Presumably because he owns the site. You would think this would be the one place that PG didn't get much pushback on his opinions. I'm not too surprised though; he hasn't been very involved here for years so the culture has shifted.
I imagine if you polled all HN users vastly more would sympathise with this essay than not. But the YC flag (and voting) system still seems relatively straightforward, and consequently enables small groups of activists to have quite a significant capability to censor (or promote) topics/comments.
This is one reason I think community notes style algorithms is where we'll probably see pretty much all community voting/moderation head over time. It's just objectively better since it basically fixes this 'glitch' in straightforward systems.
Appeal to authority needs to be used with prudence. I wouldn't trust pg on a medical topic, but I have no issue hearing what he has to say on this particular topic because as far as I am concerned academic credentials do not give you a better understanding of the contemporary social climate.
For that matter Trump and MAGA have no degrees in psychology and sociology. Despite this, they were much more in tune with the American public than the Democrats with their fake intellectualism.
I mean that's fine, that's the kind of distinction everyone has to make for themselves. Personally I haven't encountered anything from PG that conveyed meaningful information to me at any point in the last decade so this is more a continuation of ignoring a zero value content stream than anything else. Put simply I don't need a lecture from PG regardless of topic.
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Presumably because he owns the site. You would think this would be the one place that PG didn't get much pushback on his opinions. I'm not too surprised though; he hasn't been very involved here for years so the culture has shifted.
I don't think he would have written this 10, even 5 years ago. It only really started becoming a trendy viewpoint in his social circles recently.
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I imagine if you polled all HN users vastly more would sympathise with this essay than not. But the YC flag (and voting) system still seems relatively straightforward, and consequently enables small groups of activists to have quite a significant capability to censor (or promote) topics/comments.
This is one reason I think community notes style algorithms is where we'll probably see pretty much all community voting/moderation head over time. It's just objectively better since it basically fixes this 'glitch' in straightforward systems.
3 replies →
Appeal to authority needs to be used with prudence. I wouldn't trust pg on a medical topic, but I have no issue hearing what he has to say on this particular topic because as far as I am concerned academic credentials do not give you a better understanding of the contemporary social climate.
For that matter Trump and MAGA have no degrees in psychology and sociology. Despite this, they were much more in tune with the American public than the Democrats with their fake intellectualism.
I mean that's fine, that's the kind of distinction everyone has to make for themselves. Personally I haven't encountered anything from PG that conveyed meaningful information to me at any point in the last decade so this is more a continuation of ignoring a zero value content stream than anything else. Put simply I don't need a lecture from PG regardless of topic.