Suggestion: Read Paul Graham

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule changed the way I budget my time, both at work and with personal projects. It's also the best piece I know of for business people to understand engineers and other creative workers, which is useful for someone in that second category.

Several points:

• For many of the things he writes about, we can take his clout and background as evidence that his insight is 'real'. It doesn't have to explained via careful science to be true. I think the fact that Paul Graham is saying something, for certain subjects, makes it highly likely to be very-mostly-correct. I'll happily believe it to a high degree unless I have reason not to. I believe the evidence that they're mostly-correct is that he wrote them, and the evidence that things he writes are mostly-correct is that they have been so in the past and that he's intelligent and moreover consistently intelligent, so we have little expectation of a given essay suddenly floundering into bullshit.

• His insight and way of thinking can be useful even if they are unreal. I mean - I'm sure every essay on that list makes points that can be argued to death or outright refuted by a sufficiently committed pedant. But they still have value. We think in heuristics anyway, for the most part, so it's valuable to glean heuristics from smart people and to see how they think and how their heuristics work (or don't work).

• Empirical evidence would not really improve many of these essays. For one thing, filling an essay with detailed evidence that isn't necessary for the reader to believe it would probably detract from the quality of the essay. And many of his points are opinions or perspectives. They shouldn't or can't be highly factual. They would become false if they were made hard-and-fast.

Mind The Gap is actually among my least favored essays, since I think that Paul Graham, coming from the position of someone who's made all his money working with startups, isn't giving adequate consideration to the ways in which business leaders can accumulate money without being high overall wealth producers. Also, he suggests that great income disparities in first world countries are positively associated with the health of those societies, but those first world nations which score best on various quality of life metrics tend to be those with lower income disparities, and even if the higher levels of income equality aren't driving the difference in quality of life, it suggests that higher levels of income inequality aren't driving improvements in overall quality of life either.

Downvoted for encouraging an ingroup-outgroup separation based on a trivial distinction (namely, Bayesianism).

I actually had the same reaction, which is what inspired this post. I was talking with some people in person and I brought up "Keep Your Identity Small," which I expected everyone (as people familiar with Less Wrong) to know, only to find that many hadn't read it and some didn't even know who Paul Graham was.

Memetic infection... successful.

Thanks a lot, you guys. Now I can't stop reading these.

Surely you can stop when you're finished them all? He isn't that prolific...