Paul Graham

General Questions

Here you'll find answers to questions that vary from site-related to personal. Some are common, others I've only been asked once or twice, but I found them especially interesting and wanted to share with you. Enjoy!

Can I mirror an essay on my site?

I'd rather you linked to it instead. I like to keep track of which ones people read, because it gives me ideas of what to write about next. I also like to be able to fix typos.

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Can I include an essay in my school newspaper?

Sure, go ahead. Please include the url of the original though.

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Can I put a translation into another language online?

Sure. Please include the url of the original, and send me the url of your translation so I can make a link to it.

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Are any of your paintings online?

I don't really consider myself a painter. I was trained in painting, but I haven't worked seriously at it for years. For the curious there is one image online. The painting on the cover of "ANSI Common Lisp" is also one of mine.

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Are you the photographer Paul Graham?

No, that's a different guy.

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What should I read to learn more about history?

The way to do it is piecemeal. You could just sit down and try reading Roberts's History of the World cover to cover, but you'd probably lose interest. I think it's a better plan to read books about specific topics, even if you don't understand everything the first time through.

Here are the most exciting ones I can think of:

Clark, Civilisation
White, Medieval Technology and Social Change
McEvedy, Penguin Atlases of Ancient and Medieval History
Laslett, The World We Have Lost
Bernal, The Extension of Man
Franklin, Autobiography
Girouard, Life in the English Country House
Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne
Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople
Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires
Hadas, A History of Rome
Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages
Vasari, Lives of the Artists
Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors
Caesar, Gallic Wars
Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution
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I'm about to become a teacher. How can I be a good one?

The best teachers I remember from school had three things in common:

(1) They had high standards. Like three year olds testing their parents, students will test teachers to see if they can get away with low-quality work or bad behavior. They won't respect the teachers who don't call them on it.

(2) They liked us. Like dogs, kids can tell very accurately whether or not someone wishes them well. I think a lot of our teachers either never liked kids much, or got burned out and started not to like them. It's hard to be a good teacher once that happens. I can't think of one teacher in all the schools I went to who managed to be good despite disliking students.

(3) They were interested in the subject. Most of the public school teachers I had weren't really interested in what they taught. Enthusiasm is contagious, and so is boredom.

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What philosophy books would you recommend?

I can't think of any I'd recommend. What I learned from trying to study philosophy is that the place to look is in other fields. If you understand math or history or aeronautical engineering very well, the most abstract of the things you know are what philosophy is supposed to be teaching. Books on philosophy per se are either highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand (e.g. Hegel).

It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of accident report than to teach you anything useful.

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