We've banned this account for serial trolling and egregious abuse using sockpuppet accounts over many years.

It's just as not-ok as it was before, so please don't.

> When it comes to politics, his opinions are poorly-thought-out, self-serving, and generally worthless.

As are 99.999% of everybody's.

Except what you're saying (ie your judgement about PG's 'poor' political thinking) is self-referentially meaningless unless you consider yourself a "native expert" in political thinking.

Why are we not to take and measure and discuss ideas a la carte?

What value is there in group-classifying the 'wrongthinkers', except to save people the exhaustion and torture of learning new and diverse ideas and for thinking for themselves?

> What value is there in group-classifying the 'wrongthinkers', except to save people the exhaustion and torture of learning new and diverse ideas and for thinking for themselves?

The pleasant feeling of superiority and relief from the obligation of considering anything the labeled person says on its own merits.

Credibility and authority is incredibly important. How much time can anyone devote to dissecting the words of each living person in case they contain a potentially great idea? I'm happy to examine arguments on merit, but perhaps we should spend more time examining other arguments and not use so much time on his.

> I'm happy to examine arguments on merit, but perhaps we should spend more time examining other arguments and not use so much time on his.

> we

I'm not sure this is even well-formed statement, you're certainly free to devote your time to issues that you consider important and ignore those that you perceive to be a waste of time. However if you want to persuade others to adopt those same economies of time then to would be helpful to share the specific motivations.

> Credibility and authority is incredibly important. How much time can anyone devote to dissecting the words of each living person in case they contain a potentially great idea?

How error-prone would it be to take someone else's assessment of an individual at face value and conclude that they had nothing further to offer and so to ignore everything they had written?

we as in his potential audience, the public, his readers etc. I don't feel like sharing the specific motivations, that is what the piece you're commenting on is doing.

I'm not taking someone's assessment at face value, I read it, considered the sources, considered pg, and am using it to build an understanding of his work.

> we as in his potential audience, the public, his readers etc.

we all have different perspectives and priorities, I'm not sure how you or I could decide for someone else that PG was not worth listening to and if I decide that for myself then I don't listen to him. If I want to persuade others that they should also ignore him then I make my case on the merits.

> I'm not taking someone's assessment at face value, I read it, considered the sources, considered pg, and am using it to build an understanding of his work.

Can you share the basis of that understanding rather than expecting that we would take your assessment at face value?

Your assertion was largely that an article like this didn’t have value. I explained why it does. You are free debate the points of pg here, but that’s not how our disagreement began and you are asking me to defend a different point than the one I commented initially to defend. Do you still believe the article is just a way to label pg as bad, or do you see why a discussion of issues of his credibility is important?

my assertion was that its of questionable value to add someone to a list of "wrong-thinkers" or in other ways suggest that they have no further contributions to make without supporting that assessment. Its great to criticize someone's thought, its not so great to attempt to deplatform them by persuading other people not to examine their ideas.

> Do you still believe the article is just a way to label pg as bad, or do you see why a discussion of issues of his credibility is important?

I think its great to discuss his credibility. I think its less great to try to write him off based on the results of that discussion.

I'm not writing him off, certainly. But I also don't see how this labels him as a wrong thinker? It demonstrates that he's missed the mark a lot as a result of his over-reliance on intuition. His technique for finding truth seems amiss. I don't think anyone is deplatforming him either. He's still able to write his blog and use all of his internet accounts. This article is compelling his audience to be more critical of the technique he's using to figure things out.

>> His attempts to grapple with the major issues of the present, especially as they intersect with his personal legacy, are so mired in intuition and incuriosity that they’re at best a distraction, and worst a real obstacle to understanding our paths forward. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely to ever change.

> What value is there in group-classifying the 'wrongthinkers', except to save people the exhaustion and torture of learning new and diverse ideas and for thinking for themselves?

I think we probably agree more than we disagree and just took different things from the discussion. The above quotes (one from the article and one from the original comment I replied to) are offered as an example of the sentiment I was replying to. Thanks for the discussion.