Paul Graham - Essays

The unfortunate writer would then sit down to work with a huge weight of expectation on his shoulders. Not wanting to blow such a public commission, he'd play it safe. This book had better command respect, and the way to ensure that would be to make it a tragedy. Audiences have to be enticed to laugh, but if you kill people they feel obliged to take you seriously. As everyone knows, America plus tragedy equals the Civil War, so that's what it would have to be about. Better stick to the standard cartoon version that the Civil War was about slavery; people would be confused otherwise; plus you can show a lot of strength and diversity. When finally completed twelve years later, the book would be a 900-page pastiche of existing popular novels-- roughly Gone with the Wind plus Roots . But its bulk and celebrity would make it a bestseller for a few months, until blown out of the water by a talk-show host's autobiography. The book would be made into a movie and thereupon forgotten, except by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom it would be a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or Battlefield Earth.

Maybe I got a little carried away with this example. And yet is this not at each point the way such a project would play out? The government knows better than to get into the novel business, but in other fields where they have a natural monopoly, like nuclear waste dumps, aircraft carriers, and regime change, you'd find plenty of projects isomorphic to this one-- and indeed, plenty that were less successful.

This little thought experiment suggests a few of the disadvantages of insider projects: the selection of the wrong kind of people, the excessive scope, the inability to take risks, the need to seem serious, the weight of expectations, the power of vested interests, the undiscerning audience, and perhaps most dangerous, the tendency of such work to become a duty rather than a pleasure.

A world with outsiders and insiders implies some kind of test for distinguishing between them. And the trouble with most tests for selecting elites is that there are two ways to pass them: to be good at what they try to measure, and to be good at hacking the test itself.

So the first question to ask about a field is how honest its tests are, because this tells you what it means to be an outsider. This tells you how much to trust your instincts when you disagree with authorities, whether it's worth going through the usual channels to become one yourself, and perhaps whether you want to work in this field at all.

Tests are least hackable when there are consistent standards for quality, and the people running the test really care about its integrity. Admissions to PhD programs in the hard sciences are fairly honest, for example. The professors will get whoever they admit as their own grad students, so they try hard to choose well, and they have a fair amount of data to go on. Whereas undergraduate admissions seem to be much more hackable.

One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach the subject in universities. At one end of the scale you have fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners. In the middle are medicine, law, history, architecture, and computer science, where many are. At the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where there's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading practitioners. It's this end that gives rise to phrases like "those who can't do, teach."

Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you should study whatever you were most interested in. But in retrospect you're probably better off studying something moderately interesting with someone who's good at it than something very interesting with someone who isn't. You often hear people say that you shouldn't major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of a more general rule: don't learn things from teachers who are bad at them.

How much you should worry about being an outsider depends on the quality of the insiders. If you're an amateur mathematician and think you've solved a famous open problem, better go back and check. When I was in grad school, a friend in the math department had the job of replying to people who sent in proofs of Fermat's last theorem and so on, and it did not seem as if he saw it as a valuable source of tips-- more like manning a mental health hotline. Whereas if the stuff you're writing seems different from what English professors are interested in, that's not necessarily a problem.

Where the method of selecting the elite is thoroughly corrupt, most of the good people will be outsiders. In art, for example, the image of the poor, misunderstood genius is not just one possible image of a great artist: it's the standard image. I'm not saying it's correct, incidentally, but it is telling how well this image has stuck. You couldn't make a rap like that stick to math or medicine.

If it's corrupt enough, a test becomes an anti-test, filtering out the people it should select by making them to do things only the wrong people would do. Popularity in high school seems to be such a test. There are plenty of similar ones in the grownup world. For example, rising up through the hierarchy of the average big company demands an attention to politics few thoughtful people could spare. Someone like Bill Gates can grow a company under him, but it's hard to imagine him having the patience to climb the corporate ladder at General Electric-- or Microsoft, actually.

It's kind of strange when you think about it, because lord-of-the-flies schools and bureaucratic companies are both the default. There are probably a lot of people who go from one to the other and never realize the whole world doesn't work this way.

I think that's one reason big companies are so often blindsided by startups. People at big companies don't realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities.

If you're an outsider, your best chances for beating insiders are obviously in fields where corrupt tests select a lame elite. But there's a catch: if the tests are corrupt, your victory won't be recognized, at least in your lifetime. You may feel you don't need that, but history suggests it's dangerous to work in fields with corrupt tests. You may beat the insiders, and yet not do as good work, on an absolute scale, as you would in a field that was more honest.

Standards in art, for example, were almost as corrupt in the first half of the eighteenth century as they are today. This was the era of those fluffy idealized portraits of countesses with their lapdogs. Chardin decided to skip all that and paint ordinary things as he saw them. He's now considered the best of that period-- and yet not the equal of Leonardo or Bellini or Memling, who all had the additional encouragement of honest standards.

It can be worth participating in a corrupt contest, however, if it's followed by another that isn't corrupt. For example, it would be worth competing with a company that can spend more than you on marketing, as long as you can survive to the next round, when customers compare your actual products. Similarly, you shouldn't be discouraged by the comparatively corrupt test of college admissions, because it's followed immediately by less hackable tests.

Even in a field with honest tests, there are still advantages to being an outsider. The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing to lose. They can do risky things, and if they fail, so what? Few will even notice.