Paul GrahamVerified account

To be fair, Paul has consistently bad takes, and is deserving of immense criticism given his position of power and influence. With his role comes a responsibility that he's tragically abdicated. I used to idolize him, but now...

True, but what gets me is the number of *totally fine* takes by various people (incl. but not limited to @paulg) that get unreasonably mischaracterized by smart people, oftentimes to make some point that could be made on its own without needing to uncharitably interpret someone.

Totally agree. Paul's (IMO) a terrible example, but there are TONs of folks to whom we owe more charitable interpretations. We're agreed on the broader message, just not that Paul's the guy to apply it to

PG is interesting to me because people have such charged feelings about him as a person, and my guess is that charged feelings about a person/topic correlate positively with uncharitable or inaccurate interpretations, especially on Twitter.

I've gotten multiple private messages in the past few days to the tune of, "Can you believe PG said X?", where X was completely reasonable, and the reader had misinterpreted, and subsequently agreed. And these were all simple, innocuous tweets about non-controversial issues.

I guess I'd think about it this way; either: A) Paul is somehow uniquely misinterpreted or a bad communicator. B) Paul is an extremely capable communicator, and opts to be controversial b/c he kinda likes it. I think we both know which one it is

Not uniquely perhaps, but people put a lot of energy into it. And I don't actually like being controversial. There is no upside to being dragged by a Twitter mob. But I'm not willing to shut up about something important in order to avoid it.