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I Met Paul Graham Once

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Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> embarrassingly naked grift of the POTUS launching a ridiculous and useless meme coin just before his inauguration It appears to be a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

> It appears to be a violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.

Hahahah! You mean that clause of the Constitution that nobody cares about because politicians have decided it doesn't mean anything?

Laws only have power if they have consequences, and it's quite clear that right now that Trump could sell tickets to the annual White House Easter Egg hunt and Congressmen would laud him for "teaching entrepreneurship" or something impossibly insane.

To be clear, I'm not laughing at you or your statement, I'm just laugh/crying at the clear slide of our republic. 30 years ago politicians on all sides of the aisle would have rightfully condemned this gross money grab, and now it's either crickets or resigned shrugs.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#832
post #726

"I’m certain he wouldn’t be rude to my face, but he might quietly discriminate against me, say no thanks. He might not even think of it as discrimination, only that I don’t have what it takes." This resonates pretty strongly (and depressingly) with me being an immigrant academic in Europe who came originally from a third-world country. Even though I am one of the most productive researchers in my department, even tho…

I worked as much as 200% more than some of my colleagues while having the lowest wage in the team. When I left, projects in my perimeter took 12x more time to develop (as assessed by a former colleague). I had a manager fired for failing to recruit me back. You're wrong in assigning the injustice you're going through to discrimination based on your ethnicity, especially in an academic context where the vast majority…

What do you assign the injustice you faced to? And who're you to deny GPs claims?

There's nothing more rancid than someone leaping to downplay someone's complaint as "ah, they're just being sensitive. They're imagining it". If they were lodging a formal complaint at their firm, sure, due process is a must but people being shit to the Other is a well established and common human behavior. It sucks what happened to you but it has little to bear on GPs words. It's just confusing why you felt the need to defend these other strangers you've never met.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a person you knew personally for years asked for your respect and understanding of an extremely difficult and personal decision, and you thought "Wow, I didn't care about this 5 minutes ago but now I've decided to get really bitter and vindictive about it"

Can you read? I don't care what my coworkers wear or who they screw. Not my business. When it bleeds over into forcing me to alter reality, yes, I have an issue.

Saying "she" != altering reality because no one is litigating what you believe, just that you treat someone's genuinely held identity with a modicum of deference. Otherwise if I were your coworker I would demand being allowed to call you a bigoted moron because anything else would be altering reality as I see it.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#834
post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked as much as 200% more than some of my colleagues while having the lowest wage in the team. When I left, projects in my perimeter took 12x more time to develop (as assessed by a former colleague). I had a manager fired for failing to recruit me back. You're wrong in assigning the injustice you're going through to discrimination based on your ethnicity, especially in an academic context where the vast majority…

What do you assign the injustice you faced to? And who're you to deny GPs claims? There's nothing more rancid than someone leaping to downplay someone's complaint as "ah, they're just being sensitive. They're imagining it". If they were lodging a formal complaint at their firm, sure, due process is a must but people being shit to the Other is a well established and common human behavior. It sucks what happened to you…

I'm not defending GP's colleagues, nor am I suggesting that the undeserved treatment he received was imaginary. However, the idea that this must be caused by racism is a cheap and comfortable narrative GP is telling himself and anyone who believes him. Should his colleagues read his post anonymously, they would probably agree with him.

As for me, my story isn't unlike the rants often shared by open-source project maintainers. One never gives of oneself without keeping a secret ledger in their mind, known only to them: that can only lead to frustration and anger. The "solution" is to never give away your work without retribution—an ideal that, of course, isn't feasible within a company. Meritocracy exists only at the periphery, driven by market forces, however flawed they may be. I don't know how to "fix" this.

To rise within a company (or academia), you also need charisma, connections, likability, and sometimes even resorting to flattery, ass-kissing, or bullying a pharmakos—all of which I took pride in refusing to partake in. These are the traits GP and I lacked. I can tell from the pathetic tone he used throughout his post—a tone that reminds me of myself.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, returning to your question, my answer would be, either Buck Angel should use a unisex restroom, or, if none is available, go elsewhere to find one. So you are trading one form of dehumanization for another. I think if you want to implement this policy you need to mandate unisex restrooms. Otherwise you are excluding trans people from public life... but that's the point isn't it? > Should a schizophrenic experie…

Once again, you ignore that all of my examples were of biological men entering women's spaces and activities. > So you are trading one form of dehumanization for another It's not even close to dehumanizing. Concentration camps are dehumanizing. War is dehumanizing. Genocide is dehumanizing. Requiring Angel to use an appropriate restroom is at most an inconvenience (for Angel). Angel wasn't born this way. Angel's deci…

I'm not asking about your examples, I'm asking about your principles. You say trans people shouldn't go into certain bathrooms, so here we are critically examining your position.

Participation in public life is a key aspect of human society. Going to the bathroom is also a key part of being a human biological being. In recognition of this, the government mandates appropriate bathroom facilities in public places like stores, restaurants, government buildings, etc.

What you're proposing essentially is that a certain class of people should not have access to the bathrooms, and therefore should be excluded from society. Explain how that is not dehumanizing. Do you know how many people kill themselves each year because of policy you are proposing? What if it was your kid?

You're denying them an aspect of society that I am 100% sure you would cry about were similar discrimination applied to you. That you don't feel it to be dehumanizing simply tells me you have not been the target of the kind of discrimination you advocate against others.

And the fact that you don't propose solutions like the government should mandate unisex bathrooms so everyone can go tells me you don't actually want these people in public life, you'd prefer if they all just stayed home. You can't even state that you don't want that.

> I'll also note that it is telling

And what exactly does that tell you? I chose that person from Google image search because he looks like the kind of person conservatives would freak out about for being in the women's restroom. His background is immaterial, no one would know anything about him if they saw him in the woman's room.

> Straw man, and also, false. [1] It is obvious that no delusional person has the right to reorder society's customs, culture, and laws. Or are you arguing that we must take all delusional people seriously in order to placate trans-people?

No, I'm pointing out our society is already run by disordered individuals. You're acting like trans people are so uniquely crazy they don't deserve to be taken seriously. But people who believe in an invisible sky wizard who speaks to them in their dreams and who grants their wishes are running the government and setting national policy based on a book of fiction they think is real. Talk about delusion, but you're fine with that, yeah?

George Bush absolutely talked about God all the time and how God influenced his decisions. The fact that in his argument for war he lied about the motivation when the whole time he was hearing voices in his head that implored him to go to war is a problem. But conservatives are fine listening to voices in their heads and setting policy over it.

I'll leave with this final point: every time a conservative says to a person "You're not man enough" or "man up", they are admitting that gender is a spectrum and implicitly linked with societal gender roles. If gender is binary then one is either man, or a woman. There's no way to become "more" of a man if gender is binary. Unless of course gender is a spectrum and a construct of society, and not biologically immutable. So is it really a delusion if even conservatives implicitly believe it?

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is… very rare? 2% of college students, and a… pharmacist? Don’t get me wrong, I definitely interacted with them probably hundreds of times through similar venues. But again, it’s just such a tiny percentage of people. And from what I know from my gay circles, trans people tend to live in areas where they feel safer. Just like the gays did until recent times. My general moral guideline has been to judge people by…

1% is not rare. That's 1 in 100 people. In a customer-facing service role, at that frequency you'll encounter multiple trans people daily. Something that happens daily to people everywhere is not "rare". > My general moral guideline has been to judge people by their actions. That's really great, I mean it. But in the year 2025 when it's being mandated from the highest office in the land that trans people don't exist…

> It's going to be very easy for you to deny their existence

And why would I do that? I think you're misunderstanding my point. All I meant to say is trans people are people, and I treat them as people not as trans. Same applies to literally any person I encounter. If someone comes out to me as trans, I'll have to reply with "ok, cool, I hope you're happy", because I just don't care about people's identities? And then continue on with our conversation.

Trans people exist, but bringing this topic up on every political issue, I think, makes it even worse for them. Bigots and assholes exist, and they will always try to pin their misfortunes on vulnerable people. Yesterday it was the gays, today it's trans people. On Tuesdays, it seems to be Indian immigrants and so on. The best I can do is treat people as people, vote for people who don't rally on hate towards others, and continue with my life.

Also, I don't live in the states :)

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#837

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again, you ignore that all of my examples were of biological men entering women's spaces and activities. > So you are trading one form of dehumanization for another It's not even close to dehumanizing. Concentration camps are dehumanizing. War is dehumanizing. Genocide is dehumanizing. Requiring Angel to use an appropriate restroom is at most an inconvenience (for Angel). Angel wasn't born this way. Angel's deci…

I'm not asking about your examples, I'm asking about your principles. You say trans people shouldn't go into certain bathrooms, so here we are critically examining your position. Participation in public life is a key aspect of human society. Going to the bathroom is also a key part of being a human biological being. In recognition of this, the government mandates appropriate bathroom facilities in public places like…

> You say trans people shouldn't go into certain bathrooms, so here we are critically examining your position.

Who's saying this? No-one in this thread.

Point is that male people shouldn't be going into female bathrooms and female people shouldn't be going into male bathrooms.

> What you're proposing essentially is that a certain class of people should not have access to the bathrooms, and therefore should be excluded from society.

No-one is proposing this.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#838

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…

> Idk if it's just me This is a widely held view amoung a lot of socialists and left-of-centre folks within America and globally. You could try "Chapo Trap House" podcast if you want to hear this point of view.

I can see why those groups would also be mad at the Dems, although I very much do not consider myself a socialist... Also I'm not exactly hungering for people to agree with me

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call it "losing my idealism," but, rather "understanding that everything is a lot more complex than my simple young mind could deal with." I'm probably more "idealistic" than I have ever been; it's just that I no longer have the silly "Let's just do this one simple thing" attitude. I've just found that getting places is always a lot more difficult than we think. Usually, it's people, and all their messy pe…

> The good news is, is that I am actually accomplishing more than I did, when I was younger. How are you making that happen? This is an honest question. As I've gotten older, and developed a deeper understanding of the intractability of the world's problems, this change in perspective has cratered my motivation. It was one thing to give my all toward what seemed like it mattered, back when the scope for possible chan…

Sounds like you’ve gotten smart enough to realize your not that smart, that’s something at least.

Re: I Met Paul Graham Once

#840
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I mentioned "remaining" as the explicit political aspects are in all religions, it's just that as we came to modernity states became secular, and only Islam remains with that element still largely in tact.

I did mention the Jewish state as well, but imo, since it is based partly on ethnicity even for open non-believers, it's kind of a mix between a secular and a religious state

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