Ok, but please don't break the site guidelines when posting to HN. Name-calling and personal attacks aren't allowed here, and your comment consists of nothing but.
The sheer amount of content-less booing of political outgroups throughout the thread (overwhelmingly in one direction, unsurprisingly given the article content) has really disappointed me.
I can't help but wonder if this is intentionally ironic.
(From TFA: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules.")
I think it’s intentional and ironic. But I don’t think PG realizes what he did. I throughly believe he’s in the space of “I can do it because i am morally superior. But other folks can’t because they don’t get it like I do.” I get this feeling from reading not just this, but his other essays too.
@malcomgreaves I'm not sure you caught the intended target of @cle's comment. I believe he was talking about your comment being the thing he thought may be intentionally ironic, not PG's essay.
One of the main points in the essay: "The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so"
And your comment is a classic example of that behavior.
I think it's just the fact he spends this much time thinking about wokeness. His whole argument is it's unimportant and performative, so then why did he spend all this time writing an article about it?
> His whole argument is it's unimportant and performative, so then why did he spend all this time writing an article about it?
Arguably because a large portion of the population doesn't agree that it's unimportant and performative. Current culture is captured by the concept and collectively spends a massive amount of time worrying about it.
If you personally feel that this is a waste of time, how else do you communicate that if not by spending time thinking and writing about it?
I also think most meetings are a complete waste of time. The fact that many other people feel meetings are important directly impacts me, and just believing that they're a waste isn't good enough. It's necessary to actively push against something if you think that thing needs to change.
> the fact he spends this much time thinking about wokeness
This is the first and only article I recall from PG about wokeness, is it part of some anthology that I've missed or where are you getting the "this much time" part from?
Not OP, but personally it's just sad to see someone that you view as a historically great mind getting distracted by nonsense, like if a great mathematician suddenly stopped their research to focus on flat earth and contrails
> view as a historically great mind getting distracted by nonsense
Are you saying that thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction, regardless of the person? Or that specifically PG thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction? Or maybe even "thinking about wokeness in that way" is the distraction?
It seems like if "wokeness" is important, then having more people thinking about it is better, regardless of their outcome from thinking about it. If "wokeness" isn't important at all, I'd totally understand you, but seems there are way more people out there thinking about it more than PG, since it's the first time I see him say anything about it at all.
Thanks for engaging. Is it nonsense if it greatly affects government and workplace policies? Especially now at a time where the incoming POTUS has demonstrated a lack of respect for a wide swath of people.
(Just to be clear, despite the above comment, I do not align with "wokeness".)
I do agree with you that it seems like that and I generally agree with you, but I'm also not a fan of your comment that only addresses the mind of PG, while the words he written are right there.
Point out the parts of the blog post that shows his lack of rational thinking and research, rather than just giving some overall personal attack, as currently the comment is relatively off-topic considering the submission.
I'm sure there are good and bad parts of the blog post, while you failed to address any sides of it.
You read a reply from a person that doesn't like the implications of PG's statements and conclusions. Which I think is further evidence of PG's claims.
As a liberal/left/progressive person who agrees with many of the ideas "woke" people are pushing, I find "wokeism" extremely problematic.
We need to put to bed the notion that criticizing some aspect of a social phenomenon somehow means someone is wholly endorsing the worst elements of the opposition.
Personally, I believe "wokeism" (I hesitate to even use this word because it's poorly defined) is actually one of the largest impediments to moving society towards the ideas generally associated with the word. It's a tactics issue.
The difference between "We want the world to look more like X" and "Let's do these specific things to make the world look more like X" is critical. How you go about the latter can have a huge impact on the former.
That's just not true. He did not like wokeism, but on the other hand he's aligned with the democrats, including voting for Kamala. Like his politics or not, he is independent thinker.
Paul Graham was never smart. He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Young people in need of guidance would do well to read the classics and disregard everyone with a pulse.
I'm assuming you're exaggerating for effect at least a little but with that caveat I couldn't agree more. CS Lewis has a great argument for this in his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation. Paraphrasing his argument: Time naturally filters out the nonsense and what we're left with are the books that are worth reading by virtue of the fact that they have stood the test of time. Truth or at least the closest we can get to it naturally bubbles up to the surface over time.
This is horrible advice if you want to work on anything innovative. You don't have time to wait for things to bubble up. For example, physics textbooks from the early 1900s rarely use linear algebra, even if they're written well.
So I've been thinking about this recently and come to the conclusion that 'smart' and 'stupid' are just extremes of behaviour and capability.
That is, people have clever _moments_ - some more than others perhaps - but can equally have stupid ones. We convenientally flatten the statistics into a boolean.
For example, recently someone considered to have made a lot of smart decisions in his life has been found to have payed others to rank his character up in a video game so he can brag about it. Everyone has stupid moments.
He’s smart in Computer Science. I studied mathematics in graduate school. Lots of smart people in my class…in mathematics. What I’ve experienced since graduate school is people being smart in their area of expertise thinking that smartness automatically extends to other areas. Arrogance and stupidity shine brightest when such people write authoritatively on areas they haven’t actually studied in any real depth.
If pg spent any of his time talking about actual computer science topics instead of the dull pablum and oligarch apologia he outputs today, we’d all be better served.
> He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Agreed. People seem to think that success is deterministic, so following the advice of successful people will lead them to success, rather than there being any number of other factors that might make someone who might make choices with the highest chance of success end up not succeeding, or someone who might make choices that aren't actually that smart end up becoming successful in spite of that. The worst part of this is that it's not just the students who naively believe this, but the successful people themselves. When someone mistakenly thinks that their own success is solely attributable to your own superior intellect or work ethic, it's not surprising that they end up advocating for policies that treat people in unfortunate circumstances as being not worth trying to help.
Graham's early essays on, say, the ambitions of cities or hackers and painters, were interesting, original, were grounded in his personal experiences, and were focused in scope.
This latest mush makes extravagant claims about the evolution of society over the course over a 70 year period, seems shocked that news rooms might have style guides, and suggests that recent campus life can somehow be meaningfully be compared to the Cultural Revolution.
It observes many trends, perhaps some accurately, but observes everything superficially.
Pragmatically, what Graham suggests at the end is reasonable--pluralism combined with openness to the ideas of others about morality. I don't know that we needed 6000 words of vague dyspeptic musings to get there.
He has demonstrated the ability to write and think more clearly than this. It is reasonable for someone to observe this and be disappointed.
Both of you are attacking pg's character, yet he's done no wrong here.
> These new administrators could often be recognized by the word "inclusion" in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an "inclusive language guide."
As an LGBT Latino, I feel gross when people step up to "include" me. The "LatinX" thing is just sick, and the fake "pride" bullshit makes me feel unbelievably cheapened. Not all gays or bis are the same. I don't go around screaming "yass qween", listen to Beyonce, or watch Ru Paul. But we're token represented like that. I hate everything about it.
Superficial facets of my "identity" have been commoditized and weaponized. (I'd say "appropriated", but that'd only be the case if this wasn't a complete cartoon representation.)
I've been called a "fag" once in public for kissing a guy. Whatever.
My wife has been called cis-scum (despite the fact she's trans!), I've been made to write software to deny grants to whites and men [1], I've been told I can't recommend people for hire because they weren't "diverse", I've been taught by my company my important "LatinX heritage" and even got some swag for it, I've had a ton of completely irrelevant people make my "identity" into a battle ground, etc. etc etc. I can't count the number of times this surfaces in my life in an abrasive and intrusive way.
I felt more at home in the world before 2010 than in the world today that supposedly "embraces my diversity".
He's smart about startups and tech but as soon as he starts to talk about politics or philosophy he gets very 2 dimensional very quickly.
In much the same way people who build useless startups never talk to any actual customers, Paul Graham wouldnt be seen dead with the types of 1970s black activists from Harlem who actually originated the term "woke" (to refer to e.g. police brutality).
Im sure he knows plenty of the rich, white moral posturers who run large corporations and pride themselves on making a rainbow version of their company's logo for use outside of middle eastern markets, though.
What I find funny is that PG thinks he is a thinker who breaks the rules. No PG, you and your friends write the rules. Wokeness is about acknowledging the game is rigged against black people and others. But go ahead PG, redefine it as political correctness, then write an essay about how the current system is actually good.
The reason wokeness scares the elite like PG is because it targets the system they themselves helped create.
It doesn’t even have any kind of real power to unseat these dorks. They have enough capital and connections to hold on to power for life. It attempts to delegitimize them, question their worldview and expose them to other viewpoints and their reaction is to lash out against it. Very fragile identities.
It just amazing to see how the new Trump administration prepares to take over, all the Tech Bros suddenly are coming out of their shell.
Musk on DEI. Zuckerberg just got back to his Misogynistic persona of the first days of Facebook. Peter Thiel published an editorial in the FT last week talking about conspiracy theories on JFK, and now...The attack on Wokeness... Cherry-picking historical examples, misrepresenting real power dynamics, and dismissing genuine social concerns as mere “performative” gestures. All while coming from a privileged VC perspective that notoriously funnels opportunities to the same elite circles...
Whatever else you think of him, he's an incredibly concise and persuasive writer. Even on topic I disagree with him on, I can't fault his reasoning or presentation.
I don't think the "be nice to everyone" is the thing people are annoyed with, rather it's the "you will be canceled if you step out of line even once" that comes along with it.
what's an example here of unfair cancellation that you are thinking about? I feel that most of those who have been "cancelled" have been so because of fairly egregious stuff like sexual assault, clearly racist speech, etc.
The irony being of course, that the current wave of performative anti-woke articles from PG, Zuck et al is based mostly on fear that they'll be cancelled by the incoming administration if they appear to be too kindly disposed to minorities...
You're clearly passionate about social justice. But pretending it's just 'being nice' and everyone who disagrees is evil? That's exactly the kind of oversimplified thinking that stops real progress and actually causes evil.
Movements for social change are messy. They involve hard trade-offs, heated debates about methods, and yeah, sometimes people on 'your side' screw up or take things too far. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
And the history is just wrong - 'stay woke' wasn't forced on anyone. People chose it proudly before it became contentious. You're rewriting history to avoid engaging with actual criticism.
You can fight for what you believe in without pretending you're in a morality play where the good guys are pure and the bad guys twirl their mustaches. Real life is more complicated than that.
You have it backwards. People who had old conservative views were told they were wrong and got upset. So they started to believe they were being targeted and persecuted when in reality, if you count how many went to jail or got fired, it was people where were brave enough, woke enough, to fight for change.
There's much more ideology attached to "wokeness" than just "be nice" and "be respectful", such as the concepts around gender and neurodiversity spectrums.
Just using the word itself evokes immediate reactions from those aligned with particular political "sides". I've formed this opinion after my many, mandatory DEI trainings at work.
I think all good people can agree that being nice and being respectful of people who aren't hurting others is a no-brainer.
Edit: Note that this comment is being downvoted to oblivion and illustrates my point.
There's also a great deal of sanctimony attached in many cases, which is the thing people hate the most in my experience.
It reminds me of when I was getting breakfast with my wife one day, and there was a guy who had just come from some kind of feminist protest. He was wearing a shirt that said (paraphrasing) that the only two reasons to not call yourself a feminist are that you are unaware it just means "treat women like people", or that you're an asshole. He seemed genuinely unaware that the sanctimonious hostility his shirt expressed is a huge reason why people don't call themselves feminists.
"Woke" is like that. I'm quite certain that there are a lot of good people who really do just want to respect everyone. However, there are also a lot of petty jerks who are using an ostensibly good cause to bully people. Unfortunately for the former people, the latter people taint the movement and make it unattractive to those outside it.
I think even the people you would call the most woke hate mandatory DEI training. The idea is fine in theory, there's three main parts that seem to be common to them.
* Here's some genres of people you might not have interacted with in your personal life before that you might run into at work, and here's the broad strokes of how each of those groups would describe themselves and some cultural differences you might want to keep in mind.
* Here's a baby's first introduction to intersectionality and some situations where that lens might be relevant at work.
* Stop sexually harassing your coworkers, Jesus people.
But the implementation is unbelievably patronizing and presented with so much "sensitivity" that the overall experience is an hour of what feels like walking on eggshells. It's exhausting.
I don't understand this wokery-as-politeness argument. Politeness obviously has a place, but if you're trying to solve real social problems while also being unable to discuss the actual problem, because speaking frankly about it is impolite, then clearly is counter-productive if your goal is to solve actual social problems. As far as I can tell, wokery functions as a straight jacket on language that is designed to make only one solution to a given problem (generally the solution that blames white people) even sayable.
I don't think it is politeness, I think its a political power play to control language that sounds nice to first-order-thinking left wing types.
This is a ridiculous comment. I don't know if you've noticed but a lot of what's happening in the entire western world politically is a result of the backlash against wokeness and leftist economics.
Without wokeness there is no Trump, and the far right in Europe would still be marginal.
Edit - it's funny, just yesterday I was listening to a podcast where Peter Thiel was lamenting the lack of introspection on the left. Lots of comments proving it correct.
This comment is historically and intellectually uninformed, i.e., devoid of understanding about the antecedents and relationships between what is driving todays rise of the right, which is a populist counterrevolution to the 60s and beyond’s postmodernism-fueled culture wars, which elevated the marginalized and women, and served as a strategic distraction while the elite locked in wealth extract ion from below and minority rule by manufacturing a pervasive epistemic crisis.
Same for yours, You can hardly call the free market and privatization policies that the western europe has been going through these last three decades "Leftish economics"
Are you accusing the people who fight against Trump's politics and who vote against him to have put him in power? Also, what "leftist economics" are you talking about?
Now this is a ridiculous comment.
It reads just like "antifascists are the new fascists" discourses. It's absurd.
Because they are helping Trump, their behavior is often so insane it drives people into his camp who might have otherwise been somewhere in the middle.
Look at the surveys done of swing voters in the last election, they biggest single item was social issues such as trans.
Also just read the linked article(seems reasonable enough, though I don't necessarily agree with all of it), and the moralistic responses attacking him personally, instead of responding by pointing with the part they disagree with, this is a logical fallacy.
Trump is the "solution" to the problem of militant radical Neo-Marxism or whatever you want to call it. He exist in a world where the Overton window sits comfortably over the destruction of the entire western world by the hand of communists bent on burning down the world to rule over the ashes. When everything is bent into identity politics, for good or ill those that can manage their image will thrive. And Trump is very good at managing the Trump brand.
Trump came to power on the back of a populist anger at the wealthy elite and the consequences of neo-liberal economics (which is pretty fucking far from e.g. Marx. Regardless of the entirety of his meaning, certainly some of Alex Jones' hatred of "globalists" springs from the fact that they outsource jobs to where the labor is cheaper). Insofar as "wokeness" factors into Trump's power, it was to harness that anger and direct it at some wealthy elites, but not others. That is, he claimed that these wealthy elites are being performatively sanctimonious and are trying to rob you of your freedom, money, power, etc, but those wealthy elites have your best interests at heart. Even though the two wealthy elites are kissing cousins (to whit, Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump Jr. both engaged in a committed long-term relationships with the same woman, albeit at different times) and don't actually care either way.
"Woke" in the traditional sense is realizing that no matter what they say, both groups are wealthy elites, and that neither actually has the interests of anyone but the elites at heart.
There are definitely moments of "are we really prioritizing this right now?" with modern social justice movements. But even on the subject of trans kids, the question for me is not "are we encouraging the wrong ideas around gender?" but rather "are we doing everything that's necessary to keep kids from committing suicide?"
The other day there was a post about fascists vs. rakes, and I really do feel like the the discussion around wokeness comes down to a similar misunderstanding about the intentions and moral principles of the two sides of the discussion.
Without wokeness, Trump et al would've already steamrolled us.
Being woke is to be aware of inequalities between ethnicities, religions, and classes. Being woke is to be aware of the fact that the planet is overheating due to our unfettered capitalism.
You calling something ridiculous is what is ridiculous, friend.
Yeah, what the rich need is more tax breaks {sarcasm}.
The world is full of people too stupid to know how stupid they are. They need to wake the fuck up.
The scientific method is to look at data and form models of reality from that. Not to have a model in mind and then look for evidence to support it or evidence to ignore.
Graham has a Hegelian, Panglossian view of things. In "woke" terms he is a very, very wealthy white cishet male born to an upper middle class physicist. As the relations of production and social order were created for and are controlled by his class he defends it.
To use an example - due to government mandates, the number of blacks attending Harvard Law School this year is less than half what it was last year. It does not fit into the narrative of a progressive, forward moving country which is meritocratic (although absurdly the legacies etc. taking their place is called a move to meritocracy). You can't say there is a national oppression of Africans in the US by the US, or that things are not meritocracy, so thinking starts getting very skewed. You can read this skewed thinking in Graham and others.
YC was started by a convicted felon, and it's due to his privileged birth that Graham was not convicted along with his co-founder. Meanwhile black men are killed by police for selling loose cigarettes or handing a clerk a counterfeit bill (something I unknowingly did once) to cheers from corporate media commentators and demagogues. What kind of country you live in even here in the imperial center is very much a question of what class you are in, as well as other things.
The working people and wretched of the earth are tired of being lectured to by the scions of diamond mines, Phillips Exeter graduates and the like. Even if they do know the worst case big O time for quicksort. History goes through twists and turns, and I welcome the challenges to their power we will be seeing this century.
Ok, but please don't break the site guidelines when posting to HN. Name-calling and personal attacks aren't allowed here, and your comment consists of nothing but.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Fair. Apologies for skirting the rules.
The sheer amount of content-less booing of political outgroups throughout the thread (overwhelmingly in one direction, unsurprisingly given the article content) has really disappointed me.
I can't help but wonder if this is intentionally ironic.
(From TFA: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules.")
I think it’s intentional and ironic. But I don’t think PG realizes what he did. I throughly believe he’s in the space of “I can do it because i am morally superior. But other folks can’t because they don’t get it like I do.” I get this feeling from reading not just this, but his other essays too.
@malcomgreaves I'm not sure you caught the intended target of @cle's comment. I believe he was talking about your comment being the thing he thought may be intentionally ironic, not PG's essay.
One of the main points in the essay: "The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so"
And your comment is a classic example of that behavior.
> I can do it because i am morally superior. But other folks can’t because they don’t get it like I do.
I think it’s more of “I can do it because I can afford it. But other folks can’t because they need their job (or something similar).”
Not sure about 'I can do it because I am morally superior'. Is it required to be morally superior to have an opposing view?
> other folks can't because they don't get it like I do
His point of view undoubtedly resonates with 'some folks'.
My respect for PG and the rest of the leadership of the tech world unfortunately seem to be headed off the same cliff.
The arrogance and lack of empathy is so disappointing and so unnecessary. Please try harder. A lot is at stake here.
Your comment, while eloquent, is totally unsubstantiated. At least PG tries to justify his perspective.
You didn't.
This comment is kinda harsh isn't it? Do you have anything specific from his words to support:
> ... mind become filled with mush
> desperate pledge of allegiance ...
I think it's just the fact he spends this much time thinking about wokeness. His whole argument is it's unimportant and performative, so then why did he spend all this time writing an article about it?
> His whole argument is it's unimportant and performative, so then why did he spend all this time writing an article about it?
Arguably because a large portion of the population doesn't agree that it's unimportant and performative. Current culture is captured by the concept and collectively spends a massive amount of time worrying about it.
If you personally feel that this is a waste of time, how else do you communicate that if not by spending time thinking and writing about it?
I also think most meetings are a complete waste of time. The fact that many other people feel meetings are important directly impacts me, and just believing that they're a waste isn't good enough. It's necessary to actively push against something if you think that thing needs to change.
Because it comes with very real consequences, sometimes even criminal now.
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He doesn't argue it's unimportant. If you took that away from the essay you didn't read it closely enough because it contains sentences like:
"College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination."
If you're describing something as poisonous, especially if it's the behavior of a large group of people, then you're saying it's important.
> the fact he spends this much time thinking about wokeness
This is the first and only article I recall from PG about wokeness, is it part of some anthology that I've missed or where are you getting the "this much time" part from?
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Do you have any points of substance you can elaborate with? I would genuinely like to hear your argument.
Not OP, but personally it's just sad to see someone that you view as a historically great mind getting distracted by nonsense, like if a great mathematician suddenly stopped their research to focus on flat earth and contrails
> view as a historically great mind getting distracted by nonsense
Are you saying that thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction, regardless of the person? Or that specifically PG thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction? Or maybe even "thinking about wokeness in that way" is the distraction?
It seems like if "wokeness" is important, then having more people thinking about it is better, regardless of their outcome from thinking about it. If "wokeness" isn't important at all, I'd totally understand you, but seems there are way more people out there thinking about it more than PG, since it's the first time I see him say anything about it at all.
Thanks for engaging. Is it nonsense if it greatly affects government and workplace policies? Especially now at a time where the incoming POTUS has demonstrated a lack of respect for a wide swath of people.
(Just to be clear, despite the above comment, I do not align with "wokeness".)
I do agree with you that it seems like that and I generally agree with you, but I'm also not a fan of your comment that only addresses the mind of PG, while the words he written are right there.
Point out the parts of the blog post that shows his lack of rational thinking and research, rather than just giving some overall personal attack, as currently the comment is relatively off-topic considering the submission.
I'm sure there are good and bad parts of the blog post, while you failed to address any sides of it.
Did we read the same article? It seems like a pretty coherent and plausible explanation for the current state of political correctness.
You read a reply from a person that doesn't like the implications of PG's statements and conclusions. Which I think is further evidence of PG's claims.
Could you expand on why this article makes you believe his mind has "become filled with mush."
What points is he making (if you consider him to be making clear points), how do you think those points are flawed, etc..
He's just kissing the ring.
As a liberal/left/progressive person who agrees with many of the ideas "woke" people are pushing, I find "wokeism" extremely problematic.
We need to put to bed the notion that criticizing some aspect of a social phenomenon somehow means someone is wholly endorsing the worst elements of the opposition.
Personally, I believe "wokeism" (I hesitate to even use this word because it's poorly defined) is actually one of the largest impediments to moving society towards the ideas generally associated with the word. It's a tactics issue.
The difference between "We want the world to look more like X" and "Let's do these specific things to make the world look more like X" is critical. How you go about the latter can have a huge impact on the former.
That's just not true. He did not like wokeism, but on the other hand he's aligned with the democrats, including voting for Kamala. Like his politics or not, he is independent thinker.
Paul Graham was never smart. He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Young people in need of guidance would do well to read the classics and disregard everyone with a pulse.
Paul Graham is one of the smartest people I've ever met, hands down, not a close call.
If I know propositional logic, one of two things follows: either (1) I've never met any smart people, or (2) you've jumped to a false conclusion.
Either way, you shouldn't be posting personal attacks to HN.
I'm assuming you're exaggerating for effect at least a little but with that caveat I couldn't agree more. CS Lewis has a great argument for this in his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation. Paraphrasing his argument: Time naturally filters out the nonsense and what we're left with are the books that are worth reading by virtue of the fact that they have stood the test of time. Truth or at least the closest we can get to it naturally bubbles up to the surface over time.
https://thecslewis-studygroup.org/the-c-s-lewis-study-group/...
Counterpoint: all the nonsense in millennia old religious texts that still wastes people's time to this day.
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Taleb is a strong proponent of this as well. Related to the “Lindy Effect”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
This is horrible advice if you want to work on anything innovative. You don't have time to wait for things to bubble up. For example, physics textbooks from the early 1900s rarely use linear algebra, even if they're written well.
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"He then received a Master of Science in 1988, and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1990, both in computer science from Harvard University."
Anyone with a PhD Comp Sci from Harvard is automatically very smart in my mind, unless by "smart" you mean something else...
So I've been thinking about this recently and come to the conclusion that 'smart' and 'stupid' are just extremes of behaviour and capability.
That is, people have clever _moments_ - some more than others perhaps - but can equally have stupid ones. We convenientally flatten the statistics into a boolean.
For example, recently someone considered to have made a lot of smart decisions in his life has been found to have payed others to rank his character up in a video game so he can brag about it. Everyone has stupid moments.
He’s smart in Computer Science. I studied mathematics in graduate school. Lots of smart people in my class…in mathematics. What I’ve experienced since graduate school is people being smart in their area of expertise thinking that smartness automatically extends to other areas. Arrogance and stupidity shine brightest when such people write authoritatively on areas they haven’t actually studied in any real depth.
You have fallen for the classic blunder. Just because someone is smart in area X does not mean they have the same proficiency in Y.
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So this is completely out of his ballpark, and he's commenting on it publicly? Seems pretty stupid to me
If pg spent any of his time talking about actual computer science topics instead of the dull pablum and oligarch apologia he outputs today, we’d all be better served.
> He was always just a successful guy whom lots of naive student mistook for a guru on account of his success. That happens a lot.
Agreed. People seem to think that success is deterministic, so following the advice of successful people will lead them to success, rather than there being any number of other factors that might make someone who might make choices with the highest chance of success end up not succeeding, or someone who might make choices that aren't actually that smart end up becoming successful in spite of that. The worst part of this is that it's not just the students who naively believe this, but the successful people themselves. When someone mistakenly thinks that their own success is solely attributable to your own superior intellect or work ethic, it's not surprising that they end up advocating for policies that treat people in unfortunate circumstances as being not worth trying to help.
Graham's early essays on, say, the ambitions of cities or hackers and painters, were interesting, original, were grounded in his personal experiences, and were focused in scope.
This latest mush makes extravagant claims about the evolution of society over the course over a 70 year period, seems shocked that news rooms might have style guides, and suggests that recent campus life can somehow be meaningfully be compared to the Cultural Revolution.
It observes many trends, perhaps some accurately, but observes everything superficially.
Pragmatically, what Graham suggests at the end is reasonable--pluralism combined with openness to the ideas of others about morality. I don't know that we needed 6000 words of vague dyspeptic musings to get there.
He has demonstrated the ability to write and think more clearly than this. It is reasonable for someone to observe this and be disappointed.
Both of you are attacking pg's character, yet he's done no wrong here.
> These new administrators could often be recognized by the word "inclusion" in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an "inclusive language guide."
As an LGBT Latino, I feel gross when people step up to "include" me. The "LatinX" thing is just sick, and the fake "pride" bullshit makes me feel unbelievably cheapened. Not all gays or bis are the same. I don't go around screaming "yass qween", listen to Beyonce, or watch Ru Paul. But we're token represented like that. I hate everything about it.
Superficial facets of my "identity" have been commoditized and weaponized. (I'd say "appropriated", but that'd only be the case if this wasn't a complete cartoon representation.)
I've been called a "fag" once in public for kissing a guy. Whatever.
My wife has been called cis-scum (despite the fact she's trans!), I've been made to write software to deny grants to whites and men [1], I've been told I can't recommend people for hire because they weren't "diverse", I've been taught by my company my important "LatinX heritage" and even got some swag for it, I've had a ton of completely irrelevant people make my "identity" into a battle ground, etc. etc etc. I can't count the number of times this surfaces in my life in an abrasive and intrusive way.
I felt more at home in the world before 2010 than in the world today that supposedly "embraces my diversity".
[1] Restaurant Revitalization Fund, look it up.
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He's smart about startups and tech but as soon as he starts to talk about politics or philosophy he gets very 2 dimensional very quickly.
In much the same way people who build useless startups never talk to any actual customers, Paul Graham wouldnt be seen dead with the types of 1970s black activists from Harlem who actually originated the term "woke" (to refer to e.g. police brutality).
Im sure he knows plenty of the rich, white moral posturers who run large corporations and pride themselves on making a rainbow version of their company's logo for use outside of middle eastern markets, though.
(regardless of the merit of your criticism, this comment was at least very funny to me, so thank you for that)
In a way, this kind of ad hominem attack supports his point.
What I find funny is that PG thinks he is a thinker who breaks the rules. No PG, you and your friends write the rules. Wokeness is about acknowledging the game is rigged against black people and others. But go ahead PG, redefine it as political correctness, then write an essay about how the current system is actually good.
The reason wokeness scares the elite like PG is because it targets the system they themselves helped create.
It doesn’t even have any kind of real power to unseat these dorks. They have enough capital and connections to hold on to power for life. It attempts to delegitimize them, question their worldview and expose them to other viewpoints and their reaction is to lash out against it. Very fragile identities.
It just amazing to see how the new Trump administration prepares to take over, all the Tech Bros suddenly are coming out of their shell.
Musk on DEI. Zuckerberg just got back to his Misogynistic persona of the first days of Facebook. Peter Thiel published an editorial in the FT last week talking about conspiracy theories on JFK, and now...The attack on Wokeness... Cherry-picking historical examples, misrepresenting real power dynamics, and dismissing genuine social concerns as mere “performative” gestures. All while coming from a privileged VC perspective that notoriously funnels opportunities to the same elite circles...
I don't disagree, but Thiel has been "out of his shell" for decades.
I found the essay cogent and accessible. He's very active online and engages in good faith even with his detractors.
Whatever else you think of him, he's an incredibly concise and persuasive writer. Even on topic I disagree with him on, I can't fault his reasoning or presentation.
>Whatever else you think of him, he's an incredibly concise and persuasive writer.
This is not a concise essay.
There is nothing logical about his essay. There is no reasoning. It's kind of all over the place. It's kind of a desperate essay.
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I don't think the "be nice to everyone" is the thing people are annoyed with, rather it's the "you will be canceled if you step out of line even once" that comes along with it.
what's an example here of unfair cancellation that you are thinking about? I feel that most of those who have been "cancelled" have been so because of fairly egregious stuff like sexual assault, clearly racist speech, etc.
The irony being of course, that the current wave of performative anti-woke articles from PG, Zuck et al is based mostly on fear that they'll be cancelled by the incoming administration if they appear to be too kindly disposed to minorities...
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You're clearly passionate about social justice. But pretending it's just 'being nice' and everyone who disagrees is evil? That's exactly the kind of oversimplified thinking that stops real progress and actually causes evil.
Movements for social change are messy. They involve hard trade-offs, heated debates about methods, and yeah, sometimes people on 'your side' screw up or take things too far. Pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone.
And the history is just wrong - 'stay woke' wasn't forced on anyone. People chose it proudly before it became contentious. You're rewriting history to avoid engaging with actual criticism.
You can fight for what you believe in without pretending you're in a morality play where the good guys are pure and the bad guys twirl their mustaches. Real life is more complicated than that.
You have it backwards. People who had old conservative views were told they were wrong and got upset. So they started to believe they were being targeted and persecuted when in reality, if you count how many went to jail or got fired, it was people where were brave enough, woke enough, to fight for change.
There's much more ideology attached to "wokeness" than just "be nice" and "be respectful", such as the concepts around gender and neurodiversity spectrums.
Just using the word itself evokes immediate reactions from those aligned with particular political "sides". I've formed this opinion after my many, mandatory DEI trainings at work.
I think all good people can agree that being nice and being respectful of people who aren't hurting others is a no-brainer.
Edit: Note that this comment is being downvoted to oblivion and illustrates my point.
>as the concepts around gender and neurodiversity spectrums
The concept that these people exist and they should be treated as people?
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There's also a great deal of sanctimony attached in many cases, which is the thing people hate the most in my experience.
It reminds me of when I was getting breakfast with my wife one day, and there was a guy who had just come from some kind of feminist protest. He was wearing a shirt that said (paraphrasing) that the only two reasons to not call yourself a feminist are that you are unaware it just means "treat women like people", or that you're an asshole. He seemed genuinely unaware that the sanctimonious hostility his shirt expressed is a huge reason why people don't call themselves feminists.
"Woke" is like that. I'm quite certain that there are a lot of good people who really do just want to respect everyone. However, there are also a lot of petty jerks who are using an ostensibly good cause to bully people. Unfortunately for the former people, the latter people taint the movement and make it unattractive to those outside it.
I think even the people you would call the most woke hate mandatory DEI training. The idea is fine in theory, there's three main parts that seem to be common to them.
* Here's some genres of people you might not have interacted with in your personal life before that you might run into at work, and here's the broad strokes of how each of those groups would describe themselves and some cultural differences you might want to keep in mind.
* Here's a baby's first introduction to intersectionality and some situations where that lens might be relevant at work.
* Stop sexually harassing your coworkers, Jesus people.
But the implementation is unbelievably patronizing and presented with so much "sensitivity" that the overall experience is an hour of what feels like walking on eggshells. It's exhausting.
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I don’t know about “be nice” - Personally the expression I equate it with is “live and let live” (or maybe “quit being an asshole”)
It’s a reaction to discrimination. If there wasn’t racism and sexism and discrimination there would be no “wokeness”
So congrats righties, you got what you asked for
I don't understand this wokery-as-politeness argument. Politeness obviously has a place, but if you're trying to solve real social problems while also being unable to discuss the actual problem, because speaking frankly about it is impolite, then clearly is counter-productive if your goal is to solve actual social problems. As far as I can tell, wokery functions as a straight jacket on language that is designed to make only one solution to a given problem (generally the solution that blames white people) even sayable.
I don't think it is politeness, I think its a political power play to control language that sounds nice to first-order-thinking left wing types.
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Western urban monoculture.
This is a ridiculous comment. I don't know if you've noticed but a lot of what's happening in the entire western world politically is a result of the backlash against wokeness and leftist economics.
Without wokeness there is no Trump, and the far right in Europe would still be marginal.
Edit - it's funny, just yesterday I was listening to a podcast where Peter Thiel was lamenting the lack of introspection on the left. Lots of comments proving it correct.
This comment is historically and intellectually uninformed, i.e., devoid of understanding about the antecedents and relationships between what is driving todays rise of the right, which is a populist counterrevolution to the 60s and beyond’s postmodernism-fueled culture wars, which elevated the marginalized and women, and served as a strategic distraction while the elite locked in wealth extract ion from below and minority rule by manufacturing a pervasive epistemic crisis.
Same for yours, You can hardly call the free market and privatization policies that the western europe has been going through these last three decades "Leftish economics"
What big leftist economics policies have been enacted in the West recently?
Massive expansionist post-Covid fiscal policy and QE that created the inflationary crisis. Mass immigration (yes immigration is an economic policy).
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All those commie socialist corporate bailouts?
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Are you accusing the people who fight against Trump's politics and who vote against him to have put him in power? Also, what "leftist economics" are you talking about?
Now this is a ridiculous comment.
It reads just like "antifascists are the new fascists" discourses. It's absurd.
When a vocal, extreme minority of the left drives things towards absurdity, there is likely to be an acute reactionary response.
A bunch of people who previously voted left are now voting right. Ask yourself why.
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Because they are helping Trump, their behavior is often so insane it drives people into his camp who might have otherwise been somewhere in the middle.
Look at the surveys done of swing voters in the last election, they biggest single item was social issues such as trans.
Also just read the linked article(seems reasonable enough, though I don't necessarily agree with all of it), and the moralistic responses attacking him personally, instead of responding by pointing with the part they disagree with, this is a logical fallacy.
Trump is the "solution" to the problem of militant radical Neo-Marxism or whatever you want to call it. He exist in a world where the Overton window sits comfortably over the destruction of the entire western world by the hand of communists bent on burning down the world to rule over the ashes. When everything is bent into identity politics, for good or ill those that can manage their image will thrive. And Trump is very good at managing the Trump brand.
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I think this is a bit reductive.
Trump came to power on the back of a populist anger at the wealthy elite and the consequences of neo-liberal economics (which is pretty fucking far from e.g. Marx. Regardless of the entirety of his meaning, certainly some of Alex Jones' hatred of "globalists" springs from the fact that they outsource jobs to where the labor is cheaper). Insofar as "wokeness" factors into Trump's power, it was to harness that anger and direct it at some wealthy elites, but not others. That is, he claimed that these wealthy elites are being performatively sanctimonious and are trying to rob you of your freedom, money, power, etc, but those wealthy elites have your best interests at heart. Even though the two wealthy elites are kissing cousins (to whit, Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump Jr. both engaged in a committed long-term relationships with the same woman, albeit at different times) and don't actually care either way.
"Woke" in the traditional sense is realizing that no matter what they say, both groups are wealthy elites, and that neither actually has the interests of anyone but the elites at heart.
There are definitely moments of "are we really prioritizing this right now?" with modern social justice movements. But even on the subject of trans kids, the question for me is not "are we encouraging the wrong ideas around gender?" but rather "are we doing everything that's necessary to keep kids from committing suicide?"
The other day there was a post about fascists vs. rakes, and I really do feel like the the discussion around wokeness comes down to a similar misunderstanding about the intentions and moral principles of the two sides of the discussion.
Without wokeness, Trump et al would've already steamrolled us.
Being woke is to be aware of inequalities between ethnicities, religions, and classes. Being woke is to be aware of the fact that the planet is overheating due to our unfettered capitalism.
You calling something ridiculous is what is ridiculous, friend.
Yeah, what the rich need is more tax breaks {sarcasm}.
The world is full of people too stupid to know how stupid they are. They need to wake the fuck up.
The scientific method is to look at data and form models of reality from that. Not to have a model in mind and then look for evidence to support it or evidence to ignore.
Graham has a Hegelian, Panglossian view of things. In "woke" terms he is a very, very wealthy white cishet male born to an upper middle class physicist. As the relations of production and social order were created for and are controlled by his class he defends it.
To use an example - due to government mandates, the number of blacks attending Harvard Law School this year is less than half what it was last year. It does not fit into the narrative of a progressive, forward moving country which is meritocratic (although absurdly the legacies etc. taking their place is called a move to meritocracy). You can't say there is a national oppression of Africans in the US by the US, or that things are not meritocracy, so thinking starts getting very skewed. You can read this skewed thinking in Graham and others.
YC was started by a convicted felon, and it's due to his privileged birth that Graham was not convicted along with his co-founder. Meanwhile black men are killed by police for selling loose cigarettes or handing a clerk a counterfeit bill (something I unknowingly did once) to cheers from corporate media commentators and demagogues. What kind of country you live in even here in the imperial center is very much a question of what class you are in, as well as other things.
The working people and wretched of the earth are tired of being lectured to by the scions of diamond mines, Phillips Exeter graduates and the like. Even if they do know the worst case big O time for quicksort. History goes through twists and turns, and I welcome the challenges to their power we will be seeing this century.
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