Here's the context: This essay is, at its core, a rebuttal to https://ideolalia.com/essays/thought-leaders-and-chicken-sex... , which makes the argument that while Paul Graham is undeniably an extraordinarily successful businessman, he's not that successful of a public intellectual, and in particular that one of the major things he's tried to be a public intellectual about - namely, Lisp / programming language design - has been a field where he has basically no successes to show.
For most people, that would be wonderful. I'm about 25 years younger than PG, and I've been interested ("earnestly," as he would say) in software packaging for a long time. If the Ghost of Christmas Future came to me and said, in 25 years you won't have really changed the field of software packaging but you'll be a billionaire who's helped thousands of people work on their life's dream, I'd say, wow, awesome. But that's not enough for PG, who took it as a personal attack (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1336005166626197506 - the author of the above post was not "mad" in any sense, just trying to talk about a serious conversation) and his VC buddies attempted to rebut this "silly essay" by arguing loudly that it didn't matter if Arc failed because it wasn't important and PG has made tons of money (https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336043592339472388 , https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336056247481630721 , https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1336048188264828929, https://twitter.com/m2jr/status/1336146070485626882).
(Before you argue "Arc didn't fail, you're using it right now," please read the post in question, which addresses this.)
So, now PG comes out with an essay arguing how "earnestness" and being "naive" is important - that being interested in a problem for its own sake is valuable, regardless of results - and throws in a comment on how "would-be intellectuals find it so difficult to understand Silicon Valley," i.e., that Silicon Valley is immune from the sorts of (constructive) criticism intellectuals usually have internally. Then he shifts gears right at the end to talking about making money and its relationship with "earnestness" (after introducing the essay by saying that they're conflicting motivations) and how ever since Henry Ford, working on the thing you're passionate about has been more closely entwined with making money.
"But," you say, "this essay doesn't talk about that other essay at all! How do we know it's a response to it?" I invite you to reread this essay closely, knowing the context I'm claiming it has, and I think you'll find it makes more sense. It no longer looks like a disjointed collection of interesting ideas, and there seems to be a reason now why it's worth advocating earnestness and naivete (and dismissing Twitter critics in a footnote).
What this essay has done by the end is argued, like Balaji Srinivasan did but more subtly, that it doesn't matter whether you're good at the thing you're earnest about by traditional measures; if you tried really hard and you made money, it's the ultimate sign you were good at it all along, and you don't need to evaluate your work on the merits as traditional. It's a deflection of the criticism that PG is an above-average Lisper but a world expert businessman - which is hardly a "criticism," really. PG is, without a doubt, a Lisp nerd, earnest about Lisp, but what he's shipped (extremely successfully!) is a change to how the world creates businesses, not a change to how the world writes code. But for some reason, he wants you to keep thinking of him as a successful Lisp nerd.