I Met Paul Graham Once

In the long run I think realizations like the authors are healthy ones.<p>PG is not a hero. He&#x27;s just a guy. A guy who entered into business transactions with a number of people, many of whom benefitted greatly (as did Paul himself). I&#x27;m not saying any of that as a negative! Just that we have a habit of attributing superhuman characteristics to folks (Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize comes to mind) and ending up disappointed.<p>I&#x27;m not an affected group by any means but I still share the disappointment in the world we see today vs the possibilities I felt tech would allow when I was younger. The tech CEOs I previously viewed as visionaries now just look like a new generation of socially regressive robber barons. I wanted to be one of those CEOs, these days I&#x27;m still not quite sure what I want to be. My only consolation is knowing that I&#x27;m seeing the world more accurately than I once did.

&quot;I’m certain he wouldn’t be rude to my face, but he might quietly discriminate against me, say no thanks. He might not even think of it as discrimination, only that I don’t have what it takes.&quot;<p>This resonates pretty strongly (and depressingly) with me being an immigrant academic in Europe who came originally from a third-world country. Even though I am one of the most productive researchers in my department, even though I studied in the best university in my country (which is mind-blowingly better than the one I&#x27;m currently in), even if I say yes to almost everything, and even if I work easily 150% what an average native colleague does, none of this matter at all. Every morning I wake up there is a new knife on my back. Opportunities just vanish transparently; pressure amounts over pressure amounts pressure; there is always that quiet, mute side look that says (without words) &quot;if you don&#x27;t like it, why don&#x27;t you leave?&quot;.<p>And what really makes this ten times worse is that the country I&#x27;m in has this almost ethereal reputation for begin some kind of paradise where everyone is super polite and calm and rational, so whenever I complain about anything it feels like I&#x27;m some kind of spoiled child. Half the time I even convince myself of that.

Once upon a time, not that long ago, within my lifetime in fact, being gay was targeted for public abuse the way that transgender people are being targeting now.<p>That has declined as people came to understand that being gay, lesbian, bi is part of how a person is made. Under public pressure, a gay person can act straight or at least act not gay. But it doesn&#x27;t change who they are, doesn&#x27;t help anyone around them, and makes them miserable. There is no point to it. Thankfully popular opinion and the law have adjusted to that reality.<p>Being transgender is the same way. A transgender person is not someone who dresses a certain way, takes hormones, or gets surgery. A transgender person is someone who is absolutely miserable when they are not permitted to express the gender they feel. It is part of who they are deep inside, how they feel every day of their life. Like gay people, they can hide it to avoid abuse. Like gay people, it&#x27;s not fair to force them to do so. And it doesn&#x27;t help anyone around them either.

I&#x27;m not a target of tech&#x27;s fascist turn, but my head is still spinning from the change of direction. When I entered this industry it was for hackers, nonconformists, weirdos, nerds, people who don&#x27;t care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are.<p>What particularly stings is that the vipers at the top tricked people into giving away an enormous amount of intellectual property. Zuck is removing tampons from the men&#x27;s room—will he also remove open source code written by queer people from his company? Of course not.

You should have finished reading PG&#x27;s essay.<p>It&#x27;s really quite narrowly scoped. There&#x27;s no indication I could see that he doesn&#x27;t still hold the same basically liberal politics (he included explicit disclaimers, for all the good that did); he might still be fine with transgender identity. He just wanted to talk about how the particular loudmouth brand of annoying leftist came to prominence. He even had a decent definition of them beyond &quot;leftist I don&#x27;t like&quot;, and put them in a broader context.<p>Even in the HN thread on the essay, it felt like hardly anyone actually read and understood it, just brought their own assumptions and intellectual allergies and let them run wild. It would be great if people could discuss these issues rationally, but the vast majority can&#x27;t. Everyone is on a hair trigger.

I appreciate the author and this article. As an immigrant and person of color, the author&#x27;s concerns resonate with me. I don&#x27;t think people like PG or Andreessen are evil bigots. But they are underestimating and enabling a movement that is cruel and exclusionary by design. A movement that they seek to tame and harness, but not understanding that the movement is fundamentally untameable.<p>I miss the days when the Republican party was led by a President like Bush, who told America that Islam is a religion of peace. And nominees like McCain, who told his supporters that Obama is a decent family man, and a natural-born American. I worry for the future, and my children&#x27;s place in it.

Having read many of PG&#x27;s essays from the 2000s and seeing how he communicates now, I can only reach one conclusion. Like Musk, Zuck and the others who got rich quick decades ago, they are too far removed from any kind of &quot;hacker&quot; ethos today, and see everything from 30,000 ft, almost literally. What kind of self-described hacker spends their days advising incubees on the best way to close &quot;high-touch B2B sales&quot;?<p>They concern themselves with accumulating power first, and maintaining their &quot;innovator&quot; image second. Any empathy or compassion they may have had for the concerns of ordinary people appear to be long gone, except perhaps for their personal friends who may be on the receiving end of state-sanctioned bigotry. Reagan for example ignored AIDS, seeing it as a &quot;gays and minorities&quot; issue, while in private he looked out for the care of his AIDS-afflicted gay actor friend Rock Hudson, who passed from complications in 1985.<p>Back to PG, see his essay from some years ago, &quot;How People Get Rich Now&quot;[0]. You would think it was ghost-written by an investment bank&#x27;s IPO division. Every single line is another way of saying &quot;raise money for speculative bet, then go public&quot;, ignoring his own decades of experience at YC indicating the overwhelming majority cannot achieve this, in the biggest VC market in the world. Much of the United States population has absolutely no entry point into Sand Hill Road.<p>A response to that essay from a software engineer provided a sobering perspective to counterbalance the winner-take-all world PG lives in. [1]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;richnow.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;richnow.html</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keenen.xyz&#x2F;just-be-rich&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keenen.xyz&#x2F;just-be-rich&#x2F;</a> (HN discussion link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40962965">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40962965</a>)

I really appreciate this article, and I would like the author to know that there are lots of people - yes, especially in tech - that support their happiness.

Great, cohesive, and clear essay! Hear hear.<p>One thing that I think is underappreciated in our current times, that gets lost on both the left <i>and</i> the right sides -- an <i>individual</i> is more important than their <i>identity</i>.<p>- A specific trans person can <i>also</i> be an asshole.<p>- A specific white man can <i>also</i> be a saint.<p>Extremists on both political sides will scream about the reasons one or the other of those statements is wrong, but doing so lumps all possible individuals of an identity into a &quot;them&quot; category to which blanket statements, positive or negative, can be applied.<p>That reductionism feels incredibly insulting to our shared, innate humanity.<p>Are there all kinds of subconscious and societal biases that seriously influence our perceptions of others on the basis of their identity? Sure!<p>But it doesn&#x27;t change the goal of treating the person standing in front of you, first and foremost and always, as an individual person.<p>Be curious. Be courteous and respectful. Be a normal, nice goddamn human to human across the table from you.<p>(And maybe, if you feel so inclined, have some compassion about what they did to get to that table)

I was genuinely afraid of this post hitting HN, but thank you for the kind words.

I thought this was better than most essays in this vein.<p>I do fundamentally disagree with the author. People can think poorly of you for whatever reason they want. If someone hates trans people, they can, and you can&#x27;t stop them. The whole &quot;war on hate&quot; thing was a bad idea; you can&#x27;t forbid hatred. It predictably didn&#x27;t work, and it&#x27;s good that we&#x27;re turning away from it.<p>Adding on, the trans issue isn&#x27;t simple. There are real questions about bathrooms, women&#x27;s sports, and when medical interventions are called for. Of course, there are also just bigots. The proper response to bigots is not to banish them, ban them, shadowban them, etc. That didn&#x27;t work. The proper response is -- in the spirit of the new era of free speech -- to firmly state your opposition to their beliefs.

I feel this a lot, not so much from the perspective of someone that belongs to a formerly &quot;protected&quot; group, but came into tech at the height of the tech revenge-of-the-nerds style &quot;zeitgeist&quot; in the early 2010&#x27;s to 2015, around the same time he mentions being involved in startups. My first job was a startup, with a bunch of students and a professor at my alma mater. We failed miserably - not in the way I had envisioned, but because of just basic VC funded stuff. We were a $20 million company with half a dozen of us, which would have been great for any of us, even our founders - but the VC&#x27;s wanted a $200 million company. Poof.<p>That put a bitter taste in my mouth that has gotten more bitter when the &quot;promise&quot; of a society led by technocrats has yielded a barrage of increasingly shitty and invasive products that don&#x27;t provide any additional utility to anyone except the people who stand to profit from them. It&#x27;s exhausting, extremely depressing, and if I had to do it again I probably would have avoided tech, as much as I like what I do - I feel a deep sense of shame sometimes at the state of how it&#x27;s gone.

There are a lot of things that bother me these days. But particularly some things that are pervasive, unnecessary, habitual amplifiers of disagreement.<p>If someone is going to address extremists on an issue, don&#x27;t just be anti-extremist. What empty courage is that?<p>Address extremists by pushing the dialog back to the real issue. In this case, treating people who have been denigrated for centuries better.<p>Otherwise, ungrounded one-sided criticism of extremists on one side of an issue, just gives tacit permission for the extremists on the other side. It can even be difficult to tell, whether they are not simply mirror extremists themselves. But either way, they just amplify the extremist vs. extremist narrative.<p>And completely distract from the real human level issues that are being hijacked.<p>Don&#x27;t be anti-bad, while conspicuously avoiding acknowledging what would be good. How should we address discrimination against trans and other non-binary people? What changes are beneficial? What companies have DEI approaches that are good models?<p>PG, any thoughts?<p>Please, don&#x27;t call out &quot;your going too far!&quot; - no matter how necessary or accurately - if you don&#x27;t have the courage, insight, or a genuine desire to solve the underlying problem. And express &quot;how far&quot; you agree we should go.<p>Don&#x27;t just poke a bear. Address the elephant!.<p>--<p>One-sided viewpoints just make an easy sport, score trivial (<i>dare I say, also performative?</i>) points, out of something more serious.<p>I.e. don&#x27;t make strong arguments for or against one side of the Israeli-Palestine situation, without acknowledging the strong points you do accept as valid from both sides.<p>I hope I don&#x27;t offend anyone by suggesting that any intellectually honest discussion of divisive views cannot possibly boil down to one-sided criticisms of other people&#x27;s one-sided views.

&gt; Are “identity politics” just a status game that economically advantaged elites play?<p>Yes. But it&#x27;s a disgrace that we&#x27;re throwing the baby (genuine progress, like the slow acceptance of non-binary people) out with the bathwater.

I appreciate this post, and that HN clearly isn&#x27;t moderating it in a way outside of their stated policies.<p>It is really hard to see the backpedaling of big tech with regards to identity politics as something other than virtue conformance. The sad and natural question that gets drawn is, where does the real virtue start and the performance begin?

I really appreciate and am impressed by how thoughtful and genuine the responses here - including those not in support of the OP - are in general. I don&#x27;t see nearly anyone giving the author crap for not blindly loving PG, I don&#x27;t see nearly anyone purposefully using the wrong pronouns as an insult (and the few who are are mostly getting flagged). Even folks who clearly disagree are praising the author and being respectful of them.<p>Seeing this, though, just makes it even more perplexing to me how the same community that is so open to the experience of the author here is also so accepting of the changes that Meta and PG are describing because they&#x27;re made under the banner of &quot;free speech&quot; or &quot;allowing conversation.&quot; It seems clear that we as a community don&#x27;t support, encourage, or permit people to throw slurs, insults, and harassment at others. Why are we okay with much larger and more powerful communities doing it in the name of these &quot;freedoms&quot; (in quotes because free speech is actually about the government, not private communities, policing speech).

I read the second part of the essay, about the author choosing to transition and live their life identifying and presenting as female. If that makes them happier then I am all for it but I certainly think society’s norms are upstream of people’s decisions. I personally believe that society should be more accepting in general, of autism, tomboys, femboys and other ways of presenting, especially for children. If they were, then people wouldn’t feel so much pressure to conform to a specific stereotype.<p>Instead when it comes to kids they are often told how they should behave — eg ADHD is another thing that’s overdiagnosed and medicated — including with amphetamines. Notable progressive Thom Hartmann even wrote a book about this ADHD medication industry, with his theory of “hunters and farmers”, when his own son was put through the ringer. In the past, many girls would be called tomboys rather than encouraged to transition because they didn’t like to associate with “feminine” things or present as female. In Sweden, they even had gender-neutral “hen” pronouns for kids.<p>As far as their observation about trans women being programmers — I want to ask a risque thing on HN. Who are the top female developers that you know? I want to follow their work.<p>I have found that some of the people I have found to be really innovative female developers, such as the makers of Redbean server (Justine), or decentralized database technology such as Mauve Signweaver, are (I believe) in fact trans women.<p>What is it that leads to nearly everyone who does hardcore programming and abstract concepts being born as a biological male? In evolutionary psychology “just-so stories”, one could say men were used to long periods of silent stalking animals or building constructions instead of socializing in the cave or raising children. But I am not so sure about just-so stories and the effect size is just way too strong. Was programming really so much different when Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper or Margaret Hamilton were doing it? Female programmers were more prevalent when it was punchcards. But then you look at, say, Apple and everyone’s a dude and Susan Kare is hired to design icons, rather than programming. Or when I worked at Bloomberg, practically all the developers were male and some of us would go to lunch with the people from the Sales department, because that’s where the females were.

&gt; He thought it was a decent enough idea, but the name, Appcanary, he wasn’t crazy about the name. He was very good at naming companies.<p>FWIW, he hated the name Reddit, and the mascot even more. He said if they have to keep the mascot, it should be on the bottom right where no one can see it.<p>PG is a smart guy, but you gotta trust your gut sometimes even when taking to experts.

My guess is there are two possibilities as to what&#x27;s going on:<p>* Many tech pioneers and leaders deep down felt an animosity towards supporting people who didn&#x27;t fit the mold and finally feel free to express it (the worst-case outcome), and&#x2F;or<p>* Many tech pioneers and leaders wish to continue supporting those who don&#x27;t fit the mold but feel their own status threatened by figures with nearly infinite power[0] who disagree.<p>The former are simply the intolerant coming up for air. The latter exhibit a cowardice, though there&#x27;s a subpoint to that second bullet: there could be some in this crowd who prefer to conform to but then dismantle the power structures enabling hatred from within, but these people likely won&#x27;t be known for a while, and it&#x27;ll be difficult to predict who&#x27;s acting subversively in this way. Though given PG&#x27;s narrowly scoped essay, there&#x27;s a reasonable chance that this is his footing.<p>The best people can do is assume the least-worst case - the cowardice - and instead seek to either craft themselves as the people they wish to see... and&#x2F;or protect oneself from the rising tides of hatred.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supremecourt.gov&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;23pdf&#x2F;23-939_e2pg.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.supremecourt.gov&#x2F;opinions&#x2F;23pdf&#x2F;23-939_e2pg.pdf</a>

These days I just feel sad for some of the richest people. First their wealth seem to have pulled them away from their humanity. Now I just see them lead troubled existence and inflict pain on others, amplified by the said wealth. All the money in the world and no humanity or peace at heart.

The industry has become very unsettling, mean, and malicious. For 20 years I have warned people about the old &quot;we are changing the world&quot; mantra and that the people leading that chant were &quot;evil&quot;, and therefore &quot;change&quot; would not be aligned with good... and here we are. Remember kids. Change and progress are extremely subjective.

This is a really personal article and I&#x27;m really grateful the author shared it. I think too often conceptual terms like &quot;wokeness&quot; and &quot;identity politics&quot; get thrown around without really considering the people underlying those ideas.<p>It&#x27;s easy to make snap judgements along the lines of &quot;the world is too woke these days&quot;, but a lot harder to argue against peoples ability to live as they choose with basic dignity.

I read the Paul Graham article mentioned here immediately before reading the Neil Gaiman exposé, and it left a sour taste in my mouth.<p>PG is an incredible writer and contributor to this community, but that doesn&#x27;t mean he isn&#x27;t human (as others have been saying). Open minded people who spend too much time with the same group of global elites (including tech-minded POCs and trans people etc.) end up thinking social justice has already been served and start wondering if those saying it has gone too far are correct.

&gt;We could get people to pay us hundreds of dollars per month, but not thousands<p>I find it interesting that they say their startup folded because they could only get people to pay hundreds a month. That sounds like success to me.<p>&gt;That’s the death knell of a vc-backed b2b saas sales model. &gt;We were too burnt out to pivot to another business idea, and we quietly folded.<p>I guess VC funding killed their successful startup and burned them out. It sounds like they didn&#x27;t need funding in the first place, and it caused more harm than good in their case.

One way to think of him is a wealthy person unaccustomed to hearing &quot;no&quot; that wants to say whatever they&#x27;d like regardless of the social collateral and writing an essay complaining about an empathy zeitgeist. Make no mistake, a person with thinking so fixed and undeservedly confident in ideas which he has a woefully limited understanding about will just as soon tell you to to rename your preferred pronouns as they would your company.

My sympathies to the author. I’ve had more than a few moments of disillusionment myself.<p>But it’s always better to be aware and disillusioned than unaware and happy.

I think I have strong feelings about this because PG exploits people the same way cults exploit vulnerable people insecurities and uses them to build power and influence for the cult. If PG is now sharpening the lines (us vs them), in a way which benefits him - it&#x27;s at the cost of the victims who didn&#x27;t make it along the way.

Earlier in my (now long) career, tech didn&#x27;t feel political at all (just a bunch of nerds trying to figure shit out). Nowadays, it feels really weird to associate things like cryptocurrency with &quot;tech bros on the right&quot;, etc. It all feels very unnecessary, but I suppose humans have a natural tendency to divide into camps as a survival characteristic. Whatever the case, The United States has certainly at a stage where it feels like tolerance for others is at a low point--at least as far as my historical memory serves--and the country seems far less welcoming than it has in the past to a variety of cohorts which will affect the makeup of the work force. The general politicization of the tech industry makes me less excited about continuing as an engineer, which is sad, because it&#x27;s always been a discipline that I&#x27;ve really loved. It feels like &quot;hate politics&quot; are oozing out of everything these days, and I don&#x27;t see how that represents progress of any kind.

Can&#x27;t help but OP might have been better engaging with PG&#x27;s Wokeness article itself (it&#x27;s full of holes, and probably one of the weakest he&#x27;s written), than talking about what they think the article said made them feel.<p>Ironically the Wokeness article does what most people accuse &quot;wokeness&quot; of doing, predetermining its conclusion, and then shoehorning in a bunch of loosely connected facts and phenomena to support that assertion.

&gt; the reason why conservative women are so mad about trans women is because they don’t want to share washrooms with the sex slave caste.<p>I would like to see more of the HN caste engage with the very notion of a caste system, but I can&#x27;t immediately think of a way to do it that also accommodates the spirit of HN—which I value—that dictates we focus on technical subjects. Perhaps the techie workforce angle is the only good faith approach.

I like the shape of your prose!

What Mark and others are doing is performative. And PG seems to be projecting.

I like the article, but one doesn&#x27;t need to meet pg once to get to know what he is.<p>You can just read his tweets (x&#x27;s?) and he, like many VCs or higher-ups in SV doesn&#x27;t give a huge importance in how other humans feel, just in his kids&#x2F;family&#x2F;relatives.<p>So overall, he doesn&#x27;t care about how you think or feel.<p>If he did, he wouldn&#x27;t write an essay on a touchy topic without making a big disclaimer.<p>By reading him tweet for sometime you&#x27;d realize the kind of person he is, and he isn&#x27;t somebody that is there to support others or something, or has threaded prejudice or huge issues in his life.<p>The deepest essay pg has written that touches the &quot;They don&#x27;t like me&quot; point, from all I&#x27;ve read is his thoughts about nerds&#x2F;geeks, after all we get bullied! You can&#x27;t compare being a nerd to being transgender, or a victim of racism, or xenophobia. It&#x27;s very different.<p>He just doesn&#x27;t have studied, or suffered enough to understand the perspective of a &quot;woke&quot;, then he wrote that article. AI engineers would say the problem with pg&#x27;s llms didn&#x27;t have enough training data ;-)

I met many people that met Paul Graham once. 2 &gt; 1. right? Not sure Paul would ever have invested in my companies. But the world is smaller than you think.

It&#x27;s interesting to see how tech bros are slowly sliding to the right. The first thing I ever read from Paul was his thing about lisp, and I almost instantly disliked him. There is an intense ego that radiates from his ilk. You see a similar thing with some small business owners. Owning and running a business gives them a feeling of superiority. They feel that they are affluent thanks solely to their own efforts (and perhaps some negligible work from their employees), and seeing that others are less wealthy they conclude themselves to be superior [1]. I think it&#x27;s an inevitable fact of capitalism that the people who rise to the top are the ones who are greedy, who confuse profit with virtue. It&#x27;s really no surprise that they are easily influenced by the winds of fashion; you don&#x27;t get rich by taking a stand.<p>[1] Footnote 12, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;superlinear.html#f12n" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;superlinear.html#f12n</a>

This is absolutely amazing, well done on the article!

If the OP struggles to reconcile their perception of PG before and after discovering his differing beliefs, that’s neither PG’s fault nor anyone else’s.<p>This reaction reflects a broader cultural issue that PG himself occasionally comments on. It’s an unfortunate symptom of our times to misattribute personal frustrations and resentments—born of an often unfriendly and unfair world—to solely <i>external</i> causes like a conspiracy of bigotry and malevolence.<p>In reality, such feelings often stem from an unrealistic <i>internal</i> denial of the natural (painful) &quot;othering&quot; of outlier behaviour or identity, something that can only be mitigated through education and maturity, and pragmatic reasonableness on both sides.<p>It cannot be solved by the hectoring, bullying, self-pitying, or other toxic behaviours rightly associated with the declining “woke” movement, which the OP seems to criticise PG for opposing.

But the Appcanary was not a bad idea, isn&#x27;t website monitoring a lucrative market (see New Relic)? Too crowded?

Some of the disagreement or confusion seems to stem from the definition of the word &quot;woke&quot; which means different things to different people?<p>Having read both essays I don&#x27;t see them necessarily in disagreement. pg criticizes the performative and orthodox nature of some social justice activists&#x27; behavior, however it doesn&#x27;t seem that the author&#x27;s behavior here is performative at all.<p>Perhaps we should just avoid these terms like &quot;woke&quot; and just say what we mean to avoid this societal dissonance? I feel like decent rational people can talk past each other depending on how they have been exposed to the term.

Thank you for the breath of fresh air, and helping reduce the echo chamber that hn can be sometimes

My current way of thinking about it is that we should tolerate communities that we find weird. People who cross dress are to me as weird as the religious people or the overly enthusiastic magic the gathering players. Should I hate them or discriminate against them? No. Should I let them force their community rituals on me? No as well.<p>I don&#x27;t like someone telling me &quot;God bless you&quot; as much as someone forcing me to pretend they&#x27;re a different gender.<p>Wokism was a movement against discrimination, bullies, and such. Not a movement to force you to adhere to specific communities rules

I&#x27;m suprised that people are super-duper angry at pg&#x27;s 2025 essay when it&#x27;s substantially the same as his 2004 essay &quot;what you can&#x27;t say&quot; - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;say.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;say.html</a> other than using the word &quot;woke&quot;.<p>It would have been better if he&#x27;d also called out some of the people who are prigs on the right (e.g. the people who are suddenly very very upset about the integrity women&#x27;s sports, which thy don&#x27;t watch anyway).

Are you the &quot;ordinary people&quot; he was referring to in a recent tweet @ Musk?

So I found the author to come across as a sincere and thoughtful individual, but when I went over to actually read PG&#x27;s essay on wokeness, it didn&#x27;t seem to have any resemblance to what was described. I wonder if the author actually read it, or just read enough to see that it was not pro-woke and decided that was all they needed to know?

The wokeness essay was long, hard to process, and still vexes me and makes me wonder if there were any specific triggers involved. One of the parts that most leapt out at me was the question of what would activists worry about after the Iron Curtain fell? Most of Europe both east and west have health care integrated with their social fabric, so that seems a likely target. And that subject is especially problematic since Romney put the Heritage Foundation market based universal health care access in place in Massachusetts which means that there is no longer any political or philosophical basis for fighting so called &quot;socialized medicine&quot;. But instead of extending health care to all the problem is the wokeness which might lead us to conceive of such a thing in the first place?

&gt; I’d be a better startup founder today than I was in 2015<p>You should do a startup then. I think you&#x27;ll be surprised how little most VCs and customers care about your personal life.<p>No doubt the vibes worldwide are taking a dark turn, but pg has been pretty reasonable and his essay in particular seems like an accurate read on what has happened.

I met PG once when we went to visit him for some office hours for my YC startup. I was a late cofounder so I hadn&#x27;t been part of the program. During the conversation I said something, he looked and me and said &quot;I have no idea what you just said&quot;, then turned back to my cofounder and kept chatting. o_O

&gt; I’m still not sure what pg thinks “Wokeness” means.2 I know for a fact, that for most people – including many of the people he hangs out with – it just means “left-wing thing I dislike”. I got the impression that he thinks it’s bad, and that companies should purge people who are too woke. Maybe I’m being unfair to him.<p>The funny thing is that Paul Graham has a framework for thinking about these sorts of things, which is explained very eloquently in &quot;beating the averages&quot;. He calls it the &quot;Blub paradox&quot;.<p>Blub is a hypothetical programming language that is roughly average in terms of expressive power and abstraction. The Blub programmer can recognize languages that are inferior to Blub because they lack some important feature that they would find it difficult to do without. On the other hand, they can&#x27;t recognize the merits of more powerful languages very easily because the features are unfamiliar and seem like &quot;a bunch of abstract nonsense invented by ivory-tower academics&quot; that have limited real-life application.<p>I think the same thing works for social views. It&#x27;s easy for someone somewhere on the spectrum from might-makes-right brutishness on one end and perfect wisdom, justice, and harmony on the other to know when they&#x27;re looking down. But someone who is more &quot;progressive&quot; than they are will usually appear indistinguishable from someone trying to impress their friends with how &quot;woke&quot; they are.<p>I think this comes into play in elections. Voters in general seem to be more willing to vote for someone more conservative than they are than someone more liberal.

This made me unreasonably annoyed, not from the author though.<p>&gt;The mentors applied a neat and very effective trick: they believed in you.<p>It&#x27;s crazy to me that the LeetCode interview style is <i>still</i> such an aberration compared to other jobs that yield potentially much more money<p>Do you want to be a Software Engineer at this company? We don&#x27;t trust you, the previous company could have let you in under the radar and you could secretly be a terrible engineer.<p>Do you want to run a SaaS and make us and yourself a bunch of money? Welcome aboard, we trust you completely once you&#x27;re in. Just change your company name to fucking <i>Oracle</i>, ha ha ha.<p>This industry is such an imbalance of misplaced scrutiny, and certainly more so when they get into political stuff like wokeness.<p>If you&#x27;re pg rich, just shut the fuck up.

Link to the essay in question: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;woke.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;woke.html</a>

&gt; Moves like Mark’s, and essays like pg’s, create the permission structure for people to discriminate against me.<p>This is key. Many people might say, &quot;come on, Mark&#x27;s just doing the usual sucking up to the new President&quot; or &quot;Paul&#x27;s just expressing his views and trying to bring things back into balance.&quot;, just like they defend Trump&#x27;s famous denigration of a disabled person on the campaign trail -- he was just joking, playing to the crowd.<p>Words are real things, and when spoken by people in positions of great power, they can enable abhorrent behavior which the original speaker might never engage in (well, maybe Trump) but others will.

I have to say that this is a very well written piece. The story in the first half does a good job of showing the author&#x27;s personality and making him seem very relatable, at least if you are a typical HN reader. And it&#x27;s a good story and didn&#x27;t have me thinking &quot;get to the point&quot;, especially since the title doesn&#x27;t make you expect anything more than a good story.<p>Then halfway down, he drops the words &quot;I&#x27;m transgender now&quot; and you start to realize what he&#x2F;she is really writing about.<p>If the article started there it would have lost a lot of people. Instead with the first half it gets you invested and you stick around to read the rest of it.<p>PG&#x27;s essay about wokeness, on the other hand, didn&#x27;t really accomplish this. In fact it kind of did the opposite: came on strong and imprecise at the beginning and became more measured and precise towards the end. And thus it probably lost a lot of readers toward the more &quot;woke&quot; end of the spectrum like this author.

Hack for the game me

This take seems to project a massive amount (of negative falsehood) onto Paul Graham&#x27;s essay. As I read his essay, Paul Graham does not care one wit about the gender (trans or otherwise) of an individual. He is explicitly criticising those who create arbitrary rules (e.g., the term LatinX) that don&#x27;t actually serve society but instead serve as virtue signals.<p>If you are competent, you&#x27;ll be able to find employment. Yes, discrimination exists, but if there is an abundance of talented trans people, someone is going to exploit that talent pool (by hiring) in an efficient market economy.<p>Frankly, the author seems a bit egotistical. Being transgender has nothing to do with being woke. People like Paul Graham criticising wokeness are not criticising transgenderism. His essay is not about you (and nobody reading his essay should interpret it in anyway as being against you).

[flagged]

&gt;A few days ago, Paul Graham published an essay on “Wokeness”. I skimmed it. I couldn’t finish reading it, it made me too upset.<p>…<p>&gt;I’m still not sure what pg thinks “Wokeness” means<p>Hmm

Didn’t we agree no more politics on HN?<p>If Trump getting shot doesn’t make on HN, I don’t think Trump announcing his gender policy should.

&gt; I’m still not sure what pg thinks “Wokeness” means.<p>So then what is it about his essay that you find so upsetting?

I&#x27;ll just say it must suck being precisely in the crosshairs of a political proxy battle. The truth is, neither the left nor the right really give a shit about transgenders but use them to rile up their bases.<p>First, the brief &quot;woke&quot; movement which was soon taken by the right and extrapolated to the extreme. It&#x27;s the same tactic used by the right for any issue - when I was a kid it was &quot;if gays can marry, then they will want to marry their pets.&quot;<p>They take whatever social progress has been made and push it until the concept annoys &gt;50% of people then say &quot;that&#x27;s what the left wants.&quot;<p>But I can&#x27;t get behind the left&#x27;s approach of highlighting and siloing every sub-group. It just simplifies division and is counter to all the American &quot;melting pot&quot; concepts that actually worked over many decades to integrate immigrants and normalize differences.<p>I don&#x27;t know where all of this leads, but it certainly doesn&#x27;t feel like progress is ever made or even really desired, only a cycling of hot button issues to distract everyone.

There are two key aspects here: the nature of work and a critique of woke narratives, which some argue deny recent developments by framing them as a simple desire for acceptance. Specifically, transgender individuals are seen as being elevated through diversity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, with accusations that these efforts sometimes prioritize activism over qualifications and invade female only spaces that are there for a reason.<p>While I understand the personal challenges you’re navigating regarding identity and humanity, it’s important to maintain boundaries between personal matters and professional life. In Silicon Valley, the focus is on achieving ambitious goals that deliver exceptional results, similar to the performance expected in professional sports. Success depends on everyone concentrating on their work, regardless of personal beliefs or identities. Therefore, keeping personal issues like sexuality and the woke religion separate from the workplace ensures a productive and diverse viewpoint inclusive environment where all qualified individuals can contribute effectively and help companies thrive against odds.

<i>The irony is I too dislike nagging, hollow, corporate DEI exercises. In the abstract I was glad they existed[3] but the insincerity was palpable</i><p>Footnote [3] is: <i>A small minority of people really do need to be taught how to be kind.</i><p>The author thinks probably thinks that fairly obvious fact is some harmless premise, but I suspect he knows well enough having been through YC and in the community of American business that this is not an accurate description of how DEI was implemented in parts of corporate America and beyond. In many companies, colleges, and government agencies, DEI initiatives were implemented in a way that assumed <i>everyone</i> had to be taught how to be kind, were differentially guilty or prone to be guilty by (sometimes externally assumed) group association of their birth or early childhood of certain offenses, and were preferentially treated to work placements, promotions, etc.<p>It was more than just &quot;hollow&quot; in many instances. It was blatant witch hunting that ruined careers and personal lives via internet virality. If PG&#x27;s greatest offense in fighting back against this was an obtusely chosen word like &quot;woke&quot;, that&#x27;s pretty minor.

&gt;I’m certain he wouldn’t be rude to my face, but he might quietly discriminate against me, say no thanks. He might not even think of it as discrimination, only that I don’t have what it takes.<p>&gt;I’m better at my job than most. I’d be a better startup founder today than I was in 2015. None of that will matter.<p>IMHO, jumping to conclusions just like this is a big reason why &#x27;going woke&#x27; isn&#x27;t a healthy mindset for someone to hold. Stating that none of it matters is exactly the same thing as saying &quot;I can&#x27;t do it&quot;

&gt;We returned something like 40 or 45 cents on the dollar to our investors.<p>&gt;I’d be a better startup founder today than I was in 2015.<p>I wonder if that means he&#x27;s better at <i>losing</i> money now?

Interesting contrast. This essay is self-indulgent and the subtext is &quot;I&#x27;m important&quot;. Paul Graham&#x27;s essays are economical and the subtext is &quot;the reader is important&quot;.

I’m also a transgender woman and while I agree with the author on many points (like sharing washrooms with the sex slave caste) I think we can rely on YC to find talent and support it regardless of what race or gender it’s associated with and in defiance of possibly sexist or racist VCs.

&quot;why go out of your way to remove them&quot; in principle, it&#x27;s fine to have them. But really, they are just a symbol of the fake performative substance free dei culture. A reminder of it. Transgender employees should not be discriminated against, should have all the protections and respect like any other employees. But do we really need tampons in mens&#x27; bathrooms, really?

It&#x27;s complicated isn&#x27;t it? A business doesn&#x27;t care about you. It doesn&#x27;t because it can&#x27;t. Business doesn&#x27;t have thoughts and feelings, business is clinical. Business is nothing more than the collection of processed and systems crafted to work together, facilitating the exchange of value between 2 parties. The problem is with the 2 parties part. The 2 parties part, that part very much does have thoughts, feelings, and emotions, those two parties are made up of humans. Bobby Sue just wants the alternator working on the car so they can go to a family funeral and mourn. Jerry in accounting at alternator inc&#x27;s going through a momentous life shift, spiraling his whole world into a new framing, changing everything. Sally in design is just trying to feed her kids. And while these things matter none to the business technically, they matter deeply to the humans involved. It&#x27;s complicated because business doesn&#x27;t, shouldn&#x27;t, and can&#x27;t have feelings, however, business activity is indeed made up of people, and they most certainly do. There is always a risk of being too cold and focusing only on the bottom line, or becoming so caught up in individual needs and emotions that you lose sight of the basic structure that keeps a business functioning. Booby Sue needs to mourn, and Jerry needs stability for his life change, Sally has kids. And so, there is some empathy to be found for people deciding fundamental things for their businesses, it&#x27;s not easy to know when to be clinical in look at the business, especially knowing it&#x27;s comprised of a collections of humans, organized, into a company. Care too much about the outside, the business fails, care too much about the inside, the business fails. These are not easy things, the trick is to avoid hostage situations, and so rationality and intellectual honesty is key when framing these discussions. I expanded these thoughts here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;b.h4x.zip&#x2F;dei&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;b.h4x.zip&#x2F;dei&#x2F;</a>

Why did this person write an essay about an essay, condemning it with a lot of serious accusations about potential future harm, while also stating they didn&#x27;t fully read it?<p>He does some throat-clearing that help address some of these complaints.<p>It is a very bad essay that says &quot;I am unfamiliar with the target of this essay, but I felt strong emotions when I read bits of it, which qualifies me to pontificate and condemn&quot;.