We have so much free inquiry going on right now that I can't even keep track of it. If free inquiry is being eroded, one of the central claims in this essay, then that means we are coming down from a greater high. When was that high and would you prefer to go back to that time?
This was after years of pointing out that it's not necessarily a good idea to specifically discuss controversial topics, if you want to spend your time thinking and learning instead of arguing (and, implied, deleting hate mail and death threats, etc).
This essay was met with an incredible amount of backlash that missed its point entirely, and if I was in PG's shoes, I'd probably have soured on taking that sort of discussion outside my closest circle. A big but very understandable loss.
I believe that discussing the phenomenon, rather than specific instances of it, still has great value. This points out tools that can be used to discover and handle the censorship of valuable heresy.
I'd love it even more if I had intimate access to a group of very intelligent and open-minded folks to actually discuss the heresies of today, as this is both super fascinating and a great mental stretching exercise. Sadly, doesn't look like public forums on the Internet are the most fertile arena for that kind of thing. It happens rarely, when I happen to stumble across a community that hits something like this by chance, or where one of my real-life acquaintances happens to stray outside the box in exactly the right way.
In this "Quadrants" essay PG clearly aligns himself with the entrepreneurial free-thinkers, who bravely face down the mob. The problem with this though is he doesn't seem to be able to handle the criticism part. He acknowledges it is going to happen but when he gets dunked on for an essay, he takes his ball, goes home, and then complains that he can't have a real discussion.
But that's the entire point. He wrote something, people disagreed, that's the discussion. Did he take people's disagreements seriously? Did he change his mind? Was he unconvinced and pointed out why the people who disagreed were wrong? He seems to want to take on the mantle of beleaguered free-thinker while only willing to receive praise.
http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html
And here's the HN thread from when it was first written:
There are ideas you can safely express if they fall on one side of the political spectrum and there are other ideas you have to be hush about even if they are completely reasonable.