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The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

441–450 of 1001 posts

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#441
I think the conditio sine qua non of whatever social movement PG is trying to describe here is that we have become, and will become more, a low-trust culture. Social circles are wider and shallower now than ever. If I can't take the time to get to know a person, I can't assume good faith when they use some questionable word. It benefits me to impute the worst motive, because (1) it is much safer to avoid a false harm than to admit a false good, and (2) it brings me social credit.

Instead of assuming that someone is well-meaning and requiring much evidence to refute that assumption, people are marked by small infractions, because the cognitive effort of the presumption of innocence cannot be applied on such a large scale and is not worth it to us. This is the mentality behind the "believe all women" principle: women are harmed more by letting a rapist free than by jailing an innocent man, and since we can't vet all the claims of sexual assault, better just lock them all up. A metaphor frequently given by proponents of that ideology is that men are like M&Ms. Would you eat an M&M from a bowl if you knew that a few were poisoned? If even 1 in 100,000 were poisoned, would you take the risk? No. Low trust. (I've never heard someone reply that women are not all benign either and yet people don't seem to apply the same logic to them.)

You see the extremes of this in the politicians representing US political parties. Trump can say anything and supporters never waiver, because they know he's "just joking around" or whatever. Meanwhile a Democrat candidate can say something small askance with what seems to me like innocent intentions, and their career is over.

This is also why the Democrats are so fractious internally, relative to the Republicans. Republicans default to trusting each other (not saying whether that's merited or not) while Democrats only make temporary uneasy alliances.

Some people tire of this low-trust culture (because they haven't been burned by trust before) and are pushing back on it.

In my opinion, the low-trust people are going to win eventually because the higher-trust people are more local and less internet-connected. Either society will collapse into many sub-societies, or else these sub-societies will dwindle until there's nothing left of them, and all that's left is The Culture.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#443

Is this a subject Paul has expressed an interest in before, or is this another instance of tech founders cozying up to the incoming president before he's installed? There seems to be a lot of that going around in Silicon Valley lately, is something threatening their billions of dollars if they don't toe the line?

He's been pretty consistent about this.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#444
post #77
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…

Elon censored me for mentioning my Mastodon handle on Twitter. Me and anyone else who did the same.

i guess pg knows one thing about it ;) https://fortune.com/2022/12/18/twitter-suspends-paul-graham-...

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#445

All of "wokeness", "social justice", etc, when you look at the "forest not the trees" ends up pretty simple: One group of people is saying: "This hurts, please stop", to which the other group says: "No". So the first goes back to the drawing board to come up with reasons, theories, explanations, convincing arguments... and you get things like critical race theory, systemic *isms, etc. That's pretty much it. Sure, the…

> One group of people is saying: "This hurts, please stop"

But the entire article you're criticizing can be summed up as "wokeness hurts, please stop". To which you say, "No".

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#446
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now.

Graham is really skipping over some pretty significant whys and wherefores on how a term that dates back to, at least, 1923 becomes a pejorative starting around the '80s. Perhaps it is worth considering in what publications and media it became a pejorative, and who would benefit from others thinking it should be one.

While some folks who lived through the Sixties went into academia, others went on to own media empires. Those groups didn't have particularly aligned goals.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#447
post #371

Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten. I don't think what pg is saying is anything new, he's always had the same sentiment around anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian/mob and pro-breaking-the-rules attitude. It's called "hacker" news for a reason.

HN has many of those who have gone through the indoctrination process in college that he describes in the essay.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#448
post #59

I think there’s a fascinating throughline from older Christian moral enforcement to what the essay calls “wokeness.” Historically, a lot of Christian movements had the same impulse to legislate language and behaviors—just grounded in sin rather than privilege. For instance, the 19th-century American Puritans famously policed each other’s speech and actions because the stakes were framed as eternal salvation versus da…

[flagged]

"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#449
post #123

And there I was, reading a comment earlier today about how HN is better than the other places because it prefers technical articles over "politics".

If you want technical articles with less politics, try the invite-only red site.

How do you get an invite?

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#450
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…

Why and how is labelling unlikable behaviour as woke bad faith. As I understand the right using the term, they use it consistently to refer to a very specific type of behaviour they see as bad (one core aspect is prioritising signalling being virtuous over actually improving the world).

Is your complaint that this usage unfairly co-opts the original left usage of the word?

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