Contra Graham

Via robey, I read an essay by Paul Graham on The Power of the Marginal, where his thesis is that innovation happens mostly, and therefore happens best, on the margins of the “eminent” establishment. This may or may not be true but there are several problems with the meat of the essay that made it hard for me to accept the conclusion.

The line that first stopped my head-nodding agreement was in Graham’s thought experiment about a hypothetical Congressional effort to commission the Great American Novel. The very nature of the Establishment selection process would, he posits, exclude any authors or topics that might actually be interesting, inevitably landing on:

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 […]

Maybe I’m unwittingly part of this Establishment, but if the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, what exactly was it about? Graham never says. It’s sloppy writing to toss a rhetorical grenade of that magnitude in an essay without some follow-up. He could have made his point without that little flourish, but this it turned out that this was just the first example — albeit the most eyebrow-raising — of a class of problem that runs through the essay: unsubstantiated contrarianism.

I first came across this concept in the blogospheric brouhaha surrounding Superfreakonomics and I think it’s quite applicable here because Graham’s essay’s common thread, indeed its main thrust, is that being outside the conventional wisdom is your best bet for creative (technical/entrepreneurial) work. However, as in the Civil War example, if you’re intending to refute the conventional wisdom, your contrarian position needs to hold to a higher standard of evidence than one supporting conventional wisdom, not a lower one or, all too often in Graham’s essay, no evidence at all.

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.”

Is this true? Is this conventional wisdom, or its opposite? (Citing a pop-culture aphorism is a clue, perhaps.) What are the criteria for being considered a “leading practitioner”? We don’t know, for Graham doesn’t cite any objective studies, references or even Web infographics — thus exhibiting the very mushiness he’s decrying in this section.

The meat of the essay is a list of things Graham believes restrict the establishment of a field of endeavour (any endeavour, as these are presented as universal truths without limits on where they’re applicable) from effective action: aversion to risk, getting overloaded by additional Peter Principle-esque responsibilities, inability to focus narrowly, focusing too narrowly (yes, both), getting caught in the ego trap of making museums instead of garden sheds, being unable to delegate work yet remain involved with one’s craft. The advantages in each of these situations go to the outsider who’s able to take risks, make small perfect things, etc, unfettered by the constraints of the Eminent. Finally, he wraps up with the advice that having people respond to your work with ad hominem attacks about how the work is inappropriate or you are personally “unqualified” to do the work should actually be a marker that you’re on the right track.

While I can’t say that these things never happen, I don’t think they happen with the inflexible invariance that Graham suggests. Sometimes criticism that your work is inappropriate or wrong-headed is exactly correct! Snark aside, his thesis is that the very best, most effective way to work around the constraints that do exist is to jump outside the system and find work in “the grooves of the chocolate bar”. As I mentioned there are no studies or external citations in the original essay to support the conclusion, just a basic contrarian premise: Establishment Bad, Outsider Good, then some sweeping generalizations about what can happen inside established organizations and why the antithetical position is better. I definitely agree that the advantages of “outsiderism” laid out in the essay (agility, innovation, personal growth, craft) are desirable and positive but I’d like to suggest that many of these are actually achievable anywhere with the right attitude: it’s more a matter of correct mental positioning than whether one works for a small or large company.

Let me group the Eminent problems into two categories: first, those about working effectively in an organization; second, maintaining one’s personal technical innovation and growth in a career path other than the lone-inventory archetype Graham idealizes. To the first, my refutation is in the form of Merlin Mann and his personal brand of productivity in the 200-email-a-day whirlwind of modern corporate knowledge work. It’s true that, per Graham, “The lives of the eminent become scheduled, and that’s not good for thinking. One of the great advantages of being an outsider is long, uninterrupted blocks of time”, but the antidote is not (necessarily) to quit and never have meetings, it’s to manage your own time rather than letting time manage you. It’s not contrarian, it’s common sense — just difficult to execute.

To address the second class of problems, I adduce the patterns laid out in the amazing Apprenticeship Patterns book that I’ve been ingesting lately. Specifically, the section on Breakable Toys directly addresses the problem of “create small perfect things”; viewing one’s role in the light of the Journeyman and Master patterns is a more holistic approach to managing a career path where one is, at times, a manager, a mentor, and a learner, rather than viewing responsibility as “an occupational disease of eminence”. There are so many more examples in the Apprenticeship Patterns, it’s hard to single out more than a couple — but the main point of the Patterns is that they can be applied in a huge range of situations. You don’t have to be an outsider to hone your craft; you just have to want to hone your craft.

In summary: the problem with Graham’s essay is twofold. First, he presents contrarian positions without sufficient supporting evidence. Second, although the goals he’s espousing are desirable, the path he advocates to achieve them isn’t the only, or even the best one. Work within your establishment or outside it; as Victor Frankl concluded in Man’s Search for Meaning:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.