You're right, my apologies. I frequently forget that I am not always writing from middle America to San Francisco on this website. I'll try to keep my blinders

You're right, my apologies. I frequently forget that I am not always writing from middle America to San Francisco on this website. I'll try to keep my blinders in check. This chapter was almost certainly posted in the context of Sam Altman's recent blog post[0], which itself echoes an essay Paul Graham wrote a decade or so ago.[1] But there's a more immediate connection between Sam Altman's essay and the essay James Damore circulated at Google. I was very interested in reading Stephen's "contemporary conservative" reaction to Mill, and wanted to place it within the timeline of human culture that I could understand: just a few years after the abolition of slavery and recognition of voting rights for black men in the United States, but a couple of generations before voting rights for women. So, Altman is writing about unpopular opinions a few months after Damore is fired from Google for circulating a set of opinions, emphasizing that men and women are fundamentally different. A century and a half ago, J.F. Stephen's most substantial disagreement with J.S. Mill's treatise on liberty is... Mill's advocacy to fundamentally alter society to treat men and women equally in the name of justice. Despite what Professor Stove said in 1987, Mill's opinion was the unpopular one in 1873. [0] http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove http://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html