Talk:Paul Graham (programmer)/Archives/2016

Portrayal of Paul Graham is extremely unfavorable

Almost every link in the "About Paul Graham" is extremely unfavorable. The focus of the article is not NPOV, painting Paul Graham in a one-sided, negative light. I would not expect to see this sort of trash in a published encyclopedia, (nor would I expect to see this in Wikipedia) even on entries of extremely unpopular individuals. Critique links should be moved to a critique links section. (since almost all of the links are of that nature) General links should be less subjective. It's not as if the man is a bad person, and in fact many people who don't like his opinions try to undermine the fact that he has authored some exceptional computer science texts. (OnLisp and ANSI Common Lisp, for example) I think the criticism in "Dabblers and Blowhards" and "Paul Graham is Wrong" provide a reasonable critique of some of his more mediocre writing, but "Paul Graham is a Tedious Windbag" is by a person who fails to be objective, and resorts to petty name-calling of Paul Graham in several of his entries. The blog author does _NOT_ deserve this sort of attention, (this "yani" person uses his blog as essentially a soapbox for his poorly defended arguments) so I'm removing his link if I can. (please _DO NOT_ revert it back) That aside, I do not believe that most blogs are up to wikipedia standard, and shouldn't be linked to anyway because they are constantly changing.

I believe that there are people out there who seek to use the web to ruin the reputations of people more famous than them; Yani's blog is a good example of such behavior.

It would seem we now have the opposite problem. :) 78.147.174.228 (talk) 22:19, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Why Paul, is that you...? 173.224.162.69 (talk) 23:34, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Born in Weymouth, England

Interesting he was born in Weymouth. I can't find any other source that confirms this. And references known? Any extra information, e.g. did his parents emigrate or were they holidaying in Weymouth at the time.  :-) -- Ralph Corderoy 22:02, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

Of course he was born in Weymouth,m Dorset, UK. I am his father and I well remember the occasion.,

Hierarchy diagram name-calling

Not sure of the best place to raise this, as the image is used in a few places around Wikipedia, but this article is probably the most significant one, since it's a biography and we're trying to summarise the man's writing.

File:Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement-en.svg explains the "name-calling" level with "sounds something like, 'You are an ass hat.'" - this is the only quotation on the diagram, but it's not a phrase Graham used in his original definition. User:Red Slash edited the image to read "you are an idiot" in July for seeming "out of place", User:CFCF changed it back explaining that it was a "long-standing supported version".

Graham's original example uses quotes of "u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!" and "The author is a self-important dilettante." (and points out that the two are not so different). Neither of those really fits the context here. "Ass hat" seems an obscure enough slang term to suggest to the reader that Graham might have used it in the essay, although has the advantage of being a silly nonsense term that can't be perceived as an ad hominem; "idiot" is more neutral in tone, but is harder to distinguish from the ad hominem of "my opponent is not intelligent enough to argue properly".

Which should the image use? Do we even need an example, when we could have a short sentence distinguishing name-calling from ad hominem? --McGeddon (talk) 17:41, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

With no response in a month I've gone ahead and reverted it, as "idiot" seems less of a profanity, making the image and this article more widely reusable. (Reading up on "ass hat" as an insult it may be intended to mean "to have one's head up one's ass", which would make it even more of an ad hominem than "idiot" anyway.)

I tried editing the SVG directly in a text editor to a third option - something like "jerk" might be a better word to use - but the text isn't editable. If anybody wants to make or implement suggestions, feel free. --McGeddon (talk) 15:25, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

I never responded, but I do appreciate your careful reversion, McGeddon. Thank you. Red Slash 20:43, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Early life

Not much info from before 1995, about younger earlier life, whereas this seems a usual thing to do, and is relevant.88.159.69.48 (talk) 13:11, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

What's stopping you to add it?Amin (Talk) 22:12, 30 November 2016 (UTC)