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Comment by pavlov

5 days ago

Would this essay be on the HN frontpage if it was written by anyone else?

There was an essay by Ken Shirriff on the front page earlier, discussing political stuff but leaning in the opposite direction. It, at time of writing has 271pts vs this with 218pts.

No. And man, I feel like the quality of PG's essays have declined. Even if I agreed with a few points, it was so rambling, and just made so many leaps. The sheer length of it is a pretty good signal he didn't really work that hard on this.

No. Stuff like this benefits those behind HN and many who frequent this site. The political-neutral face HN puts on is a farce.

  • I'd like to think "no", but we've debated a lot of dumb shit written by famous-in-some-circles people over the years.

    I'd also push back on HN ever having been politically neutral. I think 20 years ago it was "politically naive" or "politically ignorant", but that's not the same thing.

  • Did pg really think through the timing of this essay?

    Whether his intention or not, releasing this right now feels like it's part of a concerted effort by the SV ultra-rich to convince their fans that Trump Is Good Actually.

    • > concerted effort by the SV ultra-rich to convince their fans that Trump Is Good Actually

      If that was his intention, wouldn't he make an article calling for the end of wokeness and everything related to it? Instead of saying something that can be summed up as "There are bad parts of wokeness, and there are some good parts"

      2 replies →

This is a rare case where the author and their position makes the content more important than the content itself.

Sometimes it's good to know where people stand when they're shooting themselves in the foot.

We just had a day-long front page about why we need to feel shameful about using the term "Cargo Cult" because some tribe that positively no one is thinking about when they use the phrase believed a God would deliver cargo if they setup fake radio towers and used bamboo headsets. Some sort of hand wavy "why I am better than all of these fools who don't understand the real details" bit of noise. Colonialism or something. White guilt.

When I saw this PG article I wondered if that article inspired it. It is the perfect example of someone walking into something where zero people have ill intentions, and everyone understands exactly what that very useful term means, and telling us all we should stop using it because of their moral eye opening. Aren't we all better people now?