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I Met Paul Graham Once

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Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#221

Post by mola »

afavour wrote: post #9

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 dis…

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.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#223

Post by inglor_cz »

diffxx wrote: post #216
inglor_cz wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

"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."

You may be right, but the anti-trans backlash in the context of the anti-woke backlash is much wider than just a few hardcore anti-trans activists on the far right. And it mostly revolves around two issues:

a. Very young kids being treated in invasive or hard-to-revert ways on flimsy evidence.

b. People with male musculature competing in women's sports leagues.

If these two things go away, the popular reaction will significantly moderate itself, maybe into gay-marriage-like acceptance levels.

But these two things won't be broadly acceptable anywhere soon, if ever.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#224

Post by coderc »

watwut wrote: post #159
coderc wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that your claim about "99% of people asking questions have literally zero interest in answers" applies more to 'both sides' than one might initially think. Is either side open to being told "no", or at least "wait, we need to be more cautious about this"? Or do both sides just want their demands to be accepted? Would either side actually back down if the research said that what they were doing was harmf…

> "wait, we need to be more cautious about this"? Or do both sides just want their demands to be accepted? I think that yours "wait, we need to be more cautious about this" or is this just another "I do not care about answers, I just want to pretend so". > Would either side actually back down if the research said that what they were doing was harmful or ineffective? Research is there and it is saying current clinics…

>I think that yours "wait, we need to be more cautious about this" or is this just another "I do not care about answers, I just want to pretend so".

I don't know what you're referring to, but if you would like to get specific about it, many authoritative medical organizations, such as the one that presides over Sweden, have declared a halt on procedures such as prescribing puberty blockers to minors. This is an example of a "wait, we need to be more cautious about this", saying that the risks outweigh the benefits.

https://segm.org/Swedish-2022-trans-guidelines-youth-experim...

But here you are implying that the science is already "settled" and that there is no harm. So when you say that one side cares about the research and the other does not, are you completely sure about that?

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#225

Post by andrewflnr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #167
andrewflnr wrote: post #10

You should have finished reading PG's essay. 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 defin…

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…

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.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#226

Post by gedpeck »

atoav wrote: post #113
lisper wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's just a guy. A guy who entered into business transactions with a number of people 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.

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 wit…

it is that honesty and consistency isn't required to get insecure people to follow you blindly.

I’m going to use this. Well stated.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#227

Post by AlexandrB »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #77
mecsred wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you don't agree at all. Every single adult in the world has "done or advocated for things that cause harm". It's inescapable.

It’s like.. incredibly escapable. Nihilism makes for a weak argument

Moral hubris - where one believes all of one's positions are morally correct - is the shortest path to becoming a monster.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#228

Post by notahacker »

rchaud wrote: post #127

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…

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

[1]https://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#229

Post by dunnlo »

diffxx wrote: post #216
inglor_cz wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

It's not considered a public health emergency because the suicide claim is bullshit and is only trotted out by activists to try to manipulate others into accepting their demands.

Anyway it's better to listen to gender critical feminists on the left, rather than anti-trans reactionaries on the right, because the former have a principled and humane opposition to the ideology of trans, that is based on women's rights and safeguarding of children.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#230

Post by arp242 »

raincole wrote: post #116
DeathRay2K wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re wrong that a so-called “war on hate” doesn’t work. More correctly, it doesn’t work in the US because of the first amendment and the few limitations on it. Many other countries have robust anti-hate speech laws that are effective, although less so in the age of the internet. People broadly conform to the society in which they live, and the rules of the society are broadly set by the laws they adhere to. So in c…

[flagged]

"Maja R was sentenced to a weekend in jail after her comments because she had a previous conviction for theft and had not attending the court hearing for the case."

Whatever you can say about the suspended sentences, merely "given harsher sentence than rapist for calling him ‘pig’" is not true by your own article.

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