Adults lie constantly to kids. I’m not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. [...]
A lot of the … - Paul Graham
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Adults lie constantly to kids. I’m not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why. [...]
A lot of the things adults conceal from smaller children, they conceal because they’d be frightening, not because they want to conceal the existence of such things. Misleading the child is just a byproduct.
This seems one of the most justifiable types of lying adults do to kids. But because the lies are indirect we don’t keep a very strict accounting of them. Parents know they’ve concealed the facts about sex, and many at some point sit their kids down and explain more. But few tell their kids about the differences between the real world and the cocoon they grew up in. Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their kids, and every year you get a new crop of 18 year olds who think they know how to run the world.
Paul Graham (born 1964) is an English computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb (later renamed Yahoo! Store), cofounding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Crédit photo: Sarah Harlin (Public domain / CC0)
Idea: Adversarial rendering. Builders proposing a new project should have to release enough of their design files for third parties to create renderings of what the project will actually look like.
It's a good sign when you cautiously suggest some ridiculously ambitious future plan to a startup, and discover they've already thought a lot about it.
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You can’t trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they’re satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.
