I might have agreed with you but the way you're presenting your argument makes me want to dismiss you outright. There's a lot of ad hominen and strawman in your post, maybe you want to rethink how you're making your point?
If I thought that pg was capable of hearing my argument, I'd make it far more carefully.
I think that it is 100% useless to attempt to persuade him away from his rediscovery of social darwinism.
The man thinks that those concerned with income inequality want communist style income equality. He's detached from reality. There aren't words that will fix that sort of broken. This has become a situation where you can't reason a man out of a situation that he arrived to unreasonably.
He has beliefs that... aren't reasonable, that aren't related to reality... he is surrounded by rich people who share those beliefs. I'm just some poor whose net worth is only in the single digit millions and who only makes a couple hundred K per year. I'm nobody to him.
so y'know... why try? Why not just make a throwaway account, and engage in angry honesty? Sure, it's not polite... but it's deeply honest.
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edit: and to be clear, I don't think pg is like, some bad dude. I've met him, I think he really loves helping people, and I don't mind that he got rich. But that essay... that essay showed that he's become disconnected in a dangerous and fundamental way and it makes me sad and angry and disappointed.... it's horrible to see somebody who used to use their skills and knowledge to generate such good start using them to lobby for social darwinistic bullshit. it's awful, and painful, and sad... and I know that nothing I say will make him change. Nobody who goes down the road he's on comes back reformed a better man. He's just going to become a bigger piece of shit as he gets more powerful, more financial successful, as more people will line up to tell him how right he is. And that's incredibly sad.
> The man thinks that those concerned with income inequality want communist style income equality.
pg's essay did not say that. I think you've misunderstood what he said, and are attributing views to him that are quite far away from reality. My best guess is that you've read his words with emotion and projected false beliefs onto his writing.
If you genuinely care about this issue, then I advise you to go back and read the essay again with a critical, logical mind. Read the words he wrote, and consider simply those words, not what you imagine or extrapolate might be the views of the person who wrote them. Consider the actual words. PG's words do not characterize the opposition argument in this debate as being in favor of communism and "100% social equality", whatever that means.
If you were to read the essay again, and attempt to connect the views you're claiming PG holds with actual words in the essay, you'd fail. PG does not characterize the opposition view as anything like how you describe.
If he characterizes the opposition, it's simply as people who argue that "social inequality is bad" without stopping to think about it in more detail, and without realizing that some inequality is fair because some people are more productive than others. The other observation in his essay is that technology amplifies this difference in productivity.
Why not accept that reality is different for different people? It's different for all different people, not just rich vs. poor.
It's your call whether someone else's reality is at all relevant to your own experience. But that doesn't stop it from being reality for them. You don't like it when someone invalidates your own lived experience. Why then turn around and invalidate theirs?
>Why not accept that reality is different for different people?
There is a consistent physical reality that exists outside the human experience. When people communicate in almost any language, they are referring to this external reality. This is why people constantly choose to "invalidate" someone else's experience.
They are essentially saying "Your description of the shared fabric of reality in which humanity dwells is completely invalid!" rather than "Your reality is your opinion and my reality is my opinion, let's sing kumbaya."
The truth of the world is that there is only one shared reality that exists for humanity and only one description of it that is correct. However, we as homosapiens can only perceive this reality through the human experience. Hence the endless debates about which reality is valid or invalid.
Yes, and whenever people talk about human concepts like inequality, wealth, economics, power, or other social constructs, they are not referring to this physical reality. You can't talk about any of these without injecting values, desires, emotions, and other subjective experiences. These exist only in peoples' heads.
The objective, physical description of a scene at work might be something like "The person called 'Andrew' sat down at a table with the person called 'Bob'. They talked. Bob stood up and left the room. Andrew rested his elbow on the table and cradled his forehead in his hand. He stared at the table for a couple minutes, and then he got up, left the room, went back to his desk, and started typing quickly."
The subjective description from Bob's POV might be: "I'm a manager for a critical feature team. We had a really challenging feature request that may bring in millions of new business. Andrew is my best engineer. Knowing that he has always delivered high-quality code, I called him in to a quick meeting and explained the customer's request. He didn't say anything, but I could see the wheels turning in his head. He was already grappling with the challenge. I left to go to my next meeting, confident that the project will be done in time."
The subjective POV from Andrew's head might be: "I work hard on my code. Sometimes I wish my boss would acknowledge that. Today, he called me in to a meeting, unscheduled, and dumped a huge new project on me. I'd planned on taking my wife on a vacation to celebrate our anniversary, but now I might have to cancel if I can't get this done in time. Grr. Anyway, better get back to work so I can crank out this code."
See the difference? What happened, objectively, is only the physical actions in the real world. Moving body parts. Manipulating tools. Being physically present in the same place. But there's a whole layer of subjective experience underneath that which people take for granted, but which may be completely different between different people.
Many, many arguments come from misapplying the tools meant to deal with objective reality to subjective reality. Both PG (in several of his essays) and many of the commenters here make that mistake. I've made it myself, frequently, in the past. But in general, whenever you're talking about wants, desires, values, or reasons, you can't say "This is the way the world is" without adding the implicit qualifier "for me" or "based on this evidence".
I haven't formed opinion on whether pg is right or not but if I were him, I would do the same. Honestly, what good does defending your opinion serve? except it being a huge time sink and a total "mind fuck". Whenever someone disagrees with me, I politely accept it, instead of defending my case because I know it will rapidly turn into an ego war.
The much better feeling than winning an argument is overcoming the urge to argue and defend.
