[ewjordan]

Too imprecise. The claim was that a segmentation by birth year would not be expected to correlate with bravery, smarts, or hard work, not that there's no segmentation that correlates with any of those qualities.

Your proposed version is quite PC, to be sure, and I'm sure most humanities majors would defend it tooth and nail (cheap dig, I know :) ), but that in itself suggests to me that it's not what pg had in mind...

For one, I'd expect a lot of people here, including pg, to believe that startup founders excel in all of those categories, even if it's simply selection bias that causes it.

[sachinag]

Actually, that's what makes it better. The argument against Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation isn't that those WWII heroes were so special; it's that no one generation could be.

I could have been more precise with a modifying phrase such as "by accident of birth", but that was too unwieldy. The upvoted comments are specific to the GG argument, which are suboptimal, because they don't work as good writing unless you've seen PG's original.

(Yeah, I'm a part-time writer/editor to pay the beer bills, and I can get defensive about my writing. Sue me. You're better at design/coding/picking up chicks than I.)

[rms]

Yours may be "good writing" but you completely changed the meaning of the statement. In my opinion, it's important to mention WW2 -- it's easy to make the statement not offensive to The Greatest Generation by completely removing the reference.