@adamkjohnston Belonging to a political party doesn't make someone political.

@billclerico Stripe is a serious technology company. Adyen is just a bunch of enterprise sales guys.

@yuris Or an investment opportunity.

I wonder if in retrospect this will have been the biggest news of February 2025, rather than any of the political controversies most people are exercised about. History often turns out like that.

The quiet, apolitical majority of professors must be so bummed. First wokeness infected the institutions where they worked and they lost the ability to speak freely about many subjects, and now they're collateral damage in air strikes by the Republicans.

@chintanjv To be one.

@daltonc I have never seen it happen before.

@simonsarris Why can't you abstract in tweet 1 and link in tweet 1?

@AdiKumarSaroj All the other claims are mixed together with politics and hard to sort through.

@AlexanderPayton I understand that. But Twitter isn't going to replace the entire web. Most good stuff will still be on other sites. So deprioritizing links hides most good stuff.


@micsolana @BigTechAlert @travisk Why do you make such claims when they're so easily falsified?

https://t.co/iAII9LhKqn

@simonsarris You can't trust photographs in old books, because after visible beams became fashionable again in the late 19th century, a lot of them were exposed or even faked up. A photograph is not by itself evidence that beams were always exposed, or even there at all.

@simonsarris It would be accurate to say that visible beams were out of fashion between 1580 and roughly 1880, when the manor house revival got going.

@simonsarris They became obsolete when ceilings arrived in England at the end of the 15th century. Great Chalfield's great hall has one of the earliest. But Burghley House (begun 1555) still has visible beams in its great hall, though by then it was a deliberate anachronism.

How Northern Europe looked from Nuremberg in 1493. https://t.co/39lo3itT4D

@noroboguy Not by killing civilians in a different country.

@mrsalmanfarsi I don't think he consciously intends to. If anyone he blocked wants to be unblocked, just ask me.

@JuniperViews A lot of them are presumably fake accounts run by Russia. I hope.

If someone had told me 5 years ago that I'd be saying that, I wouldn't have believed it. "What will have happened to the world?" I'd have asked. So I'm asking: what has happened to the world? Let's not start treating this as normal, because it isn't.

Remember how lame it seemed back in 2000 when the President of South Africa didn't believe that HIV caused AIDS? Now we have someone like that in the US government, and he's Secretary of Health and Human Services.


Hackers and Painters
May 2003
(This essay is derived from a guest lecture at Harvard, which incorporated
an earlier talk at Northeastern.)
When I finished grad school in computer science I went
to art school to study painting.  A lot of people seemed surprised
that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting.
They seemed to think that
hacking and painting were very different kinds of work-- that
hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that
painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge.
Both of these images are wrong.  Hacking and painting have a
lot in common.  In fact, of all the different types of people I've
known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.
What hackers and painters have in common is that they're
both makers.  Along with composers, architects, and writers,
what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things.
They're not doing research per se, though if in the course of
trying to make good things they discover some new technique,
so much the better.
I've never liked the term "computer science."  The main
reason I don't like it is that there's no such thing.
Computer science is a
grab bag of tenuously related areas thrown together
by an accident of history, like Yugoslavia.
At one end you have people who are really mathematicians,
but call what they're doing computer science so they can get DARPA grants.
In the middle you have people working on
something like the natural history of computers-- studying the
behavior of algorithms for routing data through
networks, for example.  And then at the other extreme you
have the hackers, who are trying to
write interesting software, and for whom computers are just a
medium of expression, as concrete is for architects or
paint for painters.  It's as if
mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in
the same department.
Sometimes what the hackers do is called "software engineering,"
but this term is just as misleading.
Good software designers are no more engineers than architects are.
The border between architecture and engineering is not sharply
defined, but it's there.
It falls between what and how: architects decide what to do,
and engineers figure out how to do it.
What and how should not be kept too separate.  You're
asking for trouble if you try to decide what to do without
understanding how to do it.
But hacking can certainly be more than just deciding how to
implement some spec.  At its best, it's creating the spec-- though
it turns out the best way to do that is to implement it.
Perhaps one day
"computer science" will, like Yugoslavia, get broken up into its
component parts.  That might be a good thing.  Especially if it
meant independence for my native land, hacking.
Bundling all these different types of work together in one
department may be convenient administratively, but it's confusing
intellectually. That's the other reason I don't like the name
"computer science."  Arguably the people in the middle are doing
something like an experimental science.  But the people at either
end, the hackers and the mathematicians, are not actually doing science.
The mathematicians don't seem bothered by this.  They happily
set to work proving theorems like the other mathematicians
over in the math department, and probably soon stop noticing
that the building they work in says ``computer science'' on the
outside.  But for the hackers this label is a problem.
If what they're doing is called science, it makes them feel they
ought to be acting scientific.
So instead of doing what they really want to do, which is
to design beautiful software, hackers in universities and
research labs feel they ought to be writing research papers.
In the best case, the papers are just a formality.  Hackers write
cool software, and then write a paper about it, and the paper
becomes a proxy for the achievement represented by the software.
But often this mismatch causes problems.  It's easy to
drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly
things that make more suitable subjects for research papers.
Unfortunately, beautiful things don't always make the
best subjects for papers.
Number one, research must be original-- and
as anyone who has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way to
be sure that you're exploring virgin territory is to stake
out a piece of ground that no one wants.  Number two, research must be
substantial-- and awkward systems yield meatier papers,
because you can write about the obstacles you have to overcome
in order to get things done.  Nothing yields meaty problems like
starting with the wrong assumptions.  Most of AI is an example
of this rule; if you assume that knowledge can be represented
as a list of predicate logic expressions whose arguments represent
abstract concepts, you'll have a lot of
papers to write about how to make this work.  As Ricky Ricardo
used to say, "Lucy, you got a lot of explaining to do."
The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle
tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing
ideas in a slightly new way.  This kind of work is hard to
convey in a research paper.
So why do universities and research labs continue to judge
hackers by publications?
For the same reason that "scholastic aptitude"
gets measured by simple-minded standardized tests, or
the productivity of programmers gets measured in lines of code.
These tests
are easy to apply, and there is nothing so tempting as an easy test
that kind of works.
Measuring what hackers are actually trying to do, designing
beautiful software, would be much more difficult.  You need
a good
sense of design
to judge
good design
.  And
there is no correlation, except possibly
a
negative
one, between people's ability to recognize good
design and their confidence that they can.
The only external test is time.  Over time, beautiful
things tend to thrive, and ugly
things tend to get discarded.  Unfortunately, the amounts of time
involved can be longer than human lifetimes.  Samuel Johnson
said it took a hundred years for a writer's reputation to
converge.  You have to wait for the writer's
influential friends to die, and then for all their followers
to die.
I think hackers just have to resign themselves to having a large random
component in their reputations.  In this they are no different
from other makers.  In fact, they're lucky by comparison.
The influence of fashion is not nearly so great in hacking as it
is in painting.
There are worse things than having people misunderstand your
work.  A worse danger is that you
will yourself misunderstand your work.  Related fields are
where you go looking for ideas.  If you find yourself in the computer science
department, there is a natural temptation to believe, for example,
that hacking is the applied version of what theoretical computer
science is the theory of.   All
the time I was in graduate school I had an uncomfortable feeling
in the back of my mind that I ought to know more theory,
and that it was very remiss of me to have forgotten all that
stuff within three weeks of the final exam.
Now I realize I was
mistaken.  Hackers need to understand the theory of computation
about as much as painters need to understand paint chemistry.
You need to know how to calculate time and
space complexity and about
Turing completeness.  You might also want to remember at
least the concept of a state machine, in case you have to write
a parser or a regular expression library.  Painters in fact
have to remember a good deal more about paint chemistry than
that.
I've found that the best sources of ideas
are not the other fields that have the word "computer" in
their names, but the other fields inhabited by makers.
Painting has been a much richer source of ideas than the
theory of computation.
For example, I was taught in college
that one ought to figure out a program
completely on paper
before even going near a computer.  I found that I did not
program this way.  I found that I liked to program
sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper.  Worse
still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program
and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew
out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into
shape.  Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pass where
you caught typos and oversights.  The way I worked, it
seemed like programming consisted of debugging.
For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once
felt bad that I didn't hold my pencil the way they taught me
to in elementary school.
If I had only looked over at
the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would
have realized that there was a name for what I was doing:
sketching.  As far as I can tell, the
way they taught me to program in college was all wrong.
You should figure out programs as you're writing them,
just as writers and painters and architects do.
Realizing this has real implications for software design.
It means that a programming language should, above all, be
malleable.  A programming language is for
thinking
of
programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought
of.  It should be a pencil, not a pen.  Static typing would
be a fine idea if people actually did write programs the way
they taught me to in college.  But that's not how any of the
hackers I know write programs.  We need a language that lets us
scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have
to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make
polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.
While we're on the subject of static typing, identifying with
the makers will save us from another problem that afflicts
the sciences: math envy.  Everyone in the sciences
secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are.
I think mathematicians also believe this.  At any rate,
the result is that scientists tend to make their
work look as mathematical as possible.  In a field like
physics this probably doesn't do much harm, but the further you
get from the natural sciences, the more of a problem it
becomes.
A page of formulas just looks so impressive.
(Tip: for extra impressiveness, use Greek variables.)  And
so there is a great temptation to work on problems you
can treat formally, rather than problems that are, say,
important.
If hackers identified with other makers, like writers and
painters, they wouldn't feel tempted to do
this.  Writers and painters don't suffer from math envy.
They feel as if they're doing something completely unrelated.
So are hackers, I think.
If universities and research labs keep hackers from doing
the kind of work they want to do,
perhaps the place for them is in companies.
Unfortunately, most companies won't let hackers do what they
want either.  Universities and research labs force hackers
to be scientists, and companies force them to be engineers.
I only discovered this myself quite recently.  When Yahoo bought
Viaweb, they asked me what I wanted to do.  I had never
liked the business side very much, and said that I just wanted to
hack.  When I got to Yahoo, I found that what hacking meant
to them was implementing software, not designing it.  Programmers
were seen as technicians who translated the visions (if
that is the word) of product managers into code.
This seems to be the
default plan in big companies.  They do it because
it decreases the standard deviation of the outcome.
Only a small percentage of hackers can actually design software,
and it's hard for the
people running a company to pick these out.  So instead of
entrusting the future of the software to
one brilliant hacker, most companies set things up so that it is
designed by committee, and the hackers merely
implement the design.
If you want to make money at some point, remember this,
because this is one of the reasons startups win.  Big companies want
to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they
want to avoid disasters.  But when you damp oscillations, you
lose the high points as well as the low.  This is not a problem for
big companies, because they don't win by making great
products.  Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.
So if you can figure out a way to get in a
design war with a company big enough that its software is
designed by product managers, they'll never be able to keep up
with you.  These opportunities are not easy to find, though.
It's hard to engage a big company in a design war,
just as it's hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand
to hand combat.  It would be pretty easy to write a better
word processor than Microsoft Word, for example, but Microsoft,
within the castle of their operating system monopoly,
probably wouldn't even notice if you did.
The place to fight design wars is in new markets, where no one
has yet managed to establish any fortifications.  That's where
you can win big by taking the bold approach to design, and
having the same people both design and implement the product.
Microsoft themselves did this at the start.  So did Apple.
And Hewlett-Packard.  I suspect almost every successful startup
has.
So one way to build great software is to start your own
startup.  There are two problems with this, though.  One is
that in a startup you have to do so much besides write software.
At Viaweb I considered myself lucky if I
got to hack a quarter of the time.  And the things I had to
do the other three quarters of the time ranged from tedious
to terrifying.  I have a benchmark for this, because I
once had to leave a board meeting to have
some cavities filled.  I remember sitting back in the
dentist's chair, waiting for the drill, and feeling like
I was on vacation.
The other problem with startups is that there is not much
overlap between the kind of software that makes money and the
kind that's interesting to write.  Programming languages
are interesting to write, and Microsoft's first product was
one, in fact, but no one will pay for programming languages
now.  If you want to make money, you tend to be forced to work
on problems that are too nasty for anyone to solve for free.
All makers face this problem.  Prices are
determined by supply and demand, and there is just not as much
demand for things that are fun to work on as there is for
things that solve the mundane problems of individual customers.
Acting in off-Broadway plays just doesn't pay as well as
wearing a gorilla suit in someone's booth at a
trade show.  Writing novels doesn't pay as well as writing
ad copy for garbage disposals.
And hacking programming languages doesn't pay as well
as figuring out how to connect some company's
legacy database to their Web server.
I think the answer to this problem, in the case of software,
is a concept known to nearly all makers: the day job.
This phrase began with musicians, who
perform at night.  More generally, it means that you have one
kind of work you do for money, and another for love.
Nearly all makers have day jobs early in their careers.
Painters and writers notoriously do.  If you're lucky
you can get a day job that's closely
related to your real work.  Musicians often
seem to work in record stores.  A hacker working on some
programming language or operating system might likewise be able to
get a day job using it.  [1]
When I say that the answer is for hackers to have day jobs,
and work on beautiful software on the side, I'm not proposing
this as a new idea.  This is what open-source hacking is all
about.  What I'm saying is that open-source is probably the right
model, because it has been independently confirmed by all the
other makers.
It seems surprising to me that any employer would be reluctant
to let hackers work on open-source projects.
At Viaweb, we would have been reluctant to hire anyone
who didn't.  When we interviewed
programmers, the main
thing we cared about was what kind of software they
wrote in their spare time.
You can't do anything really well unless
you love it, and if you love to hack you'll inevitably
be working on projects of your own. [2]
Because hackers are makers rather than scientists,
the right place to look for metaphors is not in the
sciences, but among other kinds of makers.  What else can painting
teach us about hacking?
One thing we can learn, or at least confirm, from the
example of painting is how to learn to hack.  You learn to
paint mostly by doing it.
Ditto for hacking.  Most hackers don't learn to hack by
taking college courses in programming.  They learn to hack
by writing programs of their own at age thirteen.  Even in
college classes, you learn to hack mostly by hacking. [3]
Because painters leave a trail of work behind them, you
can watch them learn by doing.  If you look at the work
of a painter in chronological order, you'll find that each
painting builds on things that have been learned in previous
ones.  When there's something in
a painting that works very well, you can usually find version
1 of it in a smaller form in some earlier painting.
I think most makers work this way.  Writers and architects seem
to as well.  Maybe it would be good for hackers
to act more like painters, and regularly start over from scratch,
instead of continuing to work for years on one project, and
trying to incorporate all their later ideas as revisions.
The fact that hackers learn to hack by doing it is another
sign of how different hacking is from the sciences.  Scientists
don't learn science by doing it, but by doing labs and problem sets.
Scientists start out doing work that's perfect, in the sense
that they're just trying to reproduce work someone else has
already done for them.
Eventually, they get
to the point where they can do original work.
Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it's
just very bad.  So hackers start original, and get good, and
scientists start good, and get original.
The other way makers learn is from examples.
For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques.
For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional
education of painters to copy the works of the great masters,
because copying forces you to look closely
at the way a painting is made.
Writers do this too.
Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points
in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to
reproduce them.  Raymond Chandler did the same thing
with detective stories.
Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at
good programs-- not just at what they do, but the source
code too.  One of the less publicized benefits
of the open-source movement is that it has made it easier
to learn to program.  When I learned to program, we had to rely
mostly on examples in books.  The one big chunk of
code available then was Unix, but even this was not
open source.  Most of the people who read the source
read it in illicit photocopies of John Lions' book, which
though written in 1977 was not allowed to be published
until 1996.
Another example we can take from painting is the way that
paintings are created by gradual refinement.  Paintings usually
begin with a sketch.
Gradually the details get filled in.
But it is not merely a process of filling in. Sometimes
the original plans turn out to be mistaken.
Countless paintings,
when you look at them in xrays, turn out to have limbs that
have been moved or facial features that have been readjusted.
Here's a case where we can learn from painting.  I think hacking
should work this way too.  It's unrealistic
to expect that the specifications for a program will be
perfect. You're
better off if you admit this up front, and write programs in
a way that allows specifications to change on the fly.
(The structure of large companies makes this hard for them
to do, so here is another place where startups have an advantage.)
Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature
optimization.  I think we should be just as worried about
premature design-- deciding too early what
a program should do.
The right tools can help us avoid
this danger.
A good programming language should, like oil paint, make it
easy to change your mind.  Dynamic typing is a win here because
you don't have to
commit to specific data representations up front.
But the key to flexibility, I think, is to make the language
very
abstract
.
The easiest program to change is one that's very short.
This sounds like a paradox, but a great painting
has to be better than it has to be.
For example, when Leonardo
painted the portrait of
Ginevra de Benci
in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head.
In it he carefully
painted each individual leaf.  Many painters might have thought,
this is just something to put in the background to frame
her head.  No one will look that closely at it.
Not Leonardo.  How hard he worked on part of a painting didn't
depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it.
He was like Michael Jordan.  Relentless.
Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details
become visible.
When people walk by the portrait of Ginevra de Benci,
their attention is often immediately arrested by it,
even before they look at the label and notice that it says
Leonardo da Vinci.  All those unseen details combine to produce
something that's just stunning, like a thousand barely audible
voices all singing in tune.
Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to
beauty.  If you look inside good software, you find that
parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.
I'm not claiming I write great software, but I
know that when it comes to code I behave in a way that would
make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday
life the same way.
It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented,
or that uses ugly variable names.
If a hacker were a mere implementor, turning a spec into code, then
he could just work his way through it from one end to the other like
someone digging a ditch.  But if the hacker is a creator, we have
to take inspiration into account.
In hacking, like painting,
work comes in cycles.  Sometimes you get excited about some
new project and you want to work sixteen hours a day on it.
Other times nothing seems interesting.
To do good work you have to take these cycles into
account, because they're affected by how you react to them.
When you're driving a
car with a manual transmission on a hill, you have to back off
the clutch sometimes to avoid stalling.  Backing
off can likewise prevent ambition from stalling.
In both painting and hacking there are some
tasks that are terrifyingly ambitious, and others that are
comfortingly routine.  It's a good idea to save some easy
tasks for moments when you would otherwise stall.
In hacking, this can literally mean saving up bugs.
I like debugging: it's the
one time that hacking is as straightforward as
people think it is.  You have a
totally constrained problem, and all you have to do is solve
it.  Your program is supposed to do x.  Instead it does y.
Where does it go wrong? You know you're going to win
in the end.  It's as relaxing as painting a wall.
The example of painting can teach us not only how to manage our
own work, but how to work together.  A lot of the
great art of the past is the work of multiple hands, though
there may only be one name on the wall next to it in the
museum.  Leonardo was an apprentice in the workshop of
Verrocchio and painted one of the angels in his
Baptism of
Christ
.  This sort of thing was the rule, not the exception.
Michelangelo was considered especially dedicated for insisting
on painting all the figures on the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel himself.
As far as I know, when painters worked together on a painting,
they never worked on the same parts.  It was common
for the master to paint the principal figures and for assistants
to paint the others and the background.  But you never had
one guy painting over the work of another.
I think this is the right model for collaboration in software
too.  Don't push it too far.  When a piece of code is
being hacked by three or four different people, no one of whom
really owns it, it will end up being like a common-room.  It will
tend to feel bleak and abandoned, and accumulate cruft.
The right
way to collaborate, I think, is to divide projects into sharply
defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces
between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible,
as articulated as programming languages.
Like painting, most software is intended for
a human audience.  And so hackers, like painters, must have
empathy to do really great work.  You have to be able to see
things from the user's point of view.
When I was a kid I was always being told to look at things from
someone else's point of view.  What this always meant in
practice was to do what someone else wanted, instead of what
I wanted.  This of course gave empathy a bad name, and I made a
point of not cultivating it.
Boy, was I wrong.  It turns out that looking at things from
other people's point of view is practically the secret of
success.  It doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing.
Far from it.  Understanding how someone else sees things
doesn't imply that you'll act in his interest; in some
situations-- in war, for example-- you want to do exactly
the opposite. [4]
Most makers make things for a human audience.
And to engage an audience you have to understand what they need.
Nearly all the greatest paintings are paintings of people,
for example, because people are what people are interested in.
Empathy is probably the single most important difference
between a good hacker and a great one.  Some hackers
are quite smart, but when it comes to empathy are
practically solipsists.  It's hard for such
people to design great software [5], because they can't
see things from the user's point of view.
One way to tell how good people are at empathy is to watch
them explain a technical question to someone without a technical
background.  We probably all know people who, though otherwise smart,
are just comically bad at this.  If someone asks them at
a dinner party what a programming language is, they'll
say something like ``Oh, a high-level language is what
the compiler uses as input to generate object code.''
High-level language?  Compiler?  Object code?  Someone who
doesn't know what a programming language is obviously doesn't
know what these things are, either.
Part of what software has to do is explain itself.  So to
write good software you have to understand how little users
understand.
They're going to walk up to the software with no preparation, and
it had better do what they guess it will, because they're
not going to read the manual.  The best system I've ever seen
in this respect was the original Macintosh, in 1985.
It did what software almost never does: it just worked. [6]
Source code, too, should explain itself.  If I could get people to
remember just one quote about programming, it would be the
one at the beginning of
Structure and Interpretation of Computer
Programs.
Programs should be written for people to read, and
only incidentally for machines to execute.
You need to have
empathy not just for your users, but for your readers.  It's in
your interest, because you'll be one of them.
Many a hacker has written a program only to
find on returning to it six months later that he has no idea
how it works.  I know several people who've sworn off Perl after
such experiences. [7]
Lack of empathy is associated with intelligence, to the point
that there is even something of a fashion for it in some places.
But I don't think there's any correlation.
You can do well in math and
the natural sciences without having to learn empathy, and people in these
fields tend to be smart, so the two qualities have come to be
associated.  But there are plenty of dumb people who are bad at
empathy too.  Just listen to the people who call in with questions on
talk shows.  They ask whatever it is they're asking in
such a roundabout way
that the hosts often have to rephrase the question for them.
So, if hacking works like painting and writing, is it as cool?
After all, you only get one life.
You might as well spend it working on something great.
Unfortunately, the question is hard to answer.  There is always
a big time lag in prestige.  It's like light from a distant star.
Painting has prestige now because of great work people did five hundred
years ago.  At the time, no one thought
these paintings were as important as we do today.  It would have
seemed very odd to people at the time that Federico da Montefeltro,
the Duke of Urbino, would one day be known mostly as the guy
with the strange nose in a
painting
by Piero della Francesca.
So while I admit that hacking doesn't seem as cool as painting now,
we should remember that painting itself didn't seem as cool in
its glory days as it does now.
What we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory
days of hacking.  In most fields the great work is done early on.
The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed.
Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born,
and pushed the medium
so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow.
Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen
with the novel.
Over and over we see the same pattern.  A new medium appears, and
people are so excited about it that they explore most of its
possibilities in the first couple generations.   Hacking seems
to be in this phase now.
Painting was not, in Leonardo's time, as cool as his work
helped make it.
How cool hacking turns out to be will depend on what we can
do with this new medium.
Notes
[1] The greatest damage that photography has done
to painting may be the fact that it killed the best day job.
Most of the great painters in history supported
themselves by painting portraits.
[2] I've been told that Microsoft discourages
employees from contributing to open-source projects, even in
their spare time.
But so many of the best hackers work on open-source
projects now that the main effect of this policy may be
to ensure that they won't be able to hire any first-rate
programmers.
[3] What you learn about programming in college is much like
what you learn about books or clothes or dating: what bad taste you
had in high school.
[4] Here's an example of applied empathy.
At Viaweb, if we couldn't decide between two alternatives, we'd
ask, what would our competitors hate most?  At one point a
competitor added a feature to their software that was basically
useless, but since it was one of few they had that we didn't, they
made much of it in the trade press.
We could have tried to explain that the feature was useless,
but we decided it would annoy our competitor more if we
just implemented it ourselves, so we hacked together our own
version that afternoon.
[5] Except text editors and compilers.  Hackers don't need empathy to
design these, because they are themselves typical users.
[6] Well, almost.  They overshot the available RAM somewhat,
causing much inconvenient disk swapping, but this could be fixed
within a few months by buying an additional disk drive.
[7] The way to make programs easy to read is not to
stuff them with comments. I would take Abelson and Sussman's
quote a step further.  Programming languages should be designed
to express algorithms, and only incidentally to tell computers
how to execute them.  A good programming language
ought to be better for explaining software than English.
You should only
need comments when there is some kind of kludge you need to warn
readers about, just as on a road there are only
arrows on parts with unexpectedly sharp curves.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Dan Giffin, and Lisa
Randall for reading drafts of this, and to Henry Leitner
and Larry Finkelstein for inviting me to speak.
Japanese Translation
Spanish Translation
German Translation
Portuguese Translation
Czech Translation
Why Good Design Comes from Bad Design
Knuth: Computer Programming as an Art
You'll find this essay and 14 others in
Hackers & Painters
.


Although I retweeted this because it's interesting, I wouldn't let it deter you from going to an Ivy League school if you can. At most these managers are looking to avoid a particular type of Ivy League student. If you're not that type, this won't affect you.

Told 12 yo that if he does well on his upcoming exams, he can hit me in the face with a pie. This seems to be an exceptionally effective motivator. We're already talking about pie types.

@matthewrohr Ok, tried sending an email through the site. Will let you know.

@matthewrohr Thank you so much! I knew they'd closed down and was carefully hoarding my remaining supply. Did they publish other blends? I'd like to know the recipe for Cape Curry too.

What a nice idea. I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually possible too.

@DamonCrockett A prediction is one kind of idea. It's usually harmless to tell people about other ideas that occur to you. Why should one have to conceal this type?

@engineers_feed I think you may be mistaken about Edison coining the term. To "iron out the bugs" from something was a phrase in common use, and presumably the phrase passed into common use via people who did it literally, with clothing.

@jack Depends who you follow. If you follow a lot of random, obscure accounts it isn't.

What a beautiful plane. A succes d'estime commercially perhaps, but no other airliner beats the Comet for looks.

@annaarthoe It's a bad sign when people self-classify as smart too, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing.


@dbasch I didn't say they'd stop making money. Obviously they can keep milking their installed base for a long time. I said they were dead in the sense that startups didn't have to worry about them they way they used to. And though Satya has done an amazing job this is still mostly true.

@saiveda @reidhoffman Schools shouldn't try to teach students about starting companies. It's impossible to do that well in a class, and not necessary anyway. Schools should teach math and CS and mechanical engineering and so on, and founders should learn about startups by starting them.

@cesarsuarezpab @roshanpateI No, I'm in my office and I think she is down in the kitchen.

@TomHacohen I assumed that was a joke, but now that you mention it...

@roshanpateI Jessica and I decided to start YC on a date.

@Noahpinion More generally, -ists lie all the time.

@thdxr I've never had a LinkedIn account and it has served me well.

In the movies I watched as a kid, the bad guys were always businessmen, and the journalists were always good guys. I was very surprised when I realized it wasn't actually like this in the real world. But you can see it happening right here.

I don't think I've ever seen a journalist with less respect for the truth than this Jacobin writer. And that's saying something, because I've seen some journalists with *very* little respect for the truth. https://t.co/wncTutDgH6

@zackkanter When they say "Password help" they're saying more than they realize.


@staysaasy I'm gradually wearing them down.

@rowanajmarshall Asking the founders questions.

Though the real answer, which Jessica finally guessed, was people who don't know how to handle books mangling my books.

@shahnifaz That was implicit in the question. Obviously the thing you dread most is something bad happening to your kids, etc.

We played a game about how well you know your family. Jessica and the boys had to say what I dreaded. Some of their guesses: having to wear a suit, pretentious waiters, having to sit through powerpoints. Basically anything with gratuitous formality.

@grbradsk You are mistaken. Being able to get somewhere faster has real advantages in a way that merely being on a higher floor doesn't.

@Malcopticon @mattyglesias What if I'm Paul Graham and one of the first investors in Boom and I get all my news (about this topic) directly from the  source?

@mattyglesias @Malcopticon The new administration is genuinely more receptive.

Phrases like "I don't want to be that guy" and "I hate to be the bearer of bad news" are interesting in that the more you say them, the less likely they are to be true.

Once you've said "I don't want to be that guy" 100 times or so, you are that guy.

@MilanistaFromMN You could use a similar argument to "prove" SpaceX isn't a big achievement either.


@0xluffy Unfortunately probably not. We're constrained by UK school schedules.

@alistairmcleay How to ace your YC interview: https://t.co/zXWErQqTmt

@GarettJones @maximlott @JohnStossel Wow, same on Polymarket. Did something specific happen, or are people just really excited to have a reasonable alternative to Trump?

What surprised me most, when I was thinking they were a company in the current batch, was how calm and confident they seemed. But it wasn't just that. They were also doing everything right: building the right kind of stuff for the right kind of users, and growing consistently.

@socialappsgame They seemed very confident, for a startup in the current batch. And they were doing everything right: they were building good stuff, and they understood their users very well.

I recently got to measure how much YC accelerates startups. Usually I do office hours with the current batch. I was talking to one company and couldn't believe how impressive they were. Then it emerged they were from the previous batch. So that's what 6 months of YC does.

For the first time, YC is doing a fall batch. If you want to start a startup right now, you can apply right now. The deadline's August 27th.

https://t.co/BDUisBaHgO

@unusual_whales If you like your work, you'll also work until you die.

"He's sometimes early, but he's never wrong."

— Cristina Spencer on Graham Spencer

@HeterodoxThis Obviously it's not enough just to claim that you're a moderate. You actually have to be one.


"Informality" is one of those ideas that seem less important than they are because their names are grammatically negative. It sounds like it's merely the absence of something. Actually it's terrifically important. It means focusing on what matters.

This is a really dramatic improvement. Any state that isn't using the same techniques to teach reading has to explain what they think they know that Mississippi doesn't. https://t.co/ZElreF0N1h

A thoughtful analysis by a founder who did YC in 2012 and again in 2025.

https://t.co/dKDThQ0hBL

Organizations that can't measure performance end up measuring performativeness instead.

In Venice you don't go to see the thing. You're in the thing.

There is something deeply wrong with Twitter. It has always been rough here, but in the past year it has become an even worse kind of nasty. Do you think maybe it's time to try to turn things around, Elon?

One of the pizza-stealing seagulls of Campo Santa Margherita in action. https://t.co/lFcq6uz60u

https://t.co/G6pjYq96DY

I'm going to delete this because there's not enough evidence yet that he was shot by a drone specifically. It could have been shrapnel, for example.

I've been making a word list to help 16 yo prepare for the SATs. As a challenge I've been writing the definitions myself, using as few words as possible. This is sometimes quite hard. How do you define cadence, for example? I said "rate of rhythm."


An Alternative Theory of Unions
May 2007
People who worry about the increasing gap between rich and poor
generally look back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age.
In those days we had a large number of high-paying union manufacturing
jobs that boosted the median income.  I wouldn't quite call the
high-paying union job a myth, but I think people who dwell on it
are reading too much into it.
Oddly enough, it was working with startups that made me realize
where the high-paying union job came from.  In a rapidly growing
market, you don't worry too much about efficiency.  It's more
important to grow fast.  If there's some mundane problem getting
in your way, and there's a simple solution that's somewhat expensive,
just take it and get on with more important things.  EBay didn't
win by paying less for servers than their competitors.
Difficult though it may be to imagine now, manufacturing was a
growth industry in the mid twentieth century.  This was an era when
small firms making everything from cars to candy were getting
consolidated into a new kind of corporation with national reach and
huge economies of scale.  You had to grow fast or die.  Workers
were for these companies what servers are for an Internet startup.
A reliable supply was more important than low cost.
If you looked in the head of a 1950s auto executive, the attitude
must have been: sure, give 'em whatever they ask for, so long as
the new model isn't delayed.
In other words, those workers were not paid what their work was
worth.  Circumstances being what they were, companies would have
been stupid to insist on paying them so little.
If you want a less controversial example of this phenomenon, ask
anyone who worked as a consultant building web sites during the
Internet Bubble.  In the late nineties you could get paid huge sums
of money for building the most trivial things.  And yet does anyone
who was there have any expectation those days will ever return?  I
doubt it.  Surely everyone realizes that was just a temporary
aberration.
The era of labor unions seems to have been the same kind of aberration,
just spread
over a longer period, and mixed together with a lot of ideology
that prevents people from viewing it with as cold an eye as they
would something like consulting during the Bubble.
Basically, unions were just Razorfish.
People who think the labor movement was the creation of heroic union
organizers have a problem to explain: why are unions shrinking now?
The best they can do is fall back on the default explanation of
people living in fallen civilizations.  Our ancestors were giants.
The workers of the early twentieth century must have had a moral
courage that's lacking today.
In fact there's a simpler explanation.  The early twentieth century
was just a fast-growing startup overpaying for infrastructure.  And
we in the present are not a fallen people, who have abandoned
whatever mysterious high-minded principles produced the high-paying
union job.  We simply live in a time when the fast-growing companies
overspend on different things.


@NPH_On_X He's having a growth spurt and when I gave him two choices for dinner he said "both." So I made salmon and peas and rice, and also lentils and rice.

@TheBrainofChan That's why I wrote this.

@shinedotrocks Old one, of course.

The future is unevenly distributed. https://t.co/ww6WTozUes

@laconlover Whoah. Was this the real life inspiration for Spinal Tap?

@the604og Land Rover.

@Scientific_Bird He turned out to be mistaken.

@NAChristakis What you get in the end is something like Mara Gay. (I don't know where she went to college, but they have that same confident delivery.)

https://t.co/qhKYxPJ6DN

@NAChristakis There are some easy majors. It's straightforward for a dumb student to slip through, especially if they act confident, which most Harvard undergrads tend to do well.

Driving home from school it felt like life was perfect. Boy, dog, Defender, sunny day. Then we got home and perfect got better. My son's eagerly awaited copy of Under Milk Wood had arrived, and he read it out loud to me while I cooked dinner for us.


Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice
August 2015
I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand
something important: why it's safe for startup founders to be nice
people.
I grew up with a cartoon idea of a very successful businessman (in
the cartoon it was always a man): a rapacious, cigar-smoking,
table-thumping guy in his fifties who wins by exercising power, and
isn't too fussy about how.  As I've
written before
, one of
the things that has surprised me most about startups is
how few
of
the most successful founders are like that.  Maybe successful people
in other industries are; I don't know; but not startup founders.
[
1
]
I knew this empirically, but I never saw the math of why till I got
this founder's email.  In it he said he worried that he was
fundamentally soft-hearted and tended to give away too much for
free. He thought perhaps he needed "a little dose of sociopath-ness."
I told him not to worry about it, because so long as he built
something good enough to spread by word of mouth, he'd have a
superlinear growth curve.  If he was bad at extracting money from
people, at worst this curve would be some constant multiple less
than 1 of what it might have been.  But a constant multiple of any
curve is exactly the same shape.  The numbers on the Y axis are
smaller, but the curve is just as steep, and when anything grows
at the rate of a successful startup, the Y axis will take care of
itself.
Some examples will make this clear.  Suppose your company is making
$1000 a month now, and you've made something so great that it's
growing at 5% a week.  Two years from now, you'll be making about
$160k a month.
Now suppose you're so un-rapacious that you only extract half as
much from your users as you could.  That means two years later
you'll be making $80k a month instead of $160k.  How far behind are
you? How long will it take to catch up with where you'd have been
if you were extracting every penny?  A mere 15 weeks.  After two
years, the un-rapacious founder is only 3.5 months behind the
rapacious one.
[
2
]
If you're going to optimize a number, the one to choose is your
growth rate
. Suppose as before that you only extract half as much
from users as you could, but that you're able to grow 6% a week
instead of 5%.  Now how are you doing compared to the rapacious
founder after two years?  You're already ahead—$214k a month
versus $160k—and pulling away fast.  In another year you'll be
making $4.4 million a month to the rapacious founder's $2 million.
Obviously one case where it would help to be rapacious is when
growth depends on that.  What makes startups different is that
usually it doesn't. Startups usually win by making something so
great that people recommend it to their friends.  And being rapacious
not only doesn't help you do that, but probably hurts.
[
3
]
The reason startup founders can safely be nice is that making great
things is compounded, and rapacity isn't.
So if you're a founder, here's a deal you can make with yourself
that will both make you happy and make your company successful.
Tell yourself you can be as nice as you want, so long as you work
hard on your growth rate to compensate.  Most successful startups
make that tradeoff unconsciously. Maybe if you do it consciously
you'll do it even better.
Notes
[
1
]
Many think successful startup founders are driven by money.
In fact the secret weapon of the most successful founders is that
they aren't.  If they were, they'd have taken one of the acquisition
offers that every fast-growing startup gets on the way up.  What
drives the most successful founders is the same thing that drives
most people who make things: the company is their project.
[
2
]
In fact since 2 ≈ 1.05 ^ 15, the un-rapacious founder is
always 15 weeks behind the rapacious one.
[
3
]
The other reason it might help to be good at squeezing money
out of customers is that startups usually lose money at first, and
making more per customer makes it easier to get to profitability
before your initial funding runs out.  But while it is very common
for startups to
die
from running through their initial funding and then being unable
to raise more, the underlying cause is usually slow growth or
excessive spending rather than insufficient effort to extract money
from existing customers.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Harj Taggar, Jessica Livingston, and
Geoff Ralston for reading drafts of this, and to Randall Bennett
for being such a nice guy.


I remember reading allegations in 2016 about Trump having sex with underage girls. At the time I dismissed them, but the energy the administration has put into preventing the release of the Epstein files has convinced me there must be some truth in them.

@jdmccafferty I wonder if he suffered from the same problem as JP Morgan, and this is a cleaned up version of his nose.

@tauqbit Depends how you use it. It's probably ok to use it to autocomplete the de facto macroexpansions that make up your source code in popular programming languages.

@NicolaManzini @BasedSamParker There's no such thing as today's British accent. There are about 30 different British accents, at least.

I started following Thomas Massie several months ago. He's one of the few genuinely independent-minded people in Congress. If you want to follow a politician who'll give you hope for the future, I recommend him.

@y_molodtsov @tracewoodgrains These happen to be diffs I notice because these are the two countries I know best. Someone from India or China would probably have a different list.

@BasedSamParker What sort of accent do you think your "founding stock" Americans spoke with?

@tracewoodgrains Say everything you're thinking.

Bigger is better.

Brag constantly.

Work all the time.

Talk loudly.

But there's another even more important reason to learn to program. That's how you get ideas for startups: when you look around the world with a programmer's eye, you see all the things that could be built but haven't been yet.

If you want to start a software startup, you should still learn to program. Even if AI writes most of your code, you'll still be in the position of an engineering manager, and to be a good engineering manager you have to be a programmer yourself.


"I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a sailor in a slow-sailing ship."

— Darwin, while writing his second book on them

@RoyDelfino I hope admissions officers would see through that.

@ianmisner No. Many if not most of the startups YC accepts don't have customers yet.

Will 3 be the largest number of amendments a court decides Trump violated simultaneously, or do you think we'll see 4?

@StefanBuilds @TaraViswanathan There's usually only one. But the partners have read their application first, so they're not starting with nothing.

@TaraViswanathan YC interviews have been 10 minutes for almost two decades.

@dpachov @reidhoffman Surely it's obvious that YC is trying to predict something very precise, and surely it's not a stretch to believe that YC tracks both kinds of failure. The names of the big misses are practically burned into the partners' brains.

@kendrictonn Dangerous stuff too those cobalts.

@worldteacherman I would encourage kids to learn how to build things, and just forget about the startup part.

@alexkitcoff @TheBroskiUSA @AliceFromQueens Yes, exactly.


@MaxWithNanos Do any of your friends or family use Airbnb or Doordash?

@Rick_Mason Exactly. IIRC the New York Airbnb ban was similar. That's the way to do these things.

@AviationMarlene Would have had to have very leggy landing gear if they'd left those engines on the wings.

@MacaesBruno For the sake of the kids I'm happy to give them the benefit of the doubt.

@PurpleWindowDev Anyone who's had a dog recognizes that expression. There's a turd somewhere in the house.

@misha_saul I honestly don't think they feel righteous. I bet their model of the world is that everything is a rigged game, and they won this round.

@ErfanOfNazareth @AaronPeskin We should make this his official campaign poster.

@julesgambit I once asked a friend who'd been a professional chess player how many times an ordinary club player would have to play a top-ranked professional player before he won, and his estimate was 10,000.

https://t.co/EPaJ5TCBib

@geisonmcd Since 2014.

@markdono The Blue Boar is good.


@jeazous The most advanced water bottle regulation perhaps.

(Note for Americans: There's a new EU rule that water bottle caps have to stay attached after you unscrew them. It's super annoying and doubtless achieves nothing. I.e. the new cookie banner.)

I happened to buy a bottle of water whose cap didn't stay attached after I unscrewed it, and it seemed so advanced. It seemed like a much improved version 2.

@cremieuxrecueil So if the data suggests 2x and Wellington said 4x, maybe 3x would be a safe bet?

@cremieuxrecueil How much bigger an army would the median general need to defeat him?

@SonofHas I wonder if they realize this sort of tactic might influence the executive or legislative branches, but is unlikely to influence the judicial branch?

Maybe that blindness is another sign of who's calling the shots. Maybe it's someone from a dictatorship...

@bsansouci @devonzuegel It means you can't get from one half of the house to the other without going outdoors.

@S_OhEigeartaigh @NathanpmYoung I don't think we should do anything to them. I just want to observe the phenomenon of DEI administrators burrowing underground, and this is the best way to get an overall picture of it.

@mgbalkin @cjoneslevy No one ever claimed that. But she created the standard docs for convertible debt that most startups in the Valley used, and thereby changed the default form of seed funding from equity to debt.

@NathanpmYoung I would if it needed money, but it doesn't. This is something an undergrad or grad student could do in his spare time.


@caitoz You have to assume a lot of these are fake accounts.

@johnarnold Do you know why? For example, have murders of certain types decreased more?

@safier I said it was a photo from the Warsaw Ghetto when I posted it.

@artmaltman @jbrown94305 No, I said it was from the Warsaw Ghetto when I posted it.

https://t.co/QJRQtkf7Z5

@sarahleah1 I can understand why people think that picture is from Gaza, but in fact it's from the Warsaw Ghetto.

@FredTheGreyCat @shashj The Soho Farmhouse crowd.

@jbrown94305 To point out the similarity between then and now, and maybe make some powerful people decide "enough is enough."

@BobTheMutant @CommunityNotes Yes, that's the point.

@DrewPavlou Unless your family has too many hundreds of years of history there, in which case you get detained by ICE for looking Mexican.

@SaintLewis44 I hoped funding Manara would be step toward liberating that talent.


@MabreyTed As I said, I'll be happy to delete it if you commit publicly on behalf of Palantir not to build things that help the government violate the US constitution.

Will you do that, Ted?

"There was one quality of mind which seemed to be of special and extreme advantage in leading him to make discoveries. It was the power of never letting exceptions pass unnoticed."

— Francis Darwin on his father

@mehakpbatra @sneha_prabhu I'd have chosen different names for the versions, but that's pretty superficial.

@theriddhigupta @sneha_prabhu I gave a deliberately broad answer. There are lots of ways to build AI models. Within that set obviously I'd look for ideas others were overlooking.

@lacker @mattyglesias It would be hilarious, but not surprising, if ChatGPT was the smartest contributor to the document.

@eulerfx @Rob_Hoffman_ Not for a reader with a basic understanding of math. For someone who understands about hill-climbing it's the quickest way to explain the situation.

@cperciva Rarely, but it's exciting when I do.

@sneha_prabhu Building AI models I think.

@mattyglesias You can tell from the clumsiness of the second entry that it was written by a different person who wasn't as smart.

One of the questions I ask startups is how long it's been possible to do what they're doing. Ideally it has only been possible for a few years. A couple days ago I asked this during office hours, and the founders said "since December." What's possible now changes in months.


@yuseftarek I'm sure they've tried, but it seems to be harder to get me shadowbanned.

@ixarmad @CompSciFact @dabeaz Common Lisp, Scheme/Racket, and Clojure.

@OptimoPrincipi Whoah, a hoard that was added to instead of just buried in a single, desperate moment. That's really unusual. Do you know of another case?

@MacaesBruno Which is why it's all the more convincing that even they are saying this.

@CompSciFact @dabeaz You have to do it in a language designed for it.

@amasad Ultimate flex: graph growth rate.

The Economist: "Israel has lost the battle for global public opinion." https://t.co/vs0qKPIpDa

@Danbusi_ @DKThomp The same time is the easy part. They do everything the same. It's all one group of people.

@DKThomp They turned against standardized tests because of the statistical trail they left when admissions officers discriminated in favor of or against certain groups. They thought they'd be able to judge candidates without them, but found that they couldn't.

@Soetsnr @TrungTPhan As many as are good enough, of course.


Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
April 2005
This summer, as an
experiment, some
friends and I are giving
seed
funding
to a bunch of new startups.  It's an experiment because
we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would.
That's why we're doing it during the summer—so even college
students can participate.
We know from Google and Yahoo that grad students can start successful
startups.  And we know from experience that some undergrads are as
capable as most grad students.  The accepted age for startup founders
has been creeping downward. We're trying to find the lower bound.
The deadline has now passed, and we're sifting through 227 applications.
We expected to divide them into two categories, promising
and unpromising.  But we soon saw we needed a third: promising
people with unpromising ideas.
[
1
]
The Artix Phase
We should have expected this.  It's very common for a group of
founders to go through one lame idea before realizing that a startup
has to make something people will pay for.   In fact, we ourselves
did.
Viaweb wasn't the first startup Robert Morris and I started.  In
January 1995, we and a couple friends started a company called
Artix.  The plan was to put art galleries on the Web.  In retrospect,
I wonder how we could have wasted our time on anything so stupid.
Galleries are not especially
excited
about being on
the Web even now, ten years later.  They don't want to have their
stock visible to any random visitor, like an antique store.
[
2
]
Besides which, art dealers are the most technophobic people on
earth.  They didn't become art dealers after a difficult choice
between that and a career in the hard sciences.  Most of them had
never seen the Web before we came to tell them why they should be
on it.  Some didn't even have computers.  It doesn't do justice to
the situation to describe it as a hard
sell
; we soon sank
to building sites for free, and it was hard to convince galleries
even to do that.
Gradually it dawned on us that
instead of trying to make Web sites for
people who didn't want them, we could make sites for
people who did.  In fact, software that would let people who wanted
sites make their own.  So we ditched Artix and
started a new company, Viaweb, to make software for building online stores.
That one succeeded.
We're in good company here.  Microsoft was not the first company
Paul Allen and Bill Gates started either.  The first was called
Traf-o-data.
It does not seem to have done as well as Micro-soft.
In Robert's defense, he was skeptical about Artix.  I dragged him
into it.
[
3
]
But there were moments when he was optimistic.  And
if we, who were 29 and 30 at the time, could get excited about such
a thoroughly boneheaded idea, we should not be surprised that hackers
aged 21 or 22 are pitching us ideas with little hope of making money.
The Still Life Effect
Why does this happen?  Why do good hackers have bad business ideas?
Let's look at our case.  One reason we had such a lame idea was
that it was the first thing we thought of.  I was in New York trying
to be a starving artist at the time (the starving part is actually
quite easy), so I was haunting galleries anyway.  When I learned
about the Web, it seemed natural to mix the two.  Make Web sites
for galleries—that's the ticket!
If you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think
it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different
ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head.
You'd think.  But people don't.  In fact, this is a constant problem
when you're painting still lifes.  You plonk down a bunch of stuff
on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to
look interesting.  But you're so impatient to get started painting
that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long.  So you start
painting.  Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at
it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and
boring composition, but by then it's too late.
Part of the problem is that big projects tend to grow out of small
ones.  You set up a still life to make a quick sketch when you have
a spare hour, and days later you're still working on it.  I once
spent a month painting three versions of a still life I set up in
about four minutes.  At each point (a day, a week, a month) I thought
I'd already put in so much time that it was too late to change.
So the biggest cause of bad ideas is the still life effect:  you
come up with a random idea, plunge into it, and then at each point
(a day, a week, a month) feel you've put so much time into it that
this must be
the
idea.
How do we fix that?  I don't think we should discard plunging.
Plunging into an idea is a good thing.  The solution is at the other
end: to realize that having invested time in something doesn't make
it good.
This is clearest in the case of names.  Viaweb was originally
called Webgen, but we discovered someone else had a product called
that.  We were so attached to our name that we offered him
5%
of the company
if he'd let us have it.   But he wouldn't, so
we had to think of another.
[
4
]
The best we could do was Viaweb,
which we disliked at first.  It was like having a new mother.  But
within three days we loved it, and Webgen sounded lame and
old-fashioned.
If it's hard to change something so simple as a name, imagine
how hard it is to garbage-collect an idea.  A name only has one
point of attachment into your head.  An idea for a company gets
woven into your thoughts.  So you must consciously discount for
that.  Plunge in, by all means, but remember later to look at your
idea in the harsh light of morning and ask: is this something people
will pay for?  Is this, of all the things we could make, the thing
people will pay most for?
Muck
The second mistake we made with Artix is also very common.  Putting
galleries on the Web seemed cool.
One of the most valuable things my father taught me is an old
Yorkshire saying: where there's muck, there's brass.  Meaning that
unpleasant work pays.  And more to the point here, vice versa.  Work
people like doesn't pay well, for reasons of supply and demand.
The most extreme case is developing programming languages, which
doesn't pay at all, because people like it so much they do it for
free.
When we started Artix, I was still ambivalent about business.  I
wanted to keep one foot in the art world.  Big, big, mistake.  Going
into business is like a hang-glider launch: you'd better do it
wholeheartedly, or not at all.  The purpose of a company, and a
startup especially, is to make money.  You can't have divided
loyalties.
Which is not to say that you have to do the most disgusting sort
of work, like spamming, or starting a company whose only purpose
is patent litigation.  What I mean is, if you're starting a company
that will do something cool, the aim had better be to make money
and maybe be cool, not to be cool and maybe make money.
It's hard enough to make money that you can't do it by accident.
Unless it's your first priority, it's unlikely to happen at all.
Hyenas
When I probe our motives with Artix, I see a third mistake: timidity.
If you'd proposed at the time that we go into the e-commerce business,
we'd have found the idea terrifying.  Surely a field like that would
be dominated by fearsome startups with five million dollars of VC
money each.  Whereas we felt pretty sure that we could hold our own
in the slightly less competitive business of generating Web sites
for art galleries.
We erred ridiculously far on the side of safety.  As it turns out,
VC-backed startups are not that fearsome.  They're too busy trying
to spend all that
money
to get software written.  In 1995, the
e-commerce business was very competitive as measured in press
releases, but not as measured in software.  And really it never
was.  The big fish like Open Market (rest their souls) were just
consulting companies pretending to be product companies
[
5
]
, and
the offerings at our end of the market were a couple hundred lines
of Perl scripts.  Or could have been implemented as a couple hundred
lines of Perl; in fact they were probably tens of thousands of lines
of C++ or Java.  Once we actually took the plunge into e-commerce,
it turned out to be surprisingly easy to compete.
So why were we afraid?  We felt we were good at programming, but
we lacked confidence in our ability to do a mysterious, undifferentiated
thing we called "business."  In fact there is no such thing as
"business." There's selling, promotion, figuring out what people
want, deciding how much to charge, customer support, paying your
bills, getting customers to pay you, getting incorporated, raising
money, and so on.  And the combination is not as hard as it seems,
because some tasks (like raising money and getting incorporated)
are an O(1) pain in the ass, whether you're big or small, and others
(like selling and promotion) depend more on energy and imagination
than any kind of special training.
Artix was like a hyena, content to survive on carrion because we
were afraid of the lions.  Except the lions turned out not to have
any teeth, and the business of putting galleries online barely
qualified as carrion.
A Familiar Problem
Sum up all these sources of error, and it's no wonder we had such
a bad idea for a company.  We did the first thing we thought of;
we were ambivalent about being in business at all; and we deliberately
chose an impoverished market to avoid competition.
Looking at the applications for the Summer Founders Program, I see
signs of all three.  But the first is by far the biggest problem.
Most of the groups applying have not stopped to ask: of all the
things we could do, is
this
the one with the best chance of
making money?
If they'd already been through their Artix phase, they'd have learned
to ask that.  After the reception we got from art dealers, we were
ready to.  This time, we thought, let's make something people want.
Reading the
Wall Street Journal
for a week should give anyone
ideas for two or three new startups.  The articles are full of
descriptions of problems that need to be solved.  But most of the
applicants don't seem to have looked far for ideas.
We expected the most common proposal to be for multiplayer games.
We were not far off: this was the second most common.
The most common was some combination of a blog, a calendar,
a dating site, and Friendster.  Maybe there is some new killer app
to be discovered here, but it seems perverse to go poking around
in this fog when there are valuable, unsolved problems lying about
in the open for anyone to see.  Why did no one propose a new scheme
for micropayments?  An ambitious project, perhaps, but I can't
believe we've considered every alternative.  And newspapers and
magazines are (literally) dying for a solution.
Why did so few applicants really think about what customers want?
I think the problem with many, as with people in their early twenties
generally, is that they've been trained their whole lives to jump
through predefined hoops.  They've spent 15-20 years solving problems
other people have set for them.  And how much time deciding what
problems would be good to solve?  Two or three course projects?
They're good at solving problems, but bad at choosing them.
But that, I'm convinced, is just the effect of training.  Or more
precisely, the effect of grading.  To make grading efficient,
everyone has to solve the same problem, and that means it has to
be decided in advance.  It would be great if schools taught students
how to choose problems as well as how to solve them, but I don't
know how you'd run such a class in practice.
Copper and Tin
The good news is, choosing problems is something that can be learned.
I know that from experience.  Hackers can learn to make things
customers want.
[
6
]
This is a controversial view.  One expert on "entrepreneurship"
told me that any startup had to include business people, because
only they could focus on what customers wanted.  I'll probably
alienate this guy forever by quoting him, but I have to risk it,
because his email was such a perfect example of this view:
80% of MIT spinoffs succeed
provided
they
  have at least one management person in the team at the start. The
  business person represents the "voice of the customer" and that's
  what keeps the engineers and product development on track.
This is, in my opinion, a crock.  Hackers are perfectly capable of
hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to
amplify the signal for them.  Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad
students in computer science, which presumably makes them "engineers."
Do you suppose Google is only good because they had some business
guy whispering in their ears what customers wanted?   It seems to
me the business guys who did the most for Google were the ones who
obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting
started.
The hard part about figuring out what customers want is figuring
out that you need to figure it out.  But that's something you can
learn quickly.  It's like seeing the other interpretation of an
ambiguous picture.  As soon as someone tells you there's a rabbit
as well as a duck, it's hard not to see it.
And compared to the sort of problems hackers are used to solving,
giving customers what they want is easy.  Anyone who can write an
optimizing compiler can design a UI that doesn't confuse users,
once they
choose
to focus on that problem.  And once you
apply that kind of brain power to petty but profitable questions,
you can create wealth very rapidly.
That's the essence of a startup: having brilliant people do work
that's beneath them.   Big companies try to hire the right person
for the job.  Startups win because they don't—because they take
people so smart that they would in a big company be doing "research,"
and set them to work instead on problems of the most immediate and
mundane sort.  Think Einstein designing refrigerators.
[
7
]
If you want to learn what people want, read
Dale Carnegie's
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
[
8
]
When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was
serious.  But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was
right.  It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience:
how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of
thinking only of yourself.
Most smart people don't do that very well.  But adding this ability
to raw brainpower is like adding tin to copper.  The result is
bronze, which is so much harder that it seems a different metal.
A hacker who has learned what to make, and not just how to make,
is extraordinarily powerful.  And not just at making money: look
what a small group of volunteers has achieved with Firefox.
Doing an Artix teaches you to make something people want in the
same way that not drinking anything would teach you how much you
depend on water.  But it would be more convenient for all involved
if the Summer Founders didn't learn this on our dime—if they could
skip the Artix phase and go right on to make something customers
wanted.  That, I think, is going to be the real experiment this
summer.  How long will it take them to grasp this?
We decided
we ought to have T-Shirts for the SFP, and we'd been thinking about
what to print on the back.  Till now we'd been planning to use
If you can read this, I should be working.
but now we've decided it's going to be
Make something people want.
Notes
[
1
]
SFP applicants: please don't assume that not being accepted
means we think your idea is bad.  Because we want to keep the
number of startups small this first summer, we're going to have
to turn down some good proposals too.
[
2
]
Dealers try to give each customer the impression that the stuff
they're showing him is something special that only a few people
have seen, when in fact it may have been sitting in their racks for
years while they tried to unload it on buyer after buyer.
[
3
]
On the other hand, he was skeptical about Viaweb too.  I have
a precise measure of that, because at one point in the first couple
months we made a bet: if he ever made a million dollars out of
Viaweb, he'd get his ear pierced.  We didn't let him
off
, either.
[
4
]
I wrote a program to generate all the combinations of "Web"
plus a three letter word.  I learned from this that most three
letter words are bad: Webpig, Webdog, Webfat, Webzit, Webfug.  But
one of them was Webvia; I swapped them to make Viaweb.
[
5
]
It's much easier to sell services than a product, just as it's
easier to make a living playing at weddings than by selling recordings.
But the margins are greater on products.  So during the
Bubble a lot of companies used consulting to generate revenues
they could attribute to the sale of products, because it made a
better story for an IPO.
[
6
]
Trevor Blackwell presents the following recipe for a startup:
"Watch people who have money to spend, see what they're wasting
their time on, cook up a solution, and try selling it to them. It's
surprising how small a problem can be and still provide a profitable
market for a solution."
[
7
]
You need to offer especially large rewards to get great people
to do tedious work.  That's why startups always pay equity rather
than just salary.
[
8
]
Buy an
old
copy from the 1940s or 50s instead of the current edition, which has been
rewritten to suit present fashions.  The original edition contained
a few unPC ideas, but it's always better to read an original book,
bearing in mind that it's a book from a past era, than to read a
new version sanitized for your protection.
Thanks
to Bill Birch, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston,
and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Russian Translation
Italian Translation
Japanese Translation
If you liked this, you may also like
Hackers & Painters
.


@DudespostingWs Being the one who goes downstairs to investigate when there's a strange noise in the middle of the night.

@7uomoki It might be possible to do that and be correct both times. They could get less woke, and then a few years later get even less woke.

@adammarkbrazier All but one are just trying it out, which is why the trend seems authentic. When something like Twitter is superseded, it doesn't take the form of people consciously leaving. They just gradually use it less and less. Like the way ChatGPT has made me use Google search less.

Once only comparatively rich people have credit cards, which even more dubious lenders will the rest borrow money from?

In the last couple days about 8-10 of the accounts I follow have independently mentioned that they're on Bluesky. These aren't whiny leftists performatively quitting. This seems an authentic trend.

@Jeffyboythought CA doesn't have a tax on unrealized capital gains.

@0xroyce369 Also like an abusive boyfriend.

@SaveYourSons How to see new ideas.

@realemjaygee Quit?

@kendrictonn He makes boxes of pure pigment which of course look bluer than any blue paint. There may be something similar going on here.


@aramh @robinhanson I assume by 1500 he meant 1500 Europe. Add today's wealth and technology to that and you'd have today's culture in a couple generations.

@robinhanson (A), because if we had the tech and economy of today, culture would rapidly adjust to match it.

The reaction of a British founder who went to visit YC:

"It has a fantastic buzz about it – a huge empowering energy – but also a collaborative and encouraging kindness that could so easily be absent."

@SilvermanJacob Can't you read? I said that institutional capture by the woke was a consequence of the collapse of the industry, not a cause of it.

@EcoSexuality No, it collapsed because of the web mostly. https://t.co/r4x3XvGMfv

@_olawalle I didn't mean that. I meant all teenagers think their parents are idiots.

@markessien @BenjaminPDixon Sure I can. I didn't say anything about how the default sense of a word is determined.

@pablothee @dflieb Partly Amjad, and partly that I'd been waiting for this idea.

@dflieb When I got a preview of the new Replit a year ago:

https://t.co/Jkngo6lVVZ

@BenjaminPDixon There's no other generally accepted word for what the pejorative sense of "wokeness" refers to. If I called it "political correctness," people would think I was talking exclusively about the variant that flourished in the 80s and 90s.


At first sight I thought this was AI. A sort of reverse Turing test.

@ahistoryinart Surely a fight between anyone and Lytton Strachey would be extremely short, let alone one with a boxer.

@grok @GeoffreySingle @ICEgov He didn't ask if the students are being arrested on school grounds, merely if students are being arrested.

@joebradford Obviously, but there must be tens of thousands of students who are equally "guilty" of that.

The students ICE is disappearing seem such a random selection. I wonder how they decide who to go after. Is it driven by denunciations? That would be even more dystopian.

At least this will be brief.

@elbasti Yes, they're great.

@fridtamir This is a common phenomenon. But you'll find it's still possible to read really good fiction, and Chandler is really good.

A sign of the times. Stanford Professor and AI luminary Andrew Ng will now teach you vibe coding on Replit.

Why did Walz and Hegseth use Signal to discuss their plans for the attack instead of whatever official secure system they were supposed to use? Is the official system unusably bad, or too restrictive? Or were they just lazy?


@RSvoboda432 Andrew Miklas applied 5 times before being accepted. Now his company has gone public and he's a YC partner.

@uche_agubata Of course. People often apply multiple times. But you'll do better with cofounders.

@caiseran A few months? That's nothing. YC has funded fusion companies.

@anna_questions Boring sounds good. Regulated market frightens me. But by all means apply.

@StevenHHB Not to let worrying about that affect you at all. The partners honestly don't care.

@kingharis I still think this is a solvable problem. I can think of at least two ways to deal with transaction fees, for example: crypto, and charging up a browser with a bunch of money that you then gradually spend.

@pitdesi At one point it would have included the entire local village, if you count serfdom as employment.

In 1086 the estate had 12 villagers, 20 smallholders, and 4 slaves.

https://t.co/6Dn1ih6hsD

@VictorTaelin YC tried to expand to other stages a few years ago, but I think it was a mistake. It's better to focus on one stage.

@Cryptomnomiconz You can either apply now as a single founder or get one and apply as a pair to the next batch. Which to choose depends on how much you need a cofounder.

@energyguy666 Many are but certainly not all.


Founders thinking of doing YC are mistaken to worry about the dilution, because their advantage in fundraising afterward more than makes up for it. A year ago I calculated that the median YC startup is net ahead after the first round they raise.

@LouisLebbos @DudespostingWs I figured as long as he was going to post the exact same thing again, I could post the exact same reply.

@vssarthak Work on your own projects. Often these are games. But do whatever interests you most.

Something else I told him: This is a trend that has been going since the stone age. Technology always increases variation in the returns for work. The bottom end is anchored at zero. Technology lets the top end move.

@RepSwalwell Mean and moronic are highly correlated. Mean means small souled. Moronic means small brained.

Something I told 16 yo: In the near term, AI will increase variation in the returns for work. For example, mediocre programmers are now finding it hard even to get hired, but great programmers are making more than ever.

@cremieuxrecueil That's not true. You learn interesting things in the process of getting an advanced degree.

The purpose of education is not merely to "put it to use." Education is also good for its own sake. I constantly read books I don't plan to "put to use."

@DudespostingWs Actually this is exactly the picture the European mind has of America.

@ElTimidoTorero That was an art dealer I asked. Sounds reasonable though.

@ugnius Not much respect.


@HistoryEJ @palakzat @sama That's easy. How the startup ends up doing.

@MichaelAArouet You've started and finished.

@sama I certainly think so, but you'd be surprised how many people disagree.

@palakzat @sama There was a spike in applications. But as we later learned, the incremental applications were bad; the number of good startups grew at roughly the normal rate.

@c_k_lynch You can tell by the fact that the individual shelves are too tall, and there aren't many of them. Compare to Althorp. https://t.co/E5bVL38zXu

@Austen @amuse Yes, it was once, back in the middle of the 20th century. That's how it became so established.

@amuse Not the Better Business Bureau and the ADL.

@Michaelskywal I retired from YC in 2014, but even before that I didn't spend much time listening to pitches. The YC application is designed to prevent applicants from shifting into pitch mode, and the partners only spend a fraction of their time reading applications anyway.

@asciidiego I told my kids they can use inflated language when they're taking an exam where it's expected, but that they should remember that this is actually bad writing and not let it become a habit.

@asciidiego When you're trying to convince people stupid enough to be fooled by it.


@Austen Every day is Capital Day.

Dressing for an event:

Me: I've looked worse.

Jessica: You *have*.

@tracewoodgrains Now if only the worse half of conservatism would leave too.

@sofipriors Hire someone iff the lack of that person is the main thing holding back your revenue growth.

@bznotes It's even worse than that. They don't trust experts whose opinions they're aware of. Questions like how to temper turbine blades are quietly decided for them without their even knowing it.

@pitdesi Yes, I love this about walking in Switzerland.

Something I just told a founder: Stay as small as you can for as long as you can. People who come to visit your office should always be surprised that such an important company has so few employees.

People who think they no longer depend on trusting experts only survive because they're mistaken. Every time you get on a plane you trust experts implicitly about a million questions you're not even aware of.

@spatialsquelch It's not expected, but it is a war crime to prevent third parties from providing humanitarian aid to civilians.

@DarrigoMelanie Declining union membership doesn't cause increasing variation in wealth. The reason the two are correlated is because they're both driven by the same underlying causes.

https://t.co/Luw9oajZyu


I do. He'd only get $2t if Tesla is very much ahead on the deal.

The reason this number seems surprising is that it's surprising that one man could have so much effect. But one man can. Look at what Steve Jobs did for Apple.

"But we don't know if it's going to work yet."

— British founder after I offered to invest more in her startup

(I explained that funding things you don't know are going to work is what seed investing consists of.)

There was a similar effort to discredit these images when the New York Times published them. In response the Times "presented the scans to a new round of multiple, independent experts in gunshot wounds, radiology and pediatric trauma, who attested to the images’ credibility."

In the article itself, a forensic pathologist and professor at the University of Leuven said "It is highly likely that these are long-distance shots aimed at the head and/or neck using military-grade ammunition."

Since you are not yourself an expert on gunshot wounds, I think we are justified in taking the experts' opinions over yours on this question.

@curiouswavefn I looked it up and I'm glad I did:

https://t.co/pDAvEKVNgk

@cremieuxrecueil There will always be bicycles and pedestrians.

@SpencerHakimian The Origins of Wokeness: https://t.co/jvOj5Ayr3x

@shaunmmaguire Shaun?

@FahaamDev @JoeDotAverage No. In fact I net de-mark them, because I often erase marks made by previous owners.

@dimitriospaolo No, it already seemed probable that Trump was on the list. Now it seems even more probable.

@Boavista_Ludwig I have no camp.

I want the files released.


@cperciva Surely it would be challenging to use this algorithm while being chased by a lion though, wouldn't it?

After all these years I finally I get to cperciva you back.

@cperciva Some must be hard for you, surely?

Apparently the Venezuelan Mike Pence was not so upstanding...

What's uniquely hard about running a startup is that you don't merely have to endure adversity, but have to solve intellectually difficult problems while doing so. It's like trying to find integrals while being chased by a lion.

Because startups are so much harder than they look, a lot of people think that successful startup founders just got lucky and had piles of money dropped in their laps. But this is so not true. Between t=0 and piles of money, they deal with novel crises every couple months.

Even in the most successful startups, even many years in, the founders are dealing with hair-raising problems. They mostly conceal these struggles from the outside world and even from their own employees. There's no upside in talking about them. But I hear about them.

@Itsjoeco Not that many anymore. Which is part of the reason they're marching. If they were seeing a lot of real-life examples of communism in action, they wouldn't be so enthusiastic about it.

@wminshew Why not?

Hackers compromised the account of @EricTopol, who has 700k followers, and are sending phishing DMs to them. https://t.co/RtDzX9Mwpt

@johnarnold Surge pricing!


@xlr8harder For sure, in my opinion some judges have overreacted. That's a problem, but it's a distinct problem from dictatorship.

Dictatorship implies restrictions on speech, but restrictions on speech don't imply dictatorship.

@staysaasy @balajis @slatestarcodex @naval @clairlemon I don't think it was a single thing. IIRC it was some kind of network of who followed and retweeted whom. So really more of a guilt by association blacklist.

I should trot out this credential next time I get an army of right wing trolls calling me a libtard. I'm not guys, I swear. Look, I'm on a hate speech blacklist.

I had forgotten that near peak woke some nut tricked the German government into funding the compilation of a "hate speech" blacklist that included @balajis, @slatestarcodex, @naval, @clairlemon, and me. Anyone remember this?

@yuureisen_king I remember this! IIRC the nutjob who created it even tricked the German government into funding it.

@AlexShulepov7 Empirically not, judging by his popularity.

@John7Istheman Their supposed obsession with Islam is no match for yours.

One thing that protects the British against authoritarianism is their habit of understatement. The bombastic language of authoritarians sounds comic to British ears, even to those of the would-be authoritarians themselves. So they can't do it with conviction.

@CcibChris At first glance I read that as a carrier deck.

@Itsjoeco These will be your Cap'n McCain's and Obama O's.


@drvolts Consumers weren't asking for semiconductors either.

We saw Clapton play at the Royal Albert Hall. Very impressive. He's still got it.

If it starts "I'm sorry I" it's a genuine apology, and if it starts "I'm sorry you" it isn't.

I don't think there's ever been anyone better than Chardin at making still lives look mellow without looking blurry. https://t.co/ILI5zAv9fq

If you take the job at the startup instead of the safer one at a big company, all your coworkers will also be people who took the job at the startup. In ten years they'll be running everything, even if the startup tanks.

@fedesimio @eyeslasho If you want to say something controversial, it's better to say it in a way that's boring when quote-tweeted.

@Moonalice Jobs and Wozniak's first business was making "blue boxes" to hack into the phone system. That's what Steve is holding in this picture, not Apple hardware. https://t.co/A09M73LxYI

@Moonalice You don't understand hackers or Silicon Valley very well if you think breaking rules only started in 2009. It goes back to the beginning.

https://t.co/QGfAuUFFnO

@eyeslasho They spoil all the far left's most prized fictions.

@eyeslasho The least biased sources of information I know of on Twitter are @MaxCRoser and @OurWorldInData. They just follow the numbers wherever they lead.


Is There Such a Thing as Good Taste?
November 2021
(This essay is derived from a talk at the Cambridge Union.)
When I was a kid, I'd have said there wasn't. My father told me so.
Some people like some things, and other people like other things,
and who's to say who's right?
It seemed so obvious that there was no such thing as good taste
that it was only through indirect evidence that I realized my father
was wrong. And that's what I'm going to give you here: a proof by
reductio ad absurdum. If we start from the premise that there's no
such thing as good taste, we end up with conclusions that are
obviously false, and therefore the premise must be wrong.
We'd better start by saying what good taste is. There's a narrow
sense in which it refers to aesthetic judgements and a broader one
in which it refers to preferences of any kind. The strongest proof
would be to show that taste exists in the narrowest sense, so I'm
going to talk about taste in art. You have better taste than me if
the art you like is better than the art I like.
If there's no such thing as good taste, then there's no such thing
as
good art
. Because if there is such a
thing as good art, it's
easy to tell which of two people has better taste. Show them a lot
of works by artists they've never seen before and ask them to
choose the best, and whoever chooses the better art has better
taste.
So if you want to discard the concept of good taste, you also have
to discard the concept of good art. And that means you have to
discard the possibility of people being good at making it. Which
means there's no way for artists to be good at their jobs. And not
just visual artists, but anyone who is in any sense an artist. You
can't have good actors, or novelists, or composers, or dancers
either. You can have popular novelists, but not good ones.
We don't realize how far we'd have to go if we discarded the concept
of good taste, because we don't even debate the most obvious cases.
But it doesn't just mean we can't say which of two famous painters
is better. It means we can't say that any painter is better than a
randomly chosen eight year old.
That was how I realized my father was wrong. I started studying
painting. And it was just like other kinds of work I'd done: you
could do it well, or badly, and if you tried hard, you could get
better at it. And it was obvious that Leonardo and Bellini were
much better at it than me. That gap between us was not imaginary.
They were so good. And if they could be good, then art could be
good, and there was such a thing as good taste after all.
Now that I've explained how to show there is such a thing as good
taste, I should also explain why people think there isn't. There
are two reasons. One is that there's always so much disagreement
about taste. Most people's response to art is a tangle of unexamined
impulses. Is the artist famous? Is the subject attractive? Is this
the sort of art they're supposed to like? Is it hanging in a famous
museum, or reproduced in a big, expensive book? In practice most
people's response to art is dominated by such extraneous factors.
And the people who do claim to have good taste are so often mistaken.
The paintings admired by the so-called experts in one generation
are often so different from those admired a few generations later.
It's easy to conclude there's nothing real there at all. It's only
when you isolate this force, for example by trying to paint and
comparing your work to Bellini's, that you can see that it does in
fact exist.
The other reason people doubt that art can be good is that there
doesn't seem to be any room in the art for this goodness. The
argument goes like this. Imagine several people looking at a work
of art and judging how good it is. If being good art really is a
property of objects, it should be in the object somehow. But it
doesn't seem to be; it seems to be something happening in the heads
of each of the observers. And if they disagree, how do you choose
between them?
The solution to this puzzle is to realize that the purpose of art
is to work on its human audience, and humans have a lot in common.
And to the extent the things an object acts upon respond in the
same way, that's arguably what it means for the object to have the
corresponding property. If everything a particle interacts with
behaves as if the particle had a mass of
m
, then it has a mass of
m
. So the distinction between "objective" and "subjective" is not
binary, but a matter of degree, depending on how much the subjects
have in common. Particles interacting with one another are at one
pole, but people interacting with art are not all the way at the
other; their reactions aren't
random
.
Because people's responses to art aren't random, art can be designed
to operate on people, and be good or bad depending on how effectively
it does so. Much as a vaccine can be. If someone were talking about
the ability of a vaccine to confer immunity, it would seem very
frivolous to object that conferring immunity wasn't really a property
of vaccines, because acquiring immunity is something that happens
in the immune system of each individual person. Sure, people's
immune systems vary, and a vaccine that worked on one might not
work on another, but that doesn't make it meaningless to talk about
the effectiveness of a vaccine.
The situation with art is messier, of course. You can't measure
effectiveness by simply taking a vote, as you do with vaccines.
You have to imagine the responses of subjects with a deep knowledge
of art, and enough clarity of mind to be able to ignore extraneous
influences like the fame of the artist. And even then you'd still
see some disagreement. People do vary, and judging art is hard,
especially recent art. There is definitely not a total order either
of works or of people's ability to judge them. But there is equally
definitely a partial order of both. So while it's not possible to
have perfect taste, it is possible to have good taste.
Thanks
to the Cambridge Union for inviting me, and to Trevor
Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts
of this.


@benkohlmann @GarettJones Make something you yourself want. Turn off the filter that it has to be a startup idea initially, or you'll lop off the outliers. When you've thought of something, start building, and get a version 1 in front of your friends as soon as you can.

@kirillzzy This literally made me laugh out loud. Then it made me wonder how many other founders must have gotten such stupid replies.

@AriDavidPaul How are imprecise weapons forcing them to restrict the entry of food and medicine?

@djgish You've pulled a switch in the middle of that tweet. Supporting Britain and actually entering the war are two very different things. The percentage of Americans who approved of the latter would naturally be much smaller.

@furkangozukara It's only 18% among Democrats.

According to the latest Gallup poll, only 36% of Americans approve of Israel's actions in Gaza. Why is Biden so eager to support something that the majority of Americans are against? https://t.co/QG3oqCX0IT

@JillFilipovic Then I have good news for you, because there are far fewer of them than you think. The great majority are chasing something simpler.

@JoeHawes6 Yeah, imagine.

@JohnConstableRA That's good! Reminds me of Spencer.

@ken_Kenobi1 More like the other way around.