Seems to me like you made your mind up before even reading it.

> "Arbitrary" ways. It's spelled "arbitrary". There are a plethora of categorical little boxes that people can try to fit other people into, and some of those have value sometimes, but they often also cause people to see other people as only their boxes.

I'm sure PG would agree with your last sentence. But your point is irrelevant here.

> Imagine never having seen /r/PoliticalCompassMemes [2]. As gross as it is, this kind of quadrant-categorization isn't new.

Imagine assuming someone has never seen something just because they use an appropriate example to introduce a reader to a concept.

Also I don't see what's gross about the political compass.

> This is a setup for seeking minority status for free-thinkers. The problem with this is that "free" thought -- or "aggressively independent-minded" in PG parlance -- has no defined, characteristic ideas, by definition. A simple thought experiment here is the current political divide in the US. Are Trump voters the "aggressively independent-minded"? Are Democrats? Progressives? None of the above? If the definition of "aggressively independent-minded" contracts to, "me and a few people I like", then it's meaningless. Everyone with a strongly-held political belief in the US right now sees themselves as belonging to the rebel outgroup.

Whoever is loudly saying something that is unpopular is part of the "aggressively independent-minded" group. I think that should be pretty easy to understand. Note it does not mean they are right.

> This had to be the most astoundingly bad line in the whole essay. It rests upon a supernatural notion of some sense of "self" that is somehow independent of time and place; that the powerful formative forces of culture and society, especially throughout early childhood, would somehow not transform each and every one of us into utterly different people. There is no more polite way to say this than that that notion is, as far as I know, entirely unfounded in the field of human development.

Fair point, but I think one can assume that the probability of a person changing from one group to the other is symmetric, so in the end you'd get a similar distribution across the population regardless of where the individuals end up. The point he ultimately makes is still valid, most of them would have supported slavery.

> Okay, do yourself a favor, and read Joseph Yannielli's really excellent article, hosted on Princeton's site, on Princeton's role in opposing abolition: https://slavery.princeton.edu/stories/princeton-and-abolitio....

> It's long, and it's historical, and it's forthright, and it's introspective. It also includes many quotes from educated opponents to abolition that, if you squint just a little bit, sound suspiciously similar to a lot of the "unacceptable" ideas that so many people right now are crying that they're no longer supposed to talk about outside the komfortable konfines of their klans.

The main similarity to today I spotted was young students being violent towards people with opposing views.

> Princeton themselves disagrees. At length.

One counterexample does not disprove the point. Do you really disagree with the idea that independent thinkers tend to go to university?

> This essay does not add to or resolve today's cultural conflicts in any amount.

I disagree and think it does add something.