In the long run I think realizations like the authors are healthy ones.
PG is not a hero. He's just a guy. A guy who entered into business transactions with a number of people, many of whom benefitted greatly (as did Paul himself). I'm not saying any of that as a negative! Just that we have a habit of attributing superhuman characteristics to folks (Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize comes to mind) and ending up disappointed.
I'm not an affected group by any means but I still share the disappointment in the world we see today vs the possibilities I felt tech would allow when I was younger. The tech CEOs I previously viewed as visionaries now just look like a new generation of socially regressive robber barons. I wanted to be one of those CEOs, these days I'm still not quite sure what I want to be. My only consolation is knowing that I'm seeing the world more accurately than I once did.
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.
And polio is largely cured from this generation, and vaccines now exist that prevent diseases that once killed infants, and we have cheap and fast internet everywhere, ...
This generation of "robber barons" has very clearly done more good for society than any other group of people of the same size, and I can't imagine how anybody who works in tech can not know of the specific good things they have done or be so confused about the bad to believe they are outweighed.
The classic Cantrill bit about not anthropormphizing Larry Ellison applies to a lot of tech CEOs.
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!
They’re all a bunch of aspiring lawnmowers, some of them just try to ride whatever the latest wave of popular opinion is to cynically accumulate some social currency.
I feel like the best advice is to take the ideas, even principles you like from folks and run with that. That's it.
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.
I was there, 1986-2006 and by and far what he said internally at company meetings was completely apolitical. He didn’t moralize, he pushed groups to create better products for customers and that’s what we as engineers were exposed to.
The one time I remember something different was around 2003 when he was asked at an all hands meeting, a question that came down to “how do we work with all this chaos, war, blaming ethnic and religious minorities”, etc. The person that asked it was almost in tears. Jobs response was to look seriously non-plussed and he answered “if you can’t do anything else, vote for the democrats” and then moved on to the next question. He may have had deeper opinions- but they were not part of his public discourse when he was ceo.
I dunno about even that. Forgive my example (though I love bringing it up, since so few people seemed to have grokked it in the time since initial release): in the video game Bioshock: Infinite, one of the later levels sees you transported into the far future of 1984. The game's setting, a flying city named Columbia, which was characterized by its almost cartoonish levels of capital-A capital-P American Patriotism, had featured in its original Gilded Age incarnation many of the ills of turn-of-the-century American society, including racism, an exploited working class, religion-driven insularity, and a predilection for violence. However, it had also presented an enthusiasm for the new and curious, an ambition for high living standards, and other cultural accoutrements that are usually associated with forward-thinking societies.
By this late-game level, however, the city has descended into dystopia. Why? Well, a three-quarter century game of telephone. The ideals of the city's original founder, already imperfect, were further transmitted imperfectly to his successor and her charges, whose personal traumas further warped their interpretation of Columbia's intended values, and the actions taken in their name. That repentant successor, having lost control of the city's populace to a revolutionary fever, sends you back to the past just as Columbia's weapons begin to level New York City (a caricature of America destroying its real-life historical "center").
It's a metaphor, of course.
It's easy for the soul of an idea to get lost in translation. It's easy for principles of one era to be an ill fit for another. It's easy for the original ideas and principles to be fundamentally flawed in ways that no one could or was willing to admit to.
"Running with it" can be dangerous. (Ask us how well Cold War politicking has worked out for us post-9/11.)
I think, at all turns, you must be asking yourself why you're doing what you're doing, and if it's actually effective. If it's actually good. I don't know that Jobs ever predicted that the bicycle for the mind would be beholden to OTA updates or have a commensurate attack surface exposure, but we have to deal with that reality, regardless.
For sure. I almost included something in my comment about "I guess this is what getting old is like", losing your idealism as you age. But equally, maybe not. If I'd grown up in, I dunno the 60s? I would have witnessed enormous leaps in technological possibility and enormous increases in standards of living, personal freedoms, yadda yadda. In my youth it felt like there was a viable future where tech enabled radical positive changes in society. Instead we concentrated wealth at the top of society at historically unprecedented levels.
That might be true, for a while. But I bet many of us have parents that are old enough that are, in uncontroversial, non-political ways, losing their ability to view the world accurately. It's not all that easy to convince them that yes, they are in cognitive decline, and we are doing their best to consider how the version of themselves 20 years before would like us to tackle the decline.
Even in less obvious cases that don't involve old age, we often call something growth, when we should just say change. Sometimes we are all just more set our ways. Others, our "learning" is just abandoning principles so that we can follow random emotional fancies. Knowing when we are actually seeing the world more accurately, instead of being wrong in a different way, is quite challenging. We all want to think we are getting better, which is precisely whi we are blind to the ways in which we aren't. The convenient story often defeats what is actually true, but inconvenient.
At the end of the essay he says "I’d be a better startup founder today than I was in 2015" and my thought was, yea but YC is biased towards college kids. And then I saw your comment and I think something clicked for me. But maybe the ignorance and pliability of youth really is required to make the crazy bet on the startup dream.
> I'm not an affected group by any means but I still share the disappointment in the world we see today vs the possibilities I felt tech would allow when I was younger. The tech CEOs I previously viewed as visionaries now just look like a new generation of socially regressive robber barons. I wanted to be one of those CEOs, these days I'm still not quite sure what I want to be.
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".
I think the issue is not being disappointed, it's being scared.
Because PG yields influence.
OP describes the mechanism by which PGs words can create a dangerous world for them, personally.
Yes they are disappointed, but mainly afraid.
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.
He's very smart, but there's no need to idolize or politicize anyone on this earth. Both instincts are counterproductive to your personal health and success.
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.
Even if your essays win you a Nobel price (Paul Grahams certainly didn't) the writer isn't protected from becoming a bullshit-dispenser.
This is why I respect authors that publish a consistent level of quality more than those who hit and miss as if they were throwing darts at a map. And the stuff I have read from Paul Graham is definitly not in the former category.
I don't feel he is intellectually honest, either with himself (bad) or with his readers (worse). But if the past decade of the Internet has shown anything, it is that honesty and consistency isn't required to get insecure people to follow you blindly.
He also frames himself, accurately I believe, with his essays and the enabling-of-others nature of his successive accomplishments, as someone who genuinely values winning by helping others win.
But frustration can over simplify issues for all of us, at some point.
And power dulls sensitivity to those with less of it.
I have enjoyed most of Paul Graham's essays, and even been slightly influenced by a few of them, but let's not overstate his influence. We're in a real echo chamber here. Outside of a tiny tech industry bubble no one in positions of power reads those essays and they have virtually zero influence.
Is he well-read? His essay on the origins of wokeness was pure vibes, with hardly any historical accuracy or understanding of sociology. Many here on HN explained it as him not being well-read.
"I’m certain he wouldn’t be rude to my face, but he might quietly discriminate against me, say no thanks. He might not even think of it as discrimination, only that I don’t have what it takes."
This resonates pretty strongly (and depressingly) with me being an immigrant academic in Europe who came originally from a third-world country. Even though I am one of the most productive researchers in my department, even though I studied in the best university in my country (which is mind-blowingly better than the one I'm currently in), even if I say yes to almost everything, and even if I work easily 150% what an average native colleague does, none of this matter at all. Every morning I wake up there is a new knife on my back. Opportunities just vanish transparently; pressure amounts over pressure amounts pressure; there is always that quiet, mute side look that says (without words) "if you don't like it, why don't you leave?".
And what really makes this ten times worse is that the country I'm in has this almost ethereal reputation for begin some kind of paradise where everyone is super polite and calm and rational, so whenever I complain about anything it feels like I'm some kind of spoiled child. Half the time I even convince myself of that.
You described the advantages of exploiting you for your boss. Your colleagues will only treat you worse because of these points. And you think because of your university someone have to like you or what?
I would like to believe that my production output would speak for itself in an environment where supposedly we should care about that. But like you said, honest work will only get you treated worse; natives around me are surfing the benefits of the state and laughing away the days, while I cry myself to 4h of sleep everyday. So yeah, you’re right, it’s a war. I just wish it wasn’t.
And nobody has to “like” me, where did I even hint at that? I’m talking about professional respect; you know, the same I give to the people around me.
I worked as much as 200% more than some of my colleagues while having the lowest wage in the team. When I left, projects in my perimeter took 12x more time to develop (as assessed by a former colleague). I had a manager fired for failing to recruit me back.
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.
There is no concrete example of racism in his testimony. He describes universal situations of professional rivalry ("opportunities vanish," "pressure amounts") but interprets them as implicit racism without tangible evidence.
The intangibility of racism paradoxically makes it more powerful as an accusatory mechanism. Its very invisibility becomes proof of its omnipresence - the more impossible it is to prove, the more "obvious" it becomes. The vicious cycle is perfect: the absence of evidence strengthens the belief in a hidden evil.
This structure mirrors the logic of primitive sacredness: an absolute but elusive evil that demands even more victims precisely because it defies empirical verification. The accused can neither defend themselves (since denial is seen as proof of guilt) nor confess (as the evil is portrayed as unconscious).
Some relevant Proust:
>"Miss Vinteuil might not have thought evil was such a rare state, so extraordinary, so exotic, such a restful place to emigrate to, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the suffering we cause which, whatever other names we give it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty."
What do you assign the injustice you faced to? And who're you to deny GPs claims?
There's nothing more rancid than someone leaping to downplay someone's complaint as "ah, they're just being sensitive. They're imagining it". If they were lodging a formal complaint at their firm, sure, due process is a must but people being shit to the Other is a well established and common human behavior. It sucks what happened to you but it has little to bear on GPs words. It's just confusing why you felt the need to defend these other strangers you've never met.
Once upon a time, not that long ago, within my lifetime in fact, being gay was targeted for public abuse the way that transgender people are being targeting now.
That has declined as people came to understand that being gay, lesbian, bi is part of how a person is made. Under public pressure, a gay person can act straight or at least act not gay. But it doesn't change who they are, doesn't help anyone around them, and makes them miserable. There is no point to it. Thankfully popular opinion and the law have adjusted to that reality.
Being transgender is the same way. A transgender person is not someone who dresses a certain way, takes hormones, or gets surgery. A transgender person is someone who is absolutely miserable when they are not permitted to express the gender they feel. It is part of who they are deep inside, how they feel every day of their life. Like gay people, they can hide it to avoid abuse. Like gay people, it's not fair to force them to do so. And it doesn't help anyone around them either.
It seems to me that prigs, as defined in pg's article, are just jumping on the transgender issue because it's an easy way for them to enforce rules. From my understanding, having read both articles, PG might say that the prigs have chosen to ride the lgbt movement. The problem is not with the lgbt movement itself.
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?
Self-congratulatory, self-righteous prigs are all over the place within human society.
When people complain about them, the substantive content of their complaint is the context in which they issue it. For example pg is complaining about the prigs who nag everyone about transgender acceptance, but not the prigs who nag everyone to reject and abuse transgender people.
Matters of speech, manners, and decorum are convenient ways to launder the advocacy of a certain set of values. All you have to do is accuse your enemies of violation when they advocate, and stay silent when your allies apply the same tactics.
In order to consistently navigate politics, one needs to start with one's own values. That's why I posted my comment above. The core issue for me is whether transgender people can show up in their preferred gender. Not whether other people are annoying jerks when they talk about that question. There are plenty of annoying jerks on both sides of any value question, if one has the open eyes to see them.
>I think PG's problem is with the prigs, not the lgbt movement itself. Can these be separated?
You're essentially asking if the LGBT movement can be separated from the exact kind of activism that's enabled the advances in LGBT rights that we've seen since the 1960s. In a word, no, they can't be separated. The 'priggishness' of one or two decades ago is the moral truism of the present. Here, for example, is a spoof flyer in the British satirical magazine Private Eye published in 1969:
It's funny. But what's even funnier is many of the items in the list of obviously ridiculous demands (demands that surely signal that Political Correctness Has Gone Mad, etc. etc.) have turned out to be completely reasonable and, in time, uncontroversial.
I think this is spot on. The confusion for me comes from the fact that, as far as I can tell, I've never met a prig in real life. And yet they seem to be the biggest political issue of our time. Is it because I live in Australia and it's more of a US thing? Or is it because I'm not online as much maybe? I find it really confusing.
Read his essay again, past the first two paragraphs. Look at the social movements he describes as priggish, woke, politically correct etc.
> There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment."
> In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia
Going by the examples pg gives, anyone willing to support women, or LGBT, is a prig. Don't let his abstract theory cloud the rest of the essay. He says it in black and white, his problem is with minorities standing up for themselves.
The prigs are doing a motte-and-bailey thing, where if you're against them, then they will claim that you're against trans people or gays or minorities or whoever.
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
Bud Light sent promotional cans to a trans influencer. The content of the promo was completely anodyne, a joke about March Madness. For this, a boycott was led by social conservatives.
Aren't the people who led this boycott "prigs"? Why is Graham referring to them in a neutral-to-laudatory way if he's so opposed to priggishness? What "wokeness" does he think Bud Light was punished for?
I agree with you about a transgender person who is 23, but not about anyone who is claiming to be transgender at 13. That is way too young to be sure of such things, and peer pressures/influences exist.
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 does not feel like at all a good faith reading of the situation. Hardcore anti trans-activists on the right would like to make life so miserable for transpeople as to essentially eliminate them from public life entirely. That is the context in which these supposedly hysterical responses emerge. I say supposedly hysterical because transgender people of all ages do commit suicide at a higher rate than other groups. This should be considered a public health emergency but it largely isn't because transgender people are the most useful scapegoat of the day (even better than immigrants). Of course that doesn't mean that every child who questions their self identity should be given immediate medical intervention, but neither does it mean we should deny care for all.
There is a social movement that seeks the suppression of all transgender expression, including by fully informed adults. They led with “save the kids” for the emotional impact, as many other well-organized social movements have in the past.
It works because concerns about kids are real. But it’s important to see and understand the greater goals of the movement, and how it affects everyone. The essay at the top of this HN thread was written by an adult, expressing their adult concerns.
> A transgender person is someone who is absolutely miserable when they are not permitted to express the gender they feel.
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.
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.
Graham says he thinks wokeness is a religion, which I think is silly, but ironically religion in the workplace is an effective model here. I don't have to believe in someone's religion to understand that I shouldn't challenge their beliefs in the workplace, nor should I whine that so-and-so took time off for their holiday, and so on. I've regularly seen people make "[holiday greeting] for those who celebrate" remarks in work chats for Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu holidays, and it would be pretty inappropriate to jump in and say (as an atheist myself) "by the way, your god doesn't exist".
Similarly, I don't need to have any particular belief about the nature of gender to respond to my coworkers asking me to use "she" or "he" or "they" to refer to them. It's not my business.
Even trans people don't have a single monolithic set of opinions about what it means to be trans, what gender is, etc. The bar for not offending most people is extremely low.
This is self-evidently incorrect, for a multitude of reasons.
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.
Yeah, I don't think people understand what transgender person is. They understand being born like that, but not why someone chooses to change their gender. It simply is not in anyone's experience nor there is any analogous thing to bridge understanding. It is NOT like being GAY, because I know and read about gay animals, and say ok, this is not specific to humans. There isn't anything like that for TGs, because animals obviously don't dress. They just are.
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.
I think being gay and having gender identity disorder are two things that are somewhat related culturally, but not that much as a condition.
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 highest risk of suicide for trans people is how the surrounding people treat them. Additionally, regret of transitions is lower than for most surgeries. There is no real reason that allowing trans people to live their lives as they please causes any harm to them, it's only moral panic.
I'm not a target of tech's fascist turn, but my head is still spinning from the change of direction. When I entered this industry it was for hackers, nonconformists, weirdos, nerds, people who don't care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are.
What particularly stings is that the vipers at the top tricked people into giving away an enormous amount of intellectual property. Zuck is removing tampons from the men's room—will he also remove open source code written by queer people from his company? Of course not.
I feel like the way you describe it came from the people who came of age in the 70s and made so much of what we now see as “hacker culture.”
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.
What “fascism” are we talking about here? A company pulling tampons from men’s rooms? Companies scaling down DEI departments that advocated (probably illegally) in favor of gender and race-based discrimination?
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.
It is fascism to create a false narrative that all of our problems are caused by people with a different skin color, country of origin, gender identity, etc., and that it justifies setting up an authoritarian government that unjustly persecutes those groups and anyone that disagrees or tries to stop them.
That hacker spirit is alive and well, and will be long after the fascists for one simple reason:
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.
> When I entered this industry it [... didn't] care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are.
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.
I got online in about 98 and had many many friends in online games or on AIM / AOL and it took until many years, maybe even a decade, after FB for me to even discover what some of these people looked like. The standard "ASL?" and just chatting about life was what happened, so I agree with the comment you replying to.
2014 is way past the "hackers, nonconformists, weirdos, nerds, people who don't care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are" period of the industry. I entered the industry in 2011 and it was already bland, corporate, and hyper-capitalist by that point.
My sense is that the term is alluding to the late 90's or even earlier.
how did free speech become fascist? even in this ludicrous essay, which claims meta announced it will "increase the hate speech people like me receive". no, it announced reduced filtering of content.
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.
It's really quite narrowly scoped. There's no indication I could see that he doesn't still hold the same basically liberal politics (he included explicit disclaimers, for all the good that did); he might still be fine with transgender identity. He just wanted to talk about how the particular loudmouth brand of annoying leftist came to prominence. He even had a decent definition of them beyond "leftist I don't like", and put them in a broader context.
Even in the HN thread on the essay, it felt like hardly anyone actually read and understood it, just brought their own assumptions and intellectual allergies and let them run wild. It would be great if people could discuss these issues rationally, but the vast majority can't. Everyone is on a hair trigger.
It is not narrowly scoped, it states that we need to stop another "wave" of "social justice piggishness" which would include challenging the gender identity framework the author is using among other things. It also makes broad claims about social justice politics writ large.
Having read it carefully I found the hn thread interesting and it correctly criticized the essay's lazy reasoning.
Unless pg just now edited it out, you're making false quotes and misrepresenting his words.
I cannot find the quote "social justice piggishness" or the word "gender" in his essay. Every single mention of the word "wave" is attached to "wave of political correctness" or a close variation thereof.
Are you sure? How many of us in tech actually made decisions that made social media how it is? How many of us were even complicit in implementing it? I wasn't. Most of "tech" is not social media. Now how many of us were sounding the alarm and trying to build alternatives?
I don't think we should put all the blame on social media anyway.
My startup idea is a iPhone/Android virtual keyboard that detects the user is writing something toxic, and refuses to cooperate. Using AI. Who wants to fund me?
My other idea is a video/audio communication app that mutes the user if they become toxic.
Yes, I'm only joking. I wonder how many will be triggered and foam about "But who determines what is toxic!?!". That makes me think about the joke about feminists where the setup is "I have a joke about feminists..." and punchline is someone from the audience yelling "That's not funny!" straight away.
From the essay: "Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
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".
Indeed. I mean, an article on censorious "priggishness" could have easily picked outrage mobs boycotting brands over deeming a trans person worthy of association as evidence that the "woke" people didn't have a monopoly on self righteousness and censoriousness.
Instead, he effectively endorsed the position that trans people were "woke" simply for existing and the consumers cancelling them had a point.
I read this less as "the Bud Light campaign was morally wrong because it was woke" and more as "the Bud Light campaign went disastrously badly for its brand and sales because it was woke". I have heard people call it "the gay beer", which is a pretty bad branding change when double-digit percentages of your (former) drinkers are homophobic and you sponsor NASCAR.
One of my personal beliefs is that paedophiles who never act on their inclinations and instead seek treatment are doing the right thing, but I sure as hell wouldn't market a beer using that belief.
I'm too lazy to search my comment history, but I wrote a comment on the original post about pg's essay that I did pretty much agree with what pg wrote, and so consequently I agree with most of what you wrote.
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.
I can explain the "pile-on", because the climate has been unsafe for the last 10 years or so he might have gotten cancelled harder, with tangible business impact to his acquaintances. I know because I faced similar dilemmas as I commented on that article.
You know who you can't speak up against because they might feel upset, that your speech is mean, unkind or malicious? The privileged class. There has not been equality on social discourse for the last 10 years or so, at least for the intellectual crowd. I see this as a natural caused power balance cycle.
I can largely agree with this as well. There were plenty of interesting and valid critiques people could make of the content, if they actually read it. I'm seeing a few of them in the replies to my comment here, but more intellectual sneezes.
The pile-on isn't a coincidence. Forgive me for the tin foil hat, but there was an absolutely massive amount of investment in Silicon Valley coming from Saudi Arabia in the last year, and reading the tea leaves from the public statements of all of the partners of these firms, those investments absolutely came with strings attached. Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who were both longtime democratic donors but only occasional-endorsers, suddenly announced their support for and endorsement of Trump almost simultaneously with an announcement of $40B from Saudi Arabia. That's just the tip of the iceberg...hundreds of VCs have received funding from SA in the last year, and many of them ended up helping Elon buy twitter and get out of a lawsuit for trying to back out of the twitter deal, and he didn't even have to sell his Tesla stock to do it. Conveniently all within the same month that Elon first met Putin, and first started echoing Putin's "plans" for Ukraine.
It is well known that Donald Trump's deal to sell jets to SA is what elevated Mohammad Bin Salman from Defense Minister to Crown Prince over Bin Nayef. It is also well known that Donald Trump ran political interference for MBS when he had international condemnation for the assassination of Khashoggi...he even was caught bragging about it. And from the best that I can see from the public record, Trump called in all his banked Saudi Arabian favors all at once and Silicon Valley, once the domain of establishment democrats, became the firm territory of MAGA nearly overnight. All it took was money.
Idk if it's just me, but I voted blue in the last 3 presidential elections and I'm way more pissed about the Democrats than the Republicans right now.
They failed the country, so hard, by making poor decisions which made them lose. They did this repeatedly, I think which decisions were the wrong ones is up for debate, but the surest one imo is Joe Biden running again instead of stepping aside and having a real primary.
Anyway, all that is to say that I feel like I understand choosing now as a time to talk about what things you despise most about the left, because a lot of people feel like they failed America and the entire world by losing so decisively for reasons that feel stupid.
> Even in the HN thread on the essay, it felt like hardly anyone actually read and understood it, just brought their own assumptions and intellectual allergies and let them run wild. It would be great if people could discuss these issues rationally, but the vast majority can't. Everyone is on a hair trigger.
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.
This one’s footnote #2 addresses PG’s definition of “woke”, which I agree is useless (I’d go further: that kind’s so inconsequential that it’s nonsense to bring it up unless you’re using those complaints to attack other actions that do maybe have some justification, using the definition as cover to retreat to if called out; if that’s actually the only part you’re complaining about, just don’t write the piece, everyone already dislikes that kind for the same reasons you do)
What is “that kind” referring to? That kind of essay? The first essay? The response essay? That kind of definition? The author? Which author? That kind of person who is aggressively performative? If by “that kind” you mean that last definition, then let’s take one example in that happened recently and address your claim that “that kind” is inconsequential.
Undemocratically, performatively, anointing behind closed doors a weak but social justice signaling candidate to run on the democratic ticket in the recent US election, seems to have been just a wee bit consequential.
Yes - this is exactly how I felt about the "Wokeness" essay. I am constantly afraid that PG is gonna fall down the same strongly right rabbit hole so many of his colleagues have, and he hasn't so far, so seeing the title of the essay was worrying.
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.
The mere fact that pg takes the word “woke” seriously tells me he’s fallen for the right-wing doublespeak where they take a word vaguely related to left-wing ideals, pretend it means something else, apply to anyone center-right or leftward, and get the mainstream media and self-conscious centrists like Paul to accept their intentional distortions at face value.
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.
It might be reasonable to disregard Mr. Graham if he were somehow abusing the term "woke", but it seems wrongheaded to disregard him due to "the mere fact that [he] takes the word "woke" seriously".
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now?
It's early in the essay, too. Pretty near or above "the fold".
This is exactly the thing the essay seems to be complaining about. It's not the ethics of equality being targeted, it's the moral hypocrisy.
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.
Your argument is, "Don't say 'I believe X and if you disagree with me you're bad'. Just say, 'I believe X.'"
But then literally in the same sentence, you say, "If you do the thing I don't like (in this case, calling people bigots because they don't support lgbtq) *then you are self-aggrandizing."
"Nobody should be called a bigot for their views on lgbtq, but it's virtuous to call people self-aggrandizing for calling people bigots."
Either name-calling is okay or it's not. You can't have it both ways.
Re your last paragraph: I feel I'm quite left, but it feels like a lot of these activists are busy trying to make enemies out of everyone, which makes me think "I'll just shut the hell up" and, if I ever get confronted as being a part of the enemy class (I'm a heterosexual male, get the pitchforks!) , I'll just point out, "if you don't want me as your ally, then hey, no worries, I can be your enemy."...
> He just wanted to talk about how the particular loudmouth brand of annoying leftist came to prominence.
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.
I appreciate the author and this article. As an immigrant and person of color, the author's concerns resonate with me. I don't think people like PG or Andreessen are evil bigots. But they are underestimating and enabling a movement that is cruel and exclusionary by design. A movement that they seek to tame and harness, but not understanding that the movement is fundamentally untameable.
I miss the days when the Republican party was led by a President like Bush, who told America that Islam is a religion of peace. And nominees like McCain, who told his supporters that Obama is a decent family man, and a natural-born American. I worry for the future, and my children's place in it.
> I miss the days when the Republican party was led by a President like Bush, who told America that Islam is a religion of peace
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.
> I miss the days when the Republican party was led by a President like Bush, who told America that Islam is a religion of peace.
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.
Far be it from me to defend GWB, but in fairness he didn't invade them because they were muslim. There were many (poor) reasons for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, but their primary religion was not among them. If it were, many other Middle Eastern countries would have also been invaded.
Words are not more important than actions. But words can inform us of the intentions behind the actions - which must be considered when casting judgement.
I don't have exact numbers but my understanding is/was the US-led wars into Iraq and Afghanistan didn't cause millions of deaths but the insurrections against the governments established afterwards did. Iraqis killing other Iraqis, Afghans killing other Afghans.
Bush might have been the one who toppled the existing equilibrium of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, but most of the suffering was inflicted by the bloody civil wars (often fueled by third parties such as Iran).
> Islam is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a religion of peace.
It is. The word Islam and Salaam are etymologically tied to the word "peace".
If your definition of peace is "never wages war", well there's no country or political regime in the world like that. Even India, which was liberated by the famous nonviolent philosopher Gandhi, did not last many years without needing to wage war and take territory.
Islam is the only remaining religion with a political element and an existing desire for statehood. You could argue for Judaism (but some of the Orthodox would disagree) also. Back when Christendom had aspirations of statehood, it was also not "peaceful" in the way most people imagine. But this isn't a feature of the religions. It's a feature of world politics. No one can be peaceful and engage meaningfully in world politics. Everyone is propped up by some army somewhere.
You can have many arguments against the social regime, views on gender, etc. Etc. of Islam, but to say it's not peaceful because it is a political entity is just not understanding politics or the world, imo
As POC I feel like equity movements in the US have, by far, become majority LGBT+ issues with a minority of racial or religious issues. Many POC cohorts in this election shifted toward Trump and I suspect it has to do with how much diversity initiatives have come to settle around White LGBT+ voices. I don't think I've seen the topic of Islam in America covered in any MSM article in years unless buried deep into an Opinion section.
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.
Kindly you're mistaken. I know it feels that way but polls say it isnt.
A solid majority of the US want mass deportation. This moment is about being white, make no mistake, the trans stuff is a side show.
I can't read minds of the POCs who went along with it but my guess is they essentially think they're white enough now and won't be swept up, but their white friends certainly don't see them that way. Likely over the next month (next week really) a lot of them who did vote for him are about to find out.
While I understand the point you're making, I am surprised by the examples you chose.
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.
> 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.
To be precise: they'd oppose the misinformation if they felt it was to their benefit, embrace it if they felt it was to their benefit, or behave neutrally towards the misinformation when it was brought to their attention... if they felt that was to their benefit.
"who told America that Islam is a religion of peace"
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.
Having read many of PG's essays from the 2000s and seeing how he communicates now, I can only reach one conclusion. Like Musk, Zuck and the others who got rich quick decades ago, they are too far removed from any kind of "hacker" ethos today, and see everything from 30,000 ft, almost literally. What kind of self-described hacker spends their days advising incubees on the best way to close "high-touch B2B sales"?
They concern themselves with accumulating power first, and maintaining their "innovator" image second. Any empathy or compassion they may have had for the concerns of ordinary people appear to be long gone, except perhaps for their personal friends who may be on the receiving end of state-sanctioned bigotry. Reagan for example ignored AIDS, seeing it as a "gays and minorities" issue, while in private he looked out for the care of his AIDS-afflicted gay actor friend Rock Hudson, who passed from complications in 1985.
Back to PG, see his essay from some years ago, "How People Get Rich Now"[0]. You would think it was ghost-written by an investment bank's IPO division. Every single line is another way of saying "raise money for speculative bet, then go public", ignoring his own decades of experience at YC indicating the overwhelming majority cannot achieve this, in the biggest VC market in the world. Much of the United States population has absolutely no entry point into Sand Hill Road.
A response to that essay from a software engineer provided a sobering perspective to counterbalance the winner-take-all world PG lives in. [1]
As I remember PG took a bold stance on the Israeli-Palestine conflict within the past couple years. For context, you can think of me as an average dude who works at a tech company, and I can't imagine coming out with anything as fiery as he did on this topic (and no one reports to me). I saw other VC's, prominent ones, publicly condemn him for it. So I wouldn't say all his takes are bland.
tbf, "high touch B2B sales" is very much something a quite ordinary hacker doing quite ordinary B2B stuff is likely to want to figure out unless they're already quite good at it or know someone else that is, and I'm sure some of the suggestions are "hacky" in ways with both positive and negative connotations.
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
I really appreciate this article, and I would like the author to know that there are lots of people - yes, especially in tech - that support their happiness.
This was also my first thought -- a deep sadness over someone hurting and feeling threatened and persecuted. I'd also like them to know they're not alone in this.
Readit News
PG is not a hero. He's just a guy. A guy who entered into business transactions with a number of people, many of whom benefitted greatly (as did Paul himself). I'm not saying any of that as a negative! Just that we have a habit of attributing superhuman characteristics to folks (Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize comes to mind) and ending up disappointed.
I'm not an affected group by any means but I still share the disappointment in the world we see today vs the possibilities I felt tech would allow when I was younger. The tech CEOs I previously viewed as visionaries now just look like a new generation of socially regressive robber barons. I wanted to be one of those CEOs, these days I'm still not quite sure what I want to be. My only consolation is knowing that I'm seeing the world more accurately than I once did.
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)
Dead Comment
This generation of "robber barons" has very clearly done more good for society than any other group of people of the same size, and I can't imagine how anybody who works in tech can not know of the specific good things they have done or be so confused about the bad to believe they are outweighed.
You mean the ones that turned around and produced the current market fundamentalist and elite-run culture we have today?
What a coincidence.
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!
They’re all a bunch of aspiring lawnmowers, some of them just try to ride whatever the latest wave of popular opinion is to cynically accumulate some social currency.
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.
The one time I remember something different was around 2003 when he was asked at an all hands meeting, a question that came down to “how do we work with all this chaos, war, blaming ethnic and religious minorities”, etc. The person that asked it was almost in tears. Jobs response was to look seriously non-plussed and he answered “if you can’t do anything else, vote for the democrats” and then moved on to the next question. He may have had deeper opinions- but they were not part of his public discourse when he was ceo.
By this late-game level, however, the city has descended into dystopia. Why? Well, a three-quarter century game of telephone. The ideals of the city's original founder, already imperfect, were further transmitted imperfectly to his successor and her charges, whose personal traumas further warped their interpretation of Columbia's intended values, and the actions taken in their name. That repentant successor, having lost control of the city's populace to a revolutionary fever, sends you back to the past just as Columbia's weapons begin to level New York City (a caricature of America destroying its real-life historical "center").
It's a metaphor, of course.
It's easy for the soul of an idea to get lost in translation. It's easy for principles of one era to be an ill fit for another. It's easy for the original ideas and principles to be fundamentally flawed in ways that no one could or was willing to admit to.
"Running with it" can be dangerous. (Ask us how well Cold War politicking has worked out for us post-9/11.)
I think, at all turns, you must be asking yourself why you're doing what you're doing, and if it's actually effective. If it's actually good. I don't know that Jobs ever predicted that the bicycle for the mind would be beholden to OTA updates or have a commensurate attack surface exposure, but we have to deal with that reality, regardless.
also known as growing older ;-)
Even in less obvious cases that don't involve old age, we often call something growth, when we should just say change. Sometimes we are all just more set our ways. Others, our "learning" is just abandoning principles so that we can follow random emotional fancies. Knowing when we are actually seeing the world more accurately, instead of being wrong in a different way, is quite challenging. We all want to think we are getting better, which is precisely whi we are blind to the ways in which we aren't. The convenient story often defeats what is actually true, but inconvenient.
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.
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.
Ha well that a particular bad joke.
Most are not so egregious.
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.
This is why I respect authors that publish a consistent level of quality more than those who hit and miss as if they were throwing darts at a map. And the stuff I have read from Paul Graham is definitly not in the former category.
I don't feel he is intellectually honest, either with himself (bad) or with his readers (worse). But if the past decade of the Internet has shown anything, it is that honesty and consistency isn't required to get insecure people to follow you blindly.
But frustration can over simplify issues for all of us, at some point.
And power dulls sensitivity to those with less of it.
A counter here would be well written essays offering the humanist perspective.
I don't think PG is particularly well read in the area of "wokeness" anyway since he has fallen for the traditional conservative trap of redefinition.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
The downgrading of exceptional individuals like PG to mediocrities is no healthier than placing them on pedestals.
Recognizing that we're all just people is certainly healthier than placing people on pedestals.
Deleted Comment
This resonates pretty strongly (and depressingly) with me being an immigrant academic in Europe who came originally from a third-world country. Even though I am one of the most productive researchers in my department, even though I studied in the best university in my country (which is mind-blowingly better than the one I'm currently in), even if I say yes to almost everything, and even if I work easily 150% what an average native colleague does, none of this matter at all. Every morning I wake up there is a new knife on my back. Opportunities just vanish transparently; pressure amounts over pressure amounts pressure; there is always that quiet, mute side look that says (without words) "if you don't like it, why don't you leave?".
And what really makes this ten times worse is that the country I'm in has this almost ethereal reputation for begin some kind of paradise where everyone is super polite and calm and rational, so whenever I complain about anything it feels like I'm some kind of spoiled child. Half the time I even convince myself of that.
And nobody has to “like” me, where did I even hint at that? I’m talking about professional respect; you know, the same I give to the people around me.
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.
The intangibility of racism paradoxically makes it more powerful as an accusatory mechanism. Its very invisibility becomes proof of its omnipresence - the more impossible it is to prove, the more "obvious" it becomes. The vicious cycle is perfect: the absence of evidence strengthens the belief in a hidden evil.
This structure mirrors the logic of primitive sacredness: an absolute but elusive evil that demands even more victims precisely because it defies empirical verification. The accused can neither defend themselves (since denial is seen as proof of guilt) nor confess (as the evil is portrayed as unconscious).
Some relevant Proust:
>"Miss Vinteuil might not have thought evil was such a rare state, so extraordinary, so exotic, such a restful place to emigrate to, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone else, that indifference to the suffering we cause which, whatever other names we give it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty."
There's nothing more rancid than someone leaping to downplay someone's complaint as "ah, they're just being sensitive. They're imagining it". If they were lodging a formal complaint at their firm, sure, due process is a must but people being shit to the Other is a well established and common human behavior. It sucks what happened to you but it has little to bear on GPs words. It's just confusing why you felt the need to defend these other strangers you've never met.
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That has declined as people came to understand that being gay, lesbian, bi is part of how a person is made. Under public pressure, a gay person can act straight or at least act not gay. But it doesn't change who they are, doesn't help anyone around them, and makes them miserable. There is no point to it. Thankfully popular opinion and the law have adjusted to that reality.
Being transgender is the same way. A transgender person is not someone who dresses a certain way, takes hormones, or gets surgery. A transgender person is someone who is absolutely miserable when they are not permitted to express the gender they feel. It is part of who they are deep inside, how they feel every day of their life. Like gay people, they can hide it to avoid abuse. Like gay people, it's not fair to force them to do so. And it doesn't help anyone around them either.
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?
When people complain about them, the substantive content of their complaint is the context in which they issue it. For example pg is complaining about the prigs who nag everyone about transgender acceptance, but not the prigs who nag everyone to reject and abuse transgender people.
Matters of speech, manners, and decorum are convenient ways to launder the advocacy of a certain set of values. All you have to do is accuse your enemies of violation when they advocate, and stay silent when your allies apply the same tactics.
In order to consistently navigate politics, one needs to start with one's own values. That's why I posted my comment above. The core issue for me is whether transgender people can show up in their preferred gender. Not whether other people are annoying jerks when they talk about that question. There are plenty of annoying jerks on both sides of any value question, if one has the open eyes to see them.
You're essentially asking if the LGBT movement can be separated from the exact kind of activism that's enabled the advances in LGBT rights that we've seen since the 1960s. In a word, no, they can't be separated. The 'priggishness' of one or two decades ago is the moral truism of the present. Here, for example, is a spoof flyer in the British satirical magazine Private Eye published in 1969:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
It's funny. But what's even funnier is many of the items in the list of obviously ridiculous demands (demands that surely signal that Political Correctness Has Gone Mad, etc. etc.) have turned out to be completely reasonable and, in time, uncontroversial.
> There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment."
> In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia
Going by the examples pg gives, anyone willing to support women, or LGBT, is a prig. Don't let his abstract theory cloud the rest of the essay. He says it in black and white, his problem is with minorities standing up for themselves.
"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."
Bud Light sent promotional cans to a trans influencer. The content of the promo was completely anodyne, a joke about March Madness. For this, a boycott was led by social conservatives.
Aren't the people who led this boycott "prigs"? Why is Graham referring to them in a neutral-to-laudatory way if he's so opposed to priggishness? What "wokeness" does he think Bud Light was punished for?
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.
It works because concerns about kids are real. But it’s important to see and understand the greater goals of the movement, and how it affects everyone. The essay at the top of this HN thread was written by an adult, expressing their adult concerns.
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.
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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.
Similarly, I don't need to have any particular belief about the nature of gender to respond to my coworkers asking me to use "she" or "he" or "they" to refer to them. It's not my business.
Even trans people don't have a single monolithic set of opinions about what it means to be trans, what gender is, etc. The bar for not offending most people is extremely low.
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.
That is patently false, there are many such cases.
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.
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.
https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equali... and https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equali...
What particularly stings is that the vipers at the top tricked people into giving away an enormous amount of intellectual property. Zuck is removing tampons from the men's room—will he also remove open source code written by queer people from his company? Of course not.
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.
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.
Stop working for billionaires.
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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.
My sense is that the term is alluding to the late 90's or even earlier.
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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.
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It's really quite narrowly scoped. There's no indication I could see that he doesn't still hold the same basically liberal politics (he included explicit disclaimers, for all the good that did); he might still be fine with transgender identity. He just wanted to talk about how the particular loudmouth brand of annoying leftist came to prominence. He even had a decent definition of them beyond "leftist I don't like", and put them in a broader context.
Even in the HN thread on the essay, it felt like hardly anyone actually read and understood it, just brought their own assumptions and intellectual allergies and let them run wild. It would be great if people could discuss these issues rationally, but the vast majority can't. Everyone is on a hair trigger.
Having read it carefully I found the hn thread interesting and it correctly criticized the essay's lazy reasoning.
I cannot find the quote "social justice piggishness" or the word "gender" in his essay. Every single mention of the word "wave" is attached to "wave of political correctness" or a close variation thereof.
Edit: OP meant "priggishness". Got it.
If only we in the tech industry could blame social media on anyone but ourselves :(
I don't think we should put all the blame on social media anyway.
My other idea is a video/audio communication app that mutes the user if they become toxic.
Yes, I'm only joking. I wonder how many will be triggered and foam about "But who determines what is toxic!?!". That makes me think about the joke about feminists where the setup is "I have a joke about feminists..." and punchline is someone from the audience yelling "That's not funny!" straight away.
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".
Instead, he effectively endorsed the position that trans people were "woke" simply for existing and the consumers cancelling them had a point.
One of my personal beliefs is that paedophiles who never act on their inclinations and instead seek treatment are doing the right thing, but I sure as hell wouldn't market a beer using that belief.
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.
You know who you can't speak up against because they might feel upset, that your speech is mean, unkind or malicious? The privileged class. There has not been equality on social discourse for the last 10 years or so, at least for the intellectual crowd. I see this as a natural caused power balance cycle.
It is well known that Donald Trump's deal to sell jets to SA is what elevated Mohammad Bin Salman from Defense Minister to Crown Prince over Bin Nayef. It is also well known that Donald Trump ran political interference for MBS when he had international condemnation for the assassination of Khashoggi...he even was caught bragging about it. And from the best that I can see from the public record, Trump called in all his banked Saudi Arabian favors all at once and Silicon Valley, once the domain of establishment democrats, became the firm territory of MAGA nearly overnight. All it took was money.
It appears to be a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
They failed the country, so hard, by making poor decisions which made them lose. They did this repeatedly, I think which decisions were the wrong ones is up for debate, but the surest one imo is Joe Biden running again instead of stepping aside and having a real primary.
Anyway, all that is to say that I feel like I understand choosing now as a time to talk about what things you despise most about the left, because a lot of people feel like they failed America and the entire world by losing so decisively for reasons that feel stupid.
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.
How extremely generous!
Be charitable.
Undemocratically, performatively, anointing behind closed doors a weak but social justice signaling candidate to run on the democratic ticket in the recent US election, seems to have been just a wee bit consequential.
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.
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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.
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> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now?
It's early in the essay, too. Pretty near or above "the fold".
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.
But then literally in the same sentence, you say, "If you do the thing I don't like (in this case, calling people bigots because they don't support lgbtq) *then you are self-aggrandizing."
"Nobody should be called a bigot for their views on lgbtq, but it's virtuous to call people self-aggrandizing for calling people bigots."
Either name-calling is okay or it's not. You can't have it both ways.
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.
I miss the days when the Republican party was led by a President like Bush, who told America that Islam is a religion of peace. And nominees like McCain, who told his supporters that Obama is a decent family man, and a natural-born American. I worry for the future, and my children's place in it.
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.
Words are not more important than actions. But words can inform us of the intentions behind the actions - which must be considered when casting judgement.
Bush might have been the one who toppled the existing equilibrium of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, but most of the suffering was inflicted by the bloody civil wars (often fueled by third parties such as Iran).
It is. The word Islam and Salaam are etymologically tied to the word "peace".
If your definition of peace is "never wages war", well there's no country or political regime in the world like that. Even India, which was liberated by the famous nonviolent philosopher Gandhi, did not last many years without needing to wage war and take territory.
Islam is the only remaining religion with a political element and an existing desire for statehood. You could argue for Judaism (but some of the Orthodox would disagree) also. Back when Christendom had aspirations of statehood, it was also not "peaceful" in the way most people imagine. But this isn't a feature of the religions. It's a feature of world politics. No one can be peaceful and engage meaningfully in world politics. Everyone is propped up by some army somewhere.
You can have many arguments against the social regime, views on gender, etc. Etc. of Islam, but to say it's not peaceful because it is a political entity is just not understanding politics or the world, imo
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.
A solid majority of the US want mass deportation. This moment is about being white, make no mistake, the trans stuff is a side show.
I can't read minds of the POCs who went along with it but my guess is they essentially think they're white enough now and won't be swept up, but their white friends certainly don't see them that way. Likely over the next month (next week really) a lot of them who did vote for him are about to find out.
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.
To be precise: they'd oppose the misinformation if they felt it was to their benefit, embrace it if they felt it was to their benefit, or behave neutrally towards the misinformation when it was brought to their attention... if they felt that was to their benefit.
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.
They concern themselves with accumulating power first, and maintaining their "innovator" image second. Any empathy or compassion they may have had for the concerns of ordinary people appear to be long gone, except perhaps for their personal friends who may be on the receiving end of state-sanctioned bigotry. Reagan for example ignored AIDS, seeing it as a "gays and minorities" issue, while in private he looked out for the care of his AIDS-afflicted gay actor friend Rock Hudson, who passed from complications in 1985.
Back to PG, see his essay from some years ago, "How People Get Rich Now"[0]. You would think it was ghost-written by an investment bank's IPO division. Every single line is another way of saying "raise money for speculative bet, then go public", ignoring his own decades of experience at YC indicating the overwhelming majority cannot achieve this, in the biggest VC market in the world. Much of the United States population has absolutely no entry point into Sand Hill Road.
A response to that essay from a software engineer provided a sobering perspective to counterbalance the winner-take-all world PG lives in. [1]
[0] https://paulgraham.com/richnow.html
[1] https://keenen.xyz/just-be-rich/ (HN discussion link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40962965)
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