The point of an essay (at least pg's style of essay) is to explore a subject and, to a lesser extent, to incite others to explore the subject and their own feelings about it as well.

Unfortunately, the writer here decides not to explore his own feelings fully and his points are made in a few sentences without details or evidence,

"The bits on London or Paris are terribly naïve and missing the point. Whoever is using the word hip for London or art for Paris can only have a vague understanding of what he is talking about"

This smells like an ad-hominem

"Looking into Paul’s ferocious defiance towards school and corporate culture, it is easy to imagine Paul being a rather shy person, who would rather jump in the ocean than being part of anything looking like a team."

Lack of substance really hurts this blog post.

I have to say, I was partly inspired to attend art school (and study painting) by 'Hackers and Painters'. After all, it's an O'Reilly book. I am an archetypal hacker personality even if my achievements are modest. Computer architecture is as natural to me as breathing, whereas I could barely draw a crude stick figure. I realise MBTI has limitations but I am solidly in the realm of INTP/INTJ.

Anecdotes are not data, but let me tell you - by any measure of personality types I have ever seen, hackers and painters are as close to different species as you can get that can still produce offspring. 'Painters' thought processes and modes of creativity are so alien to those of a 'hacker' that I have no idea how the world does not descend into chaos with so many of those types populating it. I say this after spending many endless days in the company of 'painters' (especially if you include the tutors, many of whom had painting careers).

In fact the experience was shaking enough to make me reconsider my once strongly-held belief in universal suffrage. I gave it a year of full time effort and then threw in the towel. Of course, I am assuming that 'painting students' don't change dramatically by the time they become 'painters'.

Also, regarding the marvellous statement about spending all day with women who aren't wearing any pants - I'll leave what that en'tails' every 28 days up to you to figure out - if that doesn't get through to you then let's just say the novelty wears off.

Paul, if you are reading this, your thesis is bollocks. Thanks for nothing.

I don't mindlessly follow everything pg says or does, but I do think the author is totally off base here.

Basically, I don't think you can "get" the hacker/painter parallel unless you really are a hacker. When I am in the right mood and sit down to code something, it is not me typing stuff and watching letters appear on the screen. It is not me transforming the state of the computer's memory. It is ideas flowing from my brain and becoming a creation. It's creative. (I don't paint, but music and coding go well together. When you hit upon the perfect melody, it just feels good. Programming is exactly the same for me.)

I don't want this post to be about me, but I do want to say that pg is not alone in thinking that programming is creative.

If all you do is write "select * from foo" into your PHP pages, though, and read "Hackers and Painters", you'll probably dislike it. That's because you're not hacking, you're code monkeying. There is plenty of money to be made by monkeying, but don't confuse it with art.

Most of the comments I've seen in response to this post are either that "the author was wrong" or "the author didn't give enough evidence." I think that you are completely missing the point of what this guy Cecil wrote.

His point was that pg's essays on philosophy/art made him cringe. Ok? That's his whole deal. He goes on and tries to explain why, but I think that what is really valuable here is that Cecil (who I'm assuming is an artist) is expressing a point of view which has largely gone unstated.

To be honest, reading Cecil's post made me feel better in some way. I don't know anything about art, but I have been thinking about philosophy for freaking forever and I have to say that PG's essays often make me cringe when he traipses into topics which he really -does- seem naive about. Note I said "seem." I don't have examples offhand because I haven't read one of his articles for weeks. Also, the point of -this- post is not at -all- to talk about PG, it is to talk about my understanding of Cecil's post[1].

I think that in general my aversion to internet discussion comes from the fact that people seem to spend approximately 1 second understanding each other and 20 minutes formulating counter-arguments to what they are assuming/hallucinating their "opponents" -meant- (not said). They often miss the -point- of what others are trying to say (and yes, I recognize the massive potential hypocrisy in meta-meta-criticism). Have some heart.

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

[1] I think that I could, in fact, explain why they make me cringe. (I assume that Cecil could, too, actually - I assume he could sit down next to you, read through them with you, and whenever you saw him cringing you could ask him why - I don't think he's making up the fact that he cringed.) I could go back and re-read his essays and write up long responses explaining what classic philosophical and logical errors he is making (most of which have to do with assuming context/over-generalization/etc.), but the problem is that his errors are very deep. His errors (like so many people's errors) have to do with his big complicated worldview - to reveal them would take a book. And frankly, I don't care - it's much more interesting and fulfilling to respond to someone who's really spent their whole life "thinking" about deep philosophical problems (Chomsky, Foucault, Nagle, Graeber, etc.)

The author might have done well to read pg's essay on disagreement since his attacks were mostly vague (I too agree that the characterization of London and Paris could have been better supported), and the attacks were executed merely by bringing up an example point and then not attacking it. On the point of cities, I think that there is good economic evidence (not cited by pg) that Cambridge and Boston are very much an intellectual center because some of the greatest universities of the world and they are leaders in terms of patents and scientific citations (from "Who's Your City" by Richard Florida).

I stopped reading as soon as I saw "jumped the shark". For me that's an auto-fail.

Wow.

In a world where philosophy was reserved for 'philosophers', art for 'artists', hacking for 'programmers' and business for 'businessmen' the hapless inhabitants would be sleeping the open and picking berries.

Thankfully this ain't 'that' world.

Repost.

fanboys, don't click it!