Every time pg puts out a new essay, we get into this privilege bingo stuff. It’s always irrelevant. There’s a huge audience of people who don’t care if their CEO is 300x better paid than they are, or that they didn’t go to an elite school, or that they didn’t have prestigious family connections: what they want to know is how did he work, what can we do to unlock our productive potential, how can we create things that we can be proud of in the same way. That’s who Graham is writing for.
Maybe the way he worked is also a product of his environment, and could thus be dependent on things like wealth, family/genetics, upbringing, network, etc.?
And those could also be good topics to explore. There’s room for different types of introspection and self-reflection. But from the perspective of how can we learn from or emulate or find proxies for the benefits of these other factors, not starting from the preposterous notion that Graham is writing self-serving screeds to hoodwink us.
