A year ago he was musing how categorizing people into two groups was too basic.

Xist versus Yist, and he showed us with some pretty basic math.

Now two groups is all we need to understand the world?

The two group categorization is a rhetorical device commonly used everywhere, throughout the world, to help drive a point, worldview, or allegory home. In it's correct form, it is never intended to be a dichotomy (as this would make it fallacious).

So perhaps the way to understand it is PG believes people fit in these two groups, but those are not the only two groups you fit in, and they are by no means all-encompassing.

It's kind of like, you are either a member of team red, or team blue. You may be a blue type of person, another is a red, but that by no means defines the entirety of your being.

Let's try to have a little more good faith here, when trying to understand people's musings. The reality is, most of us here wouldn't have the courage to put our thoughts and opinions out there on the internet for the whole world to see, at least not to the extent PG does.

I am reminded of a fun idea:

The reason that 4 quadrant divisions of the world seem like they always work is because any two vectors chosen at random in a high dimensional space are nearly orthogonal with high probability.

If one were suitably cynical (and independent-minded, another of his bugaboos) one might suggest that it's always been "the kind Paul appeals to" and "the bad people".

The article is an attempt of classifying people into neat groups with certain characteristics, without acknowledging their true inner personality as a result of the cultural background and the particular individual qualities. "Nerd" is one such classification, "fierce" is a sub-classification. Semantic word-play with little empirical or anecdotal evidence.

Well, we could certainly speak to the difference between those whose emotional needs are served by sharing their advice with the world, and those for whom they aren't.

I’d take PG more seriously if he actually had to work to maintain his flock. Folks who struck it rich in the lottery talk about how suddenly everyone wanted to be their friend.

I’ve been rummaging around the human experience for 41 years, applying technology to problems at public uni and big corp, building houses, growing food, hunting, earned degrees in electrical engineering and math.

To me that’s all there is, to go do directly.

All this feels like is someone who is riding off that lottery ticket.

That is, I’m not seeing an information advantage. Just a political capital advantage.

I thought we did away with allegiance to unelected political agents?