This is the first in a series of posts about Paul Graham’s book Hackers & Painters.
I’m going to be interviewed for Y Combinator next weekend. So what better time to finally read through Paul Graham’s 2004 essay collection Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age?
When this book came out, I was a college freshman, and Graham was—unbeknownst to him—on the cusp of creating one of the startup world’s most prestigious (and most imitated) institutions. At the time, he was most famous for founding Viaweb, a now-forgotten e-commerce webapp that was acquired by Yahoo! for ~$45 million back in 1998.
So much has changed over the last six years that I was worried that Hackers & Painters would be irrelevant, a quaint relic from the aftermath of the dot-com boom. My fears were further stoked by the first sentence of the preface: “This book is an attempt to explain to the world at large what goes on in the world of computers.” Uh-oh, I thought, this isn’t a book for young, ambitious coders at all! “The computer world is an intellectual Wild West,” the preface pronounces, “where you can think anything you want, if you’re willing to risk the consequences. And this book, if I’ve done what I intended, is an intellectual Western.” This was written before Firefly and Deadwood, so I’m afraid the analogy is lost on me.
However, once I started the first chapter, my fears vanished. If I could send one 17-page document back in time to my high school self, it would be this chapter, “Why Nerds Are Unpopular.” Graham asks a simple, obvious question: “Why don’t smart kids make themselves popular? If they’re so smart, why don’t they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?” Suddenly I felt as if Graham knew me! Worse, he knew my future. One of the questions on the Y Combinator application is: “Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.” And I told the story of how I’d gotten perfect SAT scores and aced a slew of AP exams (some in subjects my school hadn’t even offered), thereby beating the education system. Now I feel like a cliché.
Graham’s main thesis is that most teenagers in the United States unconsciously dedicate every waking moment to the pursuit of popularity. The reason is that they want nothing more than to be popular. The exceptions are nerds. But don’t they want to be popular, too? “Of course I wanted to be popular,” Graham (the chess nerd standing in the upper-left in the 1981 photo above) writes, “But in fact I didn’t, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.”
This rings true with me. Mind you, I grew up in the era of video games, and (tragically) spent far more time with them than with either my studies or my ambitions. But I was ambitious, and I didn’t want to wait for adulthood to hit it big. Like so many other nerds of my generation, I set out to create a video game. Obviously that’s much easier said than done, but at least I taught myself (some) programming along the way. So the desire to accomplish real things was there, and it trumped my desire for Bueller-esque cachet. “Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.”
Aren’t there exceptions, smart people who avoid the social stigma of nerdiness? “Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they’ll tend to become nerds.” Hence the correlation between awkwardness and nerdiness: If you’re smart but not awkward, you can be popular with little effort. It’s a compelling hypothesis. And Graham expands it beyond high school to everywhere people resort to meaningless competition for lack of meaningful things to do: “Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives… I think the important thing about the real world is not that it’s populated by adults, but that it’s very large, and the things you do have real effects. That’s what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack.” He sums up, “Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.”
I’m a pretty mellow guy (“soft and nice,” as Max Klein put it on HN in response to my previous post), but I’m 100% behind Graham’s unforgiving condemnation of the primitive culture of high school: “If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn’t get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.” Don’t we all, PG. Don’t we all.
Tags: hackers & painters philosophy
I had a grotesquely familiar experience in an econ class today: The prof drew up a simple example of a simple concept, yet no one—myself included—understood it. Why? Multiple inconsistencies. A variable name meant one thing in the premises, and something else in the conclusion; a vector was used interchangeably with its distance; the matrix dimensions didn’t match up. Individually, each of these small errors could have been caught and corrected. But taken as a whole, they destroyed every trace of coherence. As a result, half the lecture was spent with the frazzled professor trying to clarify things, only to confuse the audience further, to the point that students were yelling, “Enough! Forget it! Let’s move on!” These are PhD-level students at one of the top econ programs in the world. Yet the situation was so agonizing that it drove them to pandemonium.