It's called "hacker" news for a reason.
Same thing happened with the rest of the nonsense over the last 5 years. From social media you would think everyone took the clot shot. 1/3 didn’t but you’d never have known that from HN or other social media.
There is a small but loud contingent who wants to dictate our language, how we teach our children, and what we put in to our bodies. The good news is most people are not stupid and are completely rejecting it - in real life.
Miss when his essays were actually about hacking!
You could have literally taken this essay from PG posted it on the timeline of any single one of his colleagues and you couldn't even tell who wrote it. The "anti woke" economy, if you look at the numbers accounts of that flavor do on Youtube, Twitter et al. is a magnitude if not larger than what, according to them, cannot be criticized.
The phrase "woke mind virus" also featured in this essay, is more of a literal meme or mind virus in the Dawkins sense of that term than anything it attempts to address. The lack of awareness to accuse others of indoctrination when you write an essay so generic that you can autocomplete the last 90% after reading the first 10% chatgpt style is quite something.
The biggest problem I see with pg, and basically with all of the SV elite, is that I rarely see them question any of their assumptions or conclusions that don't lead them to "everything I've done is right, or at least the original goals of the 'SV ethos' is the best thing for society."
For example, take the concept of meritocracy. I completely agree that I think the "wokeness" of many on the left went way overboard in demonizing meritocratic processes, e.g. getting rid of advanced classes and opportunities for some students in the name of "fairness". At the same time, I rarely if ever see these SV kingpins suggest viable solutions to the fact that in the relatively new "winner take all" tech-led economy, very bad things happen if only a teeny meritocratic elite hoards all the wealth and leaves everyone else in an extremely precarious state. For a counterpoint as to someone who I do find insightful, consider Scott Galloway. He is definitely not someone who I would call woke, but he also understands some of the real problems so often ignored by the "tech utopianists".
In this particular pg essay, there is not much I disagree with, but I didn't really learn anything from it either. I'm also extremely suspect at all these SV leaders suddenly highlighting their views that are conveniently in lock step with the new administration. Like you say, pg has talked about this before, so I'm not saying his thoughts aren't genuine, I just think what Tim Sweeney said recently is pretty spot on "All these SV leaders pretended to be Democrats, and now they're pretending to be Republicans." It's similar to how I feel about Zuckerberg's recent pronouncements. When I first heard them, most of them I agreed with and they made sense to me. Then I read the actual new "hateful conduct" guidelines and I almost threw up. I'm actually fine with being able to call gay people like me mentally ill - I'm willing to debate that 9 ways to Sunday. But kindly STFU about "free speech" when only gay and transgender people had a specific carve out to allow for their denigration. Like I have to listen to all this crazy religious bullshit that in a sane world we'd recognize as symptoms of schizophrenia, yet if I said that on FB that would go against their new hateful conduct guidelines.
Frankly, I see pg largely as another uninteresting SV elite: someone very, very smart and who obviously worked very hard, but who was also obviously extremely lucky and now thinks that his thoughts are worth so much more than anyone else.
But he missed the mark here. It feels like he published a first-draft without getting any dissenting takes on one of the biggest hot-button topics on the web. I (or a million other people) would have been happy to read a draft of this and explain that he'd create offense and confusion with his... attempt to explain the history of priggishness around social justice based on his lived experience... if that's really what this is supposed to be.
The federal government censored speech it didn’t like by PAYING social media to delete it. In many instances it was content that was objectively true.
Public schools are right now telling children in kindergarten they can choose their own gender. They cannot.
The federal government wanted to implement policies to require administration of an experimental gene therapy, that didn’t even work and was never even tested for protection against transmission, and many many people were forced in to taking it if they wanted to keep their job.
I’ve voted for left progressive candidates for 20 years but I can’t vote for this shit any more and judging by the recent election neither can over half of America. Have fun crying about trump for the next four years.
You won't see PG writing an article on how homeless people in SF should be more pro-breaking-the-rules. Because it's OK to steal from your users, to inflate your growth numbers, to make false promises to build your initial userbase, but it's not OK not to shoplift from the Safeway or do drugs on the BART. That's the kind of breaking the rules that isn't cool, edgy, smart, and most importantly high status and beneficial to Paul Graham. Don't you think that double standard is a bit suspect, that he's "pro-breaking-the-rules" exactly when the rules restrain him and not others, when it's the rules he thinks are stupid and not the rules someone else thinks are stupid?
You won't see PG writing an article about how it's bad to deny a 15 year old medical information on puberty blockers. That is, undeniably, censorship in its very simplest form: it's the suppression of information out of a belief that it is in some way dangerous to let people know about it. But most of the people who claim to be so concerned with censorship won't say a word against it, and a lot actively support it, because it stops being "censorship" when it's something they like.
And, of course, the idea that the anti-woke crowd is "anti-authoritarian" is kind of laughable right now, given their response to the incoming administration.
The change isn't that his (or other tech elites') ostensible values have changed. It's that their ostensible values have become increasingly transparently hypocritical. PG hasn't become less of a hacker: it's "hacker culture" itself, especially as represented and hijacked by venture capital, that is not what we (or at least what I) hoped it was.
Rule breaking for me, and not for thee sums up my objection, I suppose.
Yep. IMO you struck right at the heart of it. My cynical POV is that pg, like many others, tries to be on the good side of who's now in power.
Everything else discussed in the article or here, as valid or interesting as it might be, looks to be a distraction from this central motivation.
Case in point, anyone else posting a screed like this would instantly be flagged and removed.
Frankly, I find it more concerning that anyone thinks HN should be pro Paul Graham by default. He should be judged by his ideas, not who he is.
"pro-breaking-the-rules attitude" come on. He's aligning himself with the most conservative and powerful people in the world right now. How is that a rule breaking attitude?
That's sort of the point of the essay, he compares woke to a religion and explores how companies deal with various religious beliefs at work, ie: no one religion is ever allowed to suppress others no matter how righteous its believers feel or offended they may become.
I'm not sure why that's a bad thing or would create "confusion" in your mind.
Btw this falls squarely into "tech culture" category.
These people are willfully ignorant, but they're so arrogant that they think that they're right about everything.
exactly, so why is a long political opinion piece from PG on wokeness here in the first place?
No, no you cannot. That makes you someone who broke a rule, not a rule breaker. There is some nuance to it which the English language is subpar at, but it’s the difference between something you are and something you did. Like being drunk VS being an alcoholic.
You’re a rule breaker if you have a pattern of breaking rules, not if you break literally one (percent of) rule.
> Additionally, it matters a lot how big and societally ingrained the rules that you're breaking are.
It does to an extent, yes, but Paul isn’t doing anything different here. He has the same conservative opinion as his billionaire friends. He is the establishment, cosplaying as a revolutionary.
* The origin of woke-ism is university humanities departments
* Musk succeeded in "neutralising" wokeness on Twitter without censoring left-wing voices.
* Racism is (or should be) independent of linguistic context.
* That wokeness is a serious problem in the US.
He also makes liberal use of argument from incredulity, does not provide any facts, figures or citations to back up his claims, and suggests some very dubious moral standpoints (that it is wrong for university staff to get reported for sexual harassment).
That said, I do somewhat agree with you when you say "I don't think what pg is saying is anything new". In fact, he's never really said anything new, and he's always been prone to fallacious thinking. What's happened here is that he's exposed this more than ever before.
That it has “hacker” is seemingly incidental. This place has always had bad takes from rich people - or takes from people who are seeking to be rich by way of tech.
I know plenty of people that didn’t want to risk the newer stuff, but understood the collective issue of getting to herd immunity and took the normal version of the vaccine. To me this was very straightforward logic.
Right, but hacker is the culture they have wrapped themselves in, and I'm commenting on that. I'm commenting on one of the markers of validity that matters to how people in this group evaluate the credibility of an argument.
How does herd immunity make any sense when it was never tested for transmission?
There isn't much point in replying to trolls like @whatwhaaaaat who claim the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines "don't even work". It's just willful ignorance at this point.
I know, but per your second point, arguing the semantics against willful ignorance doesn't work.
I simply opt to point out that there was and is an old-school vaccine because the focus on the mRNA side of things baffles me.