We could have productive discussion about ideas themselves:

* Should the government subsidize dairy?

* Should the government pay for maternity leave? Should employers?

We can talk about what works in Europe, whether money is really fungible, and how to provide welfare without distorting the market or accidentally causing hiring discrimination.

But it's less productive to discuss people:

* Is Contrapoints right?

* Is Joaquin Phoenix right?

You get sidetracked with "Remember that time she hired Buck Angel? Remember that time Joaquin starred in Joker?" That's not discussion. That's a fan-made tabloid.

And it's useless to discuss hashtags:

* Does feminism??

* Is veganism???

"Remember that blog that said hetero sex is inherently bad? Remember that time a PETA employee killed someone's pet dog?"

Now we're 2 cuils from changing minds.

I am guessing this is a problem on HN, because it's a problem everywhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon

Edit: Formatting trouble. I'm new here

Are feminism and veganism granfalloons?

I'm not sure the definition of granfalloon even makes sense. I get the humour and the wisdom of granfalloonery... but where does it leave us?

How is the clustering of people who share a common characteristic, such as an interest or an origin, "meaningless"? It depends on what you mean by meaninglessness. If we defer to the notion of Shannon information, the association of people who share an ideal or a belief is not random, is it? So it must have meaning?

Maybe yes and maybe no. It depends on what you measure, and what you consider to be meaningful.

A room full of feminists, like a room full of vegans, do have at least one thing in common. Getting these people together in a room increases the possibility that they might organise to act in a way that furthers the advancement of their group interest. That seems like it could fit the definition of meaningfulness, does it not?

Still, the insight of labelling these as granfalloons serves to highlight that on any other measure or criteria, the same people might have nothing in common, and might well be adversarial or counterproductively affiliated.

So, a roomful of vegans might also comprise half a roomful of Democrats, and half a roomful of Republicans, right? On diet, they reinforce. But on politics, they cancel out. Is that the wisdom of granfalloonery? I'm not entirely sure, but in the matter of feminism, post Beauvoir, we can see fragmentation, which is the classical dilemma of the movement as a political force. All feminists are not all alike on all measures, and just being feminists is not enough to get a roomful of them to agree to agree on anything.

At the Super Bowl, one of them might root for the Patriots, and the other for the Giants, right? That's the absurdist dimension of the meaninglessness of their clustering. But is that the most salient aspect of their interests?

Amy Coney Barret is not the same as Ruth Bader Ginsberg. The notion that humans of their gender are entitled to serve on the supreme court bench is an ideal of feminism. It does not follow that one woman is substitutable for another woman, just because of her gender. But to exclude people from the supreme court on the basis of gender is to throw out an entire class of people that cuts across all categories of ideology, interest, aesthetics, dietary practice, race, religion and culture. That we can see that now is testament to the work that Beauvoir did to open up our understanding of classifications of people to the nuance of gender.

She isn’t Gloria Steinem. She’s an academic writer who uses a technical vocabulary, and assumes familiarity with lots of mid-20th century (and earlier) writers.

One can be a committed feminist, and reject quite a bit of de Beauvoir’s thought.

HN just isn’t the correct forum for a meaningful debate on existentialism.

HN readers tend to be inspired by the model of science, which is more settled in its vocabulary, and concepts are less immediately tied to the speaker. That is, you can study relativity without knowing a word of German. It would sound absurd to tell somebody to read Einstein in the original in order to understand it. Quite the contrary: later re-formulations are preferred, as they benefit from later developments in framing the questions. The numbers it yields are identical and therefore at least as good.

This is a challenge for anybody studying any philosophy. HN readers are generally smart enough to understand it and even be interested in in it, but the way discussions are framed tends to put them off.

What is the gender composition of HN readers? Do we have any information about that?

My note on Beauvoir, I read plenty of her when younger and her mix of intellectual rigour with fierce independence was illuminating for me, definitely she influenced how I live as an independent thinker. She focused on facts and historical analysis to get her arguments across, without appeal to emotion. She also lived a true life of love and courage, and fought hard for her beliefs. Would recommend her biography to anyone interested in the history of 20th c feminism.

How many folks on HN have strong views on whether “existence precedes essence?”