAP. BALLS TO THE WALL FOR ALL (TM).
posted by lalochezia at 12:34 PM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

clawsoon gets at a meaningful distinction between vrg/Ribbonfarm’s writing and SV intellectual tropes. Although vgr has fans in Silicon Valley and even wrote for one of the funds (A16Z?) for a while, he’s fundamentally playful in his approach and sometimes digs up real diamonds along with the rocks. For this, I give him a pass. View From Hell characterized his genre as Insight Porn a decade ago, and cited vgr in particular:

We are less able than normal humans to perceive social/sacredness reality in the first place, and to make matters worse, we are addicted to the insight rewards that come from trying to see through it even further. … Why are so many of us in love with Julian Jaynes even though it's batshit insane and obviously wrong? Because it's satisfying, amazing science fiction: insight porn that delivers.

The SV intellectual stuff on the other hand is disingenuous, salesy, full of unintended consequences, and distinctly un-playful. It’s the grasping, beshitted Musk-equivalent of sci-fi.
posted by migurski at 1:01 PM on March 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

Somebody (not me) needs to post this to "Hacker" "News" just so I can read the snark about it over at n-gate.
posted by Dr. Twist at 1:04 PM on March 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

I don't know, migurski - I think it's a difference of style, not content. It's still full of unintended consequences, is disingenuous as often as Silicon Valley is, and I feel like it's often trying to dance with Rationalist-style "What if bad things were actually good" ideas.
posted by sagc at 1:09 PM on March 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Here's my half-baked theory: What's attractive about a writer like this is that they still have a sense of wonder about the subject that they're stumbling into. It infuses their writing with the excitement of discovery

Look this type of writing (like the comment you linked) is legit What Makes Life Worthwhile, a pure good, the most distilled form of joy being set free into the world. I love that kind of writing.

But what's linked, IMO, is the evil mirror-world twin of it. These are people who not only say "dihydrogen monoxide" when they mean "water" but also insist on explaining every time that it's more poetic this way. If they ever walk their dogs they must immediately write an essay about how dogwalking gamifies the disruptive synergetics of pivotable Apportunities. Their heads are permanently stuck inside their butts... and yeah, I grant you, they do have an indefatigable sense of wonder every time they rediscover the smell of their own farts.
posted by MiraK at 1:14 PM on March 8, 2021 [20 favorites]

sagc that’s a good point. I’ve not seen vgr/Ribbonfarm cross this divide myself, but the same tendency is there. Awareness of the boundary with danger is what (to me) distinguishes playfulness. You can’t just play chicken with eDgY IdEaS and these times we live in are not friendly to people who appear to be doing so. There’s a reason the Insight Porn article is from 2012 and not 2021.
posted by migurski at 1:24 PM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

Appropos blurb from n-gate:

What I Worked On
February 16, 2021
Paul Graham takes a break from telling people how to think, in order to focus on a more general-interest topic with a broader audience: himself. The result is a fourteen-thousand-word morass constituting the slug track left by a spoiled clown with no meaningful contributions to make to anything. Hackernews continues to be in love. One focus of their adoration is Paul Graham's toy programming language, Bel, which also serves as a flawless analogy for its author: presented with every chance to succeed, recipient of years and years of people's time and attention, only to turn out to be a completely ineffective collection of text on a website, of use to nobody.

posted by maxwelton at 1:46 PM on March 8, 2021 [16 favorites]

Can anyone here link the terms “fungible” and “asshat” into this discussion?
posted by njohnson23 at 1:58 PM on March 8, 2021

What’s the point of taking long vacations if your society doesn’t have a retail economy built on Groupon vouchers? The French have developed no good answer to this question, but America must continue to ask it.

My favorite part. Great post, thanks!
posted by Bella Donna at 1:58 PM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

We are less able than normal humans to perceive social/sacredness reality in the first place, and to make matters worse, we are addicted to the insight rewards that come from trying to see through it even further. … Why are so many of us in love with Julian Jaynes even though it's batshit insane and obviously wrong? Because it's satisfying, amazing science fiction: insight porn that delivers.

Insight porn literally is spirituality. This is exactly the problem. They're in denial that they have a deep need for spiritual understanding, so they devise all of these stupendously verbose theories and musings in an unwitting attempt to fill that hole.
posted by J.K. Seazer at 2:00 PM on March 8, 2021 [10 favorites]

"Peter Principles." Heh.
posted by doctornemo at 2:26 PM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

About 2/3rds of the way through "Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos", I realized that I was reading science porn. All of the feeling of having made great discoveries, none of the work needed to get to the real thing.
posted by clawsoon at 2:48 PM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

Insight porn literally is spirituality. This is exactly the problem. They're in denial that they have a deep need for spiritual understanding, so they devise all of these stupendously verbose theories and musings in an unwitting attempt to fill that hole.

If they were pursuing such questions wittingly and rigorously, they'd just be doing philosophy or theology, neither of which is apparently flashy or exciting enough for these 'hacker' types.
posted by davedave at 3:22 PM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

Dear God, I tried making in through "the calculus of grit," but it just got so f-ing BORING, and the dude is so, so earnest and righteous about his nonsense.
posted by Saxon Kane at 3:33 PM on March 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Are you saying you didn't have the grit to read about the calculus of grit?
posted by clawsoon at 3:43 PM on March 8, 2021 [8 favorites]

Dear God, give the me the grit to read what's actually insightful, the courage to bail if it isn't, and the wisdom to know the difference...
posted by clawsoon at 3:46 PM on March 8, 2021 [8 favorites]

I think I read Complexity but I have no memory of it at all. The one I’m more ashamed to have spent money on was Negroponte’s Being Digital. At some point I was like “why am I still reading this.”
posted by fedward at 4:33 PM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

> the snark about it over at n-gate.

Oh man, that is such a great site, and the perfect antidote to the rage Hacker News induces in me, thanks for pointing me to this. Their summary of Hacker News' take on Dr Seuss, for instance:

Dr. Seuss books deemed offensive will be delisted from eBay
March 04, 2021 (comments)
The Wall Street Journal closely examines eBay listings for discontinued children's books. Hackernews is extremely disappointed that both Random House Books for Young Readers and eBay are willing to take even the slightest action to even marginally improve the life of any nonwhite child. In order to ensure that this concern is taken seriously, Hackernews rants about Obama, free-market economics, In-Q-Tel (the CIA's capital investment firm), and lynching. A few Hackernews claim to have actually read the obscure books in question, but nobody believes them. The Hacker News Hall Monitor intervenes in the ensuing shitshow precisely twice: once to warn off someone for pointing out that lynching happens outside the US, and once to ban someone whose username was that of a convicted Nazi war criminal. (link)
posted by splitpeasoup at 4:57 PM on March 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

The biggest difference between this generation of rich sociopath nitwits and previous ones is that they seem to be comfortable posting their deep thoughts on personal blogs instead of trying to find prestigious institutions to launder and repackage their views.
posted by zymil at 6:31 PM on March 8, 2021

MiraK: Sample article.

I zoned out after a couple paragraphs, and was like "well, in 2011 blogs were still a thing. I wonder if it's still ongoing?"

Super amused that not only was it still going, but on the front page there was useless 4 quadrant chart differentiating expectations (me/others/high/low) and a bit further down a Venn diagram. Right out of the OP style guide.
posted by mark k at 7:01 PM on March 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

Signed,

Foo Barr
Disruptor
Thought Ninja
Why Combinatorics, LLC
posted by apathy at 7:30 PM on March 8, 2021

You know what really sucks? This stuff actually works. You can inspire worship by being completely full of shit.

Don't worry! Just give it plenty of oomph.
posted by flabdablet at 7:33 PM on March 8, 2021

If you’re content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don’t invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, [and] dump their toxic waste on your territory.

It's funny what an incredible projection this is. "If we institute a wealth tax, why, we'll end up like a third-world country that we prevented from going Red in the '80s!"
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 8:14 PM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

mhoye: I love the phrase “Roko’s Bolsheviks” so much that I remembered to like and subscribe.

That's good, because that's how you avoid having the Bolsheviks digitally resurrect you in the distant future to work in a cyber-kolkhoz.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:26 PM on March 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

mhoye: I love the phrase “Roko’s Bolsheviks” so much that I remembered to like and subscribe.

I liked it so much I logged in to favourite your post and that one.

Great article. The ideas about charts reminded me of Harari's Sapiens, which I read recently and didn't have a quibble about, but now am reconsidering.
posted by illongruci at 3:42 AM on March 9, 2021

MiraK: Look this type of writing (like the comment you linked) is legit What Makes Life Worthwhile, a pure good, the most distilled form of joy being set free into the world. I love that kind of writing.

Looking back, I realize I wasn't very clear in what I was saying about caution live frog's comment. It's definitely not a bullshit comment; it's from an expert who has the ability to reveal what's truly interesting about the phenomenon at hand. What I found interesting from a communication point of view is that it starts off with, oh, yeah, I forgot how mind-blowingly interesting this stuff is since I've been immersed in it so long.
posted by clawsoon at 5:55 AM on March 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Somebody (not me) needs to post this to "Hacker" "News" just so I can read the snark about it over at n-gate.

It's been posted a few times with minimal traction. Probably a lesson there.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 7:36 AM on March 9, 2021

The problem with a lack of introspection is that it doesn't seem to be something you can teach.

"I feel the article proved Paul Graham’s point in a way, about people insulting his essays. I wonder what drives people to do this."
posted by fedward at 7:58 AM on March 9, 2021

METAFILTER: somehow convincing the folks out there that it is imperative to implement socialism ASAP or else Roko's Bolsheviks will murder them
posted by philip-random at 8:53 PM on March 9, 2021

I've been spreading the word about Roko's Bolshevik wherever I can. So far not very many converts.
posted by clawsoon at 1:04 PM on March 10, 2021