I Met Paul Graham Once

> socially regressive robber barons

At least we got some good universities (and a somewhat functional transcontinental rail system) out of the 19th century iteration.

> In 1975 the student body of Stanford University voted to use "Robber Barons" as the nickname for their sports teams. However, school administrators disallowed it, saying it was disrespectful to the school's founder, Leland Stanford [1]

It's a shame that the school's administrators (perhaps fearing the wrath of alumni and donors) were so humorless – "Stealin' Landford" would have been a highly entertaining mascot, and one oddly appropriate for the gridiron.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)

The classic Cantrill bit about not anthropormphizing Larry Ellison applies to a lot of tech CEOs.

Thing is Larry Ellison doesn't write blog posts acting like he's a philosopher. Some tech CEOs really position themselves as arbiters of culture and it just feels more and more like trying to transfer their tech/business positioning into a cultural one. I do not like it!

I feel like the best advice is to take the ideas, even principles you like from folks and run with that. That's it.

I still like a lot of what Steve Jobs had to say at times. I do not pretend to know what he was like IRL or if I would even like him ... doesn't matter.

Truth be told folks who take those ideas and principles from others and not carry the weight of those folks as idols, might even do better with them.

>My only consolation is knowing that I'm seeing the world more accurately than I used to.

also known as growing older ;-)

> 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.

Upvoted because I couldn't describe better how I feel if I tried. There were so many of these tech leaders who I looked at with such awe, and a lot of it was because they did have a set of skills that I didn't and that I really envied (namely an incredible perseverance, amount of energy, and ability to thrive under pressure, while I was often the reverse). So it's hard to overstate how disappointed I am with people (and really, myself for idolizing them) whom I used to look at with such admiration, who now I often look at with something that varies between dissatisfaction and disgust.

But I realized 2 important things: the same qualities that allowed these leaders to get ahead also figures in to why I don't like them now. That is, if you care too much about other people and what they think, it will be paralyzing in the tech/startup world - you do have to "break some eggs" when you're doing big things or trying to make changes. At the same time, this empathy deficit is a fundamental reason I think of a lot of these guys and gals (it's usually guys but not always, e.g. Carly Fiorina) as high school-level douchebags now. Second, it's allowed me to have a higher, more compassionate vision of myself. I used to feel bad that I wasn't as "successful" as I wanted to be, and while I do have some regrets, I'd much rather be someone who cares deeply about my friends and family and really wants to do some good in the world, as opposed to someone I see as just trying to vacuum up power and money under the false guise of "changing the world".

I think the issue is not being disappointed, it's being scared. Because PG yields influence. OP describes the mechanism by which PGs words can create a dangerous world for them, personally. Yes they are disappointed, but mainly afraid.

The very powerful just affirmed a reversal of "wokeness" this may become performative just as much as their acceptance of the "other" became performative by their admirers and corporate copycats. This will result in tangible harm to people. I think OP did a great job in explaining this.

He's very smart, but there's no need to idolize or politicize anyone on this earth. Both instincts are counterproductive to your personal health and success.

You want to look at a person and identify what they are very good at -- and then study what they know, say and do specifically in that area, maybe take it on faith a bit that they know something you don't in those spheres. You can safely ignore everything else from them.

So let's look at some people, with Mark Zuckerberg for instance, I would say here's a guy who seems to have some good instincts for doing aggressive and invasive viral marketing, and he also seemed to be a pretty prolific PHP hacker in his early days. I don't need much else from him.

With PG, high level Lisp hacker, good systems thinker, good at getting businesses going (if I'm being cynical I'd say in environments where there's not much competition, but a guy like PG might wisely argue finding those is part of the skill). I want to absorb everything I can from him on programming language design, startup thinking and then I want to move on.

With Donald Trump, here's a guy who is literally the best in the world at parlaying negative social media attention into power. And being fueled by rage at Sith Lord levels at an age when most people have thrown in the towel and are just waiting to die. Again, all I really need to hear from him is how he does that stuff, then it's best I just ignore the rest.

Well, before CEOs, we wanted to be hackers. Watching CCC 24 reminded me of what that felt like.

Do you happen to live in Switzerland?

You described the advantages of exploiting you for your boss. Your colleagues will only treat you worse because of these points. And you think because of your university someone have to like you or what?

I worked as much as 200% more than some of my colleagues while having the lowest wage in the team. When I left, projects in my perimeter took 12x more time to develop (as assessed by a former colleague). I had a manager fired for failing to recruit me back.

You're wrong in assigning the injustice you're going through to discrimination based on your ethnicity, especially in an academic context where the vast majority is pro-immigration.

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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?

I agree with you about a transgender person who is 23, but not about anyone who is claiming to be transgender at 13. That is way too young to be sure of such things, and peer pressures/influences exist.

The current backlash is mostly caused by the hardcore activists pressuring for "the alternatives are either gender-affirming care or SUICIDE! SUICIDE! even for 13 y.o.'s"

This attitude is so hysterical that it cannot stand for long.

The author sums it up well: "It’s mean, and unkind. It’s malicious."

> A transgender person is someone who is absolutely miserable when they are not permitted to express the gender they feel.

Is that true of everyone who identifies as trans, though?

I get the impression there is a subset of trans folks for whom this is the case, and many others (perhaps a majority) who simply prefer to use different pronouns than the ones they started with.

I would love to have data that establishes whether that impression is correct or incorrect. There appears to be a puzzling conflation between folks who enjoy or prefer alternative gender expressions and folks whose survival depends on it, and it would be a great relief to know what's really going on.

> But it doesn't change who they are

This is the part that we all don't really actually converse about. It's not an easy point to prove (genetically, after sequencing the entire human genome, there is not actually any proof that gay is something one "is" intrinsically), but it's also so personal and getting it wrong has such heavy consequences that most avoid the topic.

This is self-evidently incorrect, for a multitude of reasons.

Reason 1: Gay men do not wait to 'realize' they are gay until their 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s. "Trans" do.

Reason 2: Autogynephilia exists.

Reason 3: Orientation threatens (essentially) no one. But transgenderism directly attacks the sex-based rights that women have long fought for, undermining their rights to sex-segregated spaces (see Tickle vs Giggle or that crazy LA Spa case).

Reason 4: While homosexuality is trivial to define (same-sex attraction), transgenderism is not. Gender was defined as "performing" one's sex, per feminism. But if one "performs" the other sex, they are merely non-gender-conforming, not the other sex! This is why "what is a woman" has become such an infamous question, because trans activists cannot answer it in a way that actually makes sense to anyone.

I could go on. Downvote if you must, but we are post-peak-trans and reality is re-asserting itself; I am glad of it. Without wishing ill towards those caught up in the madness, I say: No. I shall not use pronouns that require me to lie about how I perceive the world, and I deny that the assertion of my right to speak truth is an act of hatred.

Yeah, I don't think people understand what transgender person is. They understand being born like that, but not why someone chooses to change their gender. It simply is not in anyone's experience nor there is any analogous thing to bridge understanding. It is NOT like being GAY, because I know and read about gay animals, and say ok, this is not specific to humans. There isn't anything like that for TGs, because animals obviously don't dress. They just are.

I also understood one thing. Most people were paying lip service to TGs. This includes people like Mark and PG. And we like, good employees, are just following what HR says without rocking the boat. I now doubt head of HR knows or understands what this is about.

Also, there are not many people who are TG. Should society adjust itself for everyone on the margin is a question one should ask themselves? Does it adjust for everyone who has kidney disease, or other ailments? I know western countries do a good job of addressing handicapped people in several ways, but the last 1% is very hard and expensive to reach. And I feel we are paying the price. Is TG issue big enough to put Climate Change activism at risk, which it is now? I am not against TG, I am against not prioritizing what's more important.

I think being gay and having gender identity disorder are two things that are somewhat related culturally, but not that much as a condition.

Being gay has no negative consequences and when homosexuals are left to live how they want, they are happy and overall have no problems. Also, this identity doesn't change much during their lives.

In comparison with that, people who are delusional, are not feeling any better when they recognize their delusion. And it might actually be dangerous to affirm them in their delusion.

People with GID are somewhere on a spectrum between homosexuals and delusional people. Even the most affirming countries are clearly not enough. They still have a very high suicide rate. Plenty of them detransition, especially kids. There is statistically significant prevalence of mental disorders. 58% of people with GID have at least one psychiatric diagnosis (source https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6830528/).

Personally, I think that society is accepting gays for a good reason and not affirming people with GID for a good reason, too. It's not bigotry, it's a recognition of reality.

I feel like the way you describe it came from the people who came of age in the 70s and made so much of what we now see as “hacker culture.”

Now, the leadership is mostly people who came of age a couple of decades later, and got sandwiched between the elders’ ancient wisdom and a newly democratizing toxic online culture.

Some found the right path, many hung out with (or were) the sort of people who pretend to pretend to have heinous opinions on 4chan and are finally feeling comfortable enough to drop the facade.

What “fascism” are we talking about here? A company pulling tampons from men’s rooms? Companies scaling down DEI departments that advocated (probably illegally) in favor of gender and race-based discrimination?

Or are you speaking more broadly about the U.S.? Is it fascist to revert to a sane border policy that’s aligned with what most U.S. citizens and legal immigrants want? Or an executive branch that’s actually run by a democratically-elected individual, instead a non-elected shadow government that governed on behalf of a dementia-afflicted president whose condition was hidden from the American public for years? The same government that censored the media? Or the tech companies that willingly obliged with the government censorship? The same tech companies that fired employees for expressing opinions that differed from those held by the liberal establishment?

Sorry, I’m getting very confused if we’re turning into the fascism or finally turning away from it.

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.

That hacker spirit is alive and well, and will be long after the fascists for one simple reason:

The same open minded creative attitude that fully and warmly welcomes people who are different, is also what makes us better able to solve science and tech problems in a creative way. The fascists need the hackers, but we don’t need them.

Authoritarianism is fundamentally culturally incompatible with innovation. Nazi cryptography was broken by an eccentric gay man, and so on- thousands of such examples.

It's time for tech to go back to its roots and starve the kings and 'noblemen' of our talent.

Stop working for billionaires.

> When I entered this industry it [... didn't] care about titles or clothes or what your genitals are.

Are we experiencing the same industry? Because as an LGBT person, I have experienced a tech industry so drunk and fixated on identity that it can't shut up about it. It's patronizing, insulting, and divisive.

how did free speech become fascist? even in this ludicrous essay, which claims meta announced it will "increase the hate speech people like me receive". no, it announced reduced filtering of content.

what is more conformist than forcing people to adopt your speech and view points under threat? what you don't realize is the hackers and nonconformists _are_ taking the tech back, they're taking it back from this oppressive bureaucratic regime that stifles creativity and forces everyone to tiptoe within its absurd religion of rules and newspeak. they're taking it back from dei consultants and hr departments. make it about merit and hacking, not about dogmatic adherence to a (fundamentally incorrect and bad imo) social cause.

It is not narrowly scoped, it states that we need to stop another "wave" of "social justice piggishness" which would include challenging the gender identity framework the author is using among other things. It also makes broad claims about social justice politics writ large.

Having read it carefully I found the hn thread interesting and it correctly criticized the essay's lazy reasoning.

> It would be great if people could discuss these issues rationally, but the vast majority can't. Everyone is on a hair trigger.

If only we in the tech industry could blame social media on anyone but ourselves :(

From the essay: "Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."

What Bud Light did was hire an influencer to promote their product in an Instagram video (and then of course they later backtracked). The only thing "woke" about the video was that the influencer was a trans woman.

If Paul Graham would like to elaborate on this passage meant I welcome it, but my read was that supporting a trans woman falls under his definition of "wokeness".

I'm too lazy to search my comment history, but I wrote a comment on the original post about pg's essay that I did pretty much agree with what pg wrote, and so consequently I agree with most of what you wrote.

But that said, I definitely could not ignore the timing of pg's essay, and it felt plain gross to me. It felt like a lazy, convenient pile-on at that moment, even if pg's position had been largely consistent for a long time. I've seen all these tech leaders now lining up to point out the problems of the left (again, a lot of which I agree with), so where is the essay about the embarrassingly naked grift of the POTUS launching a ridiculous and useless meme coin just before his inauguration?

Also, there was nothing in that essay that I felt was particularly insightful or that I learned much from. It was, honestly, some bloviating pontification from someone who I now think holds his ideas in much higher regard than they deserve.

> 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.

I think the essay was a rorschach test for readers. On its face, it has a very reasonable and measured tone. It also has some nods to the other side like the disclaimer you mentioned. However, it starts from some uncharitable premises (e.g., its definition of wokeness) and contains unnecessary gibes (e.g., against social sciences). More importantly, it takes the tone of a social sciences essay, a discipline that he mocks, without any of the rigor. There are not sources for his claims about the origins of wokeness or how universities operated from the 80's until today, you just have to take him at face value. It gives the illusion of being erudite without doing any of the actual work.

> “he might still be fine with transgender identity”

How extremely generous!

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)

Yes - this is exactly how I felt about the "Wokeness" essay. I am constantly afraid that PG is gonna fall down the same strongly right rabbit hole so many of his colleagues have, and he hasn't so far, so seeing the title of the essay was worrying.

When I read it though, I realized he was just using "wokeness" to mean the dogmatic surface level understanding of the subject (IE, not that he was being surface level, but he's talking about people who engage with equality/identity issues in a surface level way). It's kind of a strawman idea, but people like that exist and are annoying. It makes me wonder how many people who are really centrists hate wokeness because they think the most annoying wing of it is representative of the whole movement.

Reading PGs article, I get the sense of someone who doesn't fully understand the thing he's criticising, so makes me hopeful he can learn. But again, I'm always a little afraid that the legit criticizisms of his article will get drowned out by people who reinforce what he says in it.

> 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

At the same time he also said that if you don't agree with him, you're with the terrorists. I do agree that Bush went out of his way to not stigmatize Muslims or Islam, but "don't be a flaming racist" is not that high of a bar to meet, and he was very much not a moderate open to nuanced views (on this topic, and various others). Never mind stuff like Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, torture. I'm not sure it really matters for the Guantanamo Bay whether Bush is or isn't prejudiced against their ethnicity or religion: they're still detained in a camp. Without trail. For years. Being tortured.

McCain defending Obama against vile racist attacks was also not that high of a bar to meet. McCain was also a standard GOP senator during the "obstruct whatever Obama does at all cost" years, never mind how he tried to appeal to the crazy Tea Party fanbase with Palin. I don't entirely dislike the man by the way – I'd say his legacy is mixed and complex.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: don't look at it the past too rose-coloured. The current mess didn't spontaneously come to exist out of nothing. People like Bush and McCain made a pig sty of things, and then were surprised pigs turned up to roll around in the mess. The old "gradually and then suddenly" quip applies not just to bankruptcy.

> 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.

He said this as he invaded a majority muslim country causing the deaths of tens of thousands of muslims. It was perception management, not a genuine concern for muslims. Words are not more important than actions.

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As POC I feel like equity movements in the US have, by far, become majority LGBT+ issues with a minority of racial or religious issues. Many POC cohorts in this election shifted toward Trump and I suspect it has to do with how much diversity initiatives have come to settle around White LGBT+ voices. I don't think I've seen the topic of Islam in America covered in any MSM article in years unless buried deep into an Opinion section.

I like to build bridges between minority groups but the current moment is really about mostly White gender minorities in the US. This is especially fraught right now because many POC communities tend to be more socially conservative than white communities, and LGBT+ acceptance is lower in POC communities than among the general American public.

That said I am not a fan of Trump and the modern MAGA movement's discriminatory politics, lack of respect for rule of law, denial of basic climate realities, and many many other things that I could list for days.

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.

"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.

As I remember PG took a bold stance on the Israeli-Palestine conflict within the past couple years. For context, you can think of me as an average dude who works at a tech company, and I can't imagine coming out with anything as fiery as he did on this topic (and no one reports to me). I saw other VC's, prominent ones, publicly condemn him for it. So I wouldn't say all his takes are bland.

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

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.

Good thought. The only change I'd make, to make your neutrality explicit, is to say

- A specific trans person can be an an asshole. A specific trans person can be a saint.

- A specific white man can be an asshole. A specific white man can be a saint.

> Be curious. Be courteous and respectful. Be a normal, nice goddamn human to human across the table from you.

The unintuitive thing is that both this article and pg's essay are both advocating this! They're each complaining about another group being mean.

Paul Graham's essay doesn't mention anything about LGBT people or issues. It doesn't really say what specific events he may have in mind, but it complains that woke people are being intolerant, sometimes bullying or ostracizing people for their beliefs, and trying to enforce allegiance to their side over honesty.

The author of this essay is reading between the lines and assuming pg is a bigot who might discriminate against a trans person. They say actions like pg's are "mean", "unkind", and "malicious".

I think a lot of this has to do with people being polarized and viewing every political statement in terms of which team it supports: if someone says something against your team, that means they must be on the other team, and are therefore evil. But regardless of the reasons, these uncharitable assumptions (on both sides) cause way too much conflict between people with similar core values.

I don't think either author would discriminate against anyone based on their sexuality or gender. One can disagree with pg's criticisms without calling him a bigot.

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.

I call it the "could I share this with my grandmother" test. I don't like things that are supposed to have a point or make a good argument but fail the grandmother test.

> gets lost on both the left and the right sides

It gets lost because of this black/white US perspective on politics. If you were multiparty system there will be less identities in politics.

I'm so tired of hearing "both sides" though.

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.

I found your post extremely touching and humanizing. We need more of these perspectives right now that highlight the complex feelings of lived experiences. This is literally what makes us human, and has the potential to reach people in ways that polemic does not (which is not to say polemic isn't important). Thanks for sharing.

Your piece is very very well said. Thank you so much for putting yourself out there.

I was terrified to look up through the comments after reading the article, but HN truly surprised me today.

Beautiful writing. I also read pg's essay and was also upset. Just know there are cis men like me who are on your side and hate where tech is going. The bigotry being out in the open is disturbing.

This is a very important conversation to have right now. Thank you for your vulnerability in sharing it.

I feel nothing but support for you. May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you live with ease.

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> 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.

This is a myopic view. You are obviously correct that you cannot legislate that someone think in any particular way or otherwise force someone to change their minds, but the idea that collectively deciding that a viewpoint is not longer tolerated within the broader society and then making efforts to support that at all levels is ineffective and not worthwhile is absurd. Threats, physical violence, and murder have always been illegal, but used to occur with much higher frequency against many minority groups toward which society tolerated hatred and abuse. It's plainly obvious what changed is the idea that it would be brushed under the rug, that others would at worst turn a blind eye to the perpetrator if not support them, that there would be no real consequences whether legal or in social circles - this environment in which people act on impulse rather than thinking twice about what they're doing - went away. We must remember that progress isn't permanent, that civil rights must be maintained and won't protect themselves, and that there's probably someone out there that hates someone each of us loves and cares about for some arbitrary reason and would act on that if only society gave them permission.

> There are real questions about bathrooms, women's sports, and when medical interventions are called for.

Yes there are real questions, but there are also real answers. Currently, 99% of people asking questions have literally zero interest in answers. They do not care about what research say or whether there is harm or not. They ask questions to convince the audience about their political project.

They do not care about whether medical interventions are good, bad, safe or unsafe. They want to convince you that that they are unsafe. They want to stop the interventions regardless of their impact. They do not care about safety of bathrooms, they want you to punish transgender people in the wrong bathroom. They do not care about women sports either, in fact they are the same people arguing against women sports whereever it matters.

> People can think poorly of you for whatever reason they want.

And it should be my god give right to call them sexist and racists if they think of me poorly because of those reasons. But somehow that is supposed to be a taboo. We are all supposed to pretend there is no sexism, that there was no historical sexism, so that someone feels good about themselves. Again and again, sjws pointed out someone is sexist/racist, there was an outrage in response, they were painted crazy stupid exaggerating. And I actually believe the response, multiple times. Except that it turned out, multiple times, that they were right all along.

> 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.

I don't understand any of this. It feels like you live in a different information bubble than mine.

What was the "war on hate", and who is turning away from it?

What would it mean to say that the "war on hate" worked? That there was no more hate, or that the situation improved somehow? What does it mean to say that it didn't work?

> 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.

It is disingenuous to suggest that anti-discrimination laws for trans people are attempting to legislate away the hatred held in people’s hearts, instead of access to healthcare, public facilities, protections against workplace discrimination — things you describe as having “real questions,” but which are, in fact, the parts of a full and dignified life that bigots would deny to trans people in particular. If you pretend like it’s trying to legislate “thoughtcrime,” it’s much easier to distinguish anti-discrimination laws for trans people from rulings like Obergefell or Brown v. Board — far easier to say “look, those were good, but this particular civil rights legislation is simply unreasonable.”

To platform these beliefs is to afford them a legitimacy they do not deserve. To suggest that bigotry, when amplified, will be in some way countered or reduced is naïve beyond belief. Instead, it becomes easier for bigotry to find an audience of receptive listeners and willing conduits for further transmission.

The author isn't talking about abstract "hatred" in the sense of people's internal, personal experiences. They are talking about hate speech, a specific concrete act with external material consequences.

> Adding on, the trans issue isn't simple.

It really kind of is though.

> The proper response is -- in the spirit of the new era of free speech -- to firmly state your opposition to their beliefs.

This doesn't really work because social networks are designed to amplify the most "engaging" things, which often means "controversial". Reasoned debate is often drowned out - this happens even here on HN for particularly controversial topics.

If social media was just people following their friends and interacting with them (I remember when FB was basically like that), we maybe wouldn't be in this horrible polarised mess.

>The whole "war on hate" thing was a bad idea; you can't forbid hatred

You can't forbid it but you can absolutely make it socially unacceptable. "Free speech" doesn't mean letting people spew hate and doing nothing; choosing not to hand them a megaphone, support their business, etc. is entirely valid.

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.