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I Met Paul Graham Once

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Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#631

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

tome wrote: post #349
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Isl…

> Islam is the only remaining religion with a political element and an existing desire for statehood What do you mean by this? There are several countries that declare themselves to be Islamic.

I'm reasonably sure the GP is referring to the fact that there are explicitly political aspects to Islam (wanting an Islamic state) that don't exist in other religions.

I'm not sure I agree though, as Judaism now has a state and Christianity had one and lost it.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#632

Post by nearbuy »

ethbr1 wrote: post #24

Great, cohesive, and clear essay! Hear hear. One thing that I think is underappreciated in our current times, that gets lost on both the left and the right sides -- an individual is more important than their identity . - A specific trans person can also be an asshole. - A specific white man can also be a saint. Extremists on both political sides will scream about the reasons one or the other of those statements is wr…

> Be curious. Be courteous and respectful. Be a normal, nice goddamn human to human across the table from you.

The unintuitive thing is that both this article and pg's essay are both advocating this! They're each complaining about another group being mean.

Paul Graham's essay doesn't mention anything about LGBT people or issues. It doesn't really say what specific events he may have in mind, but it complains that woke people are being intolerant, sometimes bullying or ostracizing people for their beliefs, and trying to enforce allegiance to their side over honesty.

The author of this essay is reading between the lines and assuming pg is a bigot who might discriminate against a trans person. They say actions like pg's are "mean", "unkind", and "malicious".

I think a lot of this has to do with people being polarized and viewing every political statement in terms of which team it supports: if someone says something against your team, that means they must be on the other team, and are therefore evil. But regardless of the reasons, these uncharitable assumptions (on both sides) cause way too much conflict between people with similar core values.

I don't think either author would discriminate against anyone based on their sexuality or gender. One can disagree with pg's criticisms without calling him a bigot.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#633

Post by eastbound »

rexpop wrote: post #138
guelo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> pliability of youth Not entirely dissimilar to the exploitation of eg college athletes.

The federation judged that even a college athlete who gets a major concussion cannot be offered a bottle of water for free, “because it could be assimilated to a wage”. No, really, college athletes are worse than unpaid.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#635

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

notahacker wrote: post #228
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 e…

I think he's more of a content marketer, but otherwise agree. VCs are always talking their book, as they say.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#636

Post by iaseiadit »

_yb2s wrote: post #603
iaseiadit wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ru…

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.

Immigrants are welcome in America, but we do not have an open border. We have an immigration process that must be followed, just like every other country on Earth.

Violating the immigration process is breaking the law. Enforcing our laws is not “unjustly persecuting” people.

If you can’t be intellectually honest and distinguish between illegal and legal immigration, or the fact that the U.S. does not have an open border and US citizens overwhelmingly do not want an open border with the rest of the world, there’s no basis for a conversation.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#637

Post by darksaints »

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…

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.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#638

Post by BlackFingolfin »

mgraczyk wrote: post #600
musicale wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> socially regressive robber barons 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 th…

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 confu…

Which robber baron do you consider to be responsible for curing polio?

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#639

Post by rockemsockem »

andrewflnr wrote: post #512
rockemsockem wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 primar…

That makes you "way more pissed" than DJT literally trying to steal the 2020 election? The Dems are bad, but let's keep things in perspective.

It's all about expectations. I expected very little of Trump and expected, something, of the Dems. When my expectations are far out of wack I get pissed.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#640

Post by iaseiadit »

tomlockwood wrote: post #611
iaseiadit wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ru…

Is it fascist to vilify immigrants? Is the republican party full of bright young twenty year olds? Can you post "cis" on twitter?

Who “vilifies immigrants”? President Trump is married to an immigrant, as is Vice President Vance. And many of Trumps advisors are immigrants. And he has repeatedly said he wants America to attract the best people from around the world. You mean he vilified illegal immigrants specifically. That’s fair, he did. But he’s not obligated to speak kindly about people who flout our laws.

> Is the republican party full of bright young twenty year olds?

An absurd question, especially when outgoing Democratic president is a senile octogenarian. Twenty year olds traditionally favor Democrats, (although many shifted towards Trump in this election) but how is that evidence of fascism?

> Can you post “cis” on twitter?

Could you speak freely about Covid-19’s origins on Facebook? Is censorship only fascism when you don’t like it?

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