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I Met Paul Graham Once

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Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#231

Post by spacechild1 »

sillyfluke wrote: post #196
spacechild1 wrote: post #17

[flagged]

Didn't downvote you, but I'm not sure there is anyone in the American VC class that shared the harrowing plight of Palestinians as much as Kamala-voting pg did. Not to say he does it alot, but in the VC feeds that I normally check out once in a while it's virtually non-existent. Hell, Musk even attended and applauded Netanyahu's speech in Congress. ...By that metric that would make pg a radical leftist. You know what…

> Kamala-voting pg

Oh! I didn't know he spoke out against Teump and endorsed Harris: https://x.com/paulg/status/1851200055220306378/photo/1

That's a pretty strong statement. Hats off!

Since then, PG seems to have gone silent on Trump. Instead he decided to post that essay about wokeness, right after major SV players publicly sucked up to Trump. Didn't he - or the people who read the draft - realized that it would make people believe he joined the MAGA camp? What happened there?

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#232

Post by femiagbabiaka »

AlexandrB wrote: post #227
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stupid and vapid. Tech is already full to the brim with people with zero moral convictions aside from the things that get them paid. Those are the real monsters

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#233

Post by mecsred »

gedpeck wrote: post #74
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.

Great harm then? I’m not morally obligated to to treat Putin with respect. Most people agree that there are people who are so reprehensible that they don’t deserve respect.

Sure I can support that. The difficulty as always comes with the grey area in defining "great". There are truly reprehensible people in the world, but they're the exception not the norm. I see you did address that in your comment with "in general" so I was a bit strong in my wording, but I do believe the in general case covers >99.99% of people.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#234

Post by andrewflnr »

skywhopper wrote: post #37
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…

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 phra…

From the essay:

> 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".

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#235

Post by Philpax »

_1tem wrote: post #207
Philpax wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

This isn't a response to what I posted. You said that it's a recent concept without any presence in non-Western spaces. My link clearly demonstrates that's not the case.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#236

Post by snowfarthing »

gedpeck wrote: post #111
haswell wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are obvious bad/evil actors in the world. When people talk about engaging with other humans respectfully, they're generally not referring to the Putins of the world. And it's pretty rare to have so much clarity about a person to know they're in the "obviously reprehensible" bucket. I'm not saying this is what you're doing, but I often see people argue like this: 1. There are obviously bad actors in the world 2.…

Herein lies the crux of the matter in my view. The jump from 2 to 3. When Bob Dole ran for President I wholeheartedly agreed with the position about being respectful to those you disagree with. Politics was still normal in the U.S. at that time. But now we in the U.S. elected a known rapist. A felon and a con man. He can’t run a charity in New York due to his misdeeds. He lusts after his own daughter. We have entered…

Do you realize the exact same things can be said about the President we had for the last four years?

It's really hard to worry about your own guy being a scumbag, when the opposition supports a scumbag too (and then lies about it).

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#237

Post by AlexandrB »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #232
AlexandrB wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Stupid and vapid. Tech is already full to the brim with people with zero moral convictions aside from the things that get them paid. Those are the real monsters

At least someone being paid to make your life worse can often also be paid to stop. I'm more afraid of someone convinced that they're saving the world as they destroy it instead.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#238

Post by AlexandrB »

whack wrote: post #42

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 Repub…

> 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.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#239

Post by tokioyoyo »

axiomo wrote: post #169
vasilipupkin wrote: post #75

"why go out of your way to remove them" in principle, it's fine to have them. But really, they are just a symbol of the fake performative substance free dei culture. A reminder of it. Transgender employees should not be discriminated against, should have all the protections and respect like any other employees. But do we really need tampons in mens' bathrooms, really?

> But do we really need tampons in mens' bathrooms, really? More to the point, do we really want men like the author in the women's bathrooms? Just because they desire to be women. We all need to take a step towards respecting women's boundaries by collectively telling these men: No.

I’ve always been baffled about people who care about it. Just for a hot second sit down, and think how many times you’ve even talked to a trans person in your life. Like it’s such a tiny percentage of people that extreme majority of people will literally never have a conversation with one in their entire lives. But for whatever reason it occupies the minds of a good chunk of people throughout entire political spectrum.

Even as a person who has a lot of gay friends, I’ve only known one trans woman. And as far as I know she’s kind and decent. I think you’re all outraged by invisible humans and arguments that never happen in the real world. Then it somehow occupies a good chunk of space in your brain.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#240

Post by tokioyoyo »

tmountain wrote: post #98

Earlier in my (now long) career, tech didn't feel political at all (just a bunch of nerds trying to figure shit out). Nowadays, it feels really weird to associate things like cryptocurrency with "tech bros on the right", etc. It all feels very unnecessary, but I suppose humans have a natural tendency to divide into camps as a survival characteristic. Whatever the case, The United States has certainly at a stage where…

There’s just more money in tech than in 2000s, so the most interest is mostly coming from financial incentives rather than general curiosity. That just puts extreme pressure for it to be politicized.
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