Paul Graham

Here’s another productivity reduction aid for you, Gary: Paul Graham, developer, artist, and venture capitalist who wrote a really fascinating book, Hackers and Painters, has an equally fascinating website (and shame on me for not thinking to look for it sooner). 

I came to it in a roundabout way, from a Digg post on online methods of disagreement. Graham’s essay, How to Disagree, classifies forms of online rebuttal. It’s a wry look at the kind of stuff you learned on the debate team in high school, and I wish everyone who participated in online discussion would read it. 

Of course, if you want to read it, you’re probably NOT the person who most needs it, but that’s the way of the world.

Graham’s essays frequently practice what I call “reasonable sedition,” i.e., he starts with a obvious, agreeable premise, then floats you gently out to the edge of accepted wisdom, and off the deep end. At some point you realize you’ve been nodding your head in time to his music, and the tune is the polar opposite of what “they say.”

Graham’s big on list-making, and his lists are the kind of stuff I like to see posted on cubicle walls. Try this one on good design (non-techies, ignore the fact that it seems focused on math).

I do wince at his tendency to minimize non-technical people. OTOH, I once worked for a large corporation that practically branded “non-technical=stupid+expendable” on my (non-technical) employees’ foreheads, forcing me to spend inordinate amounts of time convincing them that they were indeed assets. So I may be doing a bit of defensive projection there.

In the end, a common thread runs through most of his essays: “Use your head.” I can get behind that one, bigtime. And my (so far) favorite Graham quote pretty much says it all: 

“That was one of the most valuable things I learned from painting: you have to figure out for yourself what’s good. You can’t trust authorities. They’ll lie to you on this one.” 

It keeps me warm on those cold nights when I doubt my own taste. Thanks, Dr. Graham.

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