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Comment by elcapitan | Hacker News Reader

I think he's correct in the choice of the word "allowed" - yes, he had to fight for his beliefs, very hard fights, but he lived in a society that still valued individual struggle and determination, and that in the end rewarded it with success. Otherwise he couldn't have achieved what he has achieved. It's at least debatable if in today's softer world somebody who gets out and tells everybody that he's the greatest would still be "allowed" to earn reputation that way. I would argue that competing for victimhood status has become the prevalent approved strategy rather than fighting for your cause.

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"somebody who gets out and tells everybody that he's the greatest would still be "allowed" to earn reputation that way"

Golden age fallacy?

Off the top of my head, here are few people who fit that description in various ways and who seem to be doing quite well, despite today's "softer world":

Donald Trump, Kanye West, Peter Thiel

Also, softer world? He faced constant death threats. Also: "Almost as quickly as Ali had arrived, his World Boxing Association heavyweight title was gone, revoked after he claimed conscientious objector status in refusing the draft. He also was stripped of his passport and all of his boxing licenses. He faced a five-year prison term after losing an initial court battle defending his objection to serving in a war that he called "despicable and unjust." Ali lost the chance at tens of millions of dollars in endorsements while appealing his case to the U.S. Supreme Court."

I would say the rise of Trump is exactly the exception to today's rule that made him such a black swan event.

Demagogues have been around forever.

Also, this idea of a "soft world" is contradictory. Your claim seems to be that back in the day, because things were less "soft", Ali was allowed to be more self expressive. Yet, it's precisely this "soft world" which promotes the kind of diversity which, for example, would make Ali's conversion to Islam far less of a controversial issue today.

>Golden age fallacy?

I take offense to the idea of the "golden age fallacy".

Let's constrain fallacies to actual logical mistakes.

Some things actually have had a golden age -- e.g. for bebop it can be fairly accurately be told to be certain decades, and it's not wrong to point to that to say that things are not the same anymore.

(And even if individual outliers might produce an X equivalent to a "golden era of X" artifact, statistically it would still be true to say that now it's not like the golden era of X, if less such works are produced in total and even less consumed and appreciated -- e.g. if I make a great "Miami Bass" tune, it wont mean that the late eights weren't the "golden age" of Miami Bass).

In fact the golden age is so much not a fallacy, that is a valid historical construct (e.g. for Roman democracy the golden age was so and so centuries -- no ifs and buts about it).

> I take offense to the idea of the "golden age fallacy".

That doesn't mean it's false.

> Roman democracy the golden age was so and so centuries -- no ifs and buts about it

Historiography is always changing.

Richard Sherman comes to mind.

>> "It's at least debatable if in today's softer world somebody who gets out and tells everybody that he's the greatest would still be "allowed" to earn reputation that way."

I don't think it's debatable at all. Just look at Mayweather or Conor McGregor. Both spend most of their time telling everyone how great they are and people are fine with that, as long as, like Ali, they back it up with results.

That wasn't exclusively about the sports part, in sports you can pretty much do anything. I meant "everything else".

>but he lived in a society that still valued individual struggle and determination

If you believe throwing someone in Jail at the prime of his career, on top of other atrocities he fought through his career while he had to stand up for himself is "society valuing individual struggle and determination", then I believe you need to sit down and open a dictionary. This is some amazing revisionist history.

That's only because of his exceptional achievements. A normal human being, standing up for his beliefs in that period, would not have had the same treatment.

>It's at least debatable if in today's softer world somebody who gets out and tells everybody that he's the greatest would still be "allowed" to earn reputation that way.

So like Kanye West?

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