> do good by trying to address specific parts of the essay

I mean its a pretty big train wreck from the start to the end but I will try to point some of the dumbest lines, and pg is a smart guy so this is a particularly weird miss by him.

>> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness

This is simply not true. Stay Woke is a phrase that has a long history and it mostly related to paying attention to political issues not correctness. The hashtag where it became mainstream was around the shooting of an african american man by the police. It wasn't cancelling someone for saying something dumb, it was because police brutality has a never ending history in the states.

One of the first issues it was used on was freeing P*ssy Riot an anti goverment band from Russia, again not a political correctness instance but one of censorship and violence.

>> Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one.

He admits he uses the word pejoritively but does not examine why a word that begins in a marginalised community is now mostly an insult. Like that is beyond irresponsible. if you and your gf have a petname and I start using it as an insult, and I control the media and the word becomes a common word to mean dumbass and I analyse it as that, then I am 1) siding with the bully 2) being a shit reporter.

>> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.

This is just stupid because "the woke" is not a real group of people, he even admits he uses it as an insult, and secondly because he has no reason to know at what scale it is a problem. Handwaving a problem that doesn't affect you is bonkers, like I'd walk in an oncology ward and say "the scale that cancer is killing you is exagerated, but its a real problem". Paul Graham is a 60 year old white dude who went to Harvard, a uni that invented Essays to admit more white kids instead of jews, sport scholarships to put more white kids than asians thorugh and that was caught admitting white kids with worse grades than asians and was sued for it. He benefits from racism in the instituion he went to, spends his life in a subject that has 0 to do with policy, politics or race and then starts a paragraph with "racism isnt so bad yall".

>> The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that

They led to the crumbling of the vietnam war, the desmitification of the american military and the end of racial segregation. I know he was a kid when it all happened but the 60s movements can hardly be called failed political projects.

I could go on because its all equally unbased and plainfully dumb. But I think just pointing out the kind of basic mistakes he has in terms of how he treats the subject means you can easily spot other equally dumb conclusions or assertions.

Another dumb conclusion, specially coming from someone with a background in computer science is

>> Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do.

We KNOW that anger is the most potent emotion in the brain, therefore social media algorithms favour it. AI feeds based on "engagement" feed people anger, people dont seek it out. Shareholders and people like Paul Graham who think humanities are stupid do by creating machines that interact with humans in ways that are completely unethical.