Paul Graham Is Not a Public Intellectual
antipodes.substack.com
antipodes.substack.com
The issue is that a polemic against PG gets downvoted and removed, but Taleb’s polemic against Nate Silver doesn’t. It certainly makes it look like the subject of a polemic is more important than the tone or content of the article being posted for very specific people.
We sometimes turn off flags when an article contains significant new information and can support a substantive discussion in the community, but this was not that.
HN hosts tons of discussion about PG, much of it negative, so that's not the issue. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25325716 was just yesterday.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160617140921/https://michaeloc...
I'm big on permissive speech, but if anything were going to be modded away by its users, this should be.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201207190930/https://antipodes...
For those that don't know the author, Michael O. Church has been banned on multiple platforms around the internet (HN, Wikipedia, Quora, and probably others). He also had an interesting tenure at Google. I believe the cause for the forum bans were about sock-puppet accounts, but he also just tends to annoy people.
A whole lot of this seems pseudo-honestly crafted just to troll.. e.g.
> So, let’s talk about this. No one gets bullied in American culture because he is smart; people get bullied because they are different. It is as true in elementary school as it is in high school. It is more true in the typical workplace than it is in high school.
Riight. Not all types of being different are equally celebrated, and high school and middle school are some of the most political and unkind places in our society. For a whole lot of us, leaving school did in fact make things better, but he just dismisses and invalidates this experience in a way that's loaded with vitriol and mockery.
Yes, it's enough that others are cry-babies who can't stand criticism...
While I agree with a lot of his goals, I very much disagree with his approach. His writing is very acidic and his past behavior is questionable. I also believe in incremental change whereas he seems to want revolutionary change. The problem with revolution is you never really know what you are going to get on the other side. Most revolutions end like Syria, not Tunisia.
So I very much disagree with this approach even though we mostly want the same thing.
By removing the article so quickly he basically self dunked. Good for him.
I don't think it's true that all non-execute corporate jobs are meaningless, and I've worked at at least one company that mchurch has. Some jobs at some (many?) companies are actually slowly and methodically creating value for humanity at large, and many bosses I've had are not soulless whip-bearers but in fact also determined to make their lives mean something through their work.
That being said I think it does levy some specific good criticisms against PG and silicon valley. It's definitely true that PG has a conflict of interest in his postings, and that the narratives about society that he pushes also happen to be ones that he benefits financially from. It's very fair to compare his views to Ayn Rand's. And it's certainly true that tech and science reporting aren't held to nearly the same ethical standards that other types of reporting are.
Some good points and food for thought, but don't lose too much sleep over another mchurch rant.
Took down that Substack not out of cowardice but b/c:
(1) Though I've endured 100s of death threats and experienced zero actual deaths— I'm hardly fazed anymore— they affect people close to me._
(2) I discovered SS is YC. On moral principle, I will no longer be using Substack.
I expected to read a more focused breakdown of Paul Graham and why he isn't a public intellectual but instead the author claims PG is wrong on his views about society because of his own unique experiences within it. But then the author goes on to make the same broad generalizations for the rest of the essay.
> People end up in “regular” (non-executive) corporate jobs for a variety of reasons— low socioeconomic status of origin, wrong educational choices, and bad luck— but the system is set up to tell them it’s their fault. They’re told they should expect no better than these demeaning jobs because they “aren’t entrepreneurial”— whatever the fuck that means, because the private-sector apparatchiks who boss them around aren’t entrepreneurs— enough for a better spot.
People also end up in these "regular" corporate jobs from high socioeconomic status of origin as well. I also know many people who are from low socioeconomic status of origin who have escaped corporate jobs or avoided them entirely. The vocabulary used by this author seems to suggest that certain people are given corporate jobs against their will and they can never leave. In reality, people apply to jobs that they have the skills (but more likely the qualifications) to get so they can support themselves but they could always try to start their own small business or a company. My parents are both uneducated and from poor socioeconomic backgrounds yet were both very successful as small business owners and while it's fair to say the world today is not the same as it was back then, technology and online resources make it easier than ever to start a business. Not everything needs to be a venture or enterprise scale company either.
The point is that this author paints a picture where workers are just forced into cubicles against their will every day and forced to work 40 hours per week when they only have 5 hours of actual work to do (which is again, a massive generalization) when that's just not the case.
I think it's useful to criticize both the Pope and PG for situations like you mention. They have sizeable resources and influence and are deserving of a gadfly in the public sphere.
All in all, I simply don't think these verbal lashing-outs are at all helpful. They suck out the air from the very same topics that it hints at (ie. inequality).
https://web.archive.org/web/20201207190930/https://antipodes...
https://web.archive.org/web/20201207190930/https://antipodes...
For those who don't have time to read the article, the author argues that Paul Graham is a salesman (not an intellectual), and the product he's selling is capitalism. The author thinks capitalism is evil, and as a proponent of capitalism, Paul Graham is also evil.
The author's hatred is clearly born out of envy for those who are more traditionally successful. This doesn't necessarily mean his ideas are wrong, but it increases the likelihood that his views are one-sided. Skepticism is warranted.
The post seems to have been removed on the blog author's site, i.e. the author took down their own post rather than HN moderators blocking it.