You're profoundly wrong about "his position as a wealthy VC" though. pg was this way long before he became a wealthy investor. As I said in the GP (but not before you replied! I was busy editing) - he was (1) exactly this way long before that, and (2) it was by being this way that he became a wealthy investor at all. YC was an exercise in exactly the same kind of thinking and writing that his essays are. And I do mean exactly.
Straw-manning is a telling sigh that you got defensive about PG, for some reason.
If people just dislike wealth, that's one thing, but nowadays they bring that up while criticizing his writing. I don't think those two things are connected, and it seems weird to conflate them.
They're also conflated because pg has written some very reductive stuff about smart people, sheep people, and ThInGs YOu JUSt CaNT SaY AnY MoRE. His stripped-back style makes for an easy read, but when he's not about his own experiences, it's ice-cold and humourless. That surely gets him pigeonholed quite fast outside of HN, even if you don't know what he does for a living.
Still this is the first of his blogs in years where I agree with him completely. No notes!
In a world of a million concepts, there are a trillion of possible directed associations between pairs of them, and each of them may be multi-valued. Say, what's a real-world relation between "ChatGPT" and "nighmare"? A good thinker will be able to find or come up with many that nobody has seen before, beyond the ones which, due to our 'social prior', are evident. What happens when instead of two, there are three or four concepts?
I would go further and say that parroting is often more complicated than being creative, you have to find those ideas to rehash first, and then rank them by popularity and efficacy at your goal, e.g. publicity or acceptance. In other words, you need to be able to "read the room", or "compute the social prior".
Yes. To be able to think for oneself means to be able to think based on one's own experiences, and not merely based on the thoughts of others.
I think what you are getting at, though, is not so much "thinking for yourself" as pg is unafraid to say unpopular things that are on his mind. And I don't mean this in a derogatory way: it's good to have people who aren't just posting sycophantic opinions following the zeitgeist. But I don't think that's what causes my reaction to pg's writings. I think he gives advice that is overly universalizing from his position as a wealthy VC: for example, his "The Two Kinds of Moderate" post strikes me as very much the kind of thing that is really only taking his own experiences into account.