<story><title>Black Swan Farming</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/swan.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>It&apos;s pretty grim.  I think that&apos;s one of the reasons I write fewer essays now.&lt;p&gt;After I wrote this one, I had to go back and armor it by pre-empting anything I could imagine anyone willfully misunderstanding to use as a weapon in comment threads.  The whole of footnote 1 is such armor for example.  I essentially anticipated all the &quot;No, what I said was&quot; type comments I&apos;d have had to make on HN and just included them in the essay.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a uniquely bad combination to both write essays and run a forum.  It&apos;s like having comments enabled on your blog whether you want them or not.</text></item><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>Off-topic, but something I&apos;ve been chewing on lately: what&apos;s it like to have your every written (or spoken!) word analyzed by a bunch of people? Esp. people that you end up having some form of contact with.&lt;p&gt;It seems like it would be difficult to just have a public conversation about a topic. Do you think about that much when you write?</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>I do care about would-be founders&apos; opinions, but surely I don&apos;t have to use every essay I write to convince people to apply to YC.  I&apos;ve already written elsewhere about the founder&apos;s eye view of YC (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html&lt;/a&gt;). This essay is just an exploration of the strangeness of startup investing as a business.  The goal is not to convince anyone to do anything.</text></item><item><author>cperciva</author><text>Quoth pg: &lt;i&gt;It would hurt YC&apos;s brand (at least among the innumerate) if we invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Paul, you&apos;re sounding like a venture capitalist who is worried about whether he can find investors for his next fund.&lt;p&gt;I would posit that the people whose opinions you should care about are &lt;i&gt;potential founders&lt;/i&gt;; and that their primary concern is &lt;i&gt;themselves&lt;/i&gt;, not the performance of a fund (oops, I mean class) as a whole.  You&apos;re damn right that it would hurt YC&apos;s brand if 70% of each class didn&apos;t survive past Demo Day -- because for an individual founder, success is pretty much binary, and having a 50% chance of becoming a millionaire is more attractive than having a 5% chance of becoming a billionaire, despite the 100-fold reduction in mean wealth.&lt;p&gt;You may be in in the business of farming black swans, but if they&apos;re all you worry about you&apos;ll find that &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; the swans end up laying their eggs elsewhere.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jseliger</author><text>Well, I still enjoy your essays. Let this comment be the generic encouragement of those who aren&apos;t trying to pointless dispute and who are usually silent.&lt;p&gt;At least some of the people who are questioning you are probably doing so out of intellectual curiosity, rather than animosity. You probably know that intellectually, but for many people—including me—it&apos;s sometimes hard to remember that in the heat of the reading moment.</text></comment>
<story><title>Black Swan Farming</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/swan.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pg</author><text>It&apos;s pretty grim.  I think that&apos;s one of the reasons I write fewer essays now.&lt;p&gt;After I wrote this one, I had to go back and armor it by pre-empting anything I could imagine anyone willfully misunderstanding to use as a weapon in comment threads.  The whole of footnote 1 is such armor for example.  I essentially anticipated all the &quot;No, what I said was&quot; type comments I&apos;d have had to make on HN and just included them in the essay.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s a uniquely bad combination to both write essays and run a forum.  It&apos;s like having comments enabled on your blog whether you want them or not.</text></item><item><author>thaumaturgy</author><text>Off-topic, but something I&apos;ve been chewing on lately: what&apos;s it like to have your every written (or spoken!) word analyzed by a bunch of people? Esp. people that you end up having some form of contact with.&lt;p&gt;It seems like it would be difficult to just have a public conversation about a topic. Do you think about that much when you write?</text></item><item><author>pg</author><text>I do care about would-be founders&apos; opinions, but surely I don&apos;t have to use every essay I write to convince people to apply to YC.  I&apos;ve already written elsewhere about the founder&apos;s eye view of YC (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html&lt;/a&gt;). This essay is just an exploration of the strangeness of startup investing as a business.  The goal is not to convince anyone to do anything.</text></item><item><author>cperciva</author><text>Quoth pg: &lt;i&gt;It would hurt YC&apos;s brand (at least among the innumerate) if we invested in huge numbers of risky startups that flamed out.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Paul, you&apos;re sounding like a venture capitalist who is worried about whether he can find investors for his next fund.&lt;p&gt;I would posit that the people whose opinions you should care about are &lt;i&gt;potential founders&lt;/i&gt;; and that their primary concern is &lt;i&gt;themselves&lt;/i&gt;, not the performance of a fund (oops, I mean class) as a whole.  You&apos;re damn right that it would hurt YC&apos;s brand if 70% of each class didn&apos;t survive past Demo Day -- because for an individual founder, success is pretty much binary, and having a 50% chance of becoming a millionaire is more attractive than having a 5% chance of becoming a billionaire, despite the 100-fold reduction in mean wealth.&lt;p&gt;You may be in in the business of farming black swans, but if they&apos;re all you worry about you&apos;ll find that &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; the swans end up laying their eggs elsewhere.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cperciva</author><text>Having people pick over every detail of what I write is something I like about HN -- it forces me to think more carefully about what I&apos;m saying, and on a few occasions (tptacek, I&apos;m looking at you) has even prompted me to go back and write further blog posts about specific points.&lt;p&gt;Of course, my blog posts don&apos;t get nearly as much attention as your essays, and I don&apos;t have the problem of having people try to draw attention to themselves in the hopes of being remembered when applications are considered for the next YC round.</text></comment>