Sure. So she helped to build a political movement—centred not around creating new non-racist businesses and communities to supplant the old racist ones, but around exposing and fighting racism in the existing businesses and communities. In terms of your dichotomy
It’s not about publically complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight evil people. It’s about building effective communities with good norms.
the NAACP was firmly on the side of publicly complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight their evil.
people are largely too impatient
That may very well be a serious problem. But it’s an issue almost perfectly orthogonal to the “fight the evil or build better new communities?” one.
(This whole discussion seems to be based, in any case, on a misunderstanding of Viliam’s complaint, which is not that Paul Graham is doing the wrong things with his life but that some things he’s said amount to trivializing something that shouldn’t be trivialized. It’s entirely possible for someone to say wrong things while doing right ones, and objecting to that is not the same thing as complaining that he’s “not signalling that he cares”.)
Sure. So she helped to build a political movement—centred not around creating new non-racist businesses and communities to supplant the old racist ones, but around exposing and fighting racism in the existing businesses and communities. In terms of your dichotomy
the NAACP was firmly on the side of publicly complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight their evil.
That may very well be a serious problem. But it’s an issue almost perfectly orthogonal to the “fight the evil or build better new communities?” one.
(This whole discussion seems to be based, in any case, on a misunderstanding of Viliam’s complaint, which is not that Paul Graham is doing the wrong things with his life but that some things he’s said amount to trivializing something that shouldn’t be trivialized. It’s entirely possible for someone to say wrong things while doing right ones, and objecting to that is not the same thing as complaining that he’s “not signalling that he cares”.)