> 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

> 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.