The Two Kinds of Moderate

As is increasingly the case, the core of pg's argument is a variant of the Appeal to Authority: the "impressive people" that pg personally knows. And there is also an Ad Hominem; one doesn't want to be anything like the nasty people who are continually mean to him online.

It is certain that pg does know some very impressive people, and that he attracts a lot of attention from Twitter leftists looking to score cheap points.

However, this argument is vague and dependent on faulty assumptions. Not only can it be easily dismissed, it probably proves the opposite of what he intends.

I think we can assume those impressive people are likely all drawn from the small coterie of technology startup founders and investors. From this and other essays, it's become clear that pg believes that success at becoming a startup founder (just like pg) is almost identical with being an impressive person.

But it's well-known that this group already comes from a relatively narrow slice of humanity. Upper-middle-class or upper-class, likely white, likely gone to a university in America. It would not be surprising if their opinions were roughly in alignment.

Even so, the "impressive people" have not taken public stands that we can verify. We only have pg's assessment of their stances as being roughly centered around a mean, and we only have pg's assessment of where the mean is. (It's rare indeed for someone to self-identify as an extremist!)

This is an informal essay, so perhaps asking for even one example is too much rigor. And, as pg often reminds us, his friends have all kinds of interesting opinions they can't reveal in public any more, due to political correctness. Luckily we have pg who valiantly is willing to stand up in public and allude to a large number of people who agree with him, but are just off-camera.

Anyway, since we are left to merely imagine, let's also imagine that we asked pg's interlocutors about other topics. What would their opinions be on, say, technology startups and business? They'd probably say they were good for the world, and good as a career path. There might be a relatively univocal assessment of taxes as being too high, the barriers to founding businesses as too onerous, and that some ideas popular outside the tech industry (like mandated key escrow, or fact-checking social media posts) are all ludicrous and counterproductive. All defensible opinions, but my point is, we can imagine them all being in close agreement on issues relating to their industry.

So let's take pg at his word that if we have a cohort of people who have self-selected an industry and risen to success, their opinions about that industry are both informed and in close agreement, and their other opinions might be defensible, but randomly scattered around a mean. Is this really that surprising?

pg wants us to believe that the relative moderation of his impressive friends proves something. That not only is moderation a virtue, but the virtuous are moderate.

But accidentally, he may be revealing that technology startup success is more random than he thinks. That it selects for people with some narrow range of skills, but success is awarded with a high degree of randomness.

And since there is no reason for this cohort to be in alignment on any other matter, they are more or less randomly scattered around the median opinion of an upper-class American university technology student.

...

PS: pg started his career as an essayist with "Beating the Averages", and now he asserts that being average is actually good!?

Okay, maybe that's a cheap shot, but we're all looking to justify ourselves and be loved, I guess, and as we pass through different stages of life that doesn't change. pg used to write about the hidden virtues of high school nerds, minority programming languages, and young founders who weren't from California. I found it easier to be a fan. Today he mostly writes about the hidden virtues of the Silicon Valley elite. While that might actually have some merit, it's a bit of a harder sell.

This is only the case if left and right are equally right and wrong, which is unlikely to be the case. The average place of an accidental moderate could be anywhere, even to the left of the left or the right of right right.