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The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#841

Post by EnergyAmy »

Can we all agree that this is an exemplar of the sort of priggishness that defines "wokeness"?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268

    Great idea; shame about the name.
    
    Here's the problem with using words like "bro" (however jokingly) [...]
It's self-righteous mindrot whose time has passed. Another great example is the master -> main renaming. People on the left are sick of being associated with this bullshit, we care about actually helping working class people not this fuckery.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#842

Post by avs733 »

xivzgrev wrote: post #828

I attended a corporate training on harassment where it said you can’t say “all hands” because it’s disrespectful toward people without hands. Use “town hall” instead. On one hand, sure it’s an easy substitution to make. On the other hand, who decides these things? How does this affect our company? Do people without hands actually care? It all adds up and it’s wearisome like PG says, all these rules and you just try t…

I find this highly highly suspect as an anecdote without some supporting evidence

A quick search suggests this is a bit of a running meme used to discredit and poke fun at such trainings rather than something you’ve honestly experienced.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#843

Post by arduinomancer »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #547

It's a well written piece. Early on, though, this caught my attention: > As for where political correctness began, if you think about it, you probably already know the answer. Did it begin outside universities and spread to them from this external source? Obviously not; it has always been most extreme in universities. So where in universities did it begin? Did it begin in math, or the hard sciences, or engineering, a…

This feels like one of the weakest PG articles

The writing quality feels like that of a university student

Just lots of assertions thrown out without any real backing

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#844

Post by EnergyAmy »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #840

I am in particular happy that we at least try to banish s-word from tech vocabulary. I never thought it bothered me, but someone out there cares for me before me even knowing, and I am grateful. Is it policing speech? Yes, kind of. Can it be considered under PC umbrella? I guess so. Priggish? Hell no. This is not priggish, this is just respect for human beings.

It's rather ironic that this is the exact priggishness he's talking about.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#845

Post by insane_dreamer »

soheil wrote: 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.

> it's called "hacker" news for a reason.

exactly, so why is a long political opinion piece from PG on wokeness here in the first place?

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#846

Post by zahlman »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #297
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…

You're right. It's really lazy to use the term at this point as there isn't a shared meaning assigned to it. It's mostly used as a pejorative by the right at this point, but it's original meaning was very different and indicated a positive attribute. Whenever I'm in a conversation with someone who uses the word, I stop them and ask them to define what they're talking about. Usually they end up with something vague th…

Just because "you know it when you see it" doesn't mean you don't understand it or don't have something coherent in mind.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#847

Post by anonfordays »

xivzgrev wrote: post #828

I attended a corporate training on harassment where it said you can’t say “all hands” because it’s disrespectful toward people without hands. Use “town hall” instead. On one hand, sure it’s an easy substitution to make. On the other hand, who decides these things? How does this affect our company? Do people without hands actually care? It all adds up and it’s wearisome like PG says, all these rules and you just try t…

I giggled at what you did here! High five!

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#848

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#850

Post by kelnos »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #796
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…

You're using a definition of "censorship" which is so broad as to be meaningless. By your definition, when I upvote a comment on Hacker News, that's "censorship" because it makes other comments in the thread a bit less prominent. >Again, the author asks: "...is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future?" But preventing somebody from expressing their moral values a…

I don't think that's true. When you and I up- or down-vote a comment, we are a part of expressing what will end up being the community's consensus. That's not censorship.

When Twitter's algorithm promotes certain topics and demotes others, that is a unilateral act made by a single, unaccountable entity that has full control over the platform. That is (or at least can be) censorship.

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