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I Met Paul Graham Once
621–630 of 860 posts
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Who are these hard core anti-trans activists? Are they mainstream? (Please dont say JK Rowling)
Some states recently enacted laws requiring teachers to snitch on students who request unauthorized pronouns to the nanny state.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#623[flagged]
If it's not meant to be a snarky attack or insult, how is it supposed to be meant?
Is it so unthinkable to you that someone's spouse could support them transitioning? That reads like projection, maybe, to me.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#624I 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…
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 Op…
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.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#625In 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…
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.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that the 'billionaires' were not exploiting their workforce. The workforce that made Google, MS and many other companies were also highly paid. The consumer surplus of all these things is the bigger thing. And getting to that is really not easy.
The developers that made Google and Facebook and such were highly paid. The people who were hired for a dollar an hour to train the anti-CP models most certainly were not and have instead suffered horrible trauma. Externalities are so easily ignored if they don't happen in SF (and even the ones that do. For instance, take a look at the pricing out of affordable housing for all the cooks, dish washers, janitors etc wh…
Mate, I'm nowhere near San Francisco.
Just because San Francisco is disastrously run despite staggering riches and has horribly magnified problems does not mean it's the fault of people who started companies in San Jose.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is more like "outrageous things dominate the news cycle". It is not even a new thing; on a similar note, already in the 1990s, people started believing widely that child abduction from the street was a real danger in their own communities. That said, the politicians meet the demand, sometimes to their own detriment. The Trump campaign could only deploy the "Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them" slogan because…
> The Trump campaign could only deploy the "Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them" slogan because Kamala herself, in 2020, felt the need to conform to then-prevailing winds and declare that she would fund gender-change surgeries for prisoners from taxpayers money. She was asked a question about it once by Fox, because Trump had brought it up, and answered that yes, she would follow the law and not deny medically…
The ACLU had her fill out a form where she agreed to that position in 2020. That’s why it was a topic that Fox could ask about. This is absolutely a case of a tiny minority making a point of making the candidate take a fringe position, or be bullied by the activist class.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#628[flagged]
I see this argument all the time and I have so, so many questions about it. It just does not make a lot of sense to me. Please know that while we have fundamental disagreements, I am also genuinely trying to understand this worldview.
According to your definition, what is an intersex person? How should one refer to one? There are intersex people who who look like women but have penises, and vice versa. You can simply Google "example of intersex person" to see plenty of them, and they have always existed. Most intersex people do not have either reproduction strategy, and are wholly infertile. Even amongst those who are not, the strategy they have often does not line up with how they look, act, or feel. They are a small subset of society, but so are trans people - on a cursory search, about 1-2% of the population is intersex, and about 1-2% is trans.
The thing I don't understand is, if your answer is anything other than "I have no way to refer to such a person and could not use pronouns to refer to them," (or using the ze/zir neopronouns which I suspect nearly none of them have ever heard of) then it would stand to reason your decision about using "she" or "he" for someone is based at least partially on how they read to you culturally, and not your definition as laid out here.
And even if that isn't true, why does "adult human female" have to map to "woman", and vice versa? Who says, other than you, and what more authority do you have than anyone? I know a lot of trans people - MTF and FTM - who are not distinguishable from your definition unless you interrogate their genitalia, or in some cases, their genetics. If you see such a person, and use the "wrong" pronouns according to your definition for them, would you then feel guilty for not using the "right" ones? If not, why not?
All of this is to say that I don't see how your reduce-it-to-biology-and-never-waver definition is workable in society, and I don't understand why folks - yourself included, it seems - are so insistent on it.
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#629I really appreciate and am impressed by how thoughtful and genuine the responses here - including those not in support of the OP - are in general. I don't see nearly anyone giving the author crap for not blindly loving PG, I don't see nearly anyone purposefully using the wrong pronouns as an insult (and the few who are are mostly getting flagged). Even folks who clearly disagree are praising the author and being respectful of them.
Seeing this, though, just makes it even more perplexing to me how the same community that is so open to the experience of the author here is also so accepting of the changes that Meta and PG are describing because they're made under the banner of "free speech" or "allowing conversation." It seems clear that we as a community don't support, encourage, or permit people to throw slurs, insults, and harassment at others. Why are we okay with much larger and more powerful communities doing it in the name of these "freedoms" (in quotes because free speech is actually about the government, not private communities, policing speech).
Re: I Met Paul Graham Once
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
The developers that made Google and Facebook and such were highly paid. The people who were hired for a dollar an hour to train the anti-CP models most certainly were not and have instead suffered horrible trauma. Externalities are so easily ignored if they don't happen in SF (and even the ones that do. For instance, take a look at the pricing out of affordable housing for all the cooks, dish washers, janitors etc wh…
Mate, I'm nowhere near San Francisco. Just because San Francisco is disastrously run despite staggering riches and has horribly magnified problems does not mean it's the fault of people who started companies in San Jose.
You don't see a connection between tech CEOs who hoard vast wealth, and a public sphere starved of real investment?