There's several points to this article. At first it's about cult followings, but then it morphs into a self-examination of the consequences of being a public figure. Finally, Eliezer ends with a question about the impulse to praise someone highly.
1) There is an enormous difference between "having a cult-like following" and "having a cult". Anyone who argues that Startup School is some sort of cult facility for churning out brainwashed followers is just plain dumb. Fortunately, I've never seen anyone admit such an opinion, so hopefully they don't exist.
2) When you choose to become a public figure, like both Eliezer and PG have done, you do give up a certain element of privacy. This applies as much to intellectual figures (like pg, Einstein or Feynman) as to more common ones (like Angelina Jolie, Tony Blair or Stephen Fry). That is part of the deal. Some people can't take it and so they attempt to escape the public life. Others can. But all make that trade-off between private life and public recognition.
3) Writing an article or a public comment about how to become a writer is not the same thing as wandering into the library to pick a book. When pg writes an article and publishes it, that is a public statement. It is perfectly reasonable that it gathers public feedback from a large number of people. Comments are also completely public, and in a format that encourages interaction. If you don't want to interact with your readers, you don't have to. But if you choose to, you cannot complain that they will sometimes disagree with you in bizarre ways.
4) One of the consequences of interacting with a large number of people is that some of them will disagree with you for the sake of disagreeing. Again, that's life... Every "mainstream" figure has contrarians who will criticise them just because they define themselves in that way. If you can't take it, don't be a public figure. Hopefully, the 90% of ppl who do think you're great make up for the 10% who want to disagree with everything you say.
Well, I'd agree that both PG and I have "cult followings" but that's not at all the same as "cult-like followings".
I should mention that this post is part of a series on things that prevent nonconformists from cooperating (http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/). You're right, this sort of thing is personally uncomfortable for me, and you're right, I did volunteer for that in the course of allowing myself to become a public figure. But it also has consequences for the larger community.
I read that article and was going to reply earlier, but HN was down... (all because of you, writing that recursive article...)
You make a very interesting point there (more than in this article, in fact, imho). My thought on it is that there is a spectrum of techniques to "engage" groups of people and elicit desired behaviour. Some of them work, and some of them don't. Some of them are towards the Dark Side, and some of them closer to the Light Side.
I think it's incorrect to suppose that only the techniques on the Dark Side work. Light Side techniques work too, but differently. And Dark Side techniques have a cost too, which is not always obvious. Raelians may be very good at generating agreement and coordinated behaviour, but what creativity do they have? The brainwashing ensures that there is little original, individual thought left.
For example, the technique used by your synagogue seems like a good technique, not unethical, but very effective.
I haven't given it too much thought, but I suspect that a good way to draw the line is to examine whether a technique merely encourages or whether it coerces.
Finally, do we "atheist/libertarian/technophile/sf-fan/early-adopter/programmer/etc" fail at organising ourselves? I don't think it's fair to say that. Considering the cooperative achievements we've achieved, starting with the operating system that this site no doubt runs on, I'd say we're doing quite well on the whole. And in the long run, that matters more.
Your critique is fair, but I have to say I really enjoyed the library analogy, flawed though it may be. I was fascinated by the mental image of groups of people behaving that way in public.
I saw an interesting clip of Murray Gellmann talking about Feynman. He, surprisingly says that initially it was good to work with Feynman, with all his independent thinker stuff and all, but in the end it started getting on his nerves. Feynman used to defy authority just for the sake of it.
The place where they worked had a dress code for their mess hall, it was a suit and tie I think, so what Feynamn used to do was that he a special worn out shirt and jacket he used to wear in the mess hall even if he had come in that day wearing a suit and tie.
Then Gellmann goes onto say that Feynman used to spend a lot of his time generating anecdotes about himself, for which Feynman is really famous. Murray says, Feynman always wanted to be different, he even didn't brush or floss his teeth! Feynman kept saying that brushing and flossing teeth and washing hands after toilet was superstition.
Well this seemed a good example of a someone famous, having a cult(-like) following, who has been accused of not conforming just for the sake of it. Maybe the cult got to Feynman in the end.
Anyway I feel that Feynman rocks and thankyou for inspiring me.
"Well this seemed a good example of a someone famous, having a cult(-like) following, who has been accused of not conforming just for the sake of it. Maybe the cult got to Feynman in the end."
I've known a number of people who've been accused of not conforming just for the sake of it. I don't think any had a cult following; it was just their nature. That seems to have been the case with Feynman, not an affectation because of fame. (Of course, I know of Feynman mostly through his own writings ...)
People have their quirks. Feynman rocks no matter what. The world could use more pranksters and skeptics.
Dude. You're in the library. Just get your stupid book and go read it? Why the deal with analyzing everything people might say to you? (grin)
I'm at a similar loss here -- your post is about anti-admiration. The community here is hackers -- people who break the rules in order to advance society by building something of value. If we were interested in conforming we'd be "IBM News" or "News for People Who Don't Disagree Much" -- both of which would be soundly boring. We'd also be some place like reddit, where herd mentality rules a great bit more than here (but it's still quite prevalent here as well).
I've seen quite a bit of mindless adoration on here, not especially for pg, but for a lot of prominent internet writers. We all know them. Famous Joe the writer could post his grocery list and it'd have 15 points and a dozen comments by tomorrow morning. I guess it's just something about being a public figure. Steven King did a nice essay about this a while back but the link escapes me. Plus, as I've pointed out before, having a hero is a completely normal thing to do. When you're 16 or 17 its critical to have somebody to idolize that is worth a damn. Once you get older that need doesn't go away, but you're able to synthesize the best of multiple people, something that isn't so easy to do with limited experience.
I think you hit the problem dead on: if you're thinking "gosh! It's PG! Why would I disagree with him?" (or agree, for that matter) then you've already lost it. Praise is great, but just react normally and don't worry about who the person is. It's the value of the idea, not the value of the person.
There was an article on here a while back about the difference between people who really succeed and those who get stuck. The gist of it was that if you can't treat everybody, including people who can help you a great deal, as equals, then they'll never think of you as an equal either.
Good essay! Made me think. And you're spot on about GED. Great book. :)
I'm going to speak out in favor of discrimination: I can't treat everybody as equals. It's an information-rich world out there, and I don't have time to read or learn even a fraction of a percent of what I'd like to.
One way I filter is by topic. I maintain a reddit account, but I subscribe to subreddits that interest me. URL acts as another filter--if it starts with news.ycombinator.com/ or overcomingbias.com/, for example, there's a higher probability I want to read it.
I apply "author" below these filters. I use reddit's "friend" feature liberally for users with a history of knowledgeable, insightful comments so I can pick them out quickly. On other sites, I just get to know usernames and pay attention to them. PG may have abandoned the "valuable user" highlighting, but I still do it mentally.
I'm sure I miss some valuable information that way, but there's not much else I can do but keep donating to SIAI and working on startup ideas until PG and Yudkowsky get together, write an FAI in Arc, and solve all the world's problems.
which makes it a bit hard to judge whether to read it or not. Improving
the title would be good. Especially since any explanatory text given at
the same time as the title doesn't make it through to RSS.
I'd like to think if it's worth posting to news.yc, taking up the time
of all those that consider reading it, it's worth putting some effort
into a good title. If it isn't, perhaps it's not worth posting?
On the other hand, title 'improvement' carries the risk of editorializing or missing out on important points. Using the author's original title at least ensures that you're in line with the author's intent. This is a pretty complex article which touches on a lot of different points regarding pg and public figures in general, and I don't know if a few words would adequately describe it.
It's a crap title. A title shouldn't just grab attention; that's easy. I'm here today on this thread, but I haven't been on many others with similarly poor RSS appearance.
omg, i'm not reading that article. I only come here to comment on articles i've found for myself independently. I don't subjugate my will to that of some random internet authority figure.
Here's why I avoid talking about certain topics: it's embarrassing, and mostly not useful to the audience.
The article focusses on people determined to agree or disagree with PG. Interestingness is a far better barometer of value than agreement. My tests for what I say/write: Is it interesting to the audience? The subsidiary test for what I write here: Will it make PG uncomfortable to hear? And my test for that: would it make me squirm in his position?
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There's endless ways to talk about how much I admire PG and Eliezer Yudkowsky. I could describe running into Eliezer's ai_design.temp.html document back in '98 after searching a new search engine called 'Google' for 'copycat eurisko sources' after reading Douglas Hofstadter's book about his cool AI projects, and my obsession with AI for the next 3 years. I could talk about the sense of epiphany of reading 'Why nerds are unpopular' and 'the age of the essay', and then PG's essays on startups that gradually opened up to a struggling, mediocre grad student the third career option besides academia and bigco research lab, with the grand culmination of 'How to do what you love'. When I met PG I felt like how I imagine teenagers felt in front of the Beatles ("OMG, I can't believe it.. it's really PG.. quick say something.. wait don't say something stupid..")
How I feel about these guys is more than admiration. It's a sense of identification intertwined with the time in my life I ran into them, and the influence they had (http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-03-22-20-03-26-soc). It's not about how good they are, or whether there are better writers out there, or whether they can kick Chuck Norris's butt; it's about the vivid memories of reading specific essays.
I could say all these things, and even rationalize to myself at the time that they were interesting, or said in interesting ways. They may even be interesting to say once. But this is a community, and there's a daily routine, and the emphasis is on the trajectory rather than on individual comments. It would be super boring to find endless ways to talk about how much I admire PG and Eliezer. Or to read everybody else's, I fear, far too similar stories.
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I like to praise the people I admire in useful ways. Like if I can focus on something they said and add more evidence. Or contrast a point with what somebody else said. Or respond to a commenter who seemed to miss the point. I admire the content of their writings, and the form. A great form of praise is by showing I understood, at a deep level, what they were trying to say. An even better one is to try to write like they do.
(OMG, I really hope I didn't make them squirm. I hope PG didn't think this was lame. But I can say this once. But I hope I'm not embarrassed next time I meet PG. Will I meet PG soon?..)
You did pretty well at avoiding squirm-induction, I think - I'm glad you tried to put yourself in my/his shoes.
For the record, one of the best ways to avoid inducing squirms and induce a strong warm fuzzy feeling is to talk about what the one has inspired you to do - i.e., "PG, it's as a result of reading your work that I learned Lisp as my first programming language and started hacking on open source", even if you never founded your own startup, is probably going to induce a stronger warm fuzzy feeling than any amount of praise directed at particular essays you liked.
I find that sort of causality hard to draw, though. My choices are either to make it a hard correlation with a minor accomplishment (I tried programming in lisp, and came up with these few programs I found interesting: http://akkartik.name/lisp.html) or to make it a more fuzzy correlation with something bigger ("Everything I have done and everything I will do, would have been less good if you hadn't written what you did." http://akkartik.name/about. Or "When I write I try to imagine how you would react to each sentence." http://akkartik.name/?f=Me)
Neither seems satisfactory, especially since other people influenced these accomplishments as well. Let me attempt a middle ground -- using examples.
Eliezer, I still maintain an interest in blackboard systems to this day. For example, here's a program I wrote a couple of weeks ago: http://github.com/akkartik/brooks-ruby-warrior/tree/master. Thanks to reading Hofstadter and you and Brooks, I knew when I approached this problem that finding the heuristics to solve a particular AI problem is relatively easy. What is hard is finding an open-ended architecture to integrate lots of heuristics together. I ended up with a faint likeness of an idea others have explored in far harder domains.
PG, as I hinted above, inspired me to come to silicon valley 2 years ago. I do what I love. That was not something I could say a few years ago. Agh, this is more squirm-inducing. Here's a program that came out of conversations when I spoke to PG at a YC dinner in Boston last July: http://akkartik.name/newsflash. PG induced me to leave the problem of generating recommendations behind, at least for some domains.
I don't have more significant contributions. Hopefully that will change.
I agree with this article, however I want to make it very clear that I agree on the basis of the soundness and truthfulness of the matter, not because of who the author is.
1) There is an enormous difference between "having a cult-like following" and "having a cult". Anyone who argues that Startup School is some sort of cult facility for churning out brainwashed followers is just plain dumb. Fortunately, I've never seen anyone admit such an opinion, so hopefully they don't exist.
2) When you choose to become a public figure, like both Eliezer and PG have done, you do give up a certain element of privacy. This applies as much to intellectual figures (like pg, Einstein or Feynman) as to more common ones (like Angelina Jolie, Tony Blair or Stephen Fry). That is part of the deal. Some people can't take it and so they attempt to escape the public life. Others can. But all make that trade-off between private life and public recognition.
3) Writing an article or a public comment about how to become a writer is not the same thing as wandering into the library to pick a book. When pg writes an article and publishes it, that is a public statement. It is perfectly reasonable that it gathers public feedback from a large number of people. Comments are also completely public, and in a format that encourages interaction. If you don't want to interact with your readers, you don't have to. But if you choose to, you cannot complain that they will sometimes disagree with you in bizarre ways.
4) One of the consequences of interacting with a large number of people is that some of them will disagree with you for the sake of disagreeing. Again, that's life... Every "mainstream" figure has contrarians who will criticise them just because they define themselves in that way. If you can't take it, don't be a public figure. Hopefully, the 90% of ppl who do think you're great make up for the 10% who want to disagree with everything you say.