Paul Graham on the Conversations with Tyler

Graham on AI, living in the UK and college majors

Paul Graham was on Conversations with Tyler (CWT). The interviews on CWT are always great and cover a broad array of topics. Cowen thoroughly researches every guest and comes up with unique questions in a more or less rapid fire manner. For instance, he might read the dissertation of a guest from 20 years ago.

The conversation with Paul Graham was no different and covered topics like painting, AI regulation, selecting talent and the English countryside. Overall the interview was very engaging although Graham was sometimes caught flat-footed and stumbled for an answer.

COWEN: Why is there not more ambition in the developed world? Say we wanted to boost ambition by 2X. What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way?

GRAHAM: Boy, what a fabulous question. I wish you’d asked me that an hour ago, so I could have had some time to think about it between now and then.

But this makes sense! He’s an engineer so he has trouble bullshitting if he hasn’t thought of something before.

Graham on generative AI

COWEN: As art. Not just that it looks impressive. It’s amazing as graphic design, but do you think it’s art in the same way that Rembrandt is art?

GRAHAM: This whole thing about what’s art and what isn’t? I think it’s all a matter of degree. My crap carnation coffee mug is art. It’s just not very good art. [laughs] There’s not some threshold, where above this threshold it’s art. Everything people make is art, just to varying degrees of goodness. I can tell you, some of the things I’ve seen that were AI-generated, I’d be impressed if a person made them. That probably is over your threshold.

…

GRAHAM: It sounds weird, but if you look at where the money’s spent at auction, it’s almost all fashionable contemporary crap because if you think about how prices in very high-end art are set, they’re auction prices. How many people does it take to generate an auction price? Two. Just two. So, you have boneheaded Russians who want to have a Picasso on their wall so people will think they’re legit, or hedge fund managers’ wives who’ve been told to buy impressive art to hang in their loft so when people come over, they’ll say, “Oh, look, they’ve got a Damien Hirst.”

The way art prices at the very high end are set is almost entirely by deeply bogus people, [laughs] which is great, actually. When I was an artist, I used to be annoyed by this. Now that I buy a lot of art at auction, I’m delighted because it means there’s all this money. You see Andy Warhol’s screen prints selling for $90 million.

I think he’s right. Generative AI is impressive and a relatively new capability. The hand-wringing from artists seems to me like FOMO and a knee jerk reaction to the threat of technology, much like portrait artists probably felt about camera technology.

Even if the technology for generative AI (large language models and art) stayed the same, I think it would take years to find its true potential. I use gpt for programming daily and I’m still discovering how to get the most out of it and finding its limitations.

Graham went on to very succinctly describe the problem with moden art.

COWEN: If you think that something has gone wrong in the history of art, and you tried to explain that in as few dimensions as possible, what’s your account of what went wrong?

GRAHAM: Oh, I can explain this very briefly. Brand and craft became divorced. It used to be that the best artists were the best craftspeople. Once art started to be reproduced in newspapers and magazines and things like that, you could create a brand that wasn’t based on quality.

This reminded me of this comic

Graham on the UK economy

Another memorable exchange was about optimism for the UK economy. Graham was born and now resides in the UK, specifically the English countryside. When asked about UK here’s what Paul said:

COWEN: Looking forward, how optimistic are you about the future of the UK? No real wage growth since 2008, no real productivity growth for as many years. What’s up, and what’s the path out of that?

…

GRAHAM: Yes, yes. Just ask HMRC. As far as they’re concerned, I never left. [laughs] HMRC is the British IRS.

Okay, the reason I’m optimistic about Britain — I was just thinking about this this morning — is because people here are not slack. They’re not lazy, and they’re not stupid, and that’s the most important thing. Eventually, non-lazy, non-stupid people will prevail.

I’ve funded a couple of start-ups here. You can see, when you introduce these people to the idea of trying to make something grow really fast and have these really big ambitions, it’s like teaching them a foreign language, but they do learn it. They do learn it. It’s not like English people are somehow genetically inferior to Americans. I think they have all that potential still to go. I’m astonished when I see statistics. I think GDP per capita in the UK is only two-thirds of what it is in America.

The UK will do just as well as the US because English people aren’t somehow genetically inferior to Americans. Why wouldn’t they do great?

This is one of those meaningless statements because you can’t reasonably argue for the inverse. It’s equivalent to being “pro child safety”. Can someone reasonably be “anti child safety”? Is there a group lazy, stupid or genetically inferior to typical Americans?

COWEN: It’s about the same as Mississippi.

GRAHAM: It’s preposterous, I know. Imagine the potential there. Imagine the potential.

COWEN: You don’t feel that way about Mississippi, necessarily?

[laughter]

GRAHAM: No, I think Mississippi’s probably already up close to its full potential. I don’t know. I’ve never actually been there. I shouldn’t say things like that.

Its a total punt on Cowen’s part for not following up on the argument that culture matters, but CWTs format doesn’t normally allow for followups. I think overall Graham is right that culture matters, but I would put that more broadly. It doesn’t matter that the people are smart, but the institutions have to be condusive to economic growth. That’s why a Mexican can more than double their income by just crossing an imaginary line

Graham understands this and touches on this briefly in discussing the dysfunction in San Fransisco:

GRAHAM: No, no, no, politics. The problems with San Francisco are entirely due to a small number of terrible politicians. It’s all because Ed Lee died. The mayor, Ed Lee, was a reasonable person. Up till the point where Ed Lee died, San Francisco seemed like a utopia. It was like when Gates left Microsoft, and things rapidly reverted to the mean. Although in San Francisco’s case, way below the mean, and so it’s not that it didn’t take that much to ruin San Francisco. It’s really, if you just replaced about five supervisors, San Francisco would be instantly a fabulously better city.

Graham on philosophy as a major

GRAHAM: Well, it’s hard to say. It’s hard to say. It’s good to be able to take ideas and flip them around like a Rubik’s Cube, and take them apart, and notice the two parts are the same shape or something like that, but I don’t think I actually learned that in philosophy classes. I think I would’ve learned that in classes about anything hard.

I mistakenly thought that you could just go and learn the most abstract truths. It sounds great to a high school student. “Why do I have to learn all the specific crap? I’ll just learn the most general truths.” Needless to say, that’s one of those things that sounds too good to be true, and it is, because if you go and look in philosophy classes . . .

I remember when Bill Clinton was saying, “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” I’m like, “Hey, that’s what I majored in, [laughs] what the meaning of ‘is’ is, literally.” I think it was pretty much a waste.

I felt the same way when I was younger. Especially with things like Google, its easy to say that anything you can look up is not worth learning. And I more or less live that way today. Most stackoverflow links I click on are blue.

But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe if we learn the general, we don’t actually learn anything. Maybe we should go back to memorizing poetry in school. Is it practical or useful? No. But it’s something. It’s not like young people today are immensely logical from years of focus on logic and reason over memorization.

Overall it was a great interview although as with nearly every CWT conversation, if felt too short. Also it would be great to hear Graham elaborate on some of the questions asked after he had some more time to think about it in a long form essay.