The amount you enjoy the entirety of this post by Zach Tellman may depend on how much you enjoy nerdy digressions about programming languages — I found those bits interesting but the technical nuances are skimmable.

Overall, Tellman has written the best takedown of Paul Graham since Maciej Cegłowski’s genre-defining “Dabblers and Blowhards”. Where Cegłowski relied on wit, humor, and his personal background as a painter and programmer, Tellman has written a precise and damning technical dismantling of Arc, Graham’s stillborn programming language, that equally serves to highlight Graham’s failure as the public intellectual he so desperately wants to be thought of. Graham’s reliance on intuition, Tellman makes clear, has served him poorly in both pursuits.

Graham doesn’t work through the consequences of his own model because the model doesn’t matter; what matters is sharing some things that feel right and true.

Graham, with the possible exception of the equally lamentable thought leader Marc Andreessen, is the person probably most responsible for contemporary Silicon Valley culture, with its adulation of “first principles” thinking and scorning of anything that reeks of premature optimization.

The problem with this ethos, which has so captured tech over the past decade and half, is how disastrously it plays out when tech comes into contact with the real world. Communities, cities, even national governments rarely hold up to the scrutiny of “first principles” because they’ve developed and warped and eroded and been rebuilt over time; obeying local laws or regulations, or thinking through the consequences of disruption, start to look like the dreaded “premature optimization” if you’re Uber or Facebook, flush with VC cash and aiming to dent the universe.

“Profoundly unserious”, as Tellman so astutely puts it, is the exact right descriptor not just of Graham but the legions that have come to build their fortunes in his wake. These fortunes, owing much more to good luck than solving some intractable world-altering problem, distort reality for the winners such that they think they actually have something novel to say.

Like Graham, too much of tech has no interest in engaging with or even understanding the broader world they are disrupting. What they fail to comprehend, and what makes them so unserious, is how their philosophy is the same justification used by tyrants for as long as civilization has existed.