Comment by foldr
6 days ago
Hmm, this is a completely generic and unreflective rant about ‘wokeness’ that could have been cobbled together from YouTube comments and Jeremy Clarkson columns. What is PG thinking?
The most striking thing about it is that it makes absolutely no attempt to consider how there might be a link between the undeniable social progress that’s been made on race and gender over the past decades and the aspects of ‘wokeness’ that PG finds distasteful. He simply assumes that you can automatically get all of the progress without any of the stuff he doesn’t like.
In "The Age of the Essay"[0], Paul writes:
"An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
"Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
"If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them."
So there's your answer. PG is thinking "This is something I don't know; I should write an essay to figure out an answer."
It also makes sense to me that when he writes an essay connected to an area he knows well (like startups), the result is maybe full of unique perspectives and is broadly insightful/useful. Whereas an essay on wokeness isn't likely to bring much to the table to anyone who has been paying attention to diversity for several years.
Maybe it's still useful to engineers who've been living under a rock and haven't paid any attention at all; I don't know.
[0] https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
That's a good reason to write an essay. I think the present case illustrates that it's not a sufficient reason to publish it.
> What is PG thinking?
My assumption would be that he's doing a performative hard right turn like pretty much every other tech billionaire this week in order to make nice with the incoming lunatic administration.
he made a hard right turn a decade or more ago. Its not just now.
source: his other blog posts.