is there any in boss.html completely false? that's what you should attack
more samples do not make a statement more truthful *
neither does any reference to 'credible' source **
* it may make conclusion more accurate; however, some of the most interesting tech breakthru comes from outliers - which by definition has small datapoints
** Gallileo would not have any credible source to support his statement that earth circles around sun ... luckily for us, he ignored the experts/pro from church
Graham's argument rests on more than his own anecdotal observations, even though he does not appear to cite a relevant source. R.I.M. Dunbar wrote a significant paper on the subject in 1993: http://www.bbsonline.org/
Preprin...bbs.dunbar.html
Great riposte; however, I must add that your comment about electric lights may be more true than your humor intended.
There have been studies (please ignore hand-waviness as this is a comment and not an essay) that correlate sleep-deprivation, biorhythms, happiness, and lighting. Without the electric light, night-time work and recreation would be severely curtailed and people would go to bed and get up more in line with the rising and setting of the sun.
Obviously, we would have to measure the increase in happiness, due to better sleep/work patterns, with the decrease in happiness from the change in life-styles to determine if happiness has increased.
Of course, there will still be the nuts who work and play by candle- and fire-light into the wee hours of the morning.
Overall, I liked and agreed with your post.
btw. Bias is one of the most stupid things ever invented. Also, it isn't logical. Maybe Graham thinks that those workers don't look lively because he advocates start ups, maybe it is the other way around and he advocates start ups because those people don't look lively. Bias is just stupid because it means: "oh, you can't say coffee is good because you like coffee!". That's the whole point.
My apologies for an ad hominem question, but do you not see the similarities between programmer teams and hunter gatherer teams?
Horseshit.
How does a "physics professor" know someone is a "crank" by mail? He/She doesn't. They examine the idea, and determine whether someone is a "crank". Doing it the other way around lends itself to infinite mistakes in logic.
Kind of like the way I started to read your essay. Once I realized you were arguing for how peachy-keen errors in logic like an ad hominem evaluation is, I really figured you for a crank. Get it? Then when I read later that telling someone "the scale is broken" *is* ad hominem, and that Buddhist monks "strive for happiness" confirmed to me you haven't got the slightest idea of what you're talking about.
In other words, I read your words, *then* figured you for a crank. Not the other way around. See how well that works?
You have missed something, I'm afraid. You have endeavored to prove that Graham's argument is invalid.
I don't think you've done that, personally (because I disagree with some of your premises), but that's beside the point here.
What you have *not* done -- not even *attempted* to do -- is to prove Graham wrong. You have not really made any argument whatsoever that refutes Graham's conclusion. You do refute (or attempt to refute -- I don't believe you succeed) his particular argument; his line of reasoning; his path to the conclusion.
You have not actually made any statement whatsoever regarding the fundamental correctness of Graham's claim -- merely attempted to point out that his particular argument is invalid.
An absurd example to prove my point. Suppose that I was trying to argue that the stars were made of large quantities of extremely hot gas. Probably you believe I am correct? But what if my argument was stupid. What if I argued that we knew it was true, because the moon was made of stinky green cheese, and that *that* was the proof that stars were made of hot gas, because what else smells bad enough to turn the whole moon into stinky cheese!
Hopefully you would successfully refute my argument, that whether the moon is green cheese or not (it isn't and you could prove it), that's a stupid reason to believe that stars were giant balls of gas. You'd be right. But, in the end, my conclusion was correct, despite the pathetically idiotic argument I made.
Someone else could come along and argue much more convincingly -- and they'd be right. And I'd be right too, just for totally the wrong reason.
(Incidentally, I know that Paul Graham is an over-the-top supporter of startups, but I too have seen lots of anecdotal evidence of at least this lesser version of his claim: people that are attracted to start-ups tend to have a more positive outlook on the nature of work and society than people who are not. They appear to better understand and appreciate the manner in which their labor is connected to the health, wealth, and future of human society. And in my limited experience, they tend to be the ones that insist that Life is a Good and Wonderful Thing.)
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