Young people in need of guidance would do well to read the classics and disregard everyone with a pulse.
https://thecslewis-studygroup.org/the-c-s-lewis-study-group/...
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.