I Met Paul Graham Once

also known as growing older ;-)

I still like a lot of what Steve Jobs had to say at times. I do not pretend to know what he was like IRL or if I would even like him ... doesn't matter.

Truth be told folks who take those ideas and principles from others and not carry the weight of those folks as idols, might even do better with them.

Unfortunately, that's not true. He is also a well-read and influential essayist. He wields power and influence through his words as well as his money.

Upvoted because I couldn't describe better how I feel if I tried. There were so many of these tech leaders who I looked at with such awe, and a lot of it was because they did have a set of skills that I didn't and that I really envied (namely an incredible perseverance, amount of energy, and ability to thrive under pressure, while I was often the reverse). So it's hard to overstate how disappointed I am with people (and really, myself for idolizing them) whom I used to look at with such admiration, who now I often look at with something that varies between dissatisfaction and disgust.

But I realized 2 important things: the same qualities that allowed these leaders to get ahead also figures in to why I don't like them now. That is, if you care too much about other people and what they think, it will be paralyzing in the tech/startup world - you do have to "break some eggs" when you're doing big things or trying to make changes. At the same time, this empathy deficit is a fundamental reason I think of a lot of these guys and gals (it's usually guys but not always, e.g. Carly Fiorina) as high school-level douchebags now. Second, it's allowed me to have a higher, more compassionate vision of myself. I used to feel bad that I wasn't as "successful" as I wanted to be, and while I do have some regrets, I'd much rather be someone who cares deeply about my friends and family and really wants to do some good in the world, as opposed to someone I see as just trying to vacuum up power and money under the false guise of "changing the world".

The very powerful just affirmed a reversal of "wokeness" this may become performative just as much as their acceptance of the "other" became performative by their admirers and corporate copycats. This will result in tangible harm to people. I think OP did a great job in explaining this.

Ha well that a particular bad joke.

Most are not so egregious.

The downgrading of exceptional individuals like PG to mediocrities is no healthier than placing them on pedestals.

At least we got some good universities (and a somewhat functional transcontinental rail system) out of the 19th century iteration.

> In 1975 the student body of Stanford University voted to use "Robber Barons" as the nickname for their sports teams. However, school administrators disallowed it, saying it was disrespectful to the school's founder, Leland Stanford [1]

It's a shame that the school's administrators (perhaps fearing the wrath of alumni and donors) were so humorless – "Stealin' Landford" would have been a highly entertaining mascot, and one oddly appropriate for the gridiron.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

Thing is Larry Ellison doesn't write blog posts acting like he's a philosopher. Some tech CEOs really position themselves as arbiters of culture and it just feels more and more like trying to transfer their tech/business positioning into a cultural one. I do not like it!

You want to look at a person and identify what they are very good at -- and then study what they know, say and do specifically in that area, maybe take it on faith a bit that they know something you don't in those spheres. You can safely ignore everything else from them.

So let's look at some people, with Mark Zuckerberg for instance, I would say here's a guy who seems to have some good instincts for doing aggressive and invasive viral marketing, and he also seemed to be a pretty prolific PHP hacker in his early days. I don't need much else from him.

With PG, high level Lisp hacker, good systems thinker, good at getting businesses going (if I'm being cynical I'd say in environments where there's not much competition, but a guy like PG might wisely argue finding those is part of the skill). I want to absorb everything I can from him on programming language design, startup thinking and then I want to move on.

With Donald Trump, here's a guy who is literally the best in the world at parlaying negative social media attention into power. And being fueled by rage at Sith Lord levels at an age when most people have thrown in the towel and are just waiting to die. Again, all I really need to hear from him is how he does that stuff, then it's best I just ignore the rest.

You're wrong in assigning the injustice you're going through to discrimination based on your ethnicity, especially in an academic context where the vast majority is pro-immigration.

Unfortunately, this gives the movement a bad reputation. Some prigs aren't lgbt people at all, but they speak on behalf of them, as they also speak on behalf of other groups that they aren't a part of. Some prigs might actually be a part of the minority they speak for, but I would hazard a guess, based on no data, and say that these are the minority of all prigs.

I think PG's problem is with the prigs, not the lgbt movement itself. Can these be separated?

Being gay has no negative consequences and when homosexuals are left to live how they want, they are happy and overall have no problems. Also, this identity doesn't change much during their lives.

In comparison with that, people who are delusional, are not feeling any better when they recognize their delusion. And it might actually be dangerous to affirm them in their delusion.

People with GID are somewhere on a spectrum between homosexuals and delusional people. Even the most affirming countries are clearly not enough. They still have a very high suicide rate. Plenty of them detransition, especially kids. There is statistically significant prevalence of mental disorders. 58% of people with GID have at least one psychiatric diagnosis (source https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6830528/).

Personally, I think that society is accepting gays for a good reason and not affirming people with GID for a good reason, too. It's not bigotry, it's a recognition of reality.

The current backlash is mostly caused by the hardcore activists pressuring for "the alternatives are either gender-affirming care or SUICIDE! SUICIDE! even for 13 y.o.'s"

This attitude is so hysterical that it cannot stand for long.

This is the part that we all don't really actually converse about. It's not an easy point to prove (genetically, after sequencing the entire human genome, there is not actually any proof that gay is something one "is" intrinsically), but it's also so personal and getting it wrong has such heavy consequences that most avoid the topic.

Is that true of everyone who identifies as trans, though?

I get the impression there is a subset of trans folks for whom this is the case, and many others (perhaps a majority) who simply prefer to use different pronouns than the ones they started with.

I would love to have data that establishes whether that impression is correct or incorrect. There appears to be a puzzling conflation between folks who enjoy or prefer alternative gender expressions and folks whose survival depends on it, and it would be a great relief to know what's really going on.

I also understood one thing. Most people were paying lip service to TGs. This includes people like Mark and PG. And we like, good employees, are just following what HR says without rocking the boat. I now doubt head of HR knows or understands what this is about.

Also, there are not many people who are TG. Should society adjust itself for everyone on the margin is a question one should ask themselves? Does it adjust for everyone who has kidney disease, or other ailments? I know western countries do a good job of addressing handicapped people in several ways, but the last 1% is very hard and expensive to reach. And I feel we are paying the price. Is TG issue big enough to put Climate Change activism at risk, which it is now? I am not against TG, I am against not prioritizing what's more important.

Reason 1: Gay men do not wait to 'realize' they are gay until their 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s. "Trans" do.

Reason 2: Autogynephilia exists.

Reason 3: Orientation threatens (essentially) no one. But transgenderism directly attacks the sex-based rights that women have long fought for, undermining their rights to sex-segregated spaces (see Tickle vs Giggle or that crazy LA Spa case).

Reason 4: While homosexuality is trivial to define (same-sex attraction), transgenderism is not. Gender was defined as "performing" one's sex, per feminism. But if one "performs" the other sex, they are merely non-gender-conforming, not the other sex! This is why "what is a woman" has become such an infamous question, because trans activists cannot answer it in a way that actually makes sense to anyone.

I could go on. Downvote if you must, but we are post-peak-trans and reality is re-asserting itself; I am glad of it. Without wishing ill towards those caught up in the madness, I say: No. I shall not use pronouns that require me to lie about how I perceive the world, and I deny that the assertion of my right to speak truth is an act of hatred.

Stop working for billionaires.

Now, the leadership is mostly people who came of age a couple of decades later, and got sandwiched between the elders’ ancient wisdom and a newly democratizing toxic online culture.

Some found the right path, many hung out with (or were) the sort of people who pretend to pretend to have heinous opinions on 4chan and are finally feeling comfortable enough to drop the facade.

Are we experiencing the same industry? Because as an LGBT person, I have experienced a tech industry so drunk and fixated on identity that it can't shut up about it. It's patronizing, insulting, and divisive.

Or are you speaking more broadly about the U.S.? Is it fascist to revert to a sane border policy that’s aligned with what most U.S. citizens and legal immigrants want? Or an executive branch that’s actually run by a democratically-elected individual, instead a non-elected shadow government that governed on behalf of a dementia-afflicted president whose condition was hidden from the American public for years? The same government that censored the media? Or the tech companies that willingly obliged with the government censorship? The same tech companies that fired employees for expressing opinions that differed from those held by the liberal establishment?

Sorry, I’m getting very confused if we’re turning into the fascism or finally turning away from it.

The same open minded creative attitude that fully and warmly welcomes people who are different, is also what makes us better able to solve science and tech problems in a creative way. The fascists need the hackers, but we don’t need them.

Authoritarianism is fundamentally culturally incompatible with innovation. Nazi cryptography was broken by an eccentric gay man, and so on- thousands of such examples.

what is more conformist than forcing people to adopt your speech and view points under threat? what you don't realize is the hackers and nonconformists _are_ taking the tech back, they're taking it back from this oppressive bureaucratic regime that stifles creativity and forces everyone to tiptoe within its absurd religion of rules and newspeak. they're taking it back from dei consultants and hr departments. make it about merit and hacking, not about dogmatic adherence to a (fundamentally incorrect and bad imo) social cause.

If only we in the tech industry could blame social media on anyone but ourselves :(

This pattern happens again and again with words and phrases like “liberal”, “socialist”, “Black Lives Matter”, “critical race theory”, “woke”, and “DEI”. Anyone who can’t see through it is either okay with the distortion, or not as good an observer as they think.

Having read it carefully I found the hn thread interesting and it correctly criticized the essay's lazy reasoning.

People put on a false front with offensive messaging claiming support of these groups, but the whole purpose is to build clout or benefit themselves. They don't care about the message at all.

Messages like "I support lgbtq, and if you don't you're a bigot," are self-aggrandizement. "I support lgbtq," is all that's needed if you want people to know they are supported. No one needs to hear it at all if the discussion isn't relevant. Just try to treat everybody with respect.

When I read it though, I realized he was just using "wokeness" to mean the dogmatic surface level understanding of the subject (IE, not that he was being surface level, but he's talking about people who engage with equality/identity issues in a surface level way). It's kind of a strawman idea, but people like that exist and are annoying. It makes me wonder how many people who are really centrists hate wokeness because they think the most annoying wing of it is representative of the whole movement.

Reading PGs article, I get the sense of someone who doesn't fully understand the thing he's criticising, so makes me hopeful he can learn. But again, I'm always a little afraid that the legit criticizisms of his article will get drowned out by people who reinforce what he says in it.

Nah, this is just not true about that essay. This is sort of excessive "lets twist what people say with maximum leftist spin so that we can paint everyone who disagree with them as crazy". It is getting repetitive, tiresome and amounts to a massive amount of online gaslighting. Center and left are all supposed to pretend that everyone is leftist just concerned with some extremists, no matter how much it is clear it is not the case, unless someone actually supports nazi party ... and sometimes even longer.

That essay did not even cared about actual history of events either.

What Bud Light did was hire an influencer to promote their product in an Instagram video (and then of course they later backtracked). The only thing "woke" about the video was that the influencer was a trans woman.

If Paul Graham would like to elaborate on this passage meant I welcome it, but my read was that supporting a trans woman falls under his definition of "wokeness".

I think the essay was a rorschach test for readers. On its face, it has a very reasonable and measured tone. It also has some nods to the other side like the disclaimer you mentioned. However, it starts from some uncharitable premises (e.g., its definition of wokeness) and contains unnecessary gibes (e.g., against social sciences). More importantly, it takes the tone of a social sciences essay, a discipline that he mocks, without any of the rigor. There are not sources for his claims about the origins of wokeness or how universities operated from the 80's until today, you just have to take him at face value. It gives the illusion of being erudite without doing any of the actual work.

But that said, I definitely could not ignore the timing of pg's essay, and it felt plain gross to me. It felt like a lazy, convenient pile-on at that moment, even if pg's position had been largely consistent for a long time. I've seen all these tech leaders now lining up to point out the problems of the left (again, a lot of which I agree with), so where is the essay about the embarrassingly naked grift of the POTUS launching a ridiculous and useless meme coin just before his inauguration?

Also, there was nothing in that essay that I felt was particularly insightful or that I learned much from. It was, honestly, some bloviating pontification from someone who I now think holds his ideas in much higher regard than they deserve.

How extremely generous!

What Bush's speechwriter wrote, did not stop Bush from authorizing torture stations across the world, murdering hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians in two failed military occupations, while weakening America vis-a-vis Russia and China, a confrontation that has dominated the past several years. Do not mistake public statements as any indication of actual policy.

As for McCain, his words were "No Ma'am, he is not an Arab, he is a decent family man", which I suppose is addressing misinformation with a decisiveness Republicans wouldn't dream of today.

This is something I considered a brazen lie in the interest of stability.

I believe in existence of individual peaceful Muslims, but I don't believe in inherent peacefulness of a religion founded by a warrior who converted Arabia by the sword and which had since seen an endless series of holy wars initiated in the name of Islam.

You can't really build societal understanding on a foundation of such misinformation.

To be clear, Christianity and Judaism aren't "religions of peace" either. Some explicitly anti-militaristic sects like the Amish maybe. But the Abrahamic faiths as such, no.

At the same time he also said that if you don't agree with him, you're with the terrorists. I do agree that Bush went out of his way to not stigmatize Muslims or Islam, but "don't be a flaming racist" is not that high of a bar to meet, and he was very much not a moderate open to nuanced views (on this topic, and various others). Never mind stuff like Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, torture. I'm not sure it really matters for the Guantanamo Bay whether Bush is or isn't prejudiced against their ethnicity or religion: they're still detained in a camp. Without trail. For years. Being tortured.

McCain defending Obama against vile racist attacks was also not that high of a bar to meet. McCain was also a standard GOP senator during the "obstruct whatever Obama does at all cost" years, never mind how he tried to appeal to the crazy Tea Party fanbase with Palin. I don't entirely dislike the man by the way – I'd say his legacy is mixed and complex.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: don't look at it the past too rose-coloured. The current mess didn't spontaneously come to exist out of nothing. People like Bush and McCain made a pig sty of things, and then were surprised pigs turned up to roll around in the mess. The old "gradually and then suddenly" quip applies not just to bankruptcy.

He said this as he invaded a majority muslim country causing the deaths of tens of thousands of muslims. It was perception management, not a genuine concern for muslims. Words are not more important than actions.

I like to build bridges between minority groups but the current moment is really about mostly White gender minorities in the US. This is especially fraught right now because many POC communities tend to be more socially conservative than white communities, and LGBT+ acceptance is lower in POC communities than among the general American public.

That said I am not a fan of Trump and the modern MAGA movement's discriminatory politics, lack of respect for rule of law, denial of basic climate realities, and many many other things that I could list for days.

But yeah, he's always ultimately been an outspoken advocate for the most optimistic outcomes Silicon Valley ecosystem, because that's where his startup funnel leads. See also his article from 2004 in which he suggested that a startup was a way to work at a high intensity for four(!) years instead of forty[1]. Wonder what proportion of YC alumni retired happy after the four year work life?

I'm sure if you actually met PG in office hours he'd be realistic enough that your most realistic exit strategy almost certainly involved a lot more than four years of hard work and that yeah, your chances of success probably aren't high enough to impact the Gini coefficient, and I'm sure if you were trans he wouldn't take the side of people that send death threats to Budweiser for featuring people like you. But most of the essays are about positioning Silicon Valley. In a sense, he's a low touch, very high stakes B2B salesperson

[1]https://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

In general I wholeheartedly agree. But if the person in front of you has done or advocated for things that cause harm or is themself a horrible person then I disagree.

It gets lost because of this black/white US perspective on politics. If you were multiparty system there will be less identities in politics.

- A specific trans person can be an an asshole. A specific trans person can be a saint.

- A specific white man can be an asshole. A specific white man can be a saint.

The unintuitive thing is that both this article and pg's essay are both advocating this! They're each complaining about another group being mean.

Paul Graham's essay doesn't mention anything about LGBT people or issues. It doesn't really say what specific events he may have in mind, but it complains that woke people are being intolerant, sometimes bullying or ostracizing people for their beliefs, and trying to enforce allegiance to their side over honesty.

The author of this essay is reading between the lines and assuming pg is a bigot who might discriminate against a trans person. They say actions like pg's are "mean", "unkind", and "malicious".

I think a lot of this has to do with people being polarized and viewing every political statement in terms of which team it supports: if someone says something against your team, that means they must be on the other team, and are therefore evil. But regardless of the reasons, these uncharitable assumptions (on both sides) cause way too much conflict between people with similar core values.

I don't think either author would discriminate against anyone based on their sexuality or gender. One can disagree with pg's criticisms without calling him a bigot.

> It took me a while to remove my facial hair, I still haven’t trained my voice.

The facial hair removal really does take forever, it's so annoying :sob:. And I've found voice training (particularly around other people) to be really intimidating. I wish you the best of luck if you decide to pursue it!

Take care, OP.

Many other countries have robust anti-hate speech laws that are effective, although less so in the age of the internet.

People broadly conform to the society in which they live, and the rules of the society are broadly set by the laws they adhere to. So in countries where hate speech is disallowed, people conform to a less hateful viewpoint as a rule, and hateful people are the exception.

In the United States, it is clear that hatred is the norm as long as it is permitted by law and by leadership.

You can't forbid it but you can absolutely make it socially unacceptable. "Free speech" doesn't mean letting people spew hate and doing nothing; choosing not to hand them a megaphone, support their business, etc. is entirely valid.

> Adding on, the trans issue isn't simple.

It really kind of is though.

Yes there are real questions, but there are also real answers. Currently, 99% of people asking questions have literally zero interest in answers. They do not care about what research say or whether there is harm or not. They ask questions to convince the audience about their political project.

They do not care about whether medical interventions are good, bad, safe or unsafe. They want to convince you that that they are unsafe. They want to stop the interventions regardless of their impact. They do not care about safety of bathrooms, they want you to punish transgender people in the wrong bathroom. They do not care about women sports either, in fact they are the same people arguing against women sports whereever it matters.

> People can think poorly of you for whatever reason they want.

And it should be my god give right to call them sexist and racists if they think of me poorly because of those reasons. But somehow that is supposed to be a taboo. We are all supposed to pretend there is no sexism, that there was no historical sexism, so that someone feels good about themselves. Again and again, sjws pointed out someone is sexist/racist, there was an outrage in response, they were painted crazy stupid exaggerating. And I actually believe the response, multiple times. Except that it turned out, multiple times, that they were right all along.

This is a myopic view. You are obviously correct that you cannot legislate that someone think in any particular way or otherwise force someone to change their minds, but the idea that collectively deciding that a viewpoint is not longer tolerated within the broader society and then making efforts to support that at all levels is ineffective and not worthwhile is absurd. Threats, physical violence, and murder have always been illegal, but used to occur with much higher frequency against many minority groups toward which society tolerated hatred and abuse. It's plainly obvious what changed is the idea that it would be brushed under the rug, that others would at worst turn a blind eye to the perpetrator if not support them, that there would be no real consequences whether legal or in social circles - this environment in which people act on impulse rather than thinking twice about what they're doing - went away. We must remember that progress isn't permanent, that civil rights must be maintained and won't protect themselves, and that there's probably someone out there that hates someone each of us loves and cares about for some arbitrary reason and would act on that if only society gave them permission.

It is disingenuous to suggest that anti-discrimination laws for trans people are attempting to legislate away the hatred held in people’s hearts, instead of access to healthcare, public facilities, protections against workplace discrimination — things you describe as having “real questions,” but which are, in fact, the parts of a full and dignified life that bigots would deny to trans people in particular. If you pretend like it’s trying to legislate “thoughtcrime,” it’s much easier to distinguish anti-discrimination laws for trans people from rulings like Obergefell or Brown v. Board — far easier to say “look, those were good, but this particular civil rights legislation is simply unreasonable.”

To platform these beliefs is to afford them a legitimacy they do not deserve. To suggest that bigotry, when amplified, will be in some way countered or reduced is naïve beyond belief. Instead, it becomes easier for bigotry to find an audience of receptive listeners and willing conduits for further transmission.

I don't understand any of this. It feels like you live in a different information bubble than mine.

What was the "war on hate", and who is turning away from it?

What would it mean to say that the "war on hate" worked? That there was no more hate, or that the situation improved somehow? What does it mean to say that it didn't work?

It seems you didn't read their post. Also, yes, if someone hates you, you can definitely change their minds. The weapon in the war on hate is love. And there is a lot of love in the author's essay. Love for others in their position.

So you too can join the War on Hate by showing love to the author and letting PG know he is wrong, so very wrong.

This doesn't really work because social networks are designed to amplify the most "engaging" things, which often means "controversial". Reasoned debate is often drowned out - this happens even here on HN for particularly controversial topics.

If social media was just people following their friends and interacting with them (I remember when FB was basically like that), we maybe wouldn't be in this horrible polarised mess.

However I don't believe that PG's article meant to address the elephant, but rather was a meta-level thesis on how he sees debates being shut down by orthodoxy, and for that he does suggest what he thinks would be a possible solution.

Perhaps the thesis could have gained in being more balanced to as you say "avoid giving tacit permissions for the extremists on the other side"? On the other hand, does one always have to shield one's expressions with disclaimers and is one not free to share thoughts however raw in order to express, discuss and learn, update our beliefs?

There likely is a bigger responsibility when one has a larger audience to avoid misinterpretations, but ultimately I believe as long as there is a rational and nuanced discussion to take the good points and have a productive debate, it should be okay.

How can we create incentives to have a more nuanced discussion?

What Israel is doing to Palestinians last 77 years it exists is much worse than what Palestinians do to Israel on average from several perspectives by at least an order of magnitude or more (eg. amount of destruction and killing for sure, amount of subjugation, ...).

So wanting balance and giving one-sided defence to one side seems fair, regardless of any "strong points" on any side. If one has strong arguments, they should be used and voiced, because it's simply a numbers game in democracy.

There is nuance and people are pretending there is not. I support trans people but also support safety for all people. There are some nuanced details when you get to reality, and we can’t just pretend those away.

The symptoms or pretending are things like not finishing the essay, or not even reading far enough to uncover PG’s definition near the beginning, so it had to become a footnote later when someone told them about it.

This reminds me of when people criticize other people for not simply being themselves. Maybe they are being themselves, and that's just not good enough for you?

The argument against "virtue signaling" is a judgement against doing something which the critic doesn't think is beneficial or necessary, and so they conclude it must be performative. But, the person doing it thinks it is beneficial or necessary.

Thus, the critic is failing to allow for a different view. Not that they have to accept the different view, but they should at least be able to recognize that someone else has a different view than their own. But, they can't or won't.

>It seems clear that we as a community don't support, encourage, or permit people to throw slurs, insults, and harassment at others. Why are we okay with much larger and more powerful communities doing it in the name of these "freedoms"

Because the community uses the same freedoms to police those that throw slurs and does not feel it requires--that is the hope anyway--any other mandatory enforcement?

I can't back this up with science, but my feeling is that because neurodivergence/autism occur at higher rates in males than females, and ND brains are better at abstract reasoning inherent in programming, male born people are drawn to it. I also believe this accounts for the overrepresentation of MtF trans women, because there is definitely an intersection of autism and transgenderism.

Which is really ironic because Zuckerberg, Musk, and Gates are all definitely on the spectrum. The current tech power center was created almost entirely by queer autistic neurodivergent weirdos.

It’s not explained in the essay why the author was so certain PG was wrong.

If PG hated “Reddit” and the mascot, I would say he was correct again. Reddit could have been a much bigger idea, but the branding excludes a lot of demographics and types of content. It helps to make Reddit what it is, but also what it is not. That can be helpful, but in the startup game you want to be biased towards generality: “Google”, “Apple” not “websearchengine” or “foundit” or “homecomputerco” or “appyphone.”

It’s a bit like being a good coder: you develop a sense of test for elegance, simplicity, leaving the door open to expansion… and it sounds like PG has (unsurprisingly) refined taste in naming.

- People who will amorally play to the limits of the rules if it helps them win.

It doesn't matter what they personally feel, or even if they have feelings at all. They tack with whatever way the wind is blowing in order to derive the maximum benefit.

E.g. the million dollar inauguration contributions

That's not a lot of money for that sort of person. The point of kissing the ring is the visible action and the favor it curries, not because the kiss is dear.

If only tech had some sort of rugged frontiersmen who weren't afraid of a bit of hardship. Davy Crockett types, pushing boundaries and standing firm under siege no matter the personal cost.

We could call them "pioneers" - if any existed.

This basic approach underpins the pop-business and some of the pop-science industry. Plus much of self-help. And a good chunk of popular political books, of course.

It’s a winning approach, lots of folks read that kind of thing and nod along, are glad they paid money for it, and recommend that others do the same.

Even the “good” books in those genres are often guilty of it :-/

Motivated reasoning, cheap rhetorical tricks, and half-fake but digestible and uncomplicated history/facts are how you “win” the war of ideas.

> A few days ago, Paul Graham published an essay on “Wokeness”. I skimmed it. I couldn’t finish reading it, it made me too upset...I’ve been feeling quite anxious ever since. It feels like the world is crumbling around me.

...as if this sort of mental fragility is something normal. This is the sort of mentality I've come to associate with woke and prig culture.

In my experience, the more "woke" a community is, the more these sort of hysterics are accepted, normalized, even celebrated - to the point of caricature. Part of it is that in those communities, the more "oppressed" you are, the higher status you are accorded, and the subconscious status-seeking primate part of your brain notices this, and molds your thoughts and feelings accordingly. While those on the right also play up their victimhood, it's not held in high status in their communities. You'd get outrage and compassion playing up victimhood in right-leaning communities, but in left-leaning communities you also get more moral weight when you're upset.

The result, I think, is that the American left is genuinely less happy with the world, and more likely to echo doomer sentiments.

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Reading that helped me come to terms with how most of the time when I read PG essays I was a lot less impressed than everyone else seemed to be, and often (any time the topic wasn’t narrowly tech or maaaybe business) his writing struck me as actually bad—not well-reasoned, not convincing, and giving an impression of his being poorly-informed.

When I experience an author everyone else is praising that way, I wonder if I’m the moron. But, sometimes, maybe I’m not…

I see many people confidently and incuriously throw this idea around, meanwhile many of the tech bros are saying “no, I haven’t shifted all that much , the left just went crazy”. [1] I’m not sure which claim is “correct”. Probably breaks one way or another on an individual basis. But it does seem like we should probably give people some credit for introspection versus mind reading.

[1] The following cartoon has been shared by many and distills the idea well: https://x.com/swipewright/status/1462114108535312388?s=46&t=...

This sounds like the criticisms of MLK, Jr. and other civil rights activists for always stirring things up. People who want change tend to stir things up.

That being said, I think you exaggerate about the toxic behaviors of the "woke" movement. Certainly, you must be referring to online, because I can't think of when I have ever experienced any of that offline. If you're talking about Twitter, then I guess I could believe it, because that place is toxic as hell.

In some circles, someone being gay or trans will always be a sin, and non-whites seen as “lesser beings” (both their views not mine). As it stands, these people vote more consistently for the same party and in larger numbers.

We should hire the right people for the right job, but let’s be honest, in cultures where the majority perceive such minorities in disgust through lack of education and bigotry, they are unlikely to hire them regardless of whether they were better fit the job or not.

DEI should have been left at a reminder checking your own biases. Instead in many organizations it spiraled into minority preferential hiring, and that caused a backlash, and rightly so.

Where do we go from here? Who knows. My hope is that we find kindness and consideration for each other, but since the incoming administration has experienced such success from beating the anti-woke drum, I fear that it won’t be such a nice ending.

What is it specifically which you don't want to do? Use their preferred pronoun?

In this scenario, who is forcing you and how?

So he also seems outspoken, by your standard. He couldn’t stop at “Hi! This is what I think about J. K. Rowling...”

A lot of this comes down to the difference between freedom of speech and platforming. I’m sure we’ll still be arguing about it in 2050.

This is not unique to "wokeness" and is in fact much more clearly expressed by people who are "anti-woke". Many folks just can't handle things that don't fit neatly into their (unexamined) categories about the world.

They'd rather destroy that person or thing rather than reflect and improve their understanding of the world.

More to the point, do we really want men like the author in the women's bathrooms? Just because they desire to be women.

We all need to take a step towards respecting women's boundaries by collectively telling these men: No.