vitajex

satire has to have some basis in truth

In order to be funny at least!

PG has written in public about this for over 20 years. See "I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet" in https://paulgraham.com/say.html.

Dumb question here: How do they know what he googled? Is it a matter of serving Google with a warrant?

I don't think anyone takes it as a positive. It's just not what voters vote on. If they support one candidate's policies more than another's, they won't flip because of that issue. The example of Bill Clinton demonstrates that this happens across the political spectrum, and his feminist supporters were the ones making this argument back then. They got criticized for being hypocritical, but in politics you have to prioritize.

You're more confident about that than I am. I find it easy to imagine how a person who produces the first kind of analysis could be technically useful in analyzing government data. He presumably didn't know anything about ancient scrolls before working on the first thing, so he has a track record of conquering a steep learning curve.

But we don't actually know what they're doing.

What he did to win the scroll competition had to do with data analysis, not ancient history, so of course it could be relevant. But none of us, including the author of the article, knows what they're specifically doing, so it's not possible to say how relevant it is. It's a pity the reporter didn't do some reporting about that, instead of writing a hit piece calling them lackeys.

Experienced enough to win this though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261861

Just "ask" and take no action to protect themselves?