Paul Graham's latest essay posits that in the tech startup world, nice people finish first. He writes:
For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.
That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things. (Peter Thiel would point out that successful founders still get rich from controlling monopolies, just monopolies they create rather than ones they capture. And while this is largely true, it means a big change in the sort of person who wins.)
Putting asside that he hasn't really defined what "mean" is, is Graham right? Or is this just further evidence that his techno-utopianism has completely disconnected him from reality?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Whoever on Monday December 01 2014, @04:25AM
Was Steve Jobs mean? He disowned his daughter for years, was (by all accounts) an abusive boss. I think most people would think of him as successful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @04:26AM
Steve Wozniak however, is by all accounts a nice guy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @05:25AM
He may have lost out to Steve Jobs on fame and fortune for being too nice/geeky, but his obesity trumped Steve Jobs' alternative medicine.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @07:05AM
He died of asscancer so he did fail in the end.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @07:19AM
I see what you did there. That's some funny shit.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @03:16PM
Bill Gates
Steve Jobs
Larry Ellison
Jeff Bezos
Larry Page
These are *not* nice people. So yeah, I think Mr. Graham is wrong.
(Score: 1) by dltaylor on Monday December 01 2014, @04:46AM
If by "successful", you mean the 1%, then, yes. It takes a certain amount of sociopathy, if not outright psychopathy, to enrich yourself at the expense of most of those working to make you wealthy and the society in which you make your wealth. I've worked for very few companies over the decades where the senior management treated (not just PR-speak) staff as anything but serfs. Health care is one of the more egregious examples. The wealthy, through the wholly-owned subsidiary Republican Party, blocked the single-payer health plan (keeping the health insurance industry rolling in money), while simultaneously fighting employer mandates and scheduling workers as part-time to prevent having to provide employer health care and/or classifying workers as "contractors", at below minimum wage, so that purchasing health insurance privately is impossibly expensive. What kind of monster wants people to be bankrupted, crippled, or dead due to illness? Most of the people we see defined as "successful", that's what kind.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 01 2014, @04:59AM
What kind of monster put forth the plan that caused it all to happen? You can't throw Obamacare and the repercussions that everyone said would happen at the feet of the Republicans, sorry.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by dltaylor on Monday December 01 2014, @05:03AM
The original proposal was for single-payer (expanded Medicare, more or less). That was totally killed whith BS about "death panels", among other things.
The crippled "obamacare" was the best that could be pushed though at the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @05:30AM
Medicare for all ages? You must be joking. The people who bother to vote are senior citizens, and seniors won't vote to share their Medicare with those damn kids who won't get off their lawn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @11:26AM
Medicare for all ages? You must be joking. The people who bother to vote are senior citizens, and seniors won't vote to share their Medicare with those damn kids who won't get off their lawn.
Yes, Medicare for everyone, complete with private supplemental insurance options and raising the medicare tax from 1.5%. Medicare is the most efficient (in terms of dollars of care per dollar of premium) healthcare provider in the US. Half of the seniors out protesting against "Obamacare" were trying to keep the Federal government from "interfering with Medicare," ie: get your government hands out of my government healthcare, so I'm not sure you want to turn to that group for rational policy. Especially if you've got Rush Limbaugh and Ted Cruz riling them up.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @05:59AM
You can't throw Obamacare and the repercussions that everyone said would happen at the feet of the Republicans
Yes, we can! Private company based insurance instead of a government based, single payer system that every other industrial nation already has? Romney-care! Wait, wasn't Romney a, um, Mormon? No, that's not it. Oh! A Republican! Yes, you see, Republicans are responsible for the repercussions of Obamacase, since it is Romneycare, and was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation, a more Republican institution than which one would be hard pressed to find. So, to repeat, Yes, we can. Thank you for your attention.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @06:06AM
I just knew it was Obama's fault.
It's always that guy's fault, especially with you.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday December 01 2014, @10:37AM
You DO realize what we got was NOT Obamacare but ROMNEYCare...yes? That Obamacare had single payer option and limits to how much profit big pharma could make on drugs, so they couldn't charge 5000% above cost on lifesaving drugs, yes? Instead what we got is almost an exact duplicate of what Mitt set up in MA and even though its practically a love letter to big insurance and big pharma the teabaggers are foaming at the bit, just dying to kill it. Not surprising as the ayn randiates can't get a boner unless they stomp on a poor person that day.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @03:22PM
But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy.
It was if I remember a party line vote who passed it. With only 1 republican voting for it in the house and 39 democrats voting against it.
Now that the real train wreck is showing up the democrats are trying to blame anyone but themselves.
The democrats and Obama ramroded that sucker thru. So yes we can clearly lay this at the feat of 'the democrats'. You can pretend someone else is responsible.
Just remember Mrs. Pelosi when your insurance bill goes up by 3x (mine already has and I get less service).
You are doing mental contortions to say the republicans wanted this all along. When clearly they didnt. Or they would have passed it back in 93-94 when they HAD a majority and Clinton wanted it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Whoever on Monday December 01 2014, @06:09AM
Ah, yes, psychopaths: CEOs or criminally insane. [independentaustralia.net] Also, destroyers of wealth. [theguardian.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @06:44AM
If you bothered to read TFA, that's not what Graham meant by "successful". He talks about startups and startup founders mostly the way most of his essays of late seem to be focused on.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday December 01 2014, @02:50PM
So basically, as long as you stay in the wading pool with the other kiddies, and avoid competing with anyone who actually wields real wealth, you can be successful without being a sociopath? Great. Not sure that means mean people fail, they just don't play in the kiddie pool.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 01 2014, @12:49PM
How soon they forget. I'm not sure where you got your information, but that reading of it is wrong.
- The Republican Party did everything they could to block any action on health care whatsoever, including what ended up as Obamacare, because no matter what the Obama administration proposes the Republican Party attempts to block (several Republican legislators are on the record as saying that's been their party's position since Obama was elected).
- The Clinton/Obama wing of the Democratic Party and the Obama administration blocked the inclusion of a "public option", which would have given citizens the choice to use the government as their insurer rather than a private insurance company. (My congresscritter at the time, Dennis Kucinich, tried to block Obamacare without this, Obama personally lobbied him and changed his mind.)
- Basically nobody except self-described socialist Bernie Sanders was really pushing single-payer.
There are Obama administration folks on the record as saying that the health care law they got was in essence the health care law the Obama administration wanted. The story that you (as a supporter of single payer) didn't get single payer because of Republicans is a complete fabrication made up by the Democrats. Had the Democrats wanted single payer, when it became clear that the Republicans were going to oppose any proposal, they could have said "Fine, we're passing single-payer without you!" and done the exact same thing they did to pass Obamacare.
This is part of the bigger illusion the Democrats live by: That they're actually a liberal party prevented from implementing a liberal agenda because of the Republicans. They aren't actually liberal at all on economic issues, because that would involve losing their big corporate donors that are a remarkably similar list of companies and billionaires as the Republicans' donors. If they got an overwhelming majority of the House and Senate, and controlled the White House, they still wouldn't enact anything remotely approaching an economically liberal agenda, but would instead focus on social issues like gay marriage and intelligent design that the big corporate guys don't care about.
(None of that is to claim that the Republicans don't live by some whoppers as well.)
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @04:53AM
It is a load of crap, even when you have two civilized groups competing for the same territory, the main thing going on is cooperation. That is why it is groups, and not isolated family groups. If one of those groups isn't cooperating with each other, they will be at a disadvantage and may fail to control their territory, even facing weaker numbers.
Sounds like somebody is "missing the forest" to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @05:16AM
Another lie told by deceitful psychopaths when they set honest people up to fail. Paul Graham is a liar, and a successful enough liar to get his mean-spirited lies discussed here.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SuperCharlie on Monday December 01 2014, @05:56AM
Mean people are notoriously in positions of power such as managers, owners, bosses, etc. We have created a society where stomping the nice little people is very lucrative and that is typically the measure of success.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @05:59AM
Someone who clearly didn't read the article:
(Score: 2, Interesting) by dltaylor on Monday December 01 2014, @06:12AM
I know people in ALL of those fields, and, in my experience, there is a positive correlation between being "mean" (lying, backstabbing, "yet another minor edition of my book, so you can't sell back, or use, the old one" professors, ...) and conventionally defined success.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nishi.b on Monday December 01 2014, @08:42AM
Same for me, the whole article is (as he says himself) based on his personal experience, not on a measured reality. Or he may have a very different definition of "successful" and "mean" compared to mine.
Mean people, for me, are not just unpleasant people who seem hard to work with. They are mostly people who are very nice to others, but stab them in the back or profit from their work by showing it as their own... Being in the spotlight for things they did not do and blaming others for their failures is correlated with being successful (*wow he made that ??* Let's pay him some more and give him a manager position !). I have seen this a lot in the university/science world (conflict about the names on a article...), and the same in two startup companies.
The ones who are 'successful' financially and in their social position (head of ***, manager of ***) were not the best people, but those who knew best how to manage their image (sociopaths ? might be).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday December 01 2014, @06:17AM
There was a nice prince of the Russian Royal family, you know, the Tsars, whose name was Peter. He was an anarchist. He wrote a very nice book titled "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" The idea was that those of us that cooperated would be more successful (why is it that when people say "successful" they often mean "survival"?) than the Social Darwinist, Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Paul Ryan types who go for the Nietzschean obermensch without any of the actual intelligence. You see, individual humans are puny, weak, and like most Randians, totally oblivious of the consequences of their actions. You piss off enough of the community, and the community will come after you, not any particular individual. This means you will lose, because you thought that power was all that mattered, without realizing that power is a possession of communities, not of individuals. If individuals seem to possess power for a time, it is because the community has allowed them to, and that permission can always, and immediately, be revoked.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @06:34AM
So the cock-sucking popular types always succeed no matter what? It doesn't matter what you know, but whose cock you sucked off? Well shit. That sure sounds like mutual aid! Suck off each others cocks, and let the windmill chaser go fuck himself.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday December 01 2014, @06:47AM
I am sorry, but I am pretty sure that, well, I am pretty sure that nobody has ever, . . . have you considered professional help? There is probably someone who cares about you, if only because you are human (though a sorry negative pressure orifice one) who can help you find help. See? This is the point Kropotkin makes, helping helps the survival of the species more than seeking your own personal, um, discharge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @07:17AM
Don't worry, Charlie, I won't pull away the football this time, honest.
Have you ever seen Charlie Brown kick a football? Lucy is a lying bitch!
Trust is an invitation to betrayal.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday December 01 2014, @07:42AM
And betrayal is more than an invitation to self destruction. I was watching ShÅhei Imamura's "Ballad of Narayama" (which by the way includes some parts about dogs that you probably would enjoy), and noticed that in this subsistence economy, the family that was discovered to be hoarding and not sharing with the rest of the commune was summarily killed and buried in a common grave. If you screw over all of us, we are not only coming after you, we are coming after your family, and your dog, because you seem to have genes that threaten us all. And of course, in this movie, it was not some Reardon Ayn Rand hero that was the hero, but Orin, the old woman who sought to sacrifice herself for the greater good of all, against her son's wishes. If you are conservative, I recommend this movie to you as an epitome of conservative values. (Oh, if you are conservative, I will have to explain that "epitome" means something like a "perfect example". And, you do not have to speak or understand Japanese, but the ability to read subtitles is a must. Call one of your literate liberal friends if you need help.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @08:26AM
Oh no where's the mutual aid? Why would murderers with superior numbers win a fight for resources? That's mean! They should fail because they're mean! No this story needs a rewrite full of pink unicorns and rainbows. The food was poisonous, only the family hoarding it knew how to prepare it safely, their secret died with them, and the commune all died a mean people's death from poisonous food. Now that's an egalitarian utopia. Everybody dies!
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday December 01 2014, @08:34AM
Fool! You know what happens when the murderers with superior numbers win? They are all mean! They will fail, because there is no honor amongst thieves. They turn on each other. I am amazed that someone has to point this out to you, and I can only attribute it to a incompetent upbringing. Yes, I am sorry, but like all those young teenage male misogynists, we are going to have to tell your mom. And get off the dog! (I take it you have not seen the movie, or you would know what a mother's love means.) Oh tempores, Oh Mores! To what depths our ACs have fallen! Is there no hope for humankind?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @05:58PM
Invalid generalizations are the root of all evil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 02 2014, @02:27AM
Your stuff (the content) is often interesting.
Your formating, however, leaves something to be desired.
If you would put in a paragraph break every 150 words or so, it would be easier to read what you write.
(You must still have young|good eyes.)
.
As for your use of the word "Conservative", Right-Wingers around here haven't wanted to conserve anything since around 1933.
The proper term for the current bunch would be Reactionary. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [alayham.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @12:07PM
You see, individual humans are puny, weak, and like most Randians, totally oblivious of the consequences of their actions. You piss off enough of the community, and the community will come after you, not any particular individual. This means you will lose, because you thought that power was all that mattered, without realizing that power is a possession of communities, not of individuals.
This is why the anarchists fail. They build up these nice rationalizations completely ignoring actual, observed, historical human behavior. "The Community" will rise up against the oppressors. The tsars ran Russia for 200 years with brutality that makes Syria look enlightened. Nicholas ii only left because he managed to kill off most of his own armies, and alienate the rest, in wars against Japan and Germany. Feudal lords dominated Europe for 600 years. American slavery lasted 300 years, and it wasn't an uprising of the oppressed community that ended it.
Humans are astonishingly tolerant of their own oppression, especially if they have the sense that they can "keep their head down" and make it through. Most humans seem completely uninterested in "success," and satisfy themselves with "survival." Survival and fantasies of rising up to take revenge against the oppressors.
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday December 04 2014, @06:16AM
I've read many good AC comments on this page and the parent is one of them.
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @02:58PM
> You piss off enough of the community, and the community will come after you, not any particular individual.
I think you misunderstand Ayn Rand. Much of what she wrote was an indictment of the power of community to bully the individual. She was not in favor of personal or political power over the individual.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 02 2014, @02:42AM
Obligatory xkcd.
http://m.xkcd.com/1049/ [xkcd.com]
If you have tootips enabled, hover over the image.
If not, right-click and select Properties.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday December 03 2014, @12:28AM
I think you misunderstand Ayn Rand. Much of what she wrote was an indictment of the power of community to bully the individual.
I think you misunderstand how much I understand Ayn Rand. Of course she would say things like that, because Greenspan!! Never read any of her books, didn't see the movie (not the only one, evidently), and do not plan to because, to put it bluntly, there is not much to understand there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @01:13PM
For years I have worked near for or with "nasty" people. There are some exceptions but most prosper. They build alliances with assholes, scumbags, thieves, sociopaths and step on anyone in their way.
They win.
One such sociopath currently pulls down six figures just for turning up. If he turns up. He likes to rub it in. Every day. He would rather run his ebay business and play with his phone than work. Management do nothing. Some of them are worse.
Assholes win.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @06:45PM
With only one exception everyone I know that nets 7 to 8 figures owns their own businesses (retail outlets, restaurants, gas stations, etc...). For the most part they are nice people, they act very professionally, but when it comes to business negotiations (ie: negotiating with customers, employees, and suppliers) they are very very tough negotiators. They pay their unskilled employees as little as they can and overwork them as much as they can get away with. It is up to their employees to become very skilled and irreplaceable and to demand higher pay for their work or else the employers risk the employees quitting and, believe me, it can take up to a year (or more) to find another employee to replace them. However these employers will reward their skilled (but not unskilled) employees with bonuses when their businesses do good to encourage them to do good and to help retain them. Good employees are very hard to replace and an employer may go through many employees (either firing them or having the employee quit because they can't keep up with the workload) before finding a good one. At the same time the employee has to be careful not to ask for too much or else the employer might try to find someone else. It works both ways. The employer can't underpay good employees or else they may quit and the employees can't ask for too much or else they may get fired. Most importantly the employee must be good at what they do. If you're unskilled and hardly speak English the only thing you will make is minimum wage and you will work like crazy. If you work hard to improve your skills and to become irreplaceable you can then start to ask for higher pay.
Now as far as being lazy these business owners are not lazy by any stretch of the imagination. They are very skilled, intelligent, fast learners, hard workers, many of them speak multiple languages well and can communicate with customers in different languages, they keep up with technology, etc... That's why they are so successful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @06:48PM
(same poster) Heck, I know this one person that owns a few restaurants and he also owns a bunch of property (apartment buildings, condominiums, etc... and has to manage them). In shows like Jeopardy, the chase, etc... he can smoke 90% of the people on there answering the questions before the person asking even has a chance to ask it. He wouldn't bother going on these shows, he makes way too much and it wouldn't be worth the invested time (he'll lose more money just to get on the show than he'll gain back).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01 2014, @07:05PM
It seems to me that evolution has two competing pressures on this issue:
1) Self interested individuals likely do well for themselves (giving to others hurts yourself) and thus unless the population sees you as self interested and counters you accordingly, you will succeed.
2) Populations of self interested individuals fair poorly compared to populations of cooperative individuals. So it is in the population's interest to keep self interested individuals from succeeding.
So the best case for an individual is one of self interest, that cannot be identified as such by the population. The ultimate form of this is psychopathy.