Comment by soheil

shrug Well I've been on HN for about 20 years, and I'm not anti-pg (he's about 50/50 by my accounting). I'm also anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian, anti-mob.

But he missed the mark here. It feels like he published a first-draft without getting any dissenting takes on one of the biggest hot-button topics on the web. I (or a million other people) would have been happy to read a draft of this and explain that he'd create offense and confusion with his... attempt to explain the history of priggishness around social justice based on his lived experience... if that's really what this is supposed to be.

Exactly, this “hacker” news. Where does this screed from PG fit into that? If this was published by literally anyone else it wouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.

I enjoy his technical and tech culture essays, ones like this are a waste of time and mental energy. I won’t read it because I know it provides zero value.

It's hard to take him seriously when he claims X doesn't censor, despite their very blatant and open censorship. Hacker news has not gotten anti-pg, it's more that pg has become more vocally political and is now facing the consequences of that.

Case in point, anyone else posting a screed like this would instantly be flagged and removed.

This is a significantly less good piece of writing than many of his older essays. It can be as simple as that.

I take it as more of an indicator of how much liberal sentiment has shifted over the last 15 or so years.

> Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten.

Frankly, I find it more concerning that anyone thinks HN should be pro Paul Graham by default. He should be judged by his ideas, not who he is.

He claims to be anti-censorship, yet he can't see Twitter is just as censored as it used to be because it aligns with his world view now. The same as the Left used to be blind to Right censorship. Maybe he should try tweeting "cis".

"pro-breaking-the-rules attitude" come on. He's aligning himself with the most conservative and powerful people in the world right now. How is that a rule breaking attitude?

Tech billionaire Paul Graham is the establishment.

Miss when his essays were actually about hacking!

Being anti-censorship is one thing that should, taken in isolation, have nothing to do with your object-level views. But in practice, those claims tend to correlate with very specific views, and they're applied hypocritically. Elon is the most high-profile recent example - I think it's hard to argue at this point that he had any principled anti-censorship views, given his behavior since taking over Twitter - but he's far from the only one.

You won't see PG writing an article on how homeless people in SF should be more pro-breaking-the-rules. Because it's OK to steal from your users, to inflate your growth numbers, to make false promises to build your initial userbase, but it's not OK not to shoplift from the Safeway or do drugs on the BART. That's the kind of breaking the rules that isn't cool, edgy, smart, and most importantly high status and beneficial to Paul Graham. Don't you think that double standard is a bit suspect, that he's "pro-breaking-the-rules" exactly when the rules restrain him and not others, when it's the rules he thinks are stupid and not the rules someone else thinks are stupid?

You won't see PG writing an article about how it's bad to deny a 15 year old medical information on puberty blockers. That is, undeniably, censorship in its very simplest form: it's the suppression of information out of a belief that it is in some way dangerous to let people know about it. But most of the people who claim to be so concerned with censorship won't say a word against it, and a lot actively support it, because it stops being "censorship" when it's something they like.

And, of course, the idea that the anti-woke crowd is "anti-authoritarian" is kind of laughable right now, given their response to the incoming administration.

The change isn't that his (or other tech elites') ostensible values have changed. It's that their ostensible values have become increasingly transparently hypocritical. PG hasn't become less of a hacker: it's "hacker culture" itself, especially as represented and hijacked by venture capital, that is not what we (or at least what I) hoped it was.

Rule breaking for me, and not for thee sums up my objection, I suppose.

> it's called "hacker" news for a reason.

exactly, so why is a long political opinion piece from PG on wokeness here in the first place?

ah yes an ill-informed whiny screed about wokeness is exactly the kind of content pg is good for. that's hacker content right there!

Yeah man, he's really breaking out of the mold by doing the exact same thing all the other SF billionaires are doing by sucking up to the right wing. Even braver and more punk of him, like Zuck, to only do it after the right wing won the election.

I'll give my opinion, as someone who used to hold pg in extremely high regard, but who is often surprised at just how thoroughly uninsightful pg's essays seem to me now.

The biggest problem I see with pg, and basically with all of the SV elite, is that I rarely see them question any of their assumptions or conclusions that don't lead them to "everything I've done is right, or at least the original goals of the 'SV ethos' is the best thing for society."

For example, take the concept of meritocracy. I completely agree that I think the "wokeness" of many on the left went way overboard in demonizing meritocratic processes, e.g. getting rid of advanced classes and opportunities for some students in the name of "fairness". At the same time, I rarely if ever see these SV kingpins suggest viable solutions to the fact that in the relatively new "winner take all" tech-led economy, very bad things happen if only a teeny meritocratic elite hoards all the wealth and leaves everyone else in an extremely precarious state. For a counterpoint as to someone who I do find insightful, consider Scott Galloway. He is definitely not someone who I would call woke, but he also understands some of the real problems so often ignored by the "tech utopianists".

In this particular pg essay, there is not much I disagree with, but I didn't really learn anything from it either. I'm also extremely suspect at all these SV leaders suddenly highlighting their views that are conveniently in lock step with the new administration. Like you say, pg has talked about this before, so I'm not saying his thoughts aren't genuine, I just think what Tim Sweeney said recently is pretty spot on "All these SV leaders pretended to be Democrats, and now they're pretending to be Republicans." It's similar to how I feel about Zuckerberg's recent pronouncements. When I first heard them, most of them I agreed with and they made sense to me. Then I read the actual new "hateful conduct" guidelines and I almost threw up. I'm actually fine with being able to call gay people like me mentally ill - I'm willing to debate that 9 ways to Sunday. But kindly STFU about "free speech" when only gay and transgender people had a specific carve out to allow for their denigration. Like I have to listen to all this crazy religious bullshit that in a sane world we'd recognize as symptoms of schizophrenia, yet if I said that on FB that would go against their new hateful conduct guidelines.

Frankly, I see pg largely as another uninteresting SV elite: someone very, very smart and who obviously worked very hard, but who was also obviously extremely lucky and now thinks that his thoughts are worth so much more than anyone else.

This is simply bad writing. And it's also quite offensive given the origin (and ultimate conservative perversion) of the term "woke."

I thought it was more pro woke than anti pg, still I was surprised.

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HN has many of those who have gone through the indoctrination process in college that he describes in the essay.

It’s just the people online posting non-stop. The rest of us, checking in only when time allows, are not commenting 30 times in a single thread. (Check some of the posters here)

Same thing happened with the rest of the nonsense over the last 5 years. From social media you would think everyone took the clot shot. 1/3 didn’t but you’d never have known that from HN or other social media.

There is a small but loud contingent who wants to dictate our language, how we teach our children, and what we put in to our bodies. The good news is most people are not stupid and are completely rejecting it - in real life.