Backtracking as a Way to Increase Respect

William Grosso @ October 9, 2006

So sometime in the past year or two, Paul Graham famously asked

The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?

It’s a good question, and the rest of the argument that he articulated made sense to me. But it only made sense to me in the “kinda, sorta” way that always makes my stomach give a little flip-flop.

Let me clarify. Ever talk to a Randian? A real live dyed-in-the-wool disciple of Ayn Rand? A lot of what they say makes sense (at, say, the “individual paragraph” level). But then, when try you assemble the individual statements and paragraphs into a philosophy, it doesn’t quite work. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle that’s had the pieces dumped onto the table and soaked in water. You can see the individual pieces, you can see how they’re supposed to fit together, and you can see that, with enough pushing and shoving and smooshing, you can sort of get the thing built. But it doesn’t quite hang together, and it’s very hard to convince the people who think it does that they’re wrong (or even that they need to think some more).

So too with Paul Graham’s original essay. It made sense, but felt a little too disconnected from reality for me.

His comments, a couple of years later, feel much better to me (I’m still a little queasy, but much less than previously).

What’s more, my respect for him (already quite high) just increased. It’s incredibly hard to stand up and say “I was wrong (kinda) and here’s why.”

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