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It sounds like a clip from some kind of a speech. There's some missing context. or, there's hardly any content.

Like, I'm not sure what he's trying to get at.

Nothing new here. The messenger always plays an important role.

Not everything that is a platitude is necessarily bad. Reinforcing, clarifying or rediscovering knowledge certainly has value.

If Paul Graham writes an essay then that is relevant to Hacker News so it should be upvoted regardless of whether it is shit.

So...you are agreeing with me that this has been upvoted based on origin and not content, and you're just repeating what I said to reinforce the point?

Thou shalt not take PG's name in vain.

Origin and context give extra meaning and weight to content. That seems trivially true to me. If Paul Graham writes this then that means the topic is on the mind of someone influential and important in our community, thus it is worthy of scrutiny and thought, thus worthy of an upvote.

Hacker News is not some game where people compete to create content with maximum merit. It is a source of new content relevant to this community.