Hacker News Reader

Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

> Take PGs four quadrants of conformity. Why stop at 4? Did he run out of numbers? There are billions of people on the planet; why not an essay that suggests then a billion quadrants of conformity?

At one level: because the root word of quadrant means four/one-fourth, so once he got to 4, he did run out of numbers [of quadrants].

He probably picked to use quadrants in large part because categorizing people’s broad behavioral tendencies into a billion groups isn’t that helpful of a mental model simplification. “People in group 24,825,726; those are the tattletales who like Brussel Sprouts, are left-handed, allergic to oak pollen, love dogs, hate cats, taste quinine, can roll their tongue, are AB+, and prefer sleeping in cool rooms.” How does that make for a readable essay?

View on HN

Why groups? Why not 7 billion points.

Everyone is their own political agenda, their own emotional timeline of experience.

Why does an arbitrary 1 of 7 billions semantic view of the gradients mean more than anyone else’s except for his politically protected privilege?

And of course we’re not supposed to discuss that here. This forum has an obligation to high mindedness first. Questioning the assigned figurative value of someone who is a random non-contributor to millions of others, and open discussion about how they may be actively harming them, is not allowed to launch.

Stick to the rules of bounding everyone else into quadrants. Oh wait, though; you all are everyone else to me. I only see points bounded by quadrants. I’ll just stick to thinking of you as a point on a Cartesian plane … what a novel math object he discovered.

The whole thing was elementary math object and biased, insulated, white guy political opinion. I’m banal?

> Why does an arbitrary 1 of 7 billions semantic view of the gradients mean more than anyone else’s except for his politically protected privilege?

I read his essays long before YC was founded. (Online first and then in dead tree reprint format.) I chose to read them because they were interesting and thought-provoking not because of some claimed politically protected privilege.

If other authors resonate more with you, I think it’s reasonable for you to read their opinions instead.

Well, maybe it’s me but it all translates to “here’s a Cartesian plane and how one random dude would describe a bunch of points on it.”

My value store is not old school business networks, but the network available to everyone. It’s all electron flow in machines, with boundaries ingrained by history.

I see value in novel information design. The history of overloaded human languages and my age related overload on them makes me question what they really offer except traditional attempts at political persuasion.

Meh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com