Yacob is automatically treated as morally superior because he’s African. That’s the whole point. It’s not actually about who said what first. That’s just being used as a pretense for pushing his superiority (and the moral superiority of people of color in general, which totally goes against the ideas of individualism Yacob and others talked about).
More like there are people who to this day attempt to use the influence of Western philosophy in arguments about why "Western culture" is inherently superior. This is not a strawman I'm referring to here, this is a literal argument made by white nationalists.
Highlighting the contributions made by philosophers from other cultures is an important part of combating these kinds of narratives.
Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? This kind of argument is always predictable: people trading the same grievances and counter-grievances over and over.
The culture wars and all that crap are beyond tedious, it's all off topic here, and the vast majority of HN users have zero interest in it. People shouldn't have to wade through sludge every time anything distantly related shows up. If you don't find this article interesting, that's fine, but please don't trash the thread for those who do.
Alan Kay famously said that a new point of view is worth 80 IQ points. An ideology is worth -80.
I apologize, I didn’t intend to pull the thread off topic. Clearly I was interpreting the article differently than most people were. I had only responded so strongly because it initially struck me as being ideological content.
Thanks for such a neutral reply. I appreciate it, especially since my comment was on the harsh side.
The article struck other people that way too, and I can see why. But this is precisely where HN commenters need to exercise a little self-discipline. If a comment is picking up on the obvious, hottest, most generic point that someone could make about the article, that's a different game than HN is supposed to be for. That's the hot public argument game. We're trying for something quite different here—call it the obscure curiosity game. We're looking for non-obvious insights, something unpredictable. The other game is more or less always the same, and is driven by very different emotions than curiosity. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that it doesn't belong here. It's off topic and it destroys what's on topic.
This is most important when an article has enough material to support either kind of discussion, which I'd say was definitely the case here.
I'd love to get better at explaining this, because I feel like if we could put it into just the right words, most HN users would see that it's in their interests to play the intended game and resist playing the unintended one.
