If a single person solves 0.01% of the world’s injustice that’s a huge success.
It looks to me as if you just switched from one 99.99% to an almost completely unrelated 99.99%. I see no reason to think that Paul Graham or AirBnB has solved 0.01% of the world’s injustice. Even if they had, finding 10k Paul Grahams or 10k AirBnBs is not at all an easy problem.
Startups funded by YC fight powerful enemies day-in-and-out by disrupting industries.
You don’t get points for fighting powerful enemies, you get points for doing actual good. No doubt some YC companies are in fact improving the world; good for them; but what does that have to do with the question actually under discussion? Viliam never said that YC is useless or that PG is a bad person. He said only that PG is focusing on one (important) part of reality—the part where some people add value to the world and get rich in the process—and may be neglecting another part.
There’s no glory in fighting for the sake of fighting.
Of course. Nor much utility. So the question is: if there’s a lot of injustice in the world, is it effective to point it out and try to reduce it? Maybe it is, maybe not, but I don’t see that you can just deflect the question by saying “effective political action is a matter of building effective communities with good norms”.
You change things for the better by providing powerful alternatives to the status quo.
You’re just restating your thesis that in the face of evil one should construct good rather than fighting evil. But sometimes you change things for the better just by saying that the status quo isn’t good enough and trying to get it knocked down, or by agitating for other people who are better placed than you are to provide powerful alternatives to do so.
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service. She helped to create a climate in which the existing bus service providers couldn’t get away with telling black people where to sit.
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service.
Rosa Parks operated as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. The NAACP was founded in 1909
and slowly build it’s powerbase til it was strong enough to allow Rosa Parks to pull of the move in 1955.
But sometimes you change things for the better just by saying that the status quo isn’t good enough and trying to get it knocked down, or by agitating for other people who are better placed than you are to provide powerful alternatives to do so.
I think cases like Egypt are an example of how things get messed up when trying to fight the evil status quo without having a good replacement.
In my own country I think the Pirate Party got too much power to soon and self destructed as a result. It failed to build a good foundation.
In modern politics people are largely to impatient to build power bases from which to create sustainable change for the better.
The direction of our core political direction at the moment is largely create by a bunch of foundations who don’t try to win in short-term fights but acts with long time horizons.
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”.)
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service. She helped to create a climate in which the existing bus service providers couldn’t get away with telling black people where to sit.
So, how did the movement she started work out for black people?
Hmm, it appears that half a century afterwards most blacks live in crime-field hell-holes where more of them get killed in a single year (by other blacks) than were lynched during the entire century of Jim Crow.
Oh, hello, Eugine. Nice to know you can still be relied on to say much the same things any time anyone mentions race.
The latest statistics I can find show a homicide rate for black Americans of about 20 per 100k per year. In 1950 the corresponding figure was a little under 30 per 100k per year. So those “crime-field hell-holes” would seem to be less bad than whatever places black people were living in in 1950.
Why you’re comparing overall homicide rates to lynching rates, I have no idea. (Nor in fact why you’re talking about lynchings at all.) The problem with lynchings was never that they were responsible for a large fraction of deaths of black people, and the civil rights movement was mostly concerned with things other than lynchings.
Hmm, it appears that half a century afterwards most blacks live in crime-field hell-holes where more of them get killed in a single year (by other blacks) than were lynched during the entire century of Jim Crow.
Does this really apply to “most blacks”, or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
Does this really apply to “most blacks”, or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities
Most blacks do in fact live in the inner cities.
just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
What news sources are you reading? Most mainstream news sources don’t report on the goings on in the inner cities at all unless it involves blacks getting shot by cops, or can be spun as a natural reaction to a black getting shot by a cop.
According to this Brookings Institute report the majority of black people living in metropolitan areas in the US live in the suburbs.
Most mainstream news sources
… are more likely to report events when they are (1) unusual and/or (2) shocking. By “inner cities” I take it you mean poor central residential areas. Not much happens there that would be of interest to most mainstream news sources.
It looks to me as if you just switched from one 99.99% to an almost completely unrelated 99.99%. I see no reason to think that Paul Graham or AirBnB has solved 0.01% of the world’s injustice. Even if they had, finding 10k Paul Grahams or 10k AirBnBs is not at all an easy problem.
You don’t get points for fighting powerful enemies, you get points for doing actual good. No doubt some YC companies are in fact improving the world; good for them; but what does that have to do with the question actually under discussion? Viliam never said that YC is useless or that PG is a bad person. He said only that PG is focusing on one (important) part of reality—the part where some people add value to the world and get rich in the process—and may be neglecting another part.
Of course. Nor much utility. So the question is: if there’s a lot of injustice in the world, is it effective to point it out and try to reduce it? Maybe it is, maybe not, but I don’t see that you can just deflect the question by saying “effective political action is a matter of building effective communities with good norms”.
You’re just restating your thesis that in the face of evil one should construct good rather than fighting evil. But sometimes you change things for the better just by saying that the status quo isn’t good enough and trying to get it knocked down, or by agitating for other people who are better placed than you are to provide powerful alternatives to do so.
Rosa Parks didn’t start her own non-racist bus service. She helped to create a climate in which the existing bus service providers couldn’t get away with telling black people where to sit.
Rosa Parks operated as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. The NAACP was founded in 1909 and slowly build it’s powerbase til it was strong enough to allow Rosa Parks to pull of the move in 1955.
I think cases like Egypt are an example of how things get messed up when trying to fight the evil status quo without having a good replacement. In my own country I think the Pirate Party got too much power to soon and self destructed as a result. It failed to build a good foundation.
In modern politics people are largely to impatient to build power bases from which to create sustainable change for the better.
The direction of our core political direction at the moment is largely create by a bunch of foundations who don’t try to win in short-term fights but acts with long time horizons.
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”.)
So, how did the movement she started work out for black people?
Hmm, it appears that half a century afterwards most blacks live in crime-field hell-holes where more of them get killed in a single year (by other blacks) than were lynched during the entire century of Jim Crow.
Oh, hello, Eugine. Nice to know you can still be relied on to say much the same things any time anyone mentions race.
The latest statistics I can find show a homicide rate for black Americans of about 20 per 100k per year. In 1950 the corresponding figure was a little under 30 per 100k per year. So those “crime-field hell-holes” would seem to be less bad than whatever places black people were living in in 1950.
Why you’re comparing overall homicide rates to lynching rates, I have no idea. (Nor in fact why you’re talking about lynchings at all.) The problem with lynchings was never that they were responsible for a large fraction of deaths of black people, and the civil rights movement was mostly concerned with things other than lynchings.
Does this really apply to “most blacks”, or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
Most blacks do in fact live in the inner cities.
What news sources are you reading? Most mainstream news sources don’t report on the goings on in the inner cities at all unless it involves blacks getting shot by cops, or can be spun as a natural reaction to a black getting shot by a cop.
According to this Brookings Institute report the majority of black people living in metropolitan areas in the US live in the suburbs.
… are more likely to report events when they are (1) unusual and/or (2) shocking. By “inner cities” I take it you mean poor central residential areas. Not much happens there that would be of interest to most mainstream news sources.
[EDITED for slightly more precise wording.]