Graham's obviously inspired by some Kuhnian paradigms here, but in Grahamiam fashion, he doesn't cite anything to back it up.
What I find interesting where he calls most people conservative is how when I'm discussing VCs, YC, etc with non SV people is we talk about how conservative they are. YC's business model for years was predicated on finding talent (kids) that was undervalued, underpaying them (10k was the initial payouts?), getting them to pack up and move to super-expensive monocultural SV like everyone else, and then when they made bukku money, lose interest in improving the service (Reddit, Dropbox). There's nothing original there, it's the business model of carpetbaggers and robber barons. How boring.
I often feel like Jonah Hill in Moneyball, a pariah for pointing out how ancient VC thinking is. Or maybe I just imagine it. Well, it is my experience that true deep domain knowledge can only come from years of insights. People without years of experience will be lacking maturity and/or won't have time to even consider those insights. Usually people who mainly care about money, influence "becoming powerful" (Graham's words about his protege, not mine) will jump at whatever shortcut they can take instead of spending the card work necessary for learning these deep insights PG is interested in.
With all due respect, Coinbase didn't require deep insight. It was the equivalent of "You like money, too?"
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PG, you should stop the contrarian persecuted intellectual look. You're not the little guy anymore, haven't been for 2 decades.