The Origins of Wokeness
January 2025
The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up
the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad:
A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if
  superior to others.
This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and
its age is an important clue: it shows that although
wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it's an
instance of a much older one.
There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a
shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates
his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every
society has these people. All that changes is the rules they
enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In
Stalin's Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the
woke, it's social justice.
So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask
is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs.
The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about
these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to
ask when and where wokeness began.
The answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a
second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which
started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and
then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally
peaking after the riots of 2020.
What was political correctness, exactly? I'm often asked to define
both this term and wokeness by people who think they're meaningless
labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
In other words, it's people being prigs about social
justice. And that's the real problem — the
performativeness, not the social justice.
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Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on
the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The
problem with political correctness was not that it focused
on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in
which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and
quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the
politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for
using the wrong words to talk about them.
As for where political correctness began, if you think about
it, you probably already know the answer. Did it begin
outside universities and spread to them from this external
source? Obviously not; it has always been most extreme in
universities. So where in universities did it begin? Did it
begin in math, or the hard sciences, or engineering, and
spread from there to the humanities and social sciences?
Those are amusing images, but no, obviously it began in the
humanities and social sciences.
Why there? And why then? What happened in the humanities and
social sciences in the 1980s?
A successful theory of the origin of political correctness
has to be able to explain why it didn't happen earlier. Why
didn't it happen during the protest movements of the 1960s,
for example? They were concerned with much the same issues.
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The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to
political correctness was precisely that — they were
student movements. They didn't have any real power. The
students may have been talking a lot about women's
liberation and black power, but it was not what they were
being taught in their classes. Not yet.
But in the early 1970s the student protestors of the 1960s
began to finish their dissertations and get hired as
professors. At first they were neither powerful nor
numerous. But as more of their peers joined them and the
previous generation of professors started to retire, they
gradually became both.
The reason political correctness began in the humanities and
social sciences was that these fields offered more scope for
the injection of politics. A 1960s radical who got a job as
a physics professor could still attend protests, but his
political beliefs wouldn't affect his work. Whereas research
in sociology and modern literature can be made as political
as you like.
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I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in
1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if
someone said something they considered sexist, but no one
was getting
reported
for it. It was still not a thing when
I started grad school in 1986. It was definitely a thing in
1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed to pervade
campus life.
What happened? How did protest become punishment? Why were
the late 1980s the point at which protests against male
chauvinism (as it used to be called) morphed into formal
complaints to university authorities about sexism?
Basically, the 1960s radicals got tenure. They became the
Establishment they'd protested against two decades before.
Now they were in a position not just to speak out about
their ideas, but to enforce them.
A new set of moral rules to enforce was exciting news to a
certain kind of student. What made it particularly exciting
was that they were allowed to attack professors. I remember
noticing that aspect of political correctness at the time.
It wasn't simply a grass-roots student movement. It was
faculty members encouraging students to attack other faculty
members. In that respect it was like the Cultural
Revolution. That wasn't a grass-roots movement either; that
was Mao unleashing the younger generation on his political
opponents. And in fact when Roderick MacFarquhar started
teaching a class on the Cultural Revolution at Harvard in
the late 1980s, many saw it as a comment on current events.
I don't know if it actually was, but people thought it was,
and that means the similarities were obvious.
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College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually
harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous
combination. The result was a kind of moral etiquette,
superficial but very complicated. Imagine having to explain
to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the
phrase "people of color" is considered particularly
enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. And
why exactly one isn't supposed to use the word "negro" now,
even though Martin Luther King used it constantly in his
speeches. There are no underlying principles. You'd just
have to give him a long list of rules to memorize.
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The danger of these rules was not just that they created
land mines for the unwary, but that their elaborateness made
them an effective substitute for virtue. Whenever a society
has a concept of heresy and orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes a
substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the
world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than
everyone who isn't. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to
bad people.
But for it to work as a substitute for virtue, orthodoxy
must be difficult. If all you have to do to be orthodox is
wear some garment or avoid saying some word, everyone knows
to do it, and the only way to seem more virtuous than other
people is to actually be virtuous. The shallow, complicated,
and frequently changing rules of political correctness made
it the perfect substitute for actual virtue. And the result
was a world in which good people who weren't up to date on
current moral fashions were brought down by people whose
characters would make you recoil in horror if you could see
them.
One big contributing factor in the rise of political
correctness was the lack of other things to be morally pure
about. Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly
about religion and sex. But among the cultural elite these
were the deadest of dead letters by the 1980s; if you were
religious, or a virgin, this was something you tended to
conceal rather than advertise. So the sort of people who
enjoy being moral enforcers had become starved of things to
enforce. A new set of rules was just what they'd been
waiting for.
Curiously enough, the tolerant side of the 1960s left helped
create the conditions in which the intolerant side
prevailed. The relaxed social rules advocated by the old,
easy-going hippy left became the dominant ones, at least
among the elite, and this left nothing for the naturally
intolerant to be intolerant about.
Another possibly contributing factor was the fall of the
Soviet empire. Marxism had been a popular focus of moral
purity on the left before political correctness emerged as a
competitor, but the pro-democracy movements in Eastern Bloc
countries took most of the shine off it. Especially the fall
of the Berlin Wall in 1989. You couldn't be on the side of
the Stasi. I remember looking at the moribund Soviet Studies
section of a used bookshop in Cambridge in the late 1980s
and thinking "what will those people go on about now?" As it
turned out the answer was right under my nose.
One thing I noticed at the time about the first phase of
political correctness was that it was more popular with
women than men. As many writers (perhaps most eloquently
George Orwell) have observed, women seem more attracted than
men to the idea of being moral enforcers. But there was
another more specific reason women tended to be the
enforcers of political correctness. There was at this time a
great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were
the point when the definition of sexual harassment was
expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a
"hostile environment." Within universities the classic form
of accusation was for a (female) student to say that a
professor made her "feel uncomfortable." But the vagueness
of this accusation allowed the radius of forbidden behavior
to expand to include talking about heterodox ideas. Those
make people uncomfortable too.
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Was it sexist to propose that Darwin's greater male
variability hypothesis might explain some variation in human
performance? Sexist enough to get Larry Summers pushed out
as president of Harvard, apparently. One woman who heard the
talk in which he mentioned this idea said it made her feel
"physically ill" and that she had to leave halfway through.
If the test of a hostile environment is how it makes people
feel, this certainly sounds like one. And yet it does seem
plausible that greater male variability explains some of the
variation in human performance. So which should prevail,
comfort or truth? Surely if truth should prevail anywhere,
it should be in universities; that's supposed to be their
specialty; but for decades starting in the late 1980s the
politically correct tried to pretend this conflict didn't
exist.
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Political correctness seemed to burn out in the second half
of the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that
it literally became a joke. It offered rich material for
comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action
upon it. Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against
priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless,
can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian
prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same
thing to political correctness.
Unfortunately this was an illusion. Within universities the
embers of political correctness were still glowing brightly.
After all, the forces that created it were still there. The
professors who started it were now becoming deans and
department heads. And in addition to their departments there
were now a bunch of new ones explicitly focused on social
justice. Students were still hungry for things to be morally
pure about. And there had been an explosion in the number of
university administrators, many of whose jobs involved
enforcing various forms of political correctness.
In the early 2010s the embers of political correctness burst
into flame anew. There were several differences between this
new phase and the original one. It was more virulent. It
spread further into the real world, although it still burned
hottest within universities. And it was concerned with a
wider variety of sins. In the first phase of political
correctness there were really only three things people got
accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia (which at the
time was a neologism invented for the purpose). But between
then and 2010 a lot of people had spent a lot of time trying
to invent new kinds of -isms and -phobias and seeing which
could be made to stick.
The second phase was, in multiple senses, political
correctness metastasized. Why did it happen when it did? My
guess is that it was due to the rise of social media,
particularly Tumblr and Twitter, because one of the most
distinctive features of the second wave of political
correctness was the
cancel mob
: a mob of angry people
uniting on social media to get someone ostracized or fired.
Indeed this second wave of political correctness was
originally called "cancel culture"; it didn't start to be
called "wokeness" till the 2020s.
One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at
first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to
like
being outraged. We're so used to this idea now that we take
it for granted, but really it's pretty strange. Being
outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect
people to seek it out. But they do. And above all, they want
to share it. I happened to be running a forum from 2007 to
2014, so I can actually quantify how much they want to share
it: our users were about three times more likely to upvote
something if it outraged them.
This tilt toward outrage wasn't due to wokeness. It's an
inherent feature of social media, or at least this
generation of it. But it did make social media the perfect
mechanism for fanning the flames of wokeness.
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It wasn't just public social networks that drove the rise of
wokeness though. Group chat apps were also critical,
especially in the final step, cancellation. Imagine if a
group of employees trying to get someone fired had to do it
using only email. It would be hard to organize a mob. But
once you have group chat, mobs form naturally.
Another contributing factor in this second wave of political
correctness was the dramatic increase in the polarization of
the press. In the print era, newspapers were constrained to
be, or at least seem, politically neutral. The department
stores that ran ads in the New York Times wanted to reach
everyone in the region, both liberal and conservative, so
the Times had to serve both. But the Times didn't regard
this neutrality as something forced upon them. They embraced
it as their duty as a
paper of record
— as one of the big
newspapers that aimed to be chronicles of their times,
reporting every sufficiently important story from a neutral
point of view.
When I grew up the papers of record seemed timeless, almost
sacred institutions. Papers like the New York Times and
Washington Post had immense prestige, partly because other
sources of news were limited, but also because they did make
some effort to be neutral.
Unfortunately it turned out that the paper of record was
mostly an artifact of the constraints imposed by print.
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When your market was determined by geography, you had
to be neutral. But publishing online enabled — in fact
probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets
defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained
in business fell in the direction they'd already been
leaning: left. On October 11, 2020 the New York Times
announced that "The paper is in the midst of an evolution
from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of
great narratives."
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Meanwhile journalists, of a sort,
had arisen to serve the right as well. And so journalism,
which in the previous era had been one of the great
centralizing forces, now became one of the great polarizing
ones.
The rise of social media and the increasing polarization of
journalism reinforced one another. In fact there arose a new
variety of journalism involving a loop through social media.
Someone would say something controversial on social media.
Within hours it would become a news story. Outraged readers
would then post links to the story on social media, driving
further arguments online. It was the cheapest source of
clicks imaginable. You didn't have to maintain overseas news
bureaus or pay for month-long investigations. All you had to
do was watch Twitter for controversial remarks and repost
them on your site, with some additional comments to inflame
readers further.
For the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren't
the only ones. That was one of the biggest differences
between the two waves of political correctness: the first
was driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was
often driven by professionals. For some it was their whole
job. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose
job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role
similar to that of the political commissars who got attached
to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they
weren't directly in the flow of the organization's work, but
watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper
happened in the doing of it. These new administrators could
often be recognized by the word "inclusion" in their titles.
Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for
wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would
usually be called an "inclusive language guide."
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This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if
their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire
people to keep watch for a particular type of problem,
they're going to find it, because otherwise there's no
justification for their existence.
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But these
bureaucrats also represented a second and possibly even
greater danger. Many were involved in hiring, and when
possible they tried to ensure their employers hired only
people who shared their political beliefs. The most
egregious cases were the new "DEI statements" that some
universities started to require from faculty candidates,
proving their commitment to wokeness. Some universities used
these statements as the initial filter and only even
considered candidates who scored high enough on them. You're
not hiring Einstein that way; imagine what you get instead.
Another factor in the rise of wokeness was the Black Lives
Matter movement, which started in 2013 when a white man was
acquitted after killing a black teenager in Florida. But
this didn't launch wokeness; it was well underway by 2013.
Similarly for the Me Too Movement, which took off in 2017
after the first news stories about Harvey Weinstein's
history of raping women. It accelerated wokeness, but didn't
play the same role in launching it that the 80s version did
in launching political correctness.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 also accelerated
wokeness, particularly in the press, where outrage now meant
traffic. Trump made the New York Times a lot of money:
headlines during his first administration mentioned his name
at about four times the rate of previous presidents.
In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white
police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video. At this
point the metaphorical fire became a literal one, as violent
protests broke out across America. But in retrospect this
turned out to be peak woke, or close to it. By every measure
I've seen, wokeness peaked in 2020 or 2021.
Wokeness is sometimes described as a mind-virus. What makes
it viral is that it defines new types of impropriety. Most
people are afraid of impropriety; they're never exactly sure
what the social rules are or which ones they might be
breaking. Especially if the rules change rapidly. And since
most people already worry that they might be breaking rules
they don't know about, if you tell them they're breaking a
rule, their default reaction is to believe you. Especially
if multiple people tell them. Which in turn is a recipe for
exponential growth. Zealots invent some new impropriety to
avoid. The first people to adopt it are fellow zealots,
eager for new ways to signal their virtue. If there are
enough of these, the initial group of zealots is followed by
a much larger group, motivated by fear. They're not trying
to signal virtue; they're just trying to avoid getting in
trouble. At this point the new impropriety is now firmly
established. Plus its success has increased the rate of
change in social rules, which, remember, is one of the
reasons people are nervous about which rules they might be
breaking. So the cycle accelerates.
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What's true of individuals is even more true of
organizations. Especially organizations without a powerful
leader. Such organizations do everything based on "best
practices." There's no higher authority; if some new "best
practice" achieves critical mass, they
must
adopt it. And
in this case the organization can't do what it usually does
when it's uncertain: delay. It might be committing
improprieties right now! So it's surprisingly easy for a
small group of zealots to capture this type of organization
by describing new improprieties it might be guilty of.
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How does this kind of cycle ever end? Eventually it leads to
disaster, and people start to say enough is enough. The
excesses of 2020 made a lot of people say that.
Since then wokeness has been in gradual but continual
retreat. Corporate CEOs, starting with Brian Armstrong, have
openly rejected it. Universities, led by the University of
Chicago and MIT, have explicitly confirmed their commitment
to free speech. Twitter, which was arguably the hub of
wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it,
and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by
censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor
right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
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Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured
too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been
permanently damaged by it. I'm not going to claim Trump's
second victory in 2024 was a referendum on wokeness; I think
he won, as presidential candidates always do, because he was
more
charismatic
; but voters'
disgust with wokeness must have helped.
So what do we do now? Wokeness is already in retreat.
Obviously we should help it along. What's the best way to do
that? And more importantly, how do we avoid a third
outbreak? After all, it seemed to be dead once, but came
back worse than ever.
In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way
to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative
moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak of
political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because
there will be a next thing. Prigs are prigs by nature. They
need rules to obey and enforce, and now that Darwin has cut
off their traditional supply of rules, they're constantly
hungry for new ones. All they need is someone to meet them
halfway by defining a new way to be morally pure, and we'll
see the same phenomenon again.
Let's start with the easier problem. Is there a simple,
principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to
use the customs we already have for dealing with religion.
Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced
by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of
this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by
the masses.
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And we already have well-established
customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You
can express your own religious identity and explain your
beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they
disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that
contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization
adopt yours as its official religion.
If we're not sure what to do about any particular
manifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some
other religion, like Christianity. Should we have people
within organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke
orthodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs
were to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor
writers
or
scientists
whose work contradicts woke doctrines?
No, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work
contradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be
required to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an
employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should
students and employees have to participate in woke
indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer
questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No,
because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way
about their religion.
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One shouldn't feel bad about not wanting to watch woke
movies any more than one would feel bad about not wanting to
listen to Christian rock. In my twenties I drove across
America several times, listening to local radio stations.
Occasionally I'd turn the dial and hear some new song. But
the moment anyone mentioned Jesus I'd turn the dial again.
Even the tiniest bit of being preached to was enough to make
me lose interest.
But by the same token we should not automatically reject
everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can
see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would
be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't
share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort
of thing a religious zealot would do.
If we have genuine pluralism, I think we'll be safe from
future outbreaks of woke intolerance. Wokeness itself won't
go away. There will for the foreseeable future continue to
be pockets of woke zealots inventing new moral fashions. The
key is not to let them treat their fashions as normative.
They can change what their coreligionists are allowed to say
every few months if they like, but they mustn't be allowed
to change what we're allowed to say.
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The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks
of aggressively performative moralism — is of course
harder. Here we're up against human nature. There will
always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the
enforcers among them, the
aggressively conventional-minded
.
These people are born that way. Every society has them. So
the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.
The aggressively conventional-minded aren't always on the
rampage. Usually they just enforce whatever random rules are
nearest to hand. They only become dangerous when some new
ideology gets a lot of them pointed in the same direction at
once. That's what happened during the Cultural Revolution,
and to a lesser extent (thank God) in the two waves of
political correctness we've experienced.
We can't get rid of the aggressively conventional-minded.
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And we couldn't prevent people from creating new
ideologies that appealed to them even if we wanted to. So if
we want to keep them bottled up, we have to do it one step
downstream. Fortunately when the aggressively
conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one
thing that gives them away: they define new
heresies
to
punish people for. So the best way to protect ourselves from
future outbreaks of things like wokeness is to have powerful
antibodies against the concept of heresy.
We should have a conscious bias against defining new forms
of heresy. Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something
that we'd previously been able to say, our initial
assumption should be that they're wrong. Only our initial
assumption of course. If they can prove we should stop
saying it, then we should. But the burden of proof is on
them. In liberal democracies, people trying to prevent
something from being said will usually claim they're not
merely engaging in censorship, but trying to prevent some
form of "harm". And maybe they're right. But once again, the
burden of proof is on them. It's not enough to claim harm;
they have to prove it.
As long as the aggressively conventional-minded continue to
give themselves away by banning heresies, we'll always be
able to notice when they become aligned behind some new
ideology. And if we always fight back at that point, with
any luck we can stop them in their tracks.
The number of true things we
can't say
should not increase. If it does, something is wrong.
Notes
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This was not the original meaning of "woke," but it's rarely
used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is
the dominant one.
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Why did 1960s radicals focus on the causes they did?
One of the people who reviewed drafts of this essay
explained this so well that I asked if I could quote him:
The middle-class student protestors of the New Left
  rejected the socialist/Marxist left as unhip. They were
  interested in sexier forms of oppression uncovered by
  cultural analysis (Marcuse) and abstruse "Theory". Labor
  politics became stodgy and old-fashioned. This took a
  couple generations to work through. The woke ideology's
  conspicuous lack of interest in the working class is the
  tell-tale sign. Such fragments as are, er, left of the old
  left are anti-woke, and meanwhile the actual working class
  shifted to the populist right and gave us Trump. Trump and
  wokeness are cousins.
The middle-class origins of wokeness smoothed its way
  through the institutions because it had no interest in
  "seizing the means of production" (how quaint such phrases
  seem now), which would quickly have run up against hard
  state and corporate power. The fact that wokeness only
  expressed interest in other kinds of class (race, sex,
  etc) signalled compromise with existing power: give us
  power within your system and we'll bestow the resource we
  control — moral rectitude — upon you. As an ideological
  stalking horse for gaining control over discourse and
  institutions, this succeeded where a more ambitious
  revolutionary program would not have.
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It helped that the humanities and social sciences also
included some of the biggest and easiest undergrad majors.
If a political movement had to start with physics students,
it could never get off the ground; there would be too few of
them, and they wouldn't have the time to spare.
At the top universities these majors are not as big as they
used to be, though. A
2022 survey
found that only 7% of
Harvard undergrads plan to major in the humanities, vs
nearly 30% during the 1970s. I expect wokeness is at least
part of the reason; when undergrads consider majoring in
English, it's presumably because they love the written word
and not because they want to listen to lectures about
racism.
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The puppet-master-and-puppet character of political
correctness became clearly visible when a bakery near
Oberlin College was falsely accused of race discrimination
in 2016. In the subsequent civil trial, lawyers for the
bakery produced a text message from Oberlin Dean of Students
Meredith Raimondo that read "I'd say unleash the students if
I wasn't convinced this needs to be put behind us."
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The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply
treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be
the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically
far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate
voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to
explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate
publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I
still hadn't covered all the cases.
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In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a
hostile work environment could constitute sex
discrimination, which in turn affected universities via
Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile
environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person,
but since for a professor merely being the subject of a
sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the
complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or
remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively
forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to
Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of
things that might not be said "with ladies present."
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Much as they tried to pretend there was no conflict
between diversity and quality. But you can't simultaneously
optimize for two things that aren't identical. What
diversity actually means, judging from the way the term is
used, is proportional representation, and unless you're
selecting a group whose purpose is to be representative,
like poll respondents, optimizing for proportional
representation has to come at the expense of quality. This
is not because of anything about representation; it's the
nature of optimization; optimizing for x has to come at the
expense of y unless x and y are identical.
[
7
]
Maybe societies will eventually develop antibodies to
viral outrage. Maybe we were just the first to be exposed to
it, so it tore through us like an epidemic through a
previously isolated population. I'm fairly confident that it
would be possible to create new social media apps that were
less driven by outrage, and an app of this type would have a
good chance of stealing users from existing ones, because
the smartest people would tend to migrate to it.
[
8
]
I say "mostly" because I have hopes that journalistic
neutrality will return in some form. There is some market
for unbiased news, and while it may be small, it's valuable.
The rich and powerful want to know what's really going on;
that's how they became rich and powerful.
[
9
]
The Times made this momentous announcement very
informally, in passing in the middle of an
article
about a
Times reporter who'd been criticized for inaccuracy. It's
quite possible no senior editor even approved it. But it's
somehow appropriate that this particular universe ended with
a whimper rather than a bang.
[
10
]
As the acronym DEI goes out of fashion, many of these
bureaucrats will try to go underground by changing their
titles. It looks like "belonging" will be a popular option.
[
11
]
If you've ever wondered why our legal system includes
protections like the separation of prosecutor, judge, and
jury, the right to examine evidence and cross-examine
witnesses, and the right to be represented by legal counsel,
the de facto
parallel legal system
established by Title IX
makes that all too clear.
[
12
]
The invention of new improprieties is most visible in
the rapid evolution of woke nomenclature. This is
particularly annoying to me as a writer, because the new
names are always worse. Any religious observance has to be
inconvenient and slightly absurd; otherwise gentiles would
do it too. So "slaves" becomes "enslaved individuals." But
web search can show us the leading edge of moral growth in
real time: if you search for "individuals experiencing
slavery" you will as of this writing find five legit
attempts to use the phrase, and you'll even find two for
"individuals experiencing enslavement."
[
13
]
Organizations that do dubious things are particularly
concerned with propriety, which is how you end up with
absurdities like tobacco and oil companies having higher ESG
ratings than Tesla.
[
14
]
Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward
though: he gave more visibility to paying users. Paying
users lean right on average, because people on the far left
dislike Elon and don't want to give him money. Elon
presumably knew this would happen. On the other hand, the
people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they
could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted
to.
[
15
]
It even, as James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian
pointed out, has a concept of original sin: privilege. Which
means unlike Christianity's egalitarian version, people have varying
degrees of it. An able-bodied straight white
American male is born with such a load of sin that only by
the most abject repentance can he be saved.
Wokeness also shares something rather funny with many actual
versions of Christianity: like God, the people for whose
sake wokeness purports to act are often revolted by the
things done in their name.
[
16
]
There is one exception to most of these rules: actual
religious organizations. It's reasonable for them to insist
on orthodoxy. But they in turn should declare that they're
religious organizations. It's rightly considered shady
when something that appears to be an ordinary business or
publication turns out to be a religious organization.
[
17
]
I don't want to give the impression that it will be
simple to roll back wokeness. There will be places where the
fight inevitably gets messy — particularly within
universities, which everyone has to share, yet which are
currently the most pervaded by wokeness of any institutions.
[
18
]
You can however get rid of aggressively
conventional-minded people within an organization, and in
many if not most organizations this would be an excellent
idea. Even a handful of them can do a lot of damage. I bet
you'd feel a noticeable improvement going from a handful to
none.
Thanks
to Sam Altman,
Ben Miller, Daniel Gackle, Robin Hanson, Jessica
Livingston, Greg Lukianoff, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, and Tim
Urban for reading drafts of this.


@iamsternlicht @stucchio I'm in favor of reining in TikTok, but he can't have been sending them that much data if it was in spreadsheets.

@Itsjoeco One day you should go into politics. But not yet!

@AaronBergman18 Not only is this true, but I can tell you precisely when: when they're the only words that will express exactly what you want to say.

@arlogilbert @Sugabush504 @msuster @upfrontvc Then why are you following me?

I hope this "and" was meant to be an "or".

@pitdesi Nothing for crypto?

@ahistoryinart He was good in a lot of different ways. I keep being pleasantly surprised by paintings of his that don't look at all like one another.

@Itsjoeco Depends on the criminal. Some are much more likely to reoffend than others, and if you make an effort you can predict predict this to some degree.

@michael_nielsen I visited Stonehenge in 1986. There were no crowds then. I suspect it's very different now.

Burgos is a great town.

@PaiMeiBTC @TarasBob @Scholars_Stage That was a different guy. And he merely said he'd sold most of his.


@ShriramKMurthi I miss this. Providence was the capital of random cleverness.

@diogomartf Not recently, no.

@RebeccaSear What if a writer becomes very famous, and the original manuscripts of her books become worth more than that? Does she then have to hand them over to the government?

When I was painting, my m.o. was pretty much the same as it is when writing essays. I'd start with a blurry picture, and then just keep looking. Probably works better with prose though. https://t.co/0qJF0Er8oD

One of Jessica's most endearing quirks is her vulnerability to incapacitating fits of laughter. One of the oldest pictures on my phone is a picture of one of them. https://t.co/v57sLqJmQp

@pitdesi I just *bought* an encyclopedia. (The 11th edition of the Britannica.)

@balajis Reminds me a bit of this famous video: https://t.co/YiOXBFt27A

@BayouPhilosophy No one who maltreats animals is good, but there are some evil people who are kind to animals.

@sarah_cone This only works below a certain number of books.

@adamyormark Only in pictures. I've never encountered this horror in real life.


@still_boneless What grade are you if some of your ancestors were there before 1607?

@daltonc For smart people. Dumb people prefer lies.

I've met two YC startups this summer that have cancer cures ready for clinical trials, and I've heard of several others that do. It feels like something is going to happen. The world may be very different in 10 years.

@netanyahu A "tragic mishap" is a missile strike that enough people start talking about.

@samiramanabi @imraj4_u The way I originally wrote it. https://t.co/m5u685pnP5

@ahistoryinart I keep thinking about whether you could get this look with oil paint. I bet you could, once you've seen it.

@orvn @BillCrosby I bet you're right. I'm going to delete my reply and block that account.

@ahistoryinart Did he varnish them? If not they'd be as fragile as pastels. And if so can a restorer even take the varnish off when it yellows?

My God. Each pair of shoes is a child's life.

@imraj4_u I knew from the awkwardness of the first sentence that I didn't write that, and sure enough, I didn't.


@samdaceo They'll go to the same place as the millions who lost their livelihoods in all the previous major innovations: to new jobs created thereby.

@cremieuxrecueil The area under the yellow line is smaller though, which implies legalizing sports betting is good in this respect. (I know it's bad in others.)

@DudespostingWs Men have higher collagen density than women.

@omuinetimi Usually I would ignore such a reflexive comment, but this is false in an interesting way. Early adopters tend to be the opposite of privileged — grad students rather than corporations. I often have to encourage startups to court them, even though there's little money there.

@Austen It's just like microprocessors and the web were.

@theynahlikeus I don't think so.

The early adopters: They can't imagine life without things you haven't even tried yet.

The interesting thing is, they're generally right. Unless you're very eccentric, something you can't imagine life without will eventually become something a lot of people want.

It's pretty wild to be tracking a Boom test flight in real time.

@fermatslibrary You don't have to bend over backwards to estimate 45 degrees. It's pretty intuitive for anyone who has thrown any number of projectiles.

@cremieuxrecueil Is there a way of estimating the extent to which it was due to an undeclared semi-strike by police?


@Scaramucci Not just look.

@DrFloSteiner Yes, it's as if something catastrophically bad happened in the last 6 months.

@DudespostingWs When our boys were little they used to have wrestling matches at bedtime (probably a bad idea but they loved it), and to equalize things we used to make the older one wear a blindfold.

At an intersection in SF I saw a car approaching on a cross street. I noticed it was a Waymo and thought "I don't have to worry about him running the stop sign," and I realized that for over 40 years I've been subconsciously watching out for this at every intersection.

@minilek I'm not advising founders to start their companies outside the US. I say explicitly *in the tweet* that this would be an extreme move. I'm merely pointing out that if you did it, you'd have an advantage in recruiting.

@Brazilian_VC This is a very reasonable question right now.

@too_locked_out It's the same tradeoff, yes.

@peng_t_ong This is very funny.

@mattyglesias Do you think this is a strategy, or do you think it's due to random individual law enforcement officers feeling like now they can get away with arbitrary behavior?

@russell_m It's a problem, but much exaggerated by social media, and way, way less of a threat to the kind of people a startup would want to recruit than what the US is doing now.


Lisp for Web-Based Applications
After a link to
Beating the Averages
was posted on slashdot,
some readers wanted to hear in more detail
about the specific technical advantages we got from using
Lisp in Viaweb.  For those who are interested,
here are some excerpts from a talk I gave in April 2001 at
BBN Labs in Cambridge, MA.
BBN Talk Excerpts (ASCII)


@growing_daniel A company in the design business could pull off this retro Gilded Age look, just barely. But a VC firm not so much.

I saw something recently mocking endnotes. But endnotes are a byproduct of the fact that ideas are tree-shaped and essays are linear. You can't always cram all the former into the latter. So frankly it's a bad sign not to have endnotes. It means you don't have enough ideas.

@growing_daniel Transformative can be good or bad. This is the bad kind, also known as decay, or collapse.

@Putin_Will_Fall @ravroberts That is the problem right there.

@cremieuxrecueil This is great, but it's revealing that one of the biggest policy victories of the administration so far is something so small.

@ravroberts That's not true. I think a minority supported Trump, and that minority is probably smaller now.

This kind of casual violation of due process is the hallmark of banana republics. Fuck, we're there.

If the administration can do this to a former high level federal official, imagine what they can do to you. https://t.co/SYxIvoT23F

@ahistoryinart Careful observation maybe, but "precise mathematical measurements" seems a bit much. If anything this is more Cezanne-style observation: clumsily earnest local observation, combined together in a patchy way. https://t.co/5r6Ye9Cup5

@PeterGazdik @Waymo @ToyotaMotorCorp I mean it's a barbaric practice.


@NathanaelKhodl Growth in GDP per capita is the best predictor of other measures of well-being. That's why historically even communists have focused on it.

https://t.co/3vhqjIg8R7

@liveatspotlight Making money depends on doing something other people want. If you can't find something other people want that you like to do, then you just have to do something you don't like.

"Have you tried talking to women?" ≈ "Have you tried learning to code?"

Socialists are economic incels. They cherish the idea that the game is rigged so much that they'd rather talk about that than about how to improve their situation.

@robertirv1 Possibly not. I think at best they could be copywriters in ad agencies or something like that.

Justin Kan and Adam Bouhenguel at YC in 2007 when what later became Twitch was called Justin TV and consisted of Justin walking around with a camera on his head. The backpack was full of custom hardware cooked up by Kyle Vogt, who'd just dropped out of MIT. https://t.co/OO3XoIHBxl

@eerac It's incredibly rare for the population as a whole, but it's not incredibly rare for good founders.

@rSanti97 We will again.

@FoolGreatest No, what these politicians would claim is that they're going to bring more people into the middle class by enriching them, not by impoverishing them.

All other things being equal, don't choose a startup idea that only reaches customers through another company. E.g. something clothing brands can offer to their customers. Even if it's good for the other companies, their slowness will kill you.


@David_AugustVC Damn, you're right. I'll delete and repost.

Why I like Lisp macros.

@themiddlerage42 @Austen Only if the founder is willing to let that happen.

@liorb_d @Austen I talked to a founder ten days ago who had an idea for a plausible competitor. Obviously I can't say what it was. And if I did, most people would write it off. In fact being writeable-off is an almost necessary quality of any sufficiently good idea.

@KTmBoyle I despise this guy too, but Hanlon's razor applies here. You don't have to assume that an EU bureaucrat would write badly in order to deceive people. Writing badly is the default.

@Austen This is potential energy that will one day drive a competitor. It won't be easy to create a competitor, but it will happen eventually, and when it does...

@Austen I don't mean a UI in the narrow sense. I mean instead of dealing directly with them, you deal with them through an agent who acts on your behalf, and is both tireless and an expert in their idiosyncrasies.

@Austen I wonder if there is a way to turn that brokenness into a startup? Perhaps for example by wrapping a new UI around them?

@AutismCapital It's worse written but harder for people with a chip on their shoulder to misinterpret.

@Richard_Florida @Noahpinion They didn't. Current tech CEOs are if anything better people than those of past generations. I suspect you're being led astray by a handful of current ones you dislike.


@DKThomp @cremieuxrecueil Yes, judging from @TheFIREorg's database of campus cancellation attempts, 2016 was a particularly bad year. But 2015 had also been the worst year up to that point.

(The really big spike is 2020, after George Floyd was killed.) https://t.co/3yhZSUDacE

@DKThomp @cremieuxrecueil I don't think Trump was the origin of wokeness. In the Bay Area, at least, it was very well established several years before he took office.

Wow: When Tolkien started writing the Lord of the Rings, it wasn't even about the ring. The sniffing rider was Gandalf!

@MajesticJCD @cremieuxrecueil They're not as powerful. All the evidence suggests that wokeness peaked in 2020.

@historyinmemes A friend of mine who was an officer in one of these regiments said it's always a really bad hangover when this happens, not heatstroke or whatever excuse they give publicly.

@cremieuxrecueil Can't deny he's right about that. It was one of the worst qualities of woke mobs, the way they became even more vicious if the victim showed any sign of weakness. It was proof that they were mobs in the truest sense.

@YasminThinks @historyinmemes Ha, you're right.

"Can I have a made-up About the Author section at the end, where it says I fought for Alexander the Great and invented both Coke and Pepsi?"

— 12 yo on a book he's writing

@cremieuxrecueil We should thank China for showing their hand early.

@deedydas This has not been my experience.


@ddayen There's an intellectually dishonest phrase for you, "fresh from facing scrutiny about..."

@kpooya He's already taller than me. But it's never enough.

15 yo (right)'s technique for looking tall in group photos. https://t.co/3AwB1Pgs1S

@HistoryEJ In the west of England. Near Wales, but not in Wales.

"Grand New Estate" offered for $30 million in Palo Alto.

How many acres is this estate?

.29

@ChristianDoesAI If you think I sat idly by you have not been paying attention.

is just a couple percent of Hunters in the Snow. https://t.co/8EygWpYObN

A data point about Impressionism. This nice little painting https://t.co/4rf0fa8EPF

@c0n5tantinople @pharmabroo The reason it makes sense is that the majority of finance is just about making money, so it attracts people who are mainly interested in that.

@danieldohh The latter.


The Word "Hacker"
April 2004
To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks
into computers.  Among programmers it means a good programmer.
But the two meanings are connected.  To programmers,
"hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone
who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer
wants to or not.
To add to the confusion, the noun "hack" also has two senses.  It can
be either a compliment or an insult.  It's called a hack when
you do something in an ugly way.  But when you do something
so clever that you somehow beat the system, that's also
called a hack.  The word is used more often in the former than
the latter sense, probably because ugly solutions are more
common than brilliant ones.
Believe it or not, the two senses of "hack" are also
connected.  Ugly and imaginative solutions have something in
common: they both break the rules.  And there is a gradual
continuum between rule breaking that's merely ugly (using
duct tape to attach something to your bike) and rule breaking
that is brilliantly imaginative (discarding Euclidean space).
Hacking predates computers.  When he
was working on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman used to
amuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret documents.
This tradition continues today.
When we were in grad school, a hacker friend of mine who spent too much
time around MIT had
his own lock picking kit.
(He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise.)
It is sometimes hard to explain to authorities why one would
want to do such things.
Another friend of mine once got in trouble with the government for
breaking into computers.  This had only recently been declared
a crime, and the FBI found that their usual investigative
technique didn't work.  Police investigation apparently begins with
a motive.  The usual motives are few: drugs, money, sex,
revenge.  Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on
the FBI's list.  Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to
them.
Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers'
general attitude of disobedience.  But that disobedience is
a byproduct of the qualities that make them good programmers.
They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate
newspeech, but they also laugh at someone who tells them
a certain problem can't be solved.
Suppress one, and you suppress the other.
This attitude is sometimes affected.  Sometimes young programmers
notice the eccentricities of eminent hackers and decide to
adopt some of their own in order to seem smarter.
The fake version is not merely
annoying; the prickly attitude of these posers
can actually slow the process of innovation.
But even factoring in their annoying eccentricities,
the disobedient attitude of hackers is a net win.  I wish its
advantages were better understood.
For example, I suspect people in Hollywood are
simply mystified by
hackers' attitudes toward copyrights.  They are a perennial
topic of heated discussion on Slashdot.
But why should people who program computers
be so concerned about copyrights, of all things?
Partly because some companies use
mechanisms
to prevent
copying.  Show any hacker a lock and his first thought is
how to pick it.  But there is a deeper reason that
hackers are alarmed by measures like copyrights and patents.
They see increasingly aggressive measures to protect
"intellectual property"
as a threat to the intellectual
freedom they need to do their job.
And they are right.
It is by poking about inside current technology that
hackers get ideas for the next generation.  No thanks,
intellectual homeowners may say, we don't need any
outside help.  But they're wrong.
The next generation of computer technology has
often—perhaps more often than not—been developed by outsiders.
In 1977 there was no doubt some group within IBM developing
what they expected to be
the next generation of business computer.  They were mistaken.
The next generation of business computer was
being developed on entirely different lines by two long-haired
guys called Steve in a
garage
in Los Altos.  At about the
same time, the powers that be
were cooperating to develop the
official next generation operating system, Multics.
But two guys who thought Multics excessively complex went off
and wrote their own.  They gave it a name that
was a joking reference to Multics: Unix.
The latest intellectual property laws impose
unprecedented restrictions on the sort of poking around that
leads to new ideas. In the past, a competitor might use patents
to prevent you from selling a copy of something they
made, but they couldn't prevent you from
taking one apart to see how it worked.   The latest
laws make this a crime.  How are we
to develop new technology if we can't study current
technology to figure out how to improve it?
Ironically, hackers have brought this on themselves.
Computers are responsible for the problem.  The control systems
inside machines used to be physical: gears and levers and cams.
Increasingly, the brains (and thus the value) of products is
in software. And by this I mean software in the general sense:
i.e. data.  A song on an LP is physically stamped into the
plastic.  A song on an iPod's disk is merely stored on it.
Data is by definition easy to copy.  And the Internet
makes copies easy to distribute.  So it is no wonder
companies are afraid.  But, as so often happens, fear has
clouded their judgement.  The government has responded
with draconian laws to protect intellectual property.
They probably mean well. But
they may not realize that such laws will do more harm
than good.
Why are programmers so violently opposed to these laws?
If I were a legislator, I'd be interested in this
mystery—for the same reason that, if I were a farmer and suddenly
heard a lot of squawking coming from my hen house one night,
I'd want to go out and investigate.  Hackers are not stupid,
and unanimity is very rare in this world.
So if they're all squawking,
perhaps there is something amiss.
Could it be that such laws, though intended to protect America,
will actually harm it?  Think about it.  There is something
very
American
about Feynman breaking into safes during
the Manhattan Project.  It's hard to imagine the authorities
having a sense of humor about such things over
in Germany at that time.  Maybe it's not a coincidence.
Hackers are unruly.  That is the essence of hacking.  And it
is also the essence of Americanness.  It is no accident
that Silicon Valley
is in America, and not France, or Germany,
or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside
the lines.
I lived for a while in Florence.  But after I'd been there
a few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping
to find there was back in the place I'd just left.
The reason Florence is famous is that in 1450, it was New York.
In 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious
people you find now in America.  (So I went back to America.)
It is greatly to America's advantage that it is
a congenial atmosphere for the right sort of unruliness—that
it is a home not just for the smart, but for smart-alecks.
And hackers are invariably smart-alecks.  If we had a national
holiday, it would be April 1st.  It says a great deal about
our work that we use the same word for a brilliant or a
horribly cheesy solution.   When we cook one up we're not
always 100% sure which kind it is.  But as long as it has
the right sort of wrongness, that's a promising sign.
It's odd that people
think of programming as precise and methodical.
Computers
are precise and methodical.  Hacking is something you do
with a gleeful laugh.
In our world some of the most characteristic solutions
are not far removed from practical
jokes.  IBM was no doubt rather surprised by the consequences
of the licensing deal for DOS, just as the hypothetical
"adversary" must be when Michael Rabin solves a problem by
redefining it as one that's easier to solve.
Smart-alecks have to develop a keen sense of how much they
can
get away
with.  And lately hackers
have sensed a change
in the atmosphere.
Lately hackerliness seems rather frowned upon.
To hackers the recent contraction in civil liberties seems
especially ominous.  That must also mystify outsiders.
Why should we care especially about civil
liberties?  Why programmers, more than
dentists or salesmen or landscapers?
Let me put the case in terms a government official would appreciate.
Civil liberties are not just an ornament, or a quaint
American tradition.  Civil liberties make countries rich.
If you made a graph of
GNP per capita vs. civil liberties, you'd notice a definite
trend.  Could civil liberties really be a cause, rather
than just an effect?  I think so.  I think a society in which
people can do and say what they want will also tend to
be one in which the most efficient solutions win, rather than
those sponsored by the most influential people.
Authoritarian countries become corrupt;
corrupt countries become poor; and poor countries are weak.
It seems to me there is
a Laffer curve for government power, just as for
tax revenues.  At least, it seems likely enough that it
would be stupid to try the experiment and find out.  Unlike
high tax rates, you can't repeal totalitarianism if it
turns out to be a mistake.
This is why hackers worry.  The government spying on people doesn't
literally make programmers write worse code.  It just leads
eventually to a world in which bad ideas win.  And because
this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive
to it.  They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a
distance, as animals can sense an approaching
thunderstorm.
It would be ironic if, as hackers fear, recent measures
intended to protect national security and intellectual property
turned out to be a missile aimed right at what makes
America successful.  But it would not be the first time that
measures taken in an atmosphere of panic had
the opposite of the intended effect.
There is such a thing as Americanness.
There's nothing like living abroad to teach you that.
And if you want to know whether something will nurture or squash
this quality, it would be hard to find a better focus
group than hackers, because they come closest of any group
I know to embodying it.  Closer, probably,  than
the men running our government,
who for all their talk of patriotism
remind me more of Richelieu or Mazarin
than Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.
When you read what the founding fathers had to say for
themselves, they sound more like hackers.
"The spirit of resistance to government,"
Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish
it always to be kept alive."
Imagine an American president saying that today.
Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of
the founding fathers have embarrassed generations of
their less confident successors.  They remind us where we come from.
They remind us that it is the people who break rules that are
the source of America's wealth and power.
Those in a position to impose rules naturally want them to be
obeyed.  But be careful what you ask for. You might get it.
Thanks
to Ken Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Daniel Giffin,
Sarah Harlin,  Shiro Kawai, Jessica Livingston, Matz,
Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Guido van Rossum,
David Weinberger, and
Steven Wolfram for reading drafts of this essay.
(The
image
shows Steves Jobs and Wozniak
with a "blue box."
Photo by Margret Wozniak. Reproduced by permission of Steve
Wozniak.)
Portuguese Translation
Hebrew Translation
Romanian Translation
You'll find this essay and 14 others in
Hackers & Painters
.


@Tyler_The_Wise This is so false that it's false in an interesting way. Wokeness/political correctness is a *very* specific phenomenon.

@barrygoldman1 @lefineder It's implicit when talking about any era except the most recent that you're talking about a limited geographical region. Otherwise you can't use any label for a period.

"It is true. Glad it's a footnote though!"

— Jessica on a controversial point in the new essay I'm writing

@MHastingz But it's *true* that it's a mistake to dismiss everyone who cares about certain problems as woke. Wokeness is a much more specific phenomenon that merely caring about certain problems. It's more about seeming to care than actually caring. That's what makes it bad.

@JayHuber16 I'm writing one right now.

@MHastingz You clearly have not been paying attention.

And the companies that don't roll back woke policies are in turn going to find themselves in an awkward position, because they'll get all the people who leave. In the limit case you get a few companies that are 100% militant woke, and I doubt they'd be productive.

As companies roll back woke policies, they're all going to learn what Brian Armstrong did: that the people who leave when you do this are, on average, exactly the people you'd want to leave.

@lefineder You don't have to put Dark Ages in quotes. This was smack in the middle of them.

@ZvonimirFras Yes, exactly.


Fierce Nerds
May 2021
Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinary
social situations they are — as quiet and diffident as the star
quarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physics
symposium. And for the same reason: they are fish out of water.
But the apparent diffidence of nerds is an illusion due to the fact
that when non-nerds observe them, it's usually in ordinary social
situations. In fact some nerds are quite fierce.
The fierce nerds are a small but interesting group. They are as a
rule extremely competitive — more competitive, I'd say, than highly
competitive non-nerds. Competition is more personal for them. Partly
perhaps because they're not emotionally mature enough to distance
themselves from it, but also because there's less randomness in the
kinds of competition they engage in, and they are thus more justified
in taking the results personally.
Fierce nerds also tend to be somewhat overconfident, especially
when young. It might seem like it would be a disadvantage to be
mistaken about one's abilities, but empirically it isn't. Up to a
point, confidence is a self-fullfilling prophecy.
Another quality you find in most fierce nerds is intelligence. Not
all nerds are smart, but the fierce ones are always at least
moderately so. If they weren't, they wouldn't have the confidence
to be fierce.
[
1
]
There's also a natural connection between nerdiness and
independent-mindedness
. It's hard to be
independent-minded without
being somewhat socially awkward, because conventional beliefs are
so often mistaken, or at least arbitrary. No one who was both
independent-minded and ambitious would want to waste the effort it
takes to fit in. And the independent-mindedness of the fierce nerds
will obviously be of the
aggressive
rather than the passive type:
they'll be annoyed by rules, rather than dreamily unaware of them.
I'm less sure why fierce nerds are impatient, but most seem to be.
You notice it first in conversation, where they tend to interrupt
you. This is merely annoying, but in the more promising fierce nerds
it's connected to a deeper impatience about solving problems. Perhaps
the competitiveness and impatience of fierce nerds are not separate
qualities, but two manifestations of a single underlying drivenness.
When you combine all these qualities in sufficient quantities, the
result is quite formidable. The most vivid example of fierce nerds
in action may be James Watson's
The Double Helix
. The first sentence
of the book is "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood,"
and the portrait he goes on to paint of Crick is the quintessential
fierce nerd: brilliant, socially awkward, competitive, independent-minded,
overconfident. But so is the implicit portrait he paints of himself.
Indeed, his lack of social awareness makes both portraits that much
more realistic, because he baldly states all sorts of opinions and
motivations that a smoother person would conceal. And moreover it's
clear from the story that Crick and Watson's fierce nerdiness was
integral to their success. Their independent-mindedness caused them
to consider approaches that most others ignored, their overconfidence
allowed them to work on problems they only half understood (they
were literally described as "clowns" by one eminent insider), and
their impatience and competitiveness got them to the answer ahead
of two other groups that would otherwise have found it within the
next year, if not the next several months.
[
2
]
The idea that there could be fierce nerds is an unfamiliar one not
just to many normal people but even to some young nerds. Especially
early on, nerds spend so much of their time in ordinary social
situations and so little doing real work that they get a lot more
evidence of their awkwardness than their power. So there will be
some who read this description of the fierce nerd and realize "Hmm,
that's me." And it is to you, young fierce nerd, that I now turn.
I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is that
your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems.
And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that
nerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number
of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases.
Recently
getting rich
became
one of them: 7 of the 8 richest people
in America are now fierce nerds.
Indeed, being a fierce nerd is probably even more helpful in business
than in nerds' original territory of scholarship. Fierceness seems
optional there. Darwin for example doesn't seem to have been
especially fierce. Whereas it's impossible to be the CEO of a company
over a certain size without being fierce, so now that nerds can win
at business, fierce nerds will increasingly monopolize the really
big successes.
The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness will
turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playground
bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the
hater
, the shooter
down of
new ideas
.
How do you avoid this fate? Work on ambitious projects. If you
succeed, it will bring you a kind of satisfaction that neutralizes
bitterness. But you don't need to have succeeded to feel this;
merely working on hard projects gives most fierce nerds some
feeling of satisfaction. And those it doesn't, it at least keeps
busy.
[
3
]
Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, by
devoting yourself to meditation or psychotherapy or something like
that. Maybe that's the right answer for some people. I have no idea.
But it doesn't seem the optimal solution to me. If you're given a
sharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edge
to avoid cutting yourself.
If you do choose the ambitious route, you'll have a tailwind behind
you. There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the past
century we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakers
to technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and I
don't see anything on the horizon that will end it. At least not
till the nerds end it themselves by bringing about the singularity.
Notes
[
1
]
To be a nerd is to be socially awkward, and there are two
distinct ways to do that: to be playing the same game as everyone
else, but badly, and to be playing a different game. The smart nerds
are the latter type.
[
2
]
The same qualities that make fierce nerds so effective can
also make them very annoying. Fierce nerds would do well to remember
this, and (a) try to keep a lid on it, and (b) seek out organizations
and types of work where getting the right answer matters more than
preserving social harmony. In practice that means small groups
working on hard problems. Which fortunately is the most fun kind
of environment anyway.
[
3
]
If success neutralizes bitterness, why are there some people
who are at least moderately successful and yet still quite bitter?
Because people's potential bitterness varies depending on how
naturally bitter their personality is, and how ambitious they are:
someone who's naturally very bitter will still have a lot left after
success neutralizes some of it, and someone who's very ambitious
will need proportionally more success to satisfy that ambition.
So the worst-case scenario is someone who's both naturally bitter
and extremely ambitious, and yet only moderately successful.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Steve Blank, Patrick Collison, Jessica
Livingston, Amjad Masad, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Chinese Translation


The motives of crazy shooters don't matter. They're crazy! The only reason people even talk about their motives is when it suits some axe they have to grind.

@soundboy Come on, that's not true. Investors who invest in YC startups from the UK don't think "they couldn't persuade anyone in the UK to invest in them." It seems so obvious to them that SV is a better place to raise money that they don't even consider whether the startup tried at home.

When drones take over, people will be amazed that Navy pilots were able to land on carriers. https://t.co/B2I8KXtCqL

The Fort Apache of academic freedom.

(In the 1970s "Fort Apache" was the nickname of a police station in a part of New York so lawless that it felt like a frontier outpost.) https://t.co/Jb7MUdr7Ia

Yet more bad behavior by Carta. This is now a clear pattern.

We can't assume that if we had a single world government, the world would look like Europe and grow like America. More likely it would look like America and grow like Europe.

@ahistoryinart Also near-obsessive composition.

@TheFIREorg My 12 yo son banned me from saying a couple of these.

@dsiroker @davidu Hard to beat Ronco in this department.

@PalmerLuckey When I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship in 1985, the project I proposed to work on was an AI as an entertaining fictional character. The committee interviewing me included an English professor. She did not like this idea At All.


@martyamark I never talked to him, but I used to see him around because he lived near us.

@TeamBlind I'm sure I've done YC interviews barefoot and unshowered.

@GregMoranX I *hope* not but the current administration is giving them a run for their money.

People sometimes speculate about whether YC would have funded Apple. We would have if Steve Jobs wanted us to, because Steve Jobs got what he wanted.

@ir605 @JonErlichman You mean for helping larval forms of things other than companies? Possibly, but a lot would have to change.

@LifeMathMoney Well that's not true. Caring about impressing random people is a mistake, but caring about impressing people whose opinions you respect is an enormously powerful force.

@billclerico TIL there was such a thing.

@shawnchauhan1 No, not that either. Being better prepared helps, but it's not the most important factor of all.

@AaronAnandji That seems about right.

@siraustin @paradoxes_ai You can construct it for yourself by walking down the Nasdaq. You don't have to walk far for it to stabilize, because there's a power-law distribution of market caps.


"It's easier to win an argument with a genius than an idiot."

— Gurwinder Bhogal

Joe Rogan on ICE:

"You don't want militarized people in the streets just roaming around snatching people up, many of which turn out to actually be US citizens that just don't have their papers on them. Are we really going to be the Gestapo? ...Is that what we've come to?"

I bet few people there know it, but YC wouldn't exist without UIUC. My father went there from England on a Fullbright, and came back determined to move to America.

How does Fra Angelico get such amazing variation in tone with tempera? Zoom in and you'll see: extraordinarily fine hatching. He painted these big altarpieces with a brush with about 10 hairs. https://t.co/BfeBscPcWi

A 1930s drone.

The stuff about Trump in the Epstein files must be really bad.

I met today with the founder of Starcloud and I realized this is going to be one of the biggest engineering projects of our era. When you look at the tradeoffs, it seems inevitable that all the GPUs are going to live in space.

One of the weird things about haters is that between their episodes of hating, you forget they exist. They're usually not prominent enough that you'd hear about them otherwise. Then they have a new outburst and you think "Oh yeah, this guy is obsessed with me. Ugh. How creepy."

I did office hours with a startup yesterday that I ended up advising to (a) decrease their growth rate and (b) spend the money they've raised faster by hiring more people and paying them high salaries. Possibly the first time I've ever told a startup this.

In this case, decrease their growth rate meant decrease it from 30% a month (23x a year) to 20% a month (9x a year). That's how well this startup is doing.


Java's Cover
April 2001
This essay developed out of conversations I've had with
several other programmers about why Java smelled suspicious.  It's not
a critique of Java!  It is a case study of hacker's radar.
Over time, hackers develop a nose for good (and bad) technology.
I thought it might be interesting to try and write down what
made Java seem suspect to me.
Some people who've read this think it's an interesting attempt to write about
something that hasn't been written about before.  Others say I
will get in trouble for appearing to be writing about
things I don't understand.  So, just in
case it does any good, let me clarify that I'm not writing here
about Java (which I have never used) but about hacker's radar
(which I have thought about a lot).
The aphorism "you can't tell a book by its cover" originated in
the times when books were sold in plain cardboard covers, to be
bound by each purchaser according to his own taste.  In those days,
you couldn't tell a book by its cover.  But publishing has advanced
since then: present-day publishers work hard to make the cover
something you can tell a book by.
I spend a lot of time in bookshops and I feel as if I have by now
learned to understand everything publishers mean to tell me about
a book, and perhaps a bit more.  The time I haven't spent in
bookshops I've spent mostly in front of computers, and I feel as
if I've learned, to some degree, to judge technology by its cover
as well.  It may be just luck, but I've saved myself from a few
technologies that turned out to be real stinkers.
So far, Java seems like a stinker to me.  I've never written a Java
program, never more than glanced over reference books about it,
but I have a hunch that it won't be a very successful language.
I may turn out to be mistaken; making predictions about technology
is a dangerous business.  But for what it's worth, as a sort of
time capsule, here's why I don't like the look of Java:
1. It has been so energetically hyped.  Real standards don't have
to be promoted.  No one had to promote C, or Unix, or HTML.  A real
standard tends to be already established by the time most people
hear about it.  On the hacker radar screen, Perl is as big as Java,
or bigger, just on the strength of its own merits.
2. It's aimed low.  In the original Java white paper, Gosling
explicitly says Java was designed not to be too difficult for
programmers used to C.  It was designed to be another C++: C plus
a few ideas taken from more advanced languages.  Like the creators
of sitcoms or junk food or package tours, Java's designers were
consciously designing a product for people not as smart as them.
Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been
bad:  Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++.  The good languages have been
those that were designed for their own creators:  C, Perl, Smalltalk,
Lisp.
3. It has ulterior motives.  Someone once said that the world would
be a better place if people only wrote books because they had
something to say, rather than because they wanted to write a book.
Likewise, the reason we hear about Java all the time is not because
it has something to say about programming languages.  We hear about
Java as part of a plan by Sun to undermine Microsoft.
4. No one loves it.  C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and Lisp programmers
love their languages.  I've never heard anyone say that they loved
Java.
5. People are forced to use it.  A lot of the people I know using
Java are using it because they feel they have to.  Either it's
something they felt they had to do to get funded, or something they
thought customers would want, or something they were told to do by
management.  These are smart people; if the technology was good,
they'd have used it voluntarily.
6. It has too many cooks.  The best programming languages have been
developed by small groups.  Java seems to be run by a committee.
If it turns out to be a good language, it will be the first time
in history that a committee has designed a good language.
7. It's bureaucratic.  From what little I know about Java, there
seem to be a lot of protocols for doing things.  Really good
languages aren't like that.  They let you do what you want and get
out of the way.
8. It's pseudo-hip.  Sun now pretends that Java is a grassroots,
open-source language effort like Perl or Python.  This one just
happens to be controlled by a giant company.  So the language is
likely to have the same drab clunkiness as anything else that comes
out of a big company.
9. It's designed for large organizations.  Large organizations have
different aims from hackers. They want languages that are (believed
to be) suitable for use by large teams of mediocre programmers--
languages with features that, like the speed limiters in U-Haul
trucks, prevent fools from doing too much damage.  Hackers don't
like a language that talks down to them.  Hackers just want power.
Historically, languages designed for large organizations (PL/I,
Ada) have lost, while hacker languages (C, Perl) have won.  The
reason: today's teenage hacker is tomorrow's CTO.
10. The wrong people like it.  The programmers I admire most are
not, on the whole, captivated by Java.  Who does like Java?  Suits,
who don't know one language from another, but know that they keep
hearing about Java in the press; programmers at big companies, who
are amazed to find that there is something even better than C++;
and plug-and-chug undergrads, who are ready to like anything that
might get them a job (will this be on the test?).  These people's
opinions change with every wind.
11. Its daddy is in a pinch.  Sun's business model is being undermined
on two fronts.  Cheap Intel processors, of the same type used in
desktop machines, are now more than fast enough for servers.  And
FreeBSD seems to be at least as good an OS for servers as Solaris.
Sun's advertising implies that you need Sun servers for industrial
strength applications.  If this were true, Yahoo would be first in
line to buy Suns;  but when I worked there, the servers were all
Intel boxes running FreeBSD.  This bodes ill for Sun's future.  If
Sun runs into trouble, they could drag Java down with them.
12. The DoD likes it.  The Defense Department is encouraging
developers to use Java. This seems to me the most damning sign of
all.  The Defense Department does a fine (though expensive) job of
defending the country, but they love plans and procedures and
protocols.  Their culture is the opposite of hacker culture; on
questions of software they will tend to bet wrong.  The last time
the DoD really liked a programming language, it was Ada.
Bear in mind, this is not a critique of Java, but a critique of
its cover.  I don't know Java well enough to like it or dislike
it.  This is just an explanation of why I don't find that I'm eager
to learn it.
It may seem cavalier to dismiss a language before you've even tried
writing programs in it.  But this is something all programmers have
to do.  There are too many technologies out there to learn them
all.  You have to learn to judge by outward signs which will be
worth your time.  I have likewise cavalierly dismissed Cobol, Ada,
Visual Basic, the IBM AS400, VRML, ISO 9000, the SET protocol, VMS,
Novell Netware, and CORBA, among others.  They just smelled wrong.
It could be that in Java's case I'm mistaken.  It could be that a
language promoted by one big company to undermine another, designed
by a committee for a "mainstream" audience, hyped to the skies,
and beloved of the DoD, happens nonetheless to be a clean, beautiful,
powerful language that I would love programming in.  It could be,
but it seems very unlikely.
Trevor Re: Java's Cover
Berners-Lee Re: Java
Being Popular
Sun Internal Memo
2005: BusinessWeek Agrees
Japanese Translation


Founder Control
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
December 2010
Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common
it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after
a series A round.  He said VCs told him this almost never happened.
Ten years ago that was true.  In the past, founders rarely kept
control of the board through a series A.  The traditional series A
board consisted of two founders, two VCs, and one independent member.
More recently the recipe is often one founder, one VC, and one
independent.  In either case the founders lose their majority.
But not always.  Mark Zuckerberg kept control of Facebook's board
through the series A and still has it today.  Mark Pincus has kept
control of Zynga's too.  But are these just outliers?  How common
is it for founders to keep control after an A round?  I'd heard of
several cases among the companies we've funded, but I wasn't sure
how many there were, so I emailed the ycfounders list.
The replies surprised me.  In a dozen companies we've funded, the
founders still had a majority of the board seats after the series
A round.
I feel like we're at a tipping point here.  A lot of VCs still act
as if founders retaining board control after a series A is unheard-of.
A lot of them try to make you feel bad if you even ask — as if
you're a noob or a control freak for wanting such a thing.  But the
founders I heard from aren't noobs or control freaks.  Or if they
are, they are, like Mark Zuckerberg, the kind of noobs and control
freaks VCs should be trying to fund more of.
Founders retaining control after a series A is clearly heard-of.
And barring financial catastrophe, I think in the coming year it
will become the norm.
Control of a company is a more complicated matter than simply
outvoting other parties in board meetings.  Investors usually get
vetos over certain big decisions, like selling the company, regardless
of how many board seats they have.  And board votes are rarely
split.  Matters are decided in the discussion preceding the vote,
not in the vote itself, which is usually unanimous.  But if opinion
is divided in such discussions, the side that knows it would lose
in a vote will tend to be less insistent.  That's what board control
means in practice.  You don't simply get to do whatever you want;
the board still has to act in the interest of the shareholders; but
if you have a majority of board seats, then your opinion about
what's in the interest of the shareholders will tend to prevail.
So while board control is not total control, it's not imaginary
either.  There's inevitably a difference in how things feel within
the company.  Which means if it becomes the norm for founders to
retain board control after a series A, that will change the way
things feel in the whole startup world.
The switch to the new norm may be surprisingly fast, because the
startups that can retain control tend to be the best ones.  They're
the ones that set the trends, both for other startups and for VCs.
A lot of the reason VCs are harsh when negotiating with startups
is that they're embarrassed to go back to their partners looking
like they got beaten.  When they sign a termsheet, they want to be
able to brag about the good terms they got.  A lot of them don't
care that much personally about whether founders keep board control.
They just don't want to seem like they had to make concessions.
Which means if letting the founders keep control stops being perceived
as a concession, it will rapidly become much more common.
Like a lot of changes that have been forced on VCs, this change
won't turn out to be as big a problem as they might think. VCs will
still be able to convince; they just won't be able to compel.  And
the startups where they have to resort to compulsion are not the
ones that matter anyway.  VCs make most of their money from a few
big hits, and those aren't them.
Knowing that founders will keep control of the board may even help
VCs pick better.  If they know they can't fire the founders, they'll
have to choose founders they can trust.  And that's who they should
have been choosing all along.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, John Bautista, Trevor Blackwell, Paul
Buchheit, Brian Chesky, Bill Clerico, Patrick Collison, Adam
Goldstein, James Lindenbaum, Jessica Livingston, and Fred Wilson
for reading drafts of this.


The Real Reason to End the Death Penalty
April 2021
When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about
things like whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's
life, whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether
more death sentences are given to some groups than others. But in
practice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether
it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to kill
innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are
innocent
.
When I was a kid I imagined that it was unusual for people to be
convicted of crimes they hadn't committed, and that in murder cases
especially this must be very rare. Far from it. Now, thanks to
organizations like the
Innocence Project
,
we see a constant stream
of stories about murder convictions being overturned after new
evidence emerges. Sometimes the police and prosecutors were just
very sloppy. Sometimes they were crooked, and knew full well they
were convicting an innocent person.
Kenneth Adams and three other men spent 18 years in prison on a
murder conviction. They were exonerated after DNA testing implicated
three different men, two of whom later confessed. The police had
been told about the other men early in the investigation, but never
followed up the lead.
Keith Harward spent 33 years in prison on a murder conviction. He
was convicted because "experts" said his teeth matched photos of
bite marks on one victim. He was exonerated after DNA testing showed
the murder had been committed by another man, Jerry Crotty.
Ricky Jackson and two other men spent 39 years in prison after being
convicted of murder on the testimony of a 12 year old boy, who later
recanted and said he'd been coerced by police. Multiple people have
confirmed the boy was elsewhere at the time. The three men were
exonerated after the county prosecutor dropped the charges, saying
"The state is conceding the obvious."
Alfred Brown spent 12 years in prison on a murder conviction,
including 10 years on death row. He was exonerated after it was
discovered that the assistant district attorney had concealed phone
records proving he could not have committed the crimes.
Glenn Ford spent 29 years on death row after having been convicted
of murder. He was exonerated after new evidence proved he was not
even at the scene when the murder occurred. The attorneys assigned
to represent him had never tried a jury case before.
Cameron Willingham was actually executed in 2004 by lethal injection.
The "expert" who testified that he deliberately set fire to his
house has since been discredited. A re-examination of the case
ordered by the state of Texas in 2009 concluded that "a finding of
arson could not be sustained."
Rich Glossip
has spent 20 years on death row after being convicted
of murder on the testimony of the actual killer, who escaped with
a life sentence in return for implicating him. In 2015 he came
within minutes of execution before it emerged that Oklahoma had
been planning to kill him with an illegal combination of drugs.
They still plan to go ahead with the execution, perhaps as soon as
this summer, despite
new
evidence
exonerating him.
I could go on. There are hundreds of similar cases. In Florida
alone, 29 death row prisoners have been exonerated so far.
Far from being rare, wrongful murder convictions are
very common
.
Police are under pressure to solve a crime that has gotten a lot
of attention. When they find a suspect, they want to believe he's
guilty, and ignore or even destroy evidence suggesting otherwise.
District attorneys want to be seen as effective and tough on crime,
and in order to win convictions are willing to manipulate witnesses
and withhold evidence. Court-appointed defense attorneys are
overworked and often incompetent. There's a ready supply of criminals
willing to give false testimony in return for a lighter sentence,
suggestible witnesses who can be made to say whatever police want,
and bogus "experts" eager to claim that science proves the defendant
is guilty. And juries want to believe them, since otherwise some
terrible crime remains unsolved.
This circus of incompetence and dishonesty is the real issue with
the death penalty. We don't even reach the point where theoretical
questions about the moral justification or effectiveness of capital
punishment start to matter, because so many of the people sentenced
to death are actually innocent. Whatever it means in theory, in
practice capital punishment means killing innocent people.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Don Knight for
reading drafts of this.
Related:
Will Florida Kill an Innocent Man?
Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?
Did Texas execute an innocent man?


Write Simply
March 2021
I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.
That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something
is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less
energy they expend on your prose, the more they'll have left for
your ideas.
And the further they'll read. Most readers' energy tends to flag
part way through an article or essay. If the friction of reading
is low enough, more keep going till the end.
There's an Italian dish called
saltimbocca
, which means "leap
into the mouth." My goal when writing might be called
saltintesta
:
the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that
got them there.
It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You
might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the
time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and
pure ideas is not filled with poetry.
Plus it's more considerate to write simply. When you write in a
fancy way to impress people, you're making them do extra work just
so you can seem cool. It's like trailing a long train behind you
that readers have to carry.
And remember, if you're writing in English, that a lot of your
readers won't be native English speakers. Their understanding of
ideas may be way ahead of their understanding of English. So you
can't assume that writing about a difficult topic means you can
use difficult words.
Of course, fancy writing doesn't just conceal ideas. It can also
conceal the lack of them. That's why some people write that way,
to conceal the fact that they have
nothing to say. Whereas writing
simply keeps you honest. If you say nothing simply, it will be
obvious to everyone, including you.
Simple writing also lasts better. People reading your stuff in the
future will be in much the same position as people from other
countries reading it today. The culture and the language will have
changed. It's not vain to care about that, any more than it's vain
for a woodworker to build a chair to last.
Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or
writing. It's a sign you did a good job.
But although these are all real advantages of writing simply, none
of them are why I do it. The main reason I write simply is that it
offends me not to. When I write a sentence that seems too complicated,
or that uses unnecessarily intellectual words, it doesn't seem fancy
to me. It seems clumsy.
There are of course times when you want to use a complicated sentence
or fancy word for effect. But you should never do it by accident.
The other reason my writing ends up being simple is the way I do
it. I write the first draft fast, then spend days editing it, trying
to get everything just right. Much of this editing is cutting, and
that makes simple writing even simpler.


@haroonahmadmd I've largely replaced Google with ChatGPT for looking things up, but it hasn't changed anything about what I write.

@SpencerHakimian What? This is no longer a tariff...

@jmhorp It's not just the aesthetic value. People can walk across that space, which you can't do across a road full of traffic.

All the while, builders are building.

@sfmcguire79 "Belonging" seems to be the default new euphemism.

@SurendranNisha You learn not to do this when they're 1.

@rashlabs You just write a good essay. But your teachers may freak out if you do.

At least 13 yo won't spend years puzzling over how the "conclusion" is supposed to be different from the "introduction" even though they're saying the same things. I told him upfront it's just an artifact of this fake format.

I don't mind if my kids have to learn math that's not real math or writing that's not real writing or science that's just words, but at the same time as I teach them these things I always try to give them an idea of how they're fake, and what the real version is like.

13 yo asked me to teach him how to write essays. I asked if he wanted to learn how to write real essays, or the kind you have to write in school. He said the school kind, because he's writing one for school.


@dbasch @ThijsVerreck I have very high standards for books. That's what makes it hard.

@ThijsVerreck Publishing a paper book takes a lot of time, and at any given time I'd rather be writing more essays.

@JoshhuaSays Out, or just over?

Good game to play with small kids: push them on the swings, but pretend to push them very clumsily. https://t.co/sjX2xhwEg7

@ilyasu I'm not accusing you of not understanding anything. I'm just talking about the shape of the problem.

@ilyasu Ah, so you only want the founders who are set on taking over the world. But that's a real problem, because it can take them several years to make up their minds about that.

@ilyasu Why? Because startups need less money?

Idea: Maybe if every time we put the link in a reply we talk about how lame it is that we have to do this, Elon will realize that it is, in fact, lame.

It's so fucking lame that I have to put the link to the source in a reply in order to avoid being penalized by Twitter's algorithm, but here it is: https://t.co/IVRrreJ7mB

AI needs a lot of power right now. But permitting has made connecting new power sources to the grid prohibitively slow (5 years!). The solution: off-grid solar. https://t.co/nU1VX4ZGHH