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Comment by let_me_post_0 | Hacker News Reader

Crazy and rather ironic that an essay from pg himself gets flagged no HN.

[flagged]

Presumably because he owns the site. You would think this would be the one place that PG didn't get much pushback on his opinions. I'm not too surprised though; he hasn't been very involved here for years so the culture has shifted.

I don't think he would have written this 10, even 5 years ago. It only really started becoming a trendy viewpoint in his social circles recently.

That's not true. PG has been ranting about wokeness for quite a long time already. I don't think you quite understand the nuance of a lot of these definitions. PG isn't a conservative MAGA guy nor a bigot. He just does not like how the woke crowd goes about trying to affect social change and how unsavory types use the woke crowd to achieve their political goals.

I've read his earlier writings on the topic and they are substantially less conspiratorial and influenced by neoreactionary thought. He even previously used the term "prig" in this 2004 article:

https://paulgraham.com/say.html

This is top to bottom a more thoughtful, nuanced take on essentially the same topic. The main difference is that saying stuff like "class of bureaucrats pursu[ing] a woke agenda" and "woke mind-virus" is fashionable among SV elites today, and it was not in 2004.

I think the big shift was in cancel culture, doxing, swatting, and all that stuff starting to rise, which is all relatively recent.

A moralistic ideology acting holier than thou is nothing new. In the 80s (and for sure time after) evangelicals had their "Moral Majority."

But nobody really cares until an ideology starts regularly driving harmful actions, at which point there starts to be a lot more push back.

Swatting and doxing aren't ideologically-aligned actions, though. They certainly don't have anything in particular to do with "woke".

I imagine if you polled all HN users vastly more would sympathise with this essay than not. But the YC flag (and voting) system still seems relatively straightforward, and consequently enables small groups of activists to have quite a significant capability to censor (or promote) topics/comments.

This is one reason I think community notes style algorithms is where we'll probably see pretty much all community voting/moderation head over time. It's just objectively better since it basically fixes this 'glitch' in straightforward systems.

HN also has vouching, so a small minority of flaggers shouldn't be able to censor a topic that a large number of HNers want to read about.

I think this got flagged initially because PG doesn't have anything to say about 'wokeness' that we have not heard many times before. He doesn't like it (big surprise) for exactly the reasons that you'd expect someone like him not to like it.

Vouching relies on visibilty while flagging dramatically reduces visibility.

And after the article was unflagged, it became one of the most upvoted topics.

Appeal to authority needs to be used with prudence. I wouldn't trust pg on a medical topic, but I have no issue hearing what he has to say on this particular topic because as far as I am concerned academic credentials do not give you a better understanding of the contemporary social climate.

For that matter Trump and MAGA have no degrees in psychology and sociology. Despite this, they were much more in tune with the American public than the Democrats with their fake intellectualism.

I mean that's fine, that's the kind of distinction everyone has to make for themselves. Personally I haven't encountered anything from PG that conveyed meaningful information to me at any point in the last decade so this is more a continuation of ignoring a zero value content stream than anything else. Put simply I don't need a lecture from PG regardless of topic.

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