[temp-dude-87844]

This essay is a frustrating read, because you can feel his condescension towards critics (oh, they must be envious, or taking cheap shots), and you get a window into his headspace in which he believes that his way of examining the world and arriving at substantially the same beliefs is the only correct way.

But to be quite honest, many PG essays fit this same basic structure, whereby some venture or belief of his is introduced in a slow-burn way, with lots of short sentences light on content as if trying to sound off-the-cuff but way too authored to sound convincingly so, and then a dispassioned but complete teardown of the critics of the idea. A subversion of an appeal to historical authority thrown in for good measure. He always comes across as the understated luminary whose low opinion of the clueless hordes or meddling schemers below him is emotionlessly obvious, and anyone who disagrees is clearly a meddling schemer because of envy or fear or some other existential insecurity, because his seldom-mentioned achievements ought to speak for themselves about the supremacy of his approach.

But what's especially frustrating about this essay is that it's clearly precipitated by the dismissive public reaction towards the Mighty app -- an observation shared by many others in this thread -- but this is intentionally unacknowledged by him, presumably so that he can pontificate about the bravery of weird ideas the envy and fear of others on his personal blog without soiling the name of a business venture he backed. But it's also evidence that with a simple Twitter beef, you can get under his skin -- a sad fact you'd be forgiven for doubting if you hang on every word of his essays.