I frankly don't care that Graham is rich and influential and maybe has an easier time of controlling what he thinks of himself than other people do. "Keep things out of your identity" is useful advice, even if some people will unavoidably find that harder to do because of their social/economic status.
And I disagree that it applies to very few conversations. This can easily apply to the big stuff, like what some people are talking about in other threads on this post, when it comes to dealing with issues that affect marginalized groups. I think people like that are a fine example of when it can be hard to keep things out of your identity. As much as your identity (I prefer "core self-image", which I think is clearer) is your choice, often external factors will pressure you into choosing in certain ways. But I think it does harm discussions about those topics when people have made it such a core part of themselves that they can't see what kinds of persuasion other people would respond best to. I unfortunately see that sort of thing pretty often.
Put another way: yes, Graham is probably the kind of person for whom it is not hard to set his own identity without all that much outside pressure. He's rich and influential. Other people will get put into boxes and groups by others who are more powerful than they are. And these less-powerful people will have a harder time keeping those things from seeping into their own identities. But that doesn't change the (IMO) correctness of Graham's message that it is useful to resist that pressure, even if it's harder for some people to do so.
> I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. and If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity[...]
To view discussions where people get upset as "useless" reflects a certain hierarchy of the purposes of discussion and the goals of inquiry. The same is true for prioritizing the kind of impassioned discussions that Graham is talking about here. His advice is good (Paul Graham is not dumb!) if you feel the same way and value this kind of high minded dispassionate discussion.
Perhaps what I should have said is that I believe most people do not feel they suffer when they experience (and voice) the emotional weight of conversations. They suffer because they feel unseen and unheard in those conversations - the conflict is a symptom, not the disease. There's nothing wrong with wanting people to discuss things they care deeply about dispassionately - but there's nothing right about it either. It reflects a certain hierarchy of values and goals that are, again, "very Paul Graham." It sounds like those values are very you too! Which is fine!
This advice will make you better able to engage in the way that Paul Graham wants to engage! I certainly agree with that. But I do not think it is "better" in a particularly universal way.
Shouldn't we all value that type of discussion? After all, it's most likely to lead to the objectively correct answers to questions about facts, and optimal answers to questions about policies.
I'm visually impaired, to the point of being legally blind. Due to some kind of flaw in my development, my optic nerves didn't fully develop (optic nerve hypoplasia), so my visual acuity is far enough below normal that, for example, I can't drive a car, I can only read print up close unless it's huge, and I use a white cane (and often, let's be honest, a sighted guide) to get around in unfamiliar environments.
Should people like me exist? I think if it had been feasible in 1980 to detect the flaw in my development and abort me before my family could develop any emotional attachment to me, it would have been morally acceptable, and perhaps even optimal, to do so. Of course, that wasn't feasible back then, but if our technological development continues, it will be someday, and we, including people like me, will need to consider the moral question rationally, even dispassionately.
Of course, disabled people like me can live full, happy lives, and many do. But it's not guaranteed that we all will. Though my own circumstances are pretty good (in some ways, very fortunate), there are aspects of me, beyond the original impairment, that could objectively be considered suboptimal. There are totally blind people who are much better at navigating unfamiliar environments and living independently than I am. For whatever reasons, attempts to teach me those skills in my childhood and adolescence didn't work very well. To some extent it might even be my own fault. If I hadn't had the natural aptitude and curiosity for programming, and the privileged circumstances to be able to develop that skill (e.g. a family computer when I was 8 years old and ample leisure time for playing with it), I might be far worse off now. Considering how high unemployment is among working-age blind people, I got very lucky. Many of us, even in developed countries, are not so lucky.
In some ways I'm a walking stereotype. I'm musically talented, though I don't make my living from that. I do make my living from being a programmer working on accessibility for people like me. When I read Eric Raymond's "Why I Hate Identity Politics", I wish that my blindness were as incidental to my identity as his cerebral palsy is to his identity. Attempts in my childhood and adolescence to make me well-adjusted and well-rounded, i.e. "normal", weren't very successful. Of course, that could just mean I'm a nerd, but in some contexts, that could be considered an additional handicap.
Even those of us who have mastered all the right skills are often thwarted by gaps in accessibility. The assumption that everyone can see is everywhere. Correcting that assumption, and doing the hard work to make a UI accessible to disabled people, is a never-ending job. That may be job security for a few of us, as long as someone is willing or compelled to pay for it. But in the meantime, people fail to get a job, or even lose a job that they already had, due to an inaccessible application, or even a whole category of such applications. On a smaller scale, people are frequently frustrated while trying to accomplish simple tasks due to gaps in accessibility.
So, to get back to the loaded moral question I raised above, I think it stands to reason that, to modify a popular saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of training and accommodation.
Of course, for those of us that already exist, the latter is still necessary. How much accommodation we should require is another question, though. I'm willing to consider that, beyond a certain point, it's simply unreasonable to expect the whole rest of the world to accommodate a minority like the one that I belong to. I don't know where that cutoff point is, but I lean toward the view that our tools, such as screen readers, should do everything they can to adapt to the world as it is, rather than requiring everyone else to change the way they do things just for us.