Paul Graham Quotes

Being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems.

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.

One big difference between talking to AIs and talking to people on Twitter is that AIs usually admit when they're mistaken and correct the error, whereas people on Twitter will do anything to avoid this.

If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.

If you're hungry but too lazy to prepare healthy food, you'll consume junk food. If you're hungry for knowledge but too lazy to seek out the truth, you'll consume misinformation.

One of the best presents you can get for a cook is a new spice they didn't know about. You're not just buying them the spice, but the knowledge that it exists, and what it's like.

You have to be able to see things from the user’s point of view.

So if you can make something that appeals to people today and would also have appealed to people in 1500, there is a good chance it will appeal to people in 2500.

If you suppress variations in income, whether by stealing private fortunes, as feudal rulers used to do, or by taxing them away, as some modern governments have done, the result always seems to be the same. Society as a whole ends up poorer.

In many domains it's an advantage to have a culture of doing things fast and cheaply. But organizations never shift toward this as they age; if they shift, it's always in the other direction. So the only way to have this culture is to start with it and not lose it.

no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.”1

The easiest people to trick are those who want to believe something false.

It would be funny if as AI technology progressed, the legal situation tightened so that they were only trainable on images that were out of copyright, with the result that AI image generators produced very high quality traditional illustrations.

People are bad at looking at seeds and guessing what size tree will grow out of them. The way you’ll get big ideas in, say, health care is by starting out with small ideas. If you try to do some big thing, you don’t just need it to be big; you need it to be good. And it’s really hard to do big and good simultaneously. So, what that means is you can either do something small and good and then gradually make it bigger, or do something big and bad and gradually make it better. And you know what? Empirically, starting big just does not work. That’s the way the government does things. They do something really big that’s really bad, and they think, Well, we’ll make it better, and then it never gets better”.

Building Fast Companies for Growth, Inc. September 2013

Before Twitter, people used to send angry messages called "hate mail" to (usually) famous people they were mad at. Now when they get mad at someone, they send messages to all their friends.