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Comment by sicromoft | Hacker News Reader

> This essay was somewhat high on opinion, somewhat low on evidence

That's putting it mildly. It's littered with straw men and other logical fallacies.

He asserts, without any proof (because it's a faulty generalization that can't be proven), 'when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion'. He then wastes a bunch of time explaining the implications of his straw man.

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I do tend to read his essays when I see them circulating and I must confess that I find them fascinating. I’ve wondered if Graham himself doesn’t entirely understand why he’s been so successful or what he’s achieved in creating - and indeed whether he’s aware of the deficit. When future historians of our increasingly interesting and shocking epoch are trying to work out what happened, I feel Graham’s essays will provide useful insights into the preoccupations and delusions of billionaire think: from arguably the most powerful clique ever to have lived. In that sense I’m thankful that he writes.

This is an incredibly useful viewpoint to apply to this essay.

As the person you are responding to, I also dismissed it as fallacy ridden bullshit written by someone who is upset that rich and/or conservative people are facing consequences for having odious beliefs and stating them publicly, but this lens of understanding their delusions is a better approach.

Same; thank you both for the insight. This is a better way to understand Graham — without having to roll your eyes and point people at the Dabblers and Blowhards essay.

edit: missing word

I always thought that Blub Languages was the most perfect distillation, though it doesn't have the additional fun of being applied to an ecosystem entirely outside of PG's expertise. The essay sets up people he disagrees with to be definitionally wrong and sets himself up to be definitionally correct and so much more enlightened then those pedestrian "blub" programmers.

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