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The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#301

Post by commandlinefan »

yapyap wrote: post #99

I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people. As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead. and then on the other side it feels like…

> not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead

[4] The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#302

Post by grahamj »

rhelz wrote: post #5

From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]" Then follow to the footnote: "[14] Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying u…

I guess you could call turning your social media site into a toilet, causing anyone with any sense of pride or morality to leave, neutralizing “wokeness”.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#303

Post by prewett »

Molitor5901 wrote: post #218
yapyap wrote: post #99

I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people. As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead. and then on the other side it feels like…

I think it's much simpler than that. Woke is power, it's a moral position that can be used like a club to force others into a specific line of thinking. While it's basic mission of recognizing discrimination, etc. around us, it morphed into a political and societal weapon to force people and institutions to do certain things, like establishing DEI offices.

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#304

Post by causal »

pavlov wrote: post #148

Would this essay be on the HN frontpage if it was written by anyone else?

No. And man, I feel like the quality of PG's essays have declined. Even if I agreed with a few points, it was so rambling, and just made so many leaps. The sheer length of it is a pretty good signal he didn't really work that hard on this.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#305

Post by spokaneplumb »

smikhanov wrote: post #111
Ukv wrote: post #38

> Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase "people of color" is considered particularly enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. [...] There are no underlying principles. To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine th…

I can't for the life of me comprehend how PG manages to write in a style that sounds so lucid, so readable and compelling, and so authoritative, but on a substance that's so factually incorrect that it won't stand to any bit of critique. Like the paragraph quoted above: it's just so blatantly obvious what's wrong with turns like "considered particularly enlightened", or "there are no underlying principles" that I fin…

I find it's super-easy to communicate this way if I pick a position I think is bad and dumb.

It frees me from giving a shit if I'm using e.g. rhetorical tricks in place of good-faith argument. Of course the argument's obviously bad, if you're any good at spotting bad arguments! So are all the others I've seen or heard supporting it. That's why I picked it—it's bad.

I can usually argue positions I disagree with far more persuasively and fluently than ones I agree with, because I'm not concerned with being correct or making it look bad to smart people, nor making myself look dumb for making a bad argument (the entire thing is an exercise in making bad arguments, there's no chance of a good one coming out). Might try that. It's kinda a fun, and/or horrifying, exercise. Drag out those slanted and context-free stats, those you-know-to-be-disproven-or-commonly-misrepesented anecdotes and studies, (mis-)define terms as something obviously bad and proceed to tear them apart in a "surely we can all agree..." way (ahem), overgeneralize the results of that already-shaky maneuver (ahem), misrepresent history in silly ways (ahem), and so on. Just cut loose. No worries about looking foolish because you already think the position's foolish.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#308

Post by nomdep »

jhp123 wrote: post #162

if you're going to talk about history, it really helps to ground your narrative in real people, events, or statements. This all comes off as a history of vibes, and I don't remember the same vibes at all (maybe because I wasn't on twitter). When pg does make contact with reality, it mostly doesn't even support his narrative. He mentions the George Floyd protests and the MeToo movement/Weinstein - by any measure real…

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#309

Post by jadbox »

p4bl0 wrote: post #114

> Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness This is a fake news. Research shows that Twitter algorithmic amplification favored right-wing politics even before Musk made it even worse. See: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025334119 > On the other hand, the people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted to. Being this much clueless in…

This feels like another VC/executive "taking a knee" towards the new administration, a vivid trend in the last few weeks. I feel like pg was particularly more left/right neutral just up until this month of inauguration.
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