What You Can't Say (2004)

paulgraham.com

5 points·geofft··7 comments

>But any idea that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a good candidate for something we're mistaken about.

I don't know about that. Most of human history had ideas/philosophies based on scarcity and tribal thinking. I think it's reasonable to think as society can move beyond that values built in that universe fail.

What exactly causes you to believe that tribes or scarcity are anywhere near going away?

I'm not sure how you define near but in the first world tremendous progress has been made toward eliminating scarcity. There's still vast differences in wealth obviously and people below the poverty line but compared to like a thousand years ago it's clear.

As to tribal differences I'm not as sure about but the global economy seems to eliminating a lot of this mindset.

Now please explain to me why everything is horrible and this is naive.

Flagged for politics

Nah, a politics article would be pointing out the president-elect's meeting with tech industry leaders next week.

This is more a general reflective philosophy and culture piece.

My interpretation of dang's experiment is that we should flag those things on the border of politics-or-not for this week. For example, pg makes many direct and indirect reference to "political correctness" which might lead to unwanted discussion of a political variety.

Well, there are worse fates than becoming Noam Chomsky.

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