Paul Graham - The Right Kind of Stubborn

Thoughts about The Right Kind of Stubborn by Paul Graham.

Thoughts along the way

But is there any real difference between these two cases? Are persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently? Or are they doing the same thing, and we just label them later as persistent or obstinate depending on whether they turned out to be right or not?

No clear answer, but gut feeling is that people who are flexible with stubbornness tend to succeed and typically young. People with more stubbornness are dumb and young or experienced and older. And it’s hard to tell stubbornness and its rate to success or the amount of success - maybe they stick till the end (incredibly rare) and have little success or maybe they gave success much later or they have a general field to work in and have some success, but does not last. I’m not sure what is the correct gauge to measure the scale between success and stubbornness, but it’s hard to even understand how stubborn someone truly is and for what goals their stubbornness is for. Also I assume Paul’s definition that obstinate is close to unmovable, but not totally. Because that would be unrealistic, I think (I have not met someone who is, perhaps I am wrong) the main point is that they won’t listen.

There’s something annoying about the obstinate that’s not simply due to being mistaken. They won’t listen. And that’s not true of all determined people. I can’t think of anyone more determined than the Collison brothers, and when you point out a problem to them, they not only listen, but listen with an almost predatory intensity. Is there a hole in the bottom of their boat? Probably not, but if there is, they want to know about it.

That’s a strong example. Perhaps, it matters in field. For a leader, it might be different because that is the hill that he/she has to die on, sometimes. Listening is strong and typically people who listen get to a point but I feel that there’s very few who can listen well and constantly find people who to listen from and appreciate deep discussions often.

It’s the same with most successful people. They’re never _more_engaged than when you disagree with them. Whereas the obstinate don’t want to hear you. When you point out problems, their eyes glaze over, and their replies sound like ideologues talking about matters of doctrine

Interesting. Yeah, I’ve seen plenty and there’s a lot of them in varying topics. I think Paul graham’s point is that they dismiss your thoughts rather than argue. This is bad; both parties lose information and if a person always is dismissive, they do not gain more information easily, because the discussion of the topic ends before it begins.

The reason the persistent and the obstinate seem similar is that they’re both hard to stop. But they’re hard to stop in different senses. The persistent are like boats whose engines can’t be throttled back. The obstinate are like boats whose rudders can’t be turned.

Perfect analogy, I wonder how Paul graham edits his essays.

In the degenerate case they’re indistinguishable: when there’s only one way to solve a problem, your only choice is whether to give up or not, and persistence and obstinacy both say no. This is presumably why the two are so often conflated in popular culture. It assumes simple problems. But as problems get more complicated, we can see the difference between them. The persistent are much more attached to points high in the decision tree than to minor ones lower down, while the obstinate spray “don’t give up” indiscriminately over the whole tree.

Hmm, is this because the obstinate people don’t have enough information/knowledge gained from others to know what is priority?

The persistent are attached to the goal. The obstinate are attached to their ideas about how to reach it. Worse still, that means they’ll tend to be attached to their _first_ideas about how to solve a problem, even though these are the least informed by the experience of working on it. So the obstinate aren’t merely attached to details, but disproportionately likely to be attached to wrong ones.

A little bit lost, but yes, I think Paul grahams views stem from observing people who stick to one romanticized solution rather a multi stage solution or alternate solution

Why are they like this? Why are the obstinate obstinate? One possibility is that they’re overwhelmed. They’re not very capable. They take on a hard problem. They’re immediately in over their head. So they grab onto ideas the way someone on the deck of a rolling ship might grab onto the nearest handhold.

No, I think it depends on the person and their willingness to be right even in the face of being incorrect. They have some set of beliefs that they hold (maybe they believe they’re the next Steve Jobs or overestimating their knowledge). Or maybe they grew up always being sort of correct? People generally do not like being wrong or having someone say that they are wrong. I believe that obstinate people do not necessarily take on hard problems either.

That was my initial theory, but on examination it doesn’t hold up. If being obstinate were simply a consequence of being in over one’s head, you could make persistent people become obstinate by making them solve harder problems. But that’s not what happens. If you handed the Collisons an extremely hard problem to solve, they wouldn’t become obstinate. If anything they’d become less obstinate. They’d know they had to be open to anything.

Ah interesting, so Paul grahams view is that the persistent people become obstinate (in theory). Actually, people do not change that much. And if persistent people are successful, then they do not become obstinate. Which is the case of collisons brothers.

Similarly, if obstinacy were caused by the situation, the obstinate would stop being obstinate when solving easier problems. But they don’t. And if obstinacy isn’t caused by the situation, it must come from within. It must be a feature of one’s personality.

Yes, I think so too and i personally believe that most people are obstinate in some form or way, otherwise there’s almost too much data to absorb.

Obstinacy is a reflexive resistance to changing one’s ideas. This is not identical with stupidity, but they’re closely related. A reflexive resistance to changing one’s ideas becomes a sort of induced stupidity as contrary evidence mounts. And obstinacy is a form of not giving up that’s easily practiced by the stupid. You don’t have to consider complicated tradeoffs; you just dig in your heels. It even works, up to a point.

That’s funny. Yeah, it’s hard to not be obstinate when especially if you do not have support continually, which is often the case with a lot of people. People would rather die on a hill than be called stupid in America, but I’m not sure about other countries. This is reflective of one’s culture partially, I believe. For example, in the classroom (where I grew up) in most teachers eyes, it’s either you’re wrong or you’re right, but why? It’s often a lot of energy to discuss with “stupid” or just kids

The fact that obstinacy works for simple problems is an important clue. Persistence and obstinacy aren’t opposites. The relationship between them is more like the relationship between the two kinds of respiration we can do: aerobic respiration, and the anaerobic respiration we inherited from our most distant ancestors. Anaerobic respiration is a more primitive process, but it has its uses. When you leap suddenly away from a threat, that’s what you’re using.

Interesting. I think the analogy is a bit hard to understand without visualization. More like in my terms, reflectively turn brain on or turn brain off to more serious questions

The optimal amount of obstinacy is not zero. It can be good if your initial reaction to a setback is an unthinking “I won’t give up,” because this helps prevent panic. But unthinking only gets you so far. The further someone is toward the obstinate end of the continuum, the less likely they are to succeed in solving hard problems

I wish he had examples of this. It’s hard to understand without points.

Obstinacy is a simple thing. Animals have it. But persistence turns out to have a fairly complicated internal structure. One thing that distinguishes the persistent is their energy. At the risk of putting too much weight on words, they persist rather than merely resisting. They keep trying things. Which means the persistent must also be imaginative. To keep trying things, you have to keep thinking of things to try.

This seems to be true; but how does one try and try and think - it’s very difficult to become such as person

Energy and imagination make a wonderful combination. Each gets the best out of the other. Energy creates demand for the ideas produced by imagination, which thus produces more, and imagination gives energy somewhere to go. In an ideal world, it is constant. When it does happen, it’s incredible. Most of the time it happens for varying degrees/durations. How does one keep this flow going? Merely having energy and imagination is quite rare. But to solve hard problems you need three more qualities: resilience, good judgement, and a focus on some kind of goal

This is interesting. Yes. I wonder if there are any more qualities? Are these the core or would more help? Or what qualities suck? And in some ways, qualities overlap. Persistence is some sort of resilience and kind of requires good judgement.

Resilience means not having one’s morale destroyed by setbacks. Setbacks are inevitable once problems reach a certain size, so if you can’t bounce back from them, you can only do good work on a small scale. But resilience is not the same as obstinacy. Resilience means setbacks can’t change your morale, not that they can’t change your mind.

Yeah, good definition. How do you even build this? Or even know what is a good morale to build on? It’s hard to know without knowing what size of the problem you’ve seen before

Indeed, persistence often requires that one change one’s mind. That’s where good judgement comes in. The persistent are quite rational. They focus on expected value. It’s this, not recklessness, that lets them work on things that are unlikely to succeed.

Wow, I think this very difficult. Judgement changes as problem changes and it’s very hard to know what is good or bad as the scope changes. Often, you have to listen to others to find good judgement as well.

There is one point at which the persistent are often irrational though: at the very top of the decision tree. When they choose between two problems of roughly equal expected value, the choice usually comes down to personal preference. Indeed, they’ll often classify projects into deliberately wide bands of expected value in order to ensure that the one they want to work on still qualifies.

Interesting thing to write. How does one determine between two problems of expected value? I feel like that’s a very hard thing to do. Like super hard. Because expected value is predicting the future. But yes, personal preference matters in motivation

Empirically this doesn’t seem to be a problem. It’s ok to be irrational near the top of the decision tree. One reason is that we humans will work harder on a problem we love. But there’s another more subtle factor involved as well: our preferences among problems aren’t random. When we love a problem that other people don’t, it’s often because we’ve unconsciously noticed that it’s more important than they realize.

What is this decision tree rationality? Doesn’t make any sense to me for some reason… maybe about thinking high level of different problems. And yes what he says is true; if you love something, you work on it a lot and if you work on it a lot, you notice things. I think good judgement is with Paul here is a about picking the problem, which is the first part of it

Which leads to our fifth quality: there needs to be some overall goal. If you’re like me you began, as a kid, merely with the desire to do something great. In theory that should be the most powerful motivator of all, since it includes everything that could possibly be done. But in practice it’s not much use, precisely because it includes too much. It doesn’t tell you what to do at this moment.

Yeah, makes sense, the goal isn’t clear as a kid and it’s suppose to be imaginative.

So in practice your energy and imagination and resilience and good judgement have to be directed toward some fairly specific goal. Not too specific, or you might miss a great discovery adjacent to what you’re searching for, but not too general, or it won’t work to motivate you.

True.

When you look at the internal structure of persistence, it doesn’t resemble obstinacy at all. It’s so much more complex. Five distinct qualities — energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal — combine to produce a phenomenon that seems a bit like obstinacy in the sense that it causes you not to give up. But the way you don’t give up is completely different. Instead of merely resisting change, you’re driven toward a goal by energy and resilience, through paths discovered by imagination and optimized by judgement. You’ll give way on any point low down in the decision tree, if its expected value drops sufficiently, but energy and resilience keep pushing you toward whatever you chose higher up.

Nice conclusion. I think the entire thought can be compressed down to this. Obviously hard to understand for people without breaking it down, which is nice.

Considering what it’s made of, it’s not surprising that the right kind of stubbornness is so much rarer than the wrong kind, or that it gets so much better results. Anyone can do obstinacy. Indeed, kids and drunks and fools are best at it. Whereas very few people have enough of all five of the qualities that produce right kind of stubbornness, but when they do the results are magical.

The question is how? And who? And what did they do? What is the progression? With the details of failures. It’s really really difficult to find and really really hard to reason without details.

Other thoughts along the way

People who have faced racism have a taste of obstinate people. Once phrases have been said, that’s the end of all the discussion. There’s no more after.

What caused Paul graham to make this article? He must have met a lot obstinate people. And generally they’re classed in this. His words hold weight. I wonder what percentage of people he’s encountered who are like that? How quickly can he determine if someone is obstinate? How deep should the conversation to people who are obstinate?

Each paragraph is quite well thought out - each paragraph almost has a thought on its own. How does Paul do this?

What are hard problems considered by Paul? I really want to know what they are. How does he define them.

The five attributes at the end; they’re extremely hard to balance. I wonder how smart people balance those attributes? Ranging from physical (diet, activity) to social (talking to others) to mindset (this is what I need to think about/actions to take)