> ... mind become filled with mush
> desperate pledge of allegiance ...
(From TFA: "There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules.")
Young people in need of guidance would do well to read the classics and disregard everyone with a pulse.
Arguably because a large portion of the population doesn't agree that it's unimportant and performative. Current culture is captured by the concept and collectively spends a massive amount of time worrying about it.
If you personally feel that this is a waste of time, how else do you communicate that if not by spending time thinking and writing about it?
I also think most meetings are a complete waste of time. The fact that many other people feel meetings are important directly impacts me, and just believing that they're a waste isn't good enough. It's necessary to actively push against something if you think that thing needs to change.
Without wokeness there is no Trump, and the far right in Europe would still be marginal.
Edit - it's funny, just yesterday I was listening to a podcast where Peter Thiel was lamenting the lack of introspection on the left. Lots of comments proving it correct.
> other folks can't because they don't get it like I do
His point of view undoubtedly resonates with 'some folks'.
https://thecslewis-studygroup.org/the-c-s-lewis-study-group/...
"College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination."
If you're describing something as poisonous, especially if it's the behavior of a large group of people, then you're saying it's important.
Now this is a ridiculous comment.
It reads just like "antifascists are the new fascists" discourses. It's absurd.
> These new administrators could often be recognized by the word "inclusion" in their titles. Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would usually be called an "inclusive language guide."
As an LGBT Latino, I feel gross when people step up to "include" me. The "LatinX" thing is just sick, and the fake "pride" bullshit makes me feel unbelievably cheapened. Not all gays or bis are the same. I don't go around screaming "yass qween", listen to Beyonce, or watch Ru Paul. But we're token represented like that. I hate everything about it.
Superficial facets of my "identity" have been commoditized and weaponized. (I'd say "appropriated", but that'd only be the case if this wasn't a complete cartoon representation.)
I've been called a "fag" once in public for kissing a guy. Whatever.
My wife has been called cis-scum (despite the fact she's trans!), I've been made to write software to deny grants to whites and men [1], I've been told I can't recommend people for hire because they weren't "diverse", I've been taught by my company my important "LatinX heritage" and even got some swag for it, I've had a ton of completely irrelevant people make my "identity" into a battle ground, etc. etc etc. I can't count the number of times this surfaces in my life in an abrasive and intrusive way.
I felt more at home in the world before 2010 than in the world today that supposedly "embraces my diversity".
[1] Restaurant Revitalization Fund, look it up.
The arrogance and lack of empathy is so disappointing and so unnecessary. Please try harder. A lot is at stake here.
In much the same way people who build useless startups never talk to any actual customers, Paul Graham wouldnt be seen dead with the types of 1970s black activists from Harlem who actually originated the term "woke" (to refer to e.g. police brutality).
Im sure he knows plenty of the rich, white moral posturers who run large corporations and pride themselves on making a rainbow version of their company's logo for use outside of middle eastern markets, though.
Anyone with a PhD Comp Sci from Harvard is automatically very smart in my mind, unless by "smart" you mean something else...
I think it’s more of “I can do it because I can afford it. But other folks can’t because they need their job (or something similar).”
Graham has a Hegelian, Panglossian view of things. In "woke" terms he is a very, very wealthy white cishet male born to an upper middle class physicist. As the relations of production and social order were created for and are controlled by his class he defends it.
To use an example - due to government mandates, the number of blacks attending Harvard Law School this year is less than half what it was last year. It does not fit into the narrative of a progressive, forward moving country which is meritocratic (although absurdly the legacies etc. taking their place is called a move to meritocracy). You can't say there is a national oppression of Africans in the US by the US, or that things are not meritocracy, so thinking starts getting very skewed. You can read this skewed thinking in Graham and others.
YC was started by a convicted felon, and it's due to his privileged birth that Graham was not convicted along with his co-founder. Meanwhile black men are killed by police for selling loose cigarettes or handing a clerk a counterfeit bill (something I unknowingly did once) to cheers from corporate media commentators and demagogues. What kind of country you live in even here in the imperial center is very much a question of what class you are in, as well as other things.
The working people and wretched of the earth are tired of being lectured to by the scions of diamond mines, Phillips Exeter graduates and the like. Even if they do know the worst case big O time for quicksort. History goes through twists and turns, and I welcome the challenges to their power we will be seeing this century.
You didn't.
Point out the parts of the blog post that shows his lack of rational thinking and research, rather than just giving some overall personal attack, as currently the comment is relatively off-topic considering the submission.
I'm sure there are good and bad parts of the blog post, while you failed to address any sides of it.
Being woke is to be aware of inequalities between ethnicities, religions, and classes. Being woke is to be aware of the fact that the planet is overheating due to our unfettered capitalism.
You calling something ridiculous is what is ridiculous, friend.
Yeah, what the rich need is more tax breaks {sarcasm}.
The world is full of people too stupid to know how stupid they are. They need to wake the fuck up.
Are you saying that thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction, regardless of the person? Or that specifically PG thinking about "wokeness" is a distraction? Or maybe even "thinking about wokeness in that way" is the distraction?
It seems like if "wokeness" is important, then having more people thinking about it is better, regardless of their outcome from thinking about it. If "wokeness" isn't important at all, I'd totally understand you, but seems there are way more people out there thinking about it more than PG, since it's the first time I see him say anything about it at all.
What points is he making (if you consider him to be making clear points), how do you think those points are flawed, etc..
We need to put to bed the notion that criticizing some aspect of a social phenomenon somehow means someone is wholly endorsing the worst elements of the opposition.
Personally, I believe "wokeism" (I hesitate to even use this word because it's poorly defined) is actually one of the largest impediments to moving society towards the ideas generally associated with the word. It's a tactics issue.
The difference between "We want the world to look more like X" and "Let's do these specific things to make the world look more like X" is critical. How you go about the latter can have a huge impact on the former.
One of the main points in the essay: "The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so"
And your comment is a classic example of that behavior.
This is the first and only article I recall from PG about wokeness, is it part of some anthology that I've missed or where are you getting the "this much time" part from?
Musk on DEI. Zuckerberg just got back to his Misogynistic persona of the first days of Facebook. Peter Thiel published an editorial in the FT last week talking about conspiracy theories on JFK, and now...The attack on Wokeness... Cherry-picking historical examples, misrepresenting real power dynamics, and dismissing genuine social concerns as mere “performative” gestures. All while coming from a privileged VC perspective that notoriously funnels opportunities to the same elite circles...
This is not a concise essay.
The reason wokeness scares the elite like PG is because it targets the system they themselves helped create.
That is, people have clever _moments_ - some more than others perhaps - but can equally have stupid ones. We convenientally flatten the statistics into a boolean.
For example, recently someone considered to have made a lot of smart decisions in his life has been found to have payed others to rank his character up in a video game so he can brag about it. Everyone has stupid moments.
Agreed. People seem to think that success is deterministic, so following the advice of successful people will lead them to success, rather than there being any number of other factors that might make someone who might make choices with the highest chance of success end up not succeeding, or someone who might make choices that aren't actually that smart end up becoming successful in spite of that. The worst part of this is that it's not just the students who naively believe this, but the successful people themselves. When someone mistakenly thinks that their own success is solely attributable to your own superior intellect or work ethic, it's not surprising that they end up advocating for policies that treat people in unfortunate circumstances as being not worth trying to help.
How long will this situation continue before the house of cards tumbles down?
Trump came to power on the back of a populist anger at the wealthy elite and the consequences of neo-liberal economics (which is pretty fucking far from e.g. Marx. Regardless of the entirety of his meaning, certainly some of Alex Jones' hatred of "globalists" springs from the fact that they outsource jobs to where the labor is cheaper). Insofar as "wokeness" factors into Trump's power, it was to harness that anger and direct it at some wealthy elites, but not others. That is, he claimed that these wealthy elites are being performatively sanctimonious and are trying to rob you of your freedom, money, power, etc, but those wealthy elites have your best interests at heart. Even though the two wealthy elites are kissing cousins (to whit, Gavin Newsom and Donald Trump Jr. both engaged in a committed long-term relationships with the same woman, albeit at different times) and don't actually care either way.
"Woke" in the traditional sense is realizing that no matter what they say, both groups are wealthy elites, and that neither actually has the interests of anyone but the elites at heart.
There are definitely moments of "are we really prioritizing this right now?" with modern social justice movements. But even on the subject of trans kids, the question for me is not "are we encouraging the wrong ideas around gender?" but rather "are we doing everything that's necessary to keep kids from committing suicide?"
The other day there was a post about fascists vs. rakes, and I really do feel like the the discussion around wokeness comes down to a similar misunderstanding about the intentions and moral principles of the two sides of the discussion.
If I know propositional logic, one of two things follows: either (1) I've never met any smart people, or (2) you've jumped to a false conclusion.
Either way, you shouldn't be posting personal attacks to HN.
I may have to write a book to educate people about how the world really works.
Thanks for the motivation.
Look at the surveys done of swing voters in the last election, they biggest single item was social issues such as trans.
Also just read the linked article(seems reasonable enough, though I don't necessarily agree with all of it), and the moralistic responses attacking him personally, instead of responding by pointing with the part they disagree with, this is a logical fallacy.
Here he is with receipts that he has been talking about wokeness like a weirdo for close to a decade now.
(Just to be clear, despite the above comment, I do not align with "wokeness".)
In which alternative reality is that happening? Where in the western world are communists in power?
If you speak out about the injustice you are deemed a far right extremist and a raciest and given a harsher sentence than the pedophiles that are raping children.
Now you might see that as unrelated but In my option it's exactly the sort of thing that is emblematic of the radical left being in power. There is an inversion of justice to correct for the "demon of whiteness".
This latest mush makes extravagant claims about the evolution of society over the course over a 70 year period, seems shocked that news rooms might have style guides, and suggests that recent campus life can somehow be meaningfully be compared to the Cultural Revolution.
It observes many trends, perhaps some accurately, but observes everything superficially.
Pragmatically, what Graham suggests at the end is reasonable--pluralism combined with openness to the ideas of others about morality. I don't know that we needed 6000 words of vague dyspeptic musings to get there.
He has demonstrated the ability to write and think more clearly than this. It is reasonable for someone to observe this and be disappointed.
I would like to see a source for this.