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I Met Paul Graham Once

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• _dark_matter_ 2y ago
  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.
  • sho_hn 2y ago
    This was also my first thought -- a deep sadness over someone hurting and feeling threatened and persecuted. I'd also like them to know they're not alone in this.
    • gnclmorais 2y ago
      Same here
• black_13 2y ago
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• quercus 2y ago
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• 1970-01-01 2y ago
  >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. >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. IMHO, jumping to conclusions just like this is a big reason why 'going woke' isn't a healthy mindset for someone to hold. Stating that none of it matters is exactly the same thing as saying "I can't do it"
  • frereubu 2y ago
    This feels like a pretty shallow reading of the article and you've fallen into the trap - described in the article itself - that "woke" is "some left-wing thing that I don't like". Whatever your views on trans issues, I think this article deserves a more thoughtful answer.
    • 1970-01-01 2y ago
      Will you agree with the author's viewpoint that "none of experience" matters if one is trans?
      • skyyler 2y ago
        That’s what facing structural oppression feels like. You can have the right skills and competency and mindset and disposition but will be looked over because you don’t fit the norm.
        • 1970-01-01 2y ago
          I agree with this somewhat, however, facing structural oppression is very different from deciding if a journey simply isn't worth starting. The mindset and disposition you speak of is or is not inclusive of assuming oppression will fully control one's overall success and happiness at a company?
        • coderc 2y ago
          It's hard to prove that this happens to any given individual, because employers aren't mandated to announce why any person was "overlooked". One might be quick to blame "structural oppression", racism, sexism, or any other -ism or -phobia, but that doesn't necessarily make it true.
        • Gothmog69 2y ago
          Yup but still a poor attitude to have. I feel this way often times as a white male in tech, that they would rather hire literally anyone else if they can add some much desired "diversity" but I'm sure you would disagree that this is the case. Better for me to try anyways and have the best possible outlook even if I believe the cards are stacked against me.
• thiago_fm 2y ago
  I like the article, but one doesn't need to meet pg once to get to know what he is. You can just read his tweets (x's?) and he, like many VCs or higher-ups in SV doesn't give a huge importance in how other humans feel, just in his kids/family/relatives. So overall, he doesn't care about how you think or feel. If he did, he wouldn't write an essay on a touchy topic without making a big disclaimer. By reading him tweet for sometime you'd realize the kind of person he is, and he isn't somebody that is there to support others or something, or has threaded prejudice or huge issues in his life. The deepest essay pg has written that touches the "They don't like me" point, from all I've read is his thoughts about nerds/geeks, after all we get bullied! You can't compare being a nerd to being transgender, or a victim of racism, or xenophobia. It's very different. He just doesn't have studied, or suffered enough to understand the perspective of a "woke", then he wrote that article. AI engineers would say the problem with pg's llms didn't have enough training data ;-)
  • quercus 2y ago
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• afavour 2y ago
  In the long run I think realizations like the authors are healthy ones. PG is not a hero. He'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'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. I'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'm still not quite sure what I want to be. My only consolation is knowing that I'm seeing the world more accurately than I once did.
  • caycep 2y ago
    sclerosis happens with time
  • bobosha 2y ago
    >My only consolation is knowing that I'm seeing the world more accurately than I used to. also known as growing older ;-)
    • afavour 2y ago
      For sure. I almost included something in my comment about "I guess this is what getting old is like", losing your idealism as you age. But equally, maybe not. If I'd grown up in, I dunno the 60s? I would have witnessed enormous leaps in technological possibility and enormous increases in standards of living, personal freedoms, yadda yadda. In my youth it felt like there was a viable future where tech enabled radical positive changes in society. Instead we concentrated wealth at the top of society at historically unprecedented levels.
      • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
        I wouldn't call it "losing my idealism," but, rather "understanding that everything is a lot more complex than my simple young mind could deal with." I'm probably more "idealistic" than I have ever been; it's just that I no longer have the silly "Let's just do this one simple thing" attitude. I've just found that getting places is always a lot more difficult than we think. Usually, it's people, and all their messy personal issues, that gum up the works. The good news is, is that I am actually accomplishing more than I did, when I was younger. I'm devoting less energy, and it is often more frustrating, but shit gets done. A big reason, is that I understand myself, and the people around me, a lot better than I used to. They are no longer "NPCs" in my Game of Life. As to the article, I seriously feel for the author, but I am not exactly in their shoes. I don't have anything against them, but their cause is not my cause. I don't have a dog in this race. I have nothing at all against trans folks. Many of my friends are varying types of LGBTQI+ folks. If I'm not going to bed with them, then who they love, and what they do, when I'm not around, isn't my concern. I'd usually like them to be happy, and support their choices, as long as they don't interfere with my life. I'm even willing to go out of my way, in some cases, to support them (that's what friends do). The one thing that is almost guaranteed to make our cause to go floop, is insisting that everyone else is either with us, or against us. This is especially annoying, when our cause is important to only a small minority of stakeholders. For some reason, almost everyone in our life ends up in the "against" column, and many of them started as people that actually supported us, but weren't willing to go much farther than that. So now, they are actively working against us, as we declared them to be "enemy combatants." The "woke" stuff caused exactly this reaction. It's not just left-leaning stuff, either. Activists of every stripe, do the same thing, and then act all puzzled, as to why everyone seems to be against them. As Dr. Phil might say, "So...how's that working out for you?"
• andrewflnr 2y ago
  You should have finished reading PG's essay. It's really quite narrowly scoped. There's no indication I could see that he doesn'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 "leftist I don't like", and put them in a broader context. 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't. Everyone is on a hair trigger.
  • spokaneplumb 2y ago
    This one’s footnote #2 addresses PG’s definition of “woke”, which I agree is useless (I’d go further: that kind’s so inconsequential that it’s nonsense to bring it up unless you’re using those complaints to attack other actions that do maybe have some justification, using the definition as cover to retreat to if called out; if that’s actually the only part you’re complaining about, just don’t write the piece, everyone already dislikes that kind for the same reasons you do)
    • natch 2y ago
      What is “that kind” referring to? That kind of essay? The first essay? The response essay? That kind of definition? The author? Which author? That kind of person who is aggressively performative? If by “that kind” you mean that last definition, then let’s take one example in that happened recently and address your claim that “that kind” is inconsequential. Undemocratically, performatively, anointing behind closed doors a weak but social justice signaling candidate to run on the democratic ticket in the recent US election, seems to have been just a wee bit consequential.
      • spokaneplumb 2y ago
        > Undemocratically, performatively, anointing behind closed doors a weak but social justice signaling candidate to run on the democratic ticket You’re just stringing together bingo-card words. I don’t think this is going to be a productive exchange, so I’ll leave things where they stand.
• JohnMakin 2y ago
  I feel this a lot, not so much from the perspective of someone that belongs to a formerly "protected" group, but came into tech at the height of the tech revenge-of-the-nerds style "zeitgeist" in the early 2010'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's wanted a $200 million company. Poof. That put a bitter taste in my mouth that has gotten more bitter when the "promise" of a society led by technocrats has yielded a barrage of increasingly shitty and invasive products that don't provide any additional utility to anyone except the people who stand to profit from them. It'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's gone.
• neom 2y ago
  It's complicated isn't it? A business doesn't care about you. It doesn't because it can't. Business doesn'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'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's complicated because business doesn't, shouldn't, and can'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's not easy to know when to be clinical in look at the business, especially knowing it'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: https://b.h4x.zip/dei/ https://b.h4x.zip/dei/
  • Angostura 2y ago
    I disagree with your axiom that businesses shouldn’t have feelings. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a business that feels it should treat its workforce kindly and ethically and recruit a diverse set of people.
    • neom 2y ago
      How can a business feel that? You mean a founder? a ceo? the investors? The laywers? People who are running business at $500MM+ arr have 4 things to consider distinctly, with their own lenses and frames: The business- It's model, it's operations, defined processes etc, every monday this report comes in, it is read by this functional area, it's converted into this insight, the insight is used, the consumer is delighted, more money comes in, the cycle continues. The humans involved are relevant so much as they must be able to do the task, who the literally are doesn't particularly matter, it's just a resource to allow a cog to spin. The company - the people inside the business. The organizations - how the people are assemble continually. The market - customers etc. If you observe the business "feeling" - done correctly, what you're observing the outcome of an evaluation process that decided it functioned more competitively in a different mode. (The best world class employees are in Spain, lets make our HR more diverse in it's language) A business cannot, should not, and does not, have feelings. The only place ethics technically come into play are in the context of law. It's nuanced, but it's important, without being fully fleshed in your framings, things get muddy. Businesses are systems and processes that fairly and adequately serve the parties involved while hedging out individual humans.
• spacechild1 2y ago
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  • fallingknife 2y ago
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    • ternnoburn 2y ago
      In no universe is Musk a centrist.
      • fallingknife 2y ago
        Name a far right position that he holds
        • monocasa 2y ago
          Support for AfD, the German Neo Nazi party.
          • spacechild1 2y ago
            ... and every other right wing movement in Europe. I would also say that supporting Trump is not exactly a centrist thing to do. BTW: AfD are far right, but I wouldn't call them a Neo Nazi party (although some members certainly are). Examples for true Neo Nazi parties would be "Die Heimat" (formerly known as NPD) or "Freie Sachsen".
        • ternnoburn 2y ago
          Nick Fuentes is celebrating the "Nazi salute" (his words) musk did on stage this week. If you have actually neo Nazis saying you did a nazi salute, and you have leftists saying you did a Nazi salute...
    • spacechild1 2y ago
      Nice bait :)
• kristianc 2y ago
  Can't help but OP might have been better engaging with PG's Wokeness article itself (it's full of holes, and probably one of the weakest he's written), than talking about what they think the article said made them feel. Ironically the Wokeness article does what most people accuse "wokeness" of doing, predetermining its conclusion, and then shoehorning in a bunch of loosely connected facts and phenomena to support that assertion.
  • ternnoburn 2y ago
    It's not a direct criticism of the PG article, the OP is examining a broader cultural phenomena right now. PGs scribbles were just one example.
  • spokaneplumb 2y ago
    > Ironically the Wokeness article does what most people accuse "wokeness" of doing, predetermining its conclusion, and then shoehorning in a bunch of loosely connected facts and phenomena to support that assertion. This basic approach underpins the pop-business and some of the pop-science industry. Plus much of self-help. And a good chunk of popular political books, of course. It’s a winning approach, lots of folks read that kind of thing and nod along, are glad they paid money for it, and recommend that others do the same. Even the “good” books in those genres are often guilty of it :-/ Motivated reasoning, cheap rhetorical tricks, and half-fake but digestible and uncomplicated history/facts are how you “win” the war of ideas.
  • imperfect_blue 2y ago
    OP wrote: > 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...I’ve been feeling quite anxious ever since. It feels like the world is crumbling around me. ...as if this sort of mental fragility is something normal. This is the sort of mentality I've come to associate with woke and prig culture. In my experience, the more "woke" a community is, the more these sort of hysterics are accepted, normalized, even celebrated - to the point of caricature. Part of it is that in those communities, the more "oppressed" you are, the higher status you are accorded, and the subconscious status-seeking primate part of your brain notices this, and molds your thoughts and feelings accordingly. While those on the right also play up their victimhood, it's not held in high status in their communities. You'd get outrage and compassion playing up victimhood in right-leaning communities, but in left-leaning communities you also get more moral weight when you're upset. The result, I think, is that the American left is genuinely less happy with the world, and more likely to echo doomer sentiments.
• JDEW 2y ago
  > Are “identity politics” just a status game that economically advantaged elites play? Yes. But it's a disgrace that we're throwing the baby (genuine progress, like the slow acceptance of non-binary people) out with the bathwater.
  • natch 2y ago
    Huge pretending going on though that we are doing this. We are not throwing away the baby. There is nuance and people are pretending there is not. I support trans people but also support safety for all people. There are some nuanced details when you get to reality, and we can’t just pretend those away. The symptoms or pretending are things like not finishing the essay, or not even reading far enough to uncover PG’s definition near the beginning, so it had to become a footnote later when someone told them about it.
    • deleted 2y ago
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• femiagbabiaka 2y ago
  My sympathies to the author. I’ve had more than a few moments of disillusionment myself. But it’s always better to be aware and disillusioned than unaware and happy.
• bryant 2y ago
  My guess is there are two possibilities as to what's going on: * Many tech pioneers and leaders deep down felt an animosity towards supporting people who didn't fit the mold and finally feel free to express it (the worst-case outcome), and/or * Many tech pioneers and leaders wish to continue supporting those who don't fit the mold but feel their own status threatened by figures with nearly infinite power[0] who disagree. The former are simply the intolerant coming up for air. The latter exhibit a cowardice, though there'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't be known for a while, and it'll be difficult to predict who's acting subversively in this way. Though given PG's narrowly scoped essay, there's a reasonable chance that this is his footing. 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/or protect oneself from the rising tides of hatred. [0] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
  • _1tem 2y ago
    Or maybe the world is simply returning to the way it has been for pretty much all of recorded history. Wars, male dominance, two fixed genders, oligarchs and barons and racism is the norm for all human beings since forever. “Wokeness” is a very recent anomaly.
    • tclancy 2y ago
      You probably need to read more history, and maybe challenge yourself to find sources, if you think those things were always widely true everywhere.
      • _1tem 2y ago
        Even most of the world right now doesn’t care about wokeness and never has. India, the Middle East, Africa, China, Russia etc. never caught on to most woke stuff that came out of the west in the past 20 years.
• ethbr1 2y ago
  Great, cohesive, and clear essay! Hear hear. One thing that I think is underappreciated in our current times, that gets lost on both the left and the right sides -- an individual is more important than their identity. - A specific trans person can also be an asshole. - A specific white man can also be a saint. 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 "them" category to which blanket statements, positive or negative, can be applied. That reductionism feels incredibly insulting to our shared, innate humanity. Are there all kinds of subconscious and societal biases that seriously influence our perceptions of others on the basis of their identity? Sure! But it doesn't change the goal of treating the person standing in front of you, first and foremost and always, as an individual person. Be curious. Be courteous and respectful. Be a normal, nice goddamn human to human across the table from you. (And maybe, if you feel so inclined, have some compassion about what they did to get to that table)
  • gedpeck 2y ago
    Be curious. Be courteous and respectful. Be a normal, nice goddamn human to human across the table from you. In general I wholeheartedly agree. But if the person in front of you has done or advocated for things that cause harm or is themself a horrible person then I disagree.
    • ethbr1 2y ago
      Fair, but in our current times using someone's identity as a justification to act like an asshole to them is a sith's whisper. We all have our less enlightened moments. Better we not afford ourselves easy intellectual justifications for being our worst selves. As the quip goes: the greatest evils are perpetrated by those most assured of their own righteousness. Edit: Or in video form. Beginning summary: "brick suit guy" was apparently an extremely aggressive heckler of the media at Trump rallies. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fRSIv7alUZ8&t=95s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fRSIv7alUZ8&t=95s
      • gedpeck 2y ago
• jiriknesl 2y ago
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• transcriptase 2y ago
  >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. … >I’m still not sure what pg thinks “Wokeness” means Hmm
  • skywhopper 2y ago
    The point he’s making is that Paul did not explain what he thinks “wokeness” means in a coherent way. Which is true.
    • ternnoburn 2y ago
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      • axiomo 2y ago
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    • transcriptase 2y ago
      How could she know if she didn’t read it.
    • anonfordays 2y ago
      Paul most definitely explained what he thinks "wokeness" means in a coherent way. The author has an malformed opinion on a piece he claimed to not read in its entirety.
• deleted 2y ago
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• slibhb 2y ago
  I thought this was better than most essays in this vein. 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't stop them. The whole "war on hate" thing was a bad idea; you can't forbid hatred. It predictably didn't work, and it's good that we're turning away from it. Adding on, the trans issue isn't simple. There are real questions about bathrooms, women'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't work. The proper response is -- in the spirit of the new era of free speech -- to firmly state your opposition to their beliefs.
  • DeathRay2K 2y ago
    You’re wrong that a so-called “war on hate” doesn’t work. More correctly, it doesn’t work in the US because of the first amendment and the few limitations on it. Many other countries have robust anti-hate speech laws that are effective, although less so in the age of the internet. People broadly conform to the society in which they live, and the rules of the society are broadly set by the laws they adhere to. So in countries where hate speech is disallowed, people conform to a less hateful viewpoint as a rule, and hateful people are the exception. In the United States, it is clear that hatred is the norm as long as it is permitted by law and by leadership.
    • yodsanklai 2y ago
      > it doesn’t work in the US because of the first amendment and the few limitations on it. This isn't clear to me. For instance, Meta was free to forbid hate speech on their platforms, or not to promote it in their feed algorithms. I don't think first amendment would force them to authorize hate speech. They do it to align with power in place (freely or coerced, not clear), but it's not a legal enforcement. > So in countries where hate speech is disallowed, people conform to a less hateful viewpoint as a rule, and hateful people are the exception. There are hateful people in Europe too.
    • raincole 2y ago
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• whack 2y ago
  I appreciate the author and this article. As an immigrant and person of color, the author's concerns resonate with me. I don'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. 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's place in it.
  • rchaud 2y ago
    While I understand the point you're making, I am surprised by the examples you chose. What Bush's speechwriter wrote, did not stop Bush from authorizing torture stations across the world, murdering hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians in two failed military occupations, while weakening America vis-a-vis Russia and China, a confrontation that has dominated the past several years. Do not mistake public statements as any indication of actual policy. As for McCain, his words were "No Ma'am, he is not an Arab, he is a decent family man", which I suppose is addressing misinformation with a decisiveness Republicans wouldn't dream of today.
    • justin66 2y ago
      > As for McCain, his words were "No Ma'am, he is not an Arab, he is a decent family man", which I suppose is addressing misinformation with a decisiveness Republicans wouldn't dream of today. To be precise: they'd oppose the misinformation if they felt it was to their benefit, embrace it if they felt it was to their benefit, or behave neutrally towards the misinformation when it was brought to their attention... if they felt that was to their benefit.
  • inglor_cz 2y ago
    "who told America that Islam is a religion of peace" This is something I considered a brazen lie in the interest of stability. I believe in existence of individual peaceful Muslims, but I don't believe in inherent peacefulness of a religion founded by a warrior who converted Arabia by the sword and which had since seen an endless series of holy wars initiated in the name of Islam. You can't really build societal understanding on a foundation of such misinformation. To be clear, Christianity and Judaism aren't "religions of peace" either. Some explicitly anti-militaristic sects like the Amish maybe. But the Abrahamic faiths as such, no.
• hnthrow90348765 2y ago
  This made me unreasonably annoyed, not from the author though. >The mentors applied a neat and very effective trick: they believed in you. It's crazy to me that the LeetCode interview style is still such an aberration compared to other jobs that yield potentially much more money Do you want to be a Software Engineer at this company? We don't trust you, the previous company could have let you in under the radar and you could secretly be a terrible engineer. Do you want to run a SaaS and make us and yourself a bunch of money? Welcome aboard, we trust you completely once you're in. Just change your company name to fucking Oracle, ha ha ha. This industry is such an imbalance of misplaced scrutiny, and certainly more so when they get into political stuff like wokeness. If you're pg rich, just shut the fuck up.
• dachworker 2y ago
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  • phillmv 2y ago
    If it's any comfort, I'm also an immigrant who was raised in a single parent household. When we last (it's a long story) moved to Canada, I had to share a bed with my dad for a while. We were never actually poor, poor, at risk. I never skipped meals, or lacked for clothing, though certainly that was a living memory my grandparents had. It was never in question that I would attend university. Privilege is intersectional blah blah, there are layers to things. I'm not of the dominant Anglo culture, I have an "ethnic" last name, I don't have the same connections people who grew up upper-middle class do. But people certainly see me as white, I'm smart, and I built my career as a bearded guy. Living as a bearded white guy is just a lot easier, it presents a lot less friction, than being gender non-conforming. That's it, really.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • Angostura 2y ago
    I think the only controversial thing there is your belief that privilege is a binary attribute, rather than multidimensional
  • raincole 2y ago
    But if you consider humanity as a whole, even the lowest decile US citizens are extremely privileged in terms of economic state. Even if you live on food bank, you're still much more privileged than most humans. So either all western people can't complain at all without being hypocrite, or we need to accept that one can be privileged in one way but vulnerable in another way.
  • axiomo 2y ago
    [flagged]
• snowwrestler 2y ago
  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. 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't change who they are, doesn'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. 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's not fair to force them to do so. And it doesn't help anyone around them either.
  • coderc 2y ago
    It seems to me that prigs, as defined in pg's article, are just jumping on the transgender issue because it's an easy way for them to enforce rules. From my understanding, having read both articles, PG might say that the prigs have chosen to ride the lgbt movement. The problem is not with the lgbt movement itself. Unfortunately, this gives the movement a bad reputation. Some prigs aren't lgbt people at all, but they speak on behalf of them, as they also speak on behalf of other groups that they aren't a part of. Some prigs might actually be a part of the minority they speak for, but I would hazard a guess, based on no data, and say that these are the minority of all prigs. I think PG's problem is with the prigs, not the lgbt movement itself. Can these be separated?
    • snowwrestler 2y ago
      Self-congratulatory, self-righteous prigs are all over the place within human society. When people complain about them, the substantive content of their complaint is the context in which they issue it. For example pg is complaining about the prigs who nag everyone about transgender acceptance, but not the prigs who nag everyone to reject and abuse transgender people. Matters of speech, manners, and decorum are convenient ways to launder the advocacy of a certain set of values. All you have to do is accuse your enemies of violation when they advocate, and stay silent when your allies apply the same tactics. In order to consistently navigate politics, one needs to start with one's own values. That's why I posted my comment above. The core issue for me is whether transgender people can show up in their preferred gender. Not whether other people are annoying jerks when they talk about that question. There are plenty of annoying jerks on both sides of any value question, if one has the open eyes to see them.
• phillmv 2y ago
  I was genuinely afraid of this post hitting HN, but thank you for the kind words.
  • solfox 2y ago
    This is a very important conversation to have right now. Thank you for your vulnerability in sharing it.
  • dungenn 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • tmearnest 2y ago
    I was terrified to look up through the comments after reading the article, but HN truly surprised me today.
  • mkaic 2y ago
    As someone pondering the exact same sentiment of "I like women so much that I kinda want to be one" but who hasn't fully committed to it yet, I really appreciated your vulnerability and lucid writing. I hope folks are kind here in the comments. > It took me a while to remove my facial hair, I still haven’t trained my voice. The facial hair removal really does take forever, it's so annoying :sob:. And I've found voice training (particularly around other people) to be really intimidating. I wish you the best of luck if you decide to pursue it! Take care, OP.
    • thr48833rway 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • phillmv 2y ago
      Hi, thanks! My unsolicited advice is: whether they realize it or not, _everyone transitions_ ;) http://okayfail.com/garden/everyone-transitions.html http://okayfail.com/garden/everyone-transitions.html I came out socially for most of a year before I committed to hormones, and it took me another year and a half to commit to removing my facial hair. At some point it really is a leap of faith. But you can do a lot of exploring and trying things out until you feel comfortable – or decide it's not really what you want. Either way, good luck!
• lubujackson 2y ago
  I'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. First, the brief "woke" movement which was soon taken by the right and extrapolated to the extreme. It's the same tactic used by the right for any issue - when I was a kid it was "if gays can marry, then they will want to marry their pets." They take whatever social progress has been made and push it until the concept annoys >50% of people then say "that's what the left wants." But I can't get behind the left's approach of highlighting and siloing every sub-group. It just simplifies division and is counter to all the American "melting pot" concepts that actually worked over many decades to integrate immigrants and normalize differences. I don't know where all of this leads, but it certainly doesn't feel like progress is ever made or even really desired, only a cycling of hot button issues to distract everyone.
  • Angostura 2y ago
    It’s not really a left- right issue, as far as I’m concerned. It’s people with empathy v those without.
  • watwut 2y ago
    I dont think transgender are in the crosshairs of a political proxy battle. The issues is that many people feel disgust and hate over the idea of transgender. And whenever they become visible, they lash out and react.
    • axiomo 2y ago
      It's more the behavior of trans activists that gets people riled up. There's really no need for men who say they're women to be going around conquering everything that's for women and then admonishing people as bigots or transphobic when they object to this. Instead they could, you know, just live their lives peacefully without launching attack after attack on women's rights. It'd be better for everyone.
      • watwut 2y ago
• vasilipupkin 2y ago
  "why go out of your way to remove them" in principle, it'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' bathrooms, really?
  • Angostura 2y ago
    If someone was born biological any male and is transitioning and still has periods, it seems useful, so why not?
    • vasilipupkin 2y ago
      how many people like this did meta have who had this issue and also had no access to a tampon, so that having it in mens' bathroom specifically was really important? what if I am a forgetful guy and I have socks with holes in them and I forget to buy new socks. Should meta bathrooms stock those socks? at some point this just becomes a bit absurd, no?
      • Angostura 2y ago
        Do Meta bathrooms currently stock socks? No, so its a silly analogy. As to the question of 'how many people did this serve?' I imagine a very small number. The shocking cost to Meta was a box of tampons that probably needed to be replaced every 10 years. They've gone out of their way to remove this cost at the expense of making that small number of employees feel comfortable.
        • vasilipupkin 2y ago
          It's not a silly analogy. It illustrates the absurdity of accommodating every kind of small group of employees.
  • timeon 2y ago
    Why does it bothers you?
• asabjorn 2y ago
  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. 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.
• James_K 2y ago
  It'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'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's really no surprise that they are easily influenced by the winds of fashion; you don't get rich by taking a stand. [1] Footnote 12, https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html#f12n https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html#f12n
  • spokaneplumb 2y ago
    You may enjoy “Dabblers and Blowhards” from IdleWords, if you’re not already familiar with it. https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm Reading that helped me come to terms with how most of the time when I read PG essays I was a lot less impressed than everyone else seemed to be, and often (any time the topic wasn’t narrowly tech or maaaybe business) his writing struck me as actually bad—not well-reasoned, not convincing, and giving an impression of his being poorly-informed. When I experience an author everyone else is praising that way, I wonder if I’m the moron. But, sometimes, maybe I’m not…
    • James_K 2y ago
      Thanks, a very good read. Made me chuckle a lot. I've always found Paul's obsession with being a "hacker" rather annoying.
  • next_xibalba 2y ago
    > tech bros are slowly sliding to the right I see many people confidently and incuriously throw this idea around, meanwhile many of the tech bros are saying “no, I haven’t shifted all that much , the left just went crazy”. [1] I’m not sure which claim is “correct”. Probably breaks one way or another on an individual basis. But it does seem like we should probably give people some credit for introspection versus mind reading. [1] The following cartoon has been shared by many and distills the idea well: https://x.com/swipewright/status/1462114108535312388?s=46&t=YiVUpqq2FViI3dUv9obV5A https://x.com/swipewright/status/1462114108535312388?s=46&t=...
• bedlamb 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • bingaweek 2y ago
    [dead]
• benrutter 2y ago
  This is a really personal article and I'm really grateful the author shared it. I think too often conceptual terms like "wokeness" and "identity politics" get thrown around without really considering the people underlying those ideas. It's easy to make snap judgements along the lines of "the world is too woke these days", but a lot harder to argue against peoples ability to live as they choose with basic dignity.
• ndesaulniers 2y ago
  Link to the essay in question: https://paulgraham.com/woke.html https://paulgraham.com/woke.html
• subarctic 2y ago
  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's personality and making him seem very relatable, at least if you are a typical HN reader. And it's a good story and didn't have me thinking "get to the point", especially since the title doesn't make you expect anything more than a good story. Then halfway down, he drops the words "I'm transgender now" and you start to realize what he/she is really writing about. 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. PG's essay about wokeness, on the other hand, didn'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 "woke" end of the spectrum like this author.
  • crimsoneer 2y ago
    Hard agree, the writing here is exceptional.
  • wastle 2y ago
    [flagged]
• tmountain 2y ago
  Earlier in my (now long) career, tech didn'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 "tech bros on the right", 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's always been a discipline that I've really loved. It feels like "hate politics" are oozing out of everything these days, and I don't see how that represents progress of any kind.
  • tokioyoyo 2y ago
    There’s just more money in tech than in 2000s, so the most interest is mostly coming from financial incentives rather than general curiosity. That just puts extreme pressure for it to be politicized.
• Nevermark 2y ago
  There are a lot of things that bother me these days. But particularly some things that are pervasive, unnecessary, habitual amplifiers of disagreement. If someone is going to address extremists on an issue, don't just be anti-extremist. What empty courage is that? Address extremists by pushing the dialog back to the real issue. In this case, treating people who have been denigrated for centuries better. 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. And completely distract from the real human level issues that are being hijacked. Don'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? PG, any thoughts? Please, don't call out "your going too far!" - no matter how necessary or accurately - if you don't have the courage, insight, or a genuine desire to solve the underlying problem. And express "how far" you agree we should go. Don't just poke a bear. Address the elephant!. -- One-sided viewpoints just make an easy sport, score trivial (dare I say, also performative?) points, out of something more serious. I.e. don'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. I hope I don't offend anyone by suggesting that any intellectually honest discussion of divisive views cannot possibly boil down to one-sided criticisms of other people's one-sided views.
  • rexpop 2y ago
    You make a good point that no one else had, afaik: PG is strawmanning, and not steelmanning his opponents. This is craven.
    • Nevermark 2y ago
      So much said, with such fewer words ... :) And giving voice to power vs. power, instead of to the less powerful. Reduced by both "sides" to pawns, their needs to playing cards.
  • 2y ago
• richrichie 2y ago
  Are you the "ordinary people" he was referring to in a recent tweet @ Musk?
• 23B1 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • benatkin 2y ago
    He doesn’t want to let people at a big NGO give their own opinion on J. K. Rowling: https://x.com/paulg/status/1866497580466942269 https://x.com/paulg/status/1866497580466942269 Says it's Orwellian. So he also seems outspoken, by your standard. He couldn’t stop at “Hi! This is what I think about J. K. Rowling...” A lot of this comes down to the difference between freedom of speech and platforming. I’m sure we’ll still be arguing about it in 2050.
• stupid_men 2y ago
  [flagged]
• ryanisnan 2y ago
  I appreciate this post, and that HN clearly isn't moderating it in a way outside of their stated policies. 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?
  • metabagel 2y ago
    > where does the real virtue start and the performance begin This reminds me of when people criticize other people for not simply being themselves. Maybe they are being themselves, and that's just not good enough for you? The argument against "virtue signaling" is a judgement against doing something which the critic doesn't think is beneficial or necessary, and so they conclude it must be performative. But, the person doing it thinks it is beneficial or necessary. Thus, the critic is failing to allow for a different view. Not that they have to accept the different view, but they should at least be able to recognize that someone else has a different view than their own. But, they can't or won't.
• rchaud 2y ago
  Having read many of PG'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 "hacker" 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 "high-touch B2B sales"? They concern themselves with accumulating power first, and maintaining their "innovator" 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 "gays and minorities" 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. Back to PG, see his essay from some years ago, "How People Get Rich Now"[0]. You would think it was ghost-written by an investment bank's IPO division. Every single line is another way of saying "raise money for speculative bet, then go public", 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. A response to that essay from a software engineer provided a sobering perspective to counterbalance the winner-take-all world PG lives in. [1] [0] https://paulgraham.com/richnow.html https://paulgraham.com/richnow.html [1] https://keenen.xyz/just-be-rich/ https://keenen.xyz/just-be-rich/ (HN discussion link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40962965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40962965)
  • notahacker 2y ago
    tbf, "high touch B2B sales" is very much something a quite ordinary hacker doing quite ordinary B2B stuff is likely to want to figure out unless they're already quite good at it or know someone else that is, and I'm sure some of the suggestions are "hacky" in ways with both positive and negative connotations. But yeah, he's always ultimately been an outspoken advocate for the most optimistic outcomes Silicon Valley ecosystem, because that's where his startup funnel leads. See also his article from 2004 in which he suggested that a startup was a way to work at a high intensity for four(!) years instead of forty[1]. Wonder what proportion of YC alumni retired happy after the four year work life? I'm sure if you actually met PG in office hours he'd be realistic enough that your most realistic exit strategy almost certainly involved a lot more than four years of hard work and that yeah, your chances of success probably aren't high enough to impact the Gini coefficient, and I'm sure if you were trans he wouldn't take the side of people that send death threats to Budweiser for featuring people like you. But most of the essays are about positioning Silicon Valley. In a sense, he's a low touch, very high stakes B2B salesperson [1]https://paulgraham.com/wealth.html https://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
• rexpop 2y ago
  > 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. I would like to see more of the HN caste engage with the very notion of a caste system, but I can'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.
• patresh 2y ago
  Some of the disagreement or confusion seems to stem from the definition of the word "woke" which means different things to different people? Having read both essays I don't see them necessarily in disagreement. pg criticizes the performative and orthodox nature of some social justice activists' behavior, however it doesn't seem that the author's behavior here is performative at all. Perhaps we should just avoid these terms like "woke" 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.
  • junto 2y ago
    If they’d named “wokeness” to be “kindness” or “considerate”, then there would be people who would still have found a way to be “anti-considerate”, and mean it as a “good” thing. In some circles, someone being gay or trans will always be a sin, and non-whites seen as “lesser beings” (both their views not mine). As it stands, these people vote more consistently for the same party and in larger numbers. We should hire the right people for the right job, but let’s be honest, in cultures where the majority perceive such minorities in disgust through lack of education and bigotry, they are unlikely to hire them regardless of whether they were better fit the job or not. DEI should have been left at a reminder checking your own biases. Instead in many organizations it spiraled into minority preferential hiring, and that caused a backlash, and rightly so. Where do we go from here? Who knows. My hope is that we find kindness and consideration for each other, but since the incoming administration has experienced such success from beating the anti-woke drum, I fear that it won’t be such a nice ending.
    • anonfordays 2y ago
      >If they’d named “wokeness” to be “kindness” or “considerate”, then there would be people who would still have found a way to be “anti-considerate”, and mean it as a “good” thing. "If we name our religion the Religion of Peace..." This line of illogic has been memed for years: https://imgflip.com/i/67qfsz https://imgflip.com/i/67qfsz
      • 2y ago
• deleted 2y ago
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• bun_terminator 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • tmpacct4 2y ago
    [flagged]
• cdelsolar 2y ago
  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't been part of the program. During the conversation I said something, he looked and me and said "I have no idea what you just said", then turned back to my cofounder and kept chatting. o_O
• jhp123 2y ago
  I'm not a target of tech'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't care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are. 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's room—will he also remove open source code written by queer people from his company? Of course not.
  • cmos 2y ago
    It's time for tech to go back to its roots and starve the kings and 'noblemen' of our talent. Stop working for billionaires.
    • neom 2y ago
      Remains to be seen, but attention_is_all_you_need.pdf might put a kink in your plan.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • aclimatt 2y ago
    Amazing what a little (a lot of) money and power can do to a culture. Some of our worst traits come out when we're all of a sudden in charge.
  • itsoktocry 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • enragedcacti 2y ago
      So a person you knew personally for years asked for your respect and understanding of an extremely difficult and personal decision, and you thought "Wow, I didn't care about this 5 minutes ago but now I've decided to get really bitter and vindictive about it"
• spinach 2y ago
  [flagged]
• bsetlow 2y ago
  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.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• lr4444lr 2y ago
  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 Footnote [3] is: A small minority of people really do need to be taught how to be kind. 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 everyone 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. It was more than just "hollow" in many instances. It was blatant witch hunting that ruined careers and personal lives via internet virality. If PG's greatest offense in fighting back against this was an obtusely chosen word like "woke", that's pretty minor.
• croisillon 2y ago
  But the Appcanary was not a bad idea, isn't website monitoring a lucrative market (see New Relic)? Too crowded?
• mellosouls 2y ago
  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. 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 external causes like a conspiracy of bigotry and malevolence. In reality, such feelings often stem from an unrealistic internal denial of the natural (painful) "othering" of outlier behaviour or identity, something that can only be mitigated through education and maturity, and pragmatic reasonableness on both sides. 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.
  • metabagel 2y ago
    > 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. This sounds like the criticisms of MLK, Jr. and other civil rights activists for always stirring things up. People who want change tend to stir things up. That being said, I think you exaggerate about the toxic behaviors of the "woke" movement. Certainly, you must be referring to online, because I can't think of when I have ever experienced any of that offline. If you're talking about Twitter, then I guess I could believe it, because that place is toxic as hell.
• countarthur 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • ivraatiems 2y ago
    If it's not meant to be a snarky attack or insult, how is it supposed to be meant? Is it so unthinkable to you that someone's spouse could support them transitioning? That reads like projection, maybe, to me.
    • countarthur 2y ago
      It's not unthinkable, but in practise there's usually strong pressure in play: sunk cost fallacy, children to support, the threat of social ostracism. This is mostly true for wives rather than husbands because of female socialisation (this is sadly where gender actually becomes relevant!). As the author himself says: "It turns out that I like women so much I’d like to be one of them" That's not how sex works. I like women a lot too: liking them a lot doesn't mean you want to be one, that's called autogynephilia and can be treated with talking therapy. However if it's a true expression of his attitudes and preferences then perhaps if his wife decided to masculinise her appearance e.g. injecting testosterone to deeper her voice, cause male-associated health growth, have elective surgical interventions like a double mastectomy, he wouldn't receive it as well as his wife seems to have. That's definitely speculation on my part of course! To answer your original question about how it's supposed to be meant: it won't matter one jot what any investors he once met may think or not think about his lifestyle choices if he's trying to impose a fantasy on his wife.
      • ivraatiems 2y ago
        Autogynephilia is a long-discredited theory, though I suspect from the content of your posts that you would deride any more recent work as being politically or socially biased. Let's assume it isn't, though. The inventor of the concept, Ray Blanchard, spent decades helping people transition. He didn't use talk therapy to talk them out of it! He developed one of the first protocols for figuring out whether a trans woman needed hormones! From his Wikipedia page: > Blanchard supports public funding of sex reassignment surgery as an appropriate treatment for transsexual people, as he believes the available evidence supports that the surgery helps them live more comfortably and happily, with high satisfaction rates. Even Blanchard would absolutely not describe a trans person as just "liking women a lot" and leave it at that. The premise that a trans woman is "just living a fantasy" isn't true and was widely recognized as not true even by previous generations of investigators on the topic. I don't understand why you insist on it. -- We're also speaking in another thread, but that thread got flagged (not by me), so I'll put my reply to it here. All of this sort of handwaves past my point, though. Maybe you are right about the actual number of intersex people. My point is that it's a small but non-zero number. We can just talk about the number of "ambiguous" people, e. g. people where you can't immediately discern their physical biology from the way they present themselves to you. Would you agree that number is at least 1%? > As to your question as to why does "woman" have to mean "adult human female" - because that's the dictionary definition. But the dictionary definition can change, and in fact, has. Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and Cambridge have all made adjustments to the term to encompass the idea of transition, gender fluidity, etc. Your original term is the primary definition but not at all the only one. Putting cards on the table: I don't believe that if the dictionary changed its definition, you would change yours. It seems to me you'd deride them for "being political" or "bowing to pressure" or somesuch. I think you are using your definitions for "woman" and "female" because you prefer them, not because you believe the dictionary is an arbitrator of truth. > Notice that arguments about the treatment of "intersex" people (those with disorders/differences of sexual development) are used to buttress the position of people who feel like they're the other sex, but are otherwise biologically completely normal. Trans people aren't always or often biologically "completely normal"; numerous studies have revealed potential biological bases for gender dysphoria, related to issues with hormones and other development in the womb. They only look normal to you, which goes to my next point: > I totally agree with you that there are some people whose sex is hard to judge immediately, often, but not always, because they've gone out of their way to make it ambiguous. Everyone else can be clocked at 100 feet in a dark alley - we're evolved that way. [...] > A few awkward social faux pas over people who look or act androgynous - for whatever reason - doesn't justify exploding a category that works and serves everyone well almost all of the time. I don't feel guilty over my use of sexed pronouns even if I occasionally get it wrong and this insistence that I should... isn't convincing. I don't know that you completely understood the scenario I was suggesting. Here is an image of Brian Michael Smith, a transmasculine actor: https://ew.com/thmb/vJSjLdP7CReb9n_px75hvqj5yYI=/1500x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/brian-michael-smith-033123-b6693e01de764625bc28c16fd8b12fe5.jpg https://ew.com/thmb/vJSjLdP7CReb9n_px75hvqj5yYI=/1500x0/filt... If you saw this person walking towards you, and you thought they were a man, and then later found out they were actually transmasculine, would you feel guilty for not referring to them with she/her? Would you correct yourself to referring to them as she/her afterwards, even in conversation with them? Why or why not?
• Quasidomo 2y ago
  [flagged]
• jedberg 2y ago
  > 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. 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. PG is a smart guy, but you gotta trust your gut sometimes even when taking to experts.
  • rhubarbtree 2y ago
    I think PG was correct here about Oracle, as it leaves the door open to being a much bigger product rather than being too niche, which ironically sounds like the reason the company failed. You can imagine lots of situations in deployment where having a monitoring “source of judgement” about running systems could be developed. Not just security, but say performance, efficiency, cost. It’s not explained in the essay why the author was so certain PG was wrong. If PG hated “Reddit” and the mascot, I would say he was correct again. Reddit could have been a much bigger idea, but the branding excludes a lot of demographics and types of content. It helps to make Reddit what it is, but also what it is not. That can be helpful, but in the startup game you want to be biased towards generality: “Google”, “Apple” not “websearchengine” or “foundit” or “homecomputerco” or “appyphone.” It’s a bit like being a good coder: you develop a sense of test for elegance, simplicity, leaving the door open to expansion… and it sounds like PG has (unsurprisingly) refined taste in naming.
• financypants 2y ago
  I like the shape of your prose!
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• spacecadet 2y ago
  The industry has become very unsettling, mean, and malicious. For 20 years I have warned people about the old "we are changing the world" mantra and that the people leading that chant were "evil", and therefore "change" would not be aligned with good... and here we are. Remember kids. Change and progress are extremely subjective.
• low_tech_love 2y ago
  "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." 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'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) "if you don't like it, why don't you leave?". And what really makes this ten times worse is that the country I'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'm some kind of spoiled child. Half the time I even convince myself of that.
  • troad 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • minitech 2y ago
      going to start introducing all my straw men with “according to the Internet” and closing all my arguments with “if you downvote me it’s because you’re triggered” now, thank you for this neat trick
      • troad 2y ago
        [flagged]
  • faraggi 2y ago
    Do you happen to live in Switzerland?
    • 2y ago
• the_clarence 2y ago
  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. I don't like someone telling me "God bless you" as much as someone forcing me to pretend they're a different gender. Wokism was a movement against discrimination, bullies, and such. Not a movement to force you to adhere to specific communities rules
  • metabagel 2y ago
    > someone forcing me to pretend they're a different gender What is it specifically which you don't want to do? Use their preferred pronoun? In this scenario, who is forcing you and how?
    • next_xibalba 2y ago
      Many examples of people losing jobs, becoming the object of online mobs, etc for refusing to use preferred pronouns. Men participating in women’s sports. Men entering women’s spaces like locker rooms and bath rooms. Men imprisoned alongside women, with predictably horrible results. We can treat trans people with compassion, but they are not entitled to change our culture and trample common sense without slow, careful examination. Now that we’re returning to sanity on that front, the data aren’t looking very good.
      • ModernMech 2y ago
        Legitimate question, according to you, this person should be going into the woman's room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_An... How do you feel about that?
        • next_xibalba 2y ago
          You seem to have ignored that all my examples were of biological men entering women's spaces and activities. A biological female entering men's spaces and activities is far, far less problematic. I for one would have no problem with that person entering a men's restroom or locker room. But I think it's not unreasonable for others to object. I think the pertinent question is, should a person who made the affirmative choice to transition their body via surgery, hormones, etc. have their preferences supersede those of others who were not involved in that choice? This question is a corollary of a deeper question, which is: should a person who insists that material, shared reality is incorrect have the right to force others to participate in their delusion? Should a schizophrenic experiencing visual hallucinations have the right to reorder society in order to accommodate their delusion? The answer is obviously "no". So why then do trans-people have the special right, in the minds of some, to reorder our language, customs, and culture to accommodate their delusions? So, returning to your question, my answer would be, either Buck Angel should use a unisex restroom, or, if none is available, go elsewhere to find one. Here is a sample of what I think are better questions to ask: Should this person be imprisoned alongside biological women? [1] Should these biological males be allowed to compete in women's cycling? [2] Should this man have been imprisoned with women? [3] Should this biological male have been given use of the girls' restroom at his high school? [4] Should this biological male have been given use of womens' restroom? [5] Should this person be imprisoned alongside biological women? [6] Should this biological male have been given access to the girls locker room at his high school? [7] [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-67613441 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-67613441 [2] https://www.nationalreview.com/news/male-cyclists-take-gold-silver-and-bronze-at-womens-competition/ https://www.nationalreview.com/news/male-cyclists-take-gold-... [3] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/man-posing-as-transgender-woman-raped-female-prisoner-at-rikers-lawsuit-says/5067904/ https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/man-posing-as-tran... [4] https://apnews.com/article/loudoun-virginia-lawsuit-transgender-bathroom-sexual-assault-a26168568cc20c2aa6cec9bef50e7c3f https://apnews.com/article/loudoun-virginia-lawsuit-transgen... [5] https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/transgender-woman-convicted-of-sexually-assaulting-10-year-old-girl-in-bathroom https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/transgender-woman-convicte... [6] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-45825838 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-45825838 [7] https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/after-trans-woman-exposed-genitalia-to-freshman-girls-in-locker-room-shower-school-district-faces-legal-scrutiny https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/after-trans-woman-exposed...
• moralestapia 2y ago
  >We returned something like 40 or 45 cents on the dollar to our investors. >I’d be a better startup founder today than I was in 2015. I wonder if that means he's better at losing money now?
• rossdavidh 2y ago
  So I found the author to come across as a sincere and thoughtful individual, but when I went over to actually read PG's essay on wokeness, it didn'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?
• joshdavham 2y ago
  > I’m still not sure what pg thinks “Wokeness” means. So then what is it about his essay that you find so upsetting?
• ajbt200128 2y ago
  Thank you for the breath of fresh air, and helping reduce the echo chamber that hn can be sometimes
• cpncrunch 2y ago
  >We could get people to pay us hundreds of dollars per month, but not thousands 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. >That’s the death knell of a vc-backed b2b saas sales model. >We were too burnt out to pivot to another business idea, and we quietly folded. I guess VC funding killed their successful startup and burned them out. It sounds like they didn't need funding in the first place, and it caused more harm than good in their case.
• m0llusk 2y ago
  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 "socialized medicine". 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?
• Wolfenstein98k 2y ago
  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't fully read it? He does some throat-clearing that help address some of these complaints. It is a very bad essay that says "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".
• riantogo 2y ago
  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.
• LeroyRaz 2y ago
  This take seems to project a massive amount (of negative falsehood) onto Paul Graham'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't actually serve society but instead serve as virtue signals. If you are competent, you'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. 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).
• hartator 2y ago
  Didn’t we agree no more politics on HN? If Trump getting shot doesn’t make on HN, I don’t think Trump announcing his gender policy should.
• elihu 2y ago
  > 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. The funny thing is that Paul Graham has a framework for thinking about these sorts of things, which is explained very eloquently in "beating the averages". He calls it the "Blub paradox". 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't recognize the merits of more powerful languages very easily because the features are unfamiliar and seem like "a bunch of abstract nonsense invented by ivory-tower academics" that have limited real-life application. I think the same thing works for social views. It'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're looking down. But someone who is more "progressive" than they are will usually appear indistinguishable from someone trying to impress their friends with how "woke" they are. 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.
• steele 2y ago
  One way to think of him is a wealthy person unaccustomed to hearing "no" that wants to say whatever they'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.
• sandspar 2y ago
  Interesting contrast. This essay is self-indulgent and the subtext is "I'm important". Paul Graham's essays are economical and the subtext is "the reader is important".
• chlodwig 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • jmeyer2k 2y ago
    Genuinely, how hard for you is it to call a person what they want to be called. What difference does gender make in the workplace even? I understand it's hard for you to use different pronouns, but it's probably much harder for the person who feels like they don't identify with their gender assigned at birth. > Requiring me to call someone who was born with a penis, and who has sired children a "she" is telling me to say that 2 + 2 = 5. It's more like someone telling you to call them John and you call them Tyler instead. It's literally just a word.
    • wastle 2y ago
      If it's just a word and makes no difference then there should be no issue with using "he" to refer to any and all individuals of the male sex.
      • jmeyer2k 2y ago
        Must be hard to have to deal with that, I'm so sorry you have to use a different word when referring to someone. It's obviously much harder for you to use a different pronoun than for them to have their entire gender identity invalidated. Would you like for people to misgender you constantly and purposefully? Your life must be so hard. I feel bad for you to have to use a different word to refer to someone. Maybe have some basic decency and respect for others?
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • wastle 2y ago
          Oh so it does make a difference now? Well then, consider that it really is not my problem if these males are offended by the simple word "he". Have you heard of the Stroop effect? More to the point, I've no interest whatsoever in encouraging a man's fantasy "woman" identity, quite the opposite in fact. Perhaps these men would consider giving women and girls the basic decency and respect of refraining from such misogynistic appropriation. They could even pick another word to describe themselves, given that "woman" is already taken. What's so hard about using a different word?
• anoncow 2y ago
  What Mark and others are doing is performative. And PG seems to be projecting.
• fart_farty_fart 2y ago
  [flagged]
• EGreg 2y ago
  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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
  • ModernMech 2y ago
    I've noticed this as well in the compilers community. Essentially every woman I know in this area is MtF. I can't back this up with science, but my feeling is that because neurodivergence/autism occur at higher rates in males than females, and ND brains are better at abstract reasoning inherent in programming, male born people are drawn to it. I also believe this accounts for the overrepresentation of MtF trans women, because there is definitely an intersection of autism and transgenderism. Which is really ironic because Zuckerberg, Musk, and Gates are all definitely on the spectrum. The current tech power center was created almost entirely by queer autistic neurodivergent weirdos.
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > Moves like Mark’s, and essays like pg’s, create the permission structure for people to discriminate against me. This is key. Many people might say, "come on, Mark's just doing the usual sucking up to the new President" or "Paul's just expressing his views and trying to bring things back into balance.", just like they defend Trump's famous denigration of a disabled person on the campaign trail -- he was just joking, playing to the crowd. 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.
• wisty 2y ago
  I'm suprised that people are super-duper angry at pg's 2025 essay when it's substantially the same as his 2004 essay "what you can't say" - https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html other than using the word "woke". It would have been better if he'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's sports, which thy don't watch anyway).
• mgraczyk 2y ago
  > I’d be a better startup founder today than I was in 2015 You should do a startup then. I think you'll be surprised how little most VCs and customers care about your personal life. 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.
• sharapat 2y ago
  Hack for the game me
• mightypirate 2y ago
  [dead]
• ivraatiems 2y ago
  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't see nearly anyone giving the author crap for not blindly loving PG, I don'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. 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're made under the banner of "free speech" or "allowing conversation." It seems clear that we as a community don'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 "freedoms" (in quotes because free speech is actually about the government, not private communities, policing speech).
  • sillyfluke 2y ago
    I, too, found it refreshing. >It seems clear that we as a community don'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 "freedoms" Because the community uses the same freedoms to police those that throw slurs and does not feel it requires--that is the hope anyway--any other mandatory enforcement?
    • ivraatiems 2y ago
      > Because the community uses the same freedoms to police those that throw slurs and does not feel it requires--that is the hope anyway--any other mandatory enforcement? We don't, though. We have moderators (hi dang) who get rid of those people. It's the same thing Facebook used to do, just on a much smaller scale.
      • sillyfluke 2y ago
        Hmm, I guess I misunderstood. But in that case, it's a bit of a mixed message. You say: > we as a community don't support, encourage, or permit people to throw slurs then you say: >We don't, though. We have moderators (hi dang) who get rid of those people. In the first you consider moderators as part of the community. In the second you don't it seems. And the people who can downvote I think are probably so high enough in number as to be seen as normal users and not moderators. The perception of the moderation in larger communities is that it is way more heavy handed and less accountable than the moderation that dang does. For example, in HN, I can see messages from dang warning a user they are repeating offences they have committed and I can easily see their past posts to verify whether that's true or not. And dang at least gives more than one-worded defenses or explanations about certain cases of moderation in the public forum itself and not restricted to private messages. HN even says you can email them regarding certain cases you feel strongly about. With Twitter, when an account is suspended you can't see the paper trail between the moderators and the user, or the past posts. And you need to get a hold of some hotshot acquaintence with a decent amount of followers to publically make your case to get the company big-wigs to notice. In HN, even in cases of shadow-banning, though newbies might not be aware, you can even toggle the shadow-banning off and see all the posts unfiltered. In Twitter, that option does not exist I think. It doesn't scale people say? Well, no one said it's easy...
• bbno4 2y ago
  This is absolutely amazing, well done on the article!
• fud101 2y ago
  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's at the cost of the victims who didn't make it along the way.
• jangliss 2y ago
  I read the Paul Graham article mentioned here immediately before reading the Neil Gaiman exposé, and it left a sour taste in my mouth. PG is an incredible writer and contributor to this community, but that doesn't mean he isn'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.
  • _yb2s 2y ago
    Yeah, PG just seems completely out of touch and isolated in a bubble- not understanding the reality of what people different than him are facing day to day in terms of racism and discrimination. I am white but in a mixed race family- and see the racism black people face day to day: getting followed and watched when they shop in a store, being always accused and suspected first when something goes wrong at work, being seen as dangerous or violent if they ever get visibly upset, etc.
• freddealmeida 2y ago
  I met many people that met Paul Graham once. 2 > 1. right? Not sure Paul would ever have invested in my companies. But the world is smaller than you think.