> You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that. I would rephrase this to "People are unlikely to listen to you if they don't trust and respe

> You have to earn people's trust and respect in order to do that. I would rephrase this to "People are unlikely to listen to you if they don't trust and respect you." Obviously you can tell people when you think they're wrong without them trusting or respecting you, but you're clearly right that it may not have many useful results in that case. > On the other hand it seems very easy for pg to gain the trust of commenters here... I have a slight bias against pg. His earliest essays I enjoyed, but his writing in the past ten or fifteen years strikes me as suffering from the blindness induced by being rich and myopically focused on startups and technological advances, with the apparent assumption that those things must be inherently good. If I happen to agree with him on this particular point, it's not because I'm inclined to like his stances by default.