Hypothesis: One way to tell whether someone's a "natural" at something is when they do it with style even when they're first learning and don't know … - Paul Graham

Being mean makes you stupid. That's why I hate fights. You never do your best work in a fight, because fights are not sufficiently general. Winning is always a function of the situation and the people involved. You don't win fights by thinking of big ideas but by thinking of tricks that work in one particular case. And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems.

Why would you have less moral obligation to help people you'll never see? If that were the rule, you could make yourself morally perfect by staying in your gated community. You'd never see anyone who needed help, and thus never fall short of delivering it.

One difficulty when trying to ban ideas on social networks is that it's the edge cases that matter most, but bans are enforced by low-level employees who don't understand them.