Paul Graham: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why not? Didn’t it allow you to think at a very general level? 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. Which kinds of ideas come more naturally to you while you’re walking?…

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