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I'm getting tired of all of the hot air coming from these tech oligarchs. They're so enriched by a tech boom and a decade of easy money that we worship at their

I'm getting tired of all of the hot air coming from these tech oligarchs. They're so enriched by a tech boom and a decade of easy money that we worship at their feet. Their vision and goal for the future is simply more money for themselves at the expense of others. "Guys look! An hour long commute is actually a good thing because you can spend it with your kids!" Why is it so hard to spend time with our kids now?! I know that sounds harsh, but we seriously need to stop the hero worship in SV culture and begin building a society that benefits everyone, not a society that works itself to the bone just to eat the cake of a larger corporation and enrich the early investors. They will just as quickly dilute your quality of life as they will dilute the shares in your company.

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stvswn 10y ago
What makes you jump to the conclusion that technology investment, or capitalism, or whatever you think is "bad" is "at the expense of others?" Currently, about 10% of the world's population lives in extreme poverty. It was 12% in 2012. It was 40% in 1990. The history of the world, post-war 20th century, is one of extreme progress for the lives of real people -- especially really poor people. So, what do you think drove that change? Was it shaping a society that "works for everyone?" Or was it technology and the efficient allocation of capital? I'd argue that it was the latter, because I can look at the world and find the places where people have remained extremely poor, where people have starved to death in large numbers, and it's not hard to see that it happens in the places where technology and capital are stopped. Before modern markets were (slowly) permitted to function in China and India, lots and lots of people died of hunger. Way more than today. The lives of nearly everyone in the former USSR became much better when the wall fell. It's still pretty terrible to live in North Korea. Right now in Venezuala people are starving, and there are hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating on the streets. I'm fine with "the oligarchs" getting rich, by comparison.
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- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  This may surprise you, but people defined as "living in extreme poverty" weren't always unhappy to be there. Western standards of affluence are the economic default, but they don't include any measure of happiness, fulfilment, or contentment. The factors that generate the last three are largely unrelated to median income. In fact they reliably go down when neoliberal "efficient allocation of capital" becomes the dominant ideology. People are starving in the US and UK too. Did you know that around 15% of US households cannot consistently afford food, while more than 5% have "very low food security" which includes persistent periods of hunger or malnourishment?
  - petra 10y ago
    I agree with a lot of what you said, but : >> 15% of US households cannot consistently afford food, .. 5% hunger What food are we talking about ? because basic grains, etc - the kind of meals indians eat, for ex.(and are very healthy and pretty tasty) - are extremely cheap. So is 15% possible ?
    - wavefunction 10y ago
      Doesn't India provide food subsidies to its poorest citizens? Why would it be hard to believe that wealthy Western countries feature extreme or even abject poverty? America had some huge tent cities filled with previously not-homeless families living in them following the 2009 meltdown.
  - stvswn 10y ago
    I'm not sure if you mean to be hitting on old Marxist tropes on purpose or if you've just absorbed some of the talking points, but I highly doubt that any poll of people who lived outside of "western standards of affluence" and then later inside of them would reveal that people actually like affluence. Yes, median household income has stagnated in the U.S. since 2000, while both the low-end and the high-end have improved. Can you support your claim that it this correlates with "neoliberal" policies? Where in the world has life gotten better that you think is a better model? Can you please name a place on earth where something other than free-market capitalism has proven successful? I never claimed that no one in the U.S. or U.K. was in poverty. I claimed fewer were than before, and fewer are than in countries will less access to technology and capital. Your other point -- that people in extreme poverty can actually be happier -- well, I don't know what to say. Feeding starving people more often seems like an intrinsically worthy goal to me. I can't imagine the pain of not having enough food for my children.
skynode 10y ago
> They will just as quickly dilute your quality of life as they will dilute the shares in your company. Lol! I think this incentive-based version works better though. If the libertarian culture of Californian idealists is imposed across the board, we would probably witness the end of innovation (unless war and existential threats provide the incentive) Even if it's broken, don't fix it.
- skynode 10y ago
  Lol! Undoubtedly down-voted by the libertarians. :)
  - jcoffland 10y ago
    and people who like to see some supporting evidence in an argument.
    - skynode 10y ago
      You want evidence of what exactly? How Soviet-style prosperity should be public agendas collapse without mercy? Please. SV needs to grow up.
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pasbesoin 10y ago
The current buzz is "basic income." While I'm not opposed to the idea that if you're born -- and if so much of the world values human life including and especially in the womb -- then you should have the opportunity to at least "get by" and not be per force exploited, much less sickened and killed. While I'm not opposed to it, there is a pre-cursor of ostensibly more limited scope, and perhaps of greater benefit than just "throwing undifferentiated dollars" at a problem. Access to healthcare. Not necessarily absolutely unlimited, spend 100K for an extra last week of life healthcare. But quality basic, effective healthcare. If we value human life, then we should also value the quality of that life. Providing effective health care greatly enhances that quality. It greatly enhances the ability of people to take care of themselves, and their families. And their friends. You may not live in a palace, nor anything close. But we'll do our best to help you have the physical wherewithal to enjoy the day. And to keep you that way. If you become injured or ill, you will not be alone -- and we will not let others prey upon you in your weakness. If we -- here in the U.S., in my case -- can't do this. With all our resources and largess. Well, then, you can just go and stuff the rest of your moralizing and idealizing.
- wincy 10y ago
  I would have a thousand children if I could. If I can pay for them all and don't draw benefits, who cares? People might think I'm eccentric, but it's not like I'm taking more than my fair share. Once the government is paying every one of my kids, suddenly people wants to have a say in the number of children I can have. I also want my insurance to spend a million dollars if it means I can live for an extra week. Even if I'm absolutely miserable. Even if I'm unconscious. I don't care about your "not necessarily absolutely unlimited" healthcare plans that dictate how long I get to live. That's not your call, if I paid for insurance that says they'll spend a million dollars on end of life care they'd better spend a million dollars. Just to preempt Poe's law here, I'm absolutely serious in both of my above statements. I'm not creating a straw man or using hyperbole. I think basic income and "free" healthcare would have strings attached that I quite frankly find disgusting.
  - redm 10y ago
    A bit OT... > I would have a thousand children if I could. I know this is just an example, but here are obligations that come with children beyond the economic cost. As someone with 3 small children, a basic income for them would not incentivize me in any way to have more.
M_Grey 10y ago
It's not really hero worship, although it can morph into that or just look like that. Really, it's just that so many people aligned with the "SV culture" you mention want to be them. When someone has achieved all that you're shooting for, you have a vast personal investment in lionizing them while in your "I'll be that guy someday!"-phase. Then of course you just have the reality that plenty of the love coming their way is just... well... ass-kissing for favors, status, money, or in some vague hope of some of those. Until or unless enough talented people figure out that they'd have better odds playing the lottery than aiming to become an SV oligarch/plutocrat, there will continue to be a culture of this intensely covetous "worship", that almost inevitably morphs into loathing and resentment. That's just the "in" people... the public at large is either subjected to intense marketing and PR, or unaware of such people.
- rhizome 10y ago
  It's not really hero worship Here's a thought experiment: what was Marc Andreesen's last idea? How much ego was in it: none, some, or a lot?
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    I'm not really disagreeing with the point that I suspect you're making, I'm just saying that it's a lot more cynical than "hero worship".
    - rhizome 10y ago
      Do you mean "insidious," in that the tech celebrities that people use as role models might be charlatans?
      - M_Grey 10y ago
        ...I didn't say "insidious" at all.
nostrademons 10y ago
So I'd agree about taking the hero worship out of SV. The history of SV is one of successive technology waves, each of which certain people happen to spot & ride first, and then because they make a lot of money on those waves, everybody else idolizes them. And then the next wave happens and it's inevitably someone else who spots them and rides them, and suddenly we all have new heroes. But when it comes to building a society that benefits everyone - how? That's always the question. Pretty much everyone agrees that it's a good goal, but when it comes down to figuring out "What would peoples' lives look like in a society that benefits everyone", nobody agrees.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  Wealth distribution is a hard problem, but it is a MASSIVE problem that most productivity gains flow to a subset of society.
- zepto 10y ago
  Right - so this is actually a hard problem worth solving, unlike many of the problems that SV solves. Let's acknowledge that and stop treating these people like Heroes because they got rich.
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- petra 10y ago
  Leaving aside disagreements by people(who a lot of them are politically motivated and maybe not the result of deep thinking and rational thought or aiming to benefit everyone), doesn't the research tells us about what interventions benefit everybody ? For example, that socialized medicine is the better method to reach that goal ?
  - SolaceQuantum 10y ago
    The difficulty with this is also convincing people that the research is valid and itself not politically motivated/without rational thought. As much as I would like research on what benefits societies in general (sociology?) to feed into how social policies are generated, I feel that there is also significant questioning on the validity of the research and how such research is conducted. Given that there are no real ways to fully account for all variables in the scope of this study, there may always be the argument that such research is shoddy and can't be replicated. (I'm not actually arguing that such science is shoddy, only that the perception that they are shoddy and invalid is a strong disincentive to listen to any research on this matter. It's actually really disheartening to me that this is the case.)
ryandrake 10y ago
The hero worship of successful people is just survivorship bias in action. Out of a population of people flipping coins, we (after the fact) find the ones who flipped heads 10 times in a row and fawn over them, asking them how they became such great coin flippers and what we can do to improve our coin flipping skills. See also: Good To Great or any similar business book.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  The other possible explanation is that there is a formula for success. It's just extraordinarily complex and we haven't figured it out yet, so we just attribute it to this thing called luck, the same way ancient people didn't understand thunder and attributed it to gods expressing their anger.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    I think we have enough examples of people being paid a fortune to run a company into the ground to dispel the myth of some link between compensation and success. Unfortunately many many people still conflate the concepts, since compensation is generally meant to indicate success. I don't see a lot of people doubting that someone like Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates figured out a viable pathway to success, for which luck plays(played) a role, but is not the only factor. The problem is that for every Buffet you have dozens of clowns with platforms, massive egos, and cults of personality.
    - acdha 10y ago
      Bill Gates is a tricky example since while he certainly worked hard, a key element to his success was his mother being on the board at IBM when they were negotiating the DOS license. Other companies could have been just as good, worked just as hard, and still gone down a very different path - as evidenced by Digital Research.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    There isn't a formula for success because "success" doesn't have a firm definition. I would argue that a person that has a happy home life and feels comfortable and sufficiently compensated in their work is a success. There are hundreds of millions such people. This doesn't seem overly complex at all.
Keyframe 10y ago
I like how 'these tech oligarchs' seem to know everything about everything and flap their gums giving advice left and right. What made them experts on everything? Because they seem to have some money? Is it the same thing when we laugh at people for listening to actors and musicians talk about politics?
bambax 10y ago
Yeah. > Self-driving cars, for example, could potentially put 5 million people involved in transportation jobs out of work. And creating 5 million new jobs for them seems impossible with net monthly job gains typically in the hundreds of thousands. “Five million jobs seem like a lot of jobs. It is a lot,” Andreessen says. But looking at the big picture shows that “every year in the U.S. on average about 21 million jobs are destroyed and about 24.5 million are created,” Andreessen says. “So the real answer to how do you replace 5 million jobs is, we already replace that in less than a quarter [of a year] today.” This is disingenuous, bordering on stupid. If a McDonald's closes and another one opens, 20 jobs are destroyed and 20 new ones are created, but they're the same! What we are talking about with self-driving cars is an entire category of jobs being destroyed, and 5 million people doing the same thing, becoming unemployed at the exact same time (a time when their job doesn't exist anymore). Very different from the normal life of the economy.
- petra 10y ago
  And actually, 5 million jobs are just a tip of the iceberg, some estimates talk about 40% of jobs being automated - and even that may be a low-ball estimate, since it doesn't include jobs that would be indirectly replaced with something more efficient(meat -> plant based meat, cars that don't need maintenance , i.e electric vehicles, etc), and jobs that we don't know how the tech will look in 10 years(creative jobs, natural language, etc).
  - moojah 10y ago
    In developed countries 40% of the jobs from 40 years ago are almost certainly automated at this point. And we're richer than ever before if you look at absolute richness (not in relatives, but that's an entirely different discussion).
- moojah 10y ago
  Not really. The effect of self driving cars may be larger than "normal tech evolutions", but we have been continually re-inventing ourselves at a pace that is not particularly different from what it has been over the last 200 years. 200 years ago 95+% of all people worked in agriculture. In developed countries, now barely 1-2% do so. 100 years ago the vast majority worked in manual labour jobs. Now people are moving on to service jobs. Macro-economically speaking, those were much larger and more rapid changes than what we're seeing right now. This is not new. It's normal economic development. Nothing unusual at all. People have to stop portraying this negatively, and Marc is correct in seeing this as a positive to humanity. His argument is that we need to manage this shift as a society. Some countries pro-actively do so (European social security comes to mind), others do not (USA). I tend to agree with him that it does need to be managed.
whack 10y ago
I only came to HN somewhat recently, around 2 years ago, but I've started to notice a very major change in the culture of this forum lately. There is so much vitriol and blanket insults being levied at anyone and everyone. The linked article is almost always a sideshow, and simply acts as a prelude for the battle in the comments section. A battle which has little to do with what the article itself says, and is simply a dumping ground for the prior beliefs and soapboxing that people actually come here for. This above comment is a perfect example. I don't know much about Marc, but where I'm concerned, he's just a guy who has experience in the VC scene, was invited to talk at an event, and agreed to share his personal thoughts and strategies. I read through the article, and nothing that he said really stood out in any way, good or bad. The thing about self-driving cars was just him saying "look at the potential upside for people who're currently wasting time in daily commutes" and "don't nitpick so much on the things that can go wrong, that you lose sight of the potential for things to go tremendously right". A little platitude-like, sure. But not really objectionable in any way. I certainly don't think anything he said in the article warranted a ranting about "hot air coming out of money-grubbing share-diluting quality-of-life-ruining tech oligarchs whose feet we're worshipping". If you really want to have a discussion about this tangent, write your own blog post, submit it, and let's have a discussion there. But it's sad to see the comments thread get hijacked by such superfluous soapboxing. I realize that me posting this isn't going to do anything. This is a lost cause, and my venting is more cathartic than anything. The culture of this place has changed, and I don't think we can ever go back to how it used to be. I guess it's time to start looking for another place to frequent.
- hathawsh 10y ago
  This effect always seems to come with popularity. Once upon a time, Slashdot had some amazingly insightful discussions, leading to a growth in popularity, which led to increased noise. That noise led to increased cynicism and eventually burnout. The same thing has sadly happened to every popular tech news site I know of. The secret is to keep searching for a new place to have high quality discussions. You never know where it will pop up. (If it's a place where people expect to find it, then all the popular kids will go there and make noise.) I wouldn't give up on HN yet though, it still has quality discussions most of the time.
voidhorse 10y ago
It's really a fascinating phenomena when you think about it. Technology has warped and dominated our world and culture to an extent it never has before. I like to imagine a little scene: a primitive man bows at the feet of another who fashioned a knife out of a mammoth tooth. That's more or less what we still do today. The technological and scientific have replaced the religious as the ruling dogma and organizational frameworks of the world. Just as many folks in the middle ages probably couldn't conceive of the radical changes that would happen were religious hegemony toppled, it's hard for us to conceive of a world where the ruling technological caste loses their influence. But what a wild world it might be. What bothers me the most about our current age is our lack of questioning when it comes to technological progress. We have a sort of close your eyes and jump philosophy when it comes to technology--we seem to go ahead and create new technologies before a. considering the full scope of their possible effects, and b. developing the requisite social, political, and economic structures to support the shifts they'll bring about (e.g. in the case of self driving cars and automation of work in general we will have to switch to an economic model other than capitalism if we are against a very slim few having the majority of the world's wealth, more so than is already the case, which is hard to imagine.) Of course, it's not possible to predict all of the side effects introducing new technology will have--for example, I doubt Tim had any notion of the extent to which the internet would change the world when he came up with an idea that let you view the documents your buddy had on his machine, but here we are. Still, I think we have a bad tendency to accelerate change in the technological sphere while social, political, and economic structures remain woefully antiquated.
- ivm 10y ago
  When ethical progress lags behind technological progress it ends up in an enormous bloodshed every single time.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  >I like to imagine a little scene: a primitive man bows at the feet of another who fashioned a knife out of a mammoth tooth. >That's more or less what we still do today. 100% yes. Psychology is a thin veneer on top of biology, and evolution is a slow process. Let none of us believe we are so beyond our forbears that their problems, difficulties, and sins are behind us, or that their thoughts and lessons are irrelevant to us.
archagon 10y ago
> I know that sounds harsh, but we seriously need to stop the hero worship in SV culture and begin building a society that benefits everyone, not a society that works itself to the bone just to eat the cake of a larger corporation and enrich the early investors. This sort of oligarchy is probably emergent from the way we structure our economy on a base level. What factors incentivize corporations to form into pyramids, with most of the wealth accruing on top? Can we instead incentivize smaller, cooperative-style companies with more democratic managerial styles and more equitable distribution of wealth? It wouldn't work for every business, but it's barely been tried at all, and I'd love to see the kind of SV culture that would emerge from these parameters. (I guess Valve is a notable example, but I can't think of many others. I suppose the OSS community?) Unfortunately, I don't think telling people to stop hero worship is going to do the trick. Things are going to have to change on a more fundamental level.
- stagbeetle 10y ago
  > What factors incentivize corporations to form into pyramids, with most of the wealth accruing on top? Most people are incapable of managing high-level responsibilities. Those on the lower rungs assign/relinquish (depending on how you look at it) their responsibilities, and the fruits they bear, to those they perceive more capable than them. So now instead of having a smooth slope of compensation, it's top-heavy. In layman's terms: The bulk of people who work are not motivated by the company's direct prosperity. They're motivated by other factors such as "work fulfillment," "passion", "making the world a better place", all of which don't align intrinsically with profit. > Can we instead incentivize smaller, cooperative-style companies with more democratic managerial styles and more equitable distribution of wealth? This is paradoxical for a few reasons. First, lead-by-many is much more inefficient than lead-by-few(usually one). See: democracy vs. democratic republic. Second, good leaders have "ego," in the way that they have a certain modus operandi and goal they won't deviate from. Thus, if you were to populate your ranks with good leaders, it would be a shit-show. See: in-fighting nobility. Third, incentives have always been abused. Take a look at any industry with "incentives" and subsidies. The companies are built around that subsidy, not upon being a successful business.
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v45h 10y ago
Perhaps SV has a lot of hero worship but I feel as though comments such as these commit the same folly. They're focused on Andreessen and not the ultimate point being made. Andreessen's base point is that whether you like it or not, millions of jobs are going to get taken away and millions more jobs are going to open up elsewhere. The question is, how do we get society to be better at adapting to this change? If you truly are concerned about building a society that benefits everyone, this is the question that should be discussed/answered.

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stvswn 10y ago

What makes you jump to the conclusion that technology investment, or capitalism, or whatever you think is "bad" is "at the expense of others?" Currently, about 10% of the world's population lives in extreme poverty. It was 12% in 2012. It was 40% in 1990. The history of the world, post-war 20th century, is one of extreme progress for the lives of real people -- especially really poor people. So, what do you think drove that change? Was it shaping a society that "works for everyone?" Or was it technology and the efficient allocation of capital? I'd argue that it was the latter, because I can look at the world and find the places where people have remained extremely poor, where people have starved to death in large numbers, and it's not hard to see that it happens in the places where technology and capital are stopped. Before modern markets were (slowly) permitted to function in China and India, lots and lots of people died of hunger. Way more than today. The lives of nearly everyone in the former USSR became much better when the wall fell. It's still pretty terrible to live in North Korea. Right now in Venezuala people are starving, and there are hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating on the streets. I'm fine with "the oligarchs" getting rich, by comparison.

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TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
This may surprise you, but people defined as "living in extreme poverty" weren't always unhappy to be there. Western standards of affluence are the economic default, but they don't include any measure of happiness, fulfilment, or contentment. The factors that generate the last three are largely unrelated to median income. In fact they reliably go down when neoliberal "efficient allocation of capital" becomes the dominant ideology. People are starving in the US and UK too. Did you know that around 15% of US households cannot consistently afford food, while more than 5% have "very low food security" which includes persistent periods of hunger or malnourishment?
- petra 10y ago
  I agree with a lot of what you said, but : >> 15% of US households cannot consistently afford food, .. 5% hunger What food are we talking about ? because basic grains, etc - the kind of meals indians eat, for ex.(and are very healthy and pretty tasty) - are extremely cheap. So is 15% possible ?
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    Doesn't India provide food subsidies to its poorest citizens? Why would it be hard to believe that wealthy Western countries feature extreme or even abject poverty? America had some huge tent cities filled with previously not-homeless families living in them following the 2009 meltdown.
- stvswn 10y ago
  I'm not sure if you mean to be hitting on old Marxist tropes on purpose or if you've just absorbed some of the talking points, but I highly doubt that any poll of people who lived outside of "western standards of affluence" and then later inside of them would reveal that people actually like affluence. Yes, median household income has stagnated in the U.S. since 2000, while both the low-end and the high-end have improved. Can you support your claim that it this correlates with "neoliberal" policies? Where in the world has life gotten better that you think is a better model? Can you please name a place on earth where something other than free-market capitalism has proven successful? I never claimed that no one in the U.S. or U.K. was in poverty. I claimed fewer were than before, and fewer are than in countries will less access to technology and capital. Your other point -- that people in extreme poverty can actually be happier -- well, I don't know what to say. Feeding starving people more often seems like an intrinsically worthy goal to me. I can't imagine the pain of not having enough food for my children.

skynode 10y ago

> They will just as quickly dilute your quality of life as they will dilute the shares in your company. Lol! I think this incentive-based version works better though. If the libertarian culture of Californian idealists is imposed across the board, we would probably witness the end of innovation (unless war and existential threats provide the incentive) Even if it's broken, don't fix it.

skynode 10y ago
Lol! Undoubtedly down-voted by the libertarians. :)
- jcoffland 10y ago
  and people who like to see some supporting evidence in an argument.
  - skynode 10y ago
    You want evidence of what exactly? How Soviet-style prosperity should be public agendas collapse without mercy? Please. SV needs to grow up.
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pasbesoin 10y ago

The current buzz is "basic income." While I'm not opposed to the idea that if you're born -- and if so much of the world values human life including and especially in the womb -- then you should have the opportunity to at least "get by" and not be per force exploited, much less sickened and killed. While I'm not opposed to it, there is a pre-cursor of ostensibly more limited scope, and perhaps of greater benefit than just "throwing undifferentiated dollars" at a problem. Access to healthcare. Not necessarily absolutely unlimited, spend 100K for an extra last week of life healthcare. But quality basic, effective healthcare. If we value human life, then we should also value the quality of that life. Providing effective health care greatly enhances that quality. It greatly enhances the ability of people to take care of themselves, and their families. And their friends. You may not live in a palace, nor anything close. But we'll do our best to help you have the physical wherewithal to enjoy the day. And to keep you that way. If you become injured or ill, you will not be alone -- and we will not let others prey upon you in your weakness. If we -- here in the U.S., in my case -- can't do this. With all our resources and largess. Well, then, you can just go and stuff the rest of your moralizing and idealizing.

wincy 10y ago
I would have a thousand children if I could. If I can pay for them all and don't draw benefits, who cares? People might think I'm eccentric, but it's not like I'm taking more than my fair share. Once the government is paying every one of my kids, suddenly people wants to have a say in the number of children I can have. I also want my insurance to spend a million dollars if it means I can live for an extra week. Even if I'm absolutely miserable. Even if I'm unconscious. I don't care about your "not necessarily absolutely unlimited" healthcare plans that dictate how long I get to live. That's not your call, if I paid for insurance that says they'll spend a million dollars on end of life care they'd better spend a million dollars. Just to preempt Poe's law here, I'm absolutely serious in both of my above statements. I'm not creating a straw man or using hyperbole. I think basic income and "free" healthcare would have strings attached that I quite frankly find disgusting.
- redm 10y ago
  A bit OT... > I would have a thousand children if I could. I know this is just an example, but here are obligations that come with children beyond the economic cost. As someone with 3 small children, a basic income for them would not incentivize me in any way to have more.

M_Grey 10y ago

It's not really hero worship, although it can morph into that or just look like that. Really, it's just that so many people aligned with the "SV culture" you mention want to be them. When someone has achieved all that you're shooting for, you have a vast personal investment in lionizing them while in your "I'll be that guy someday!"-phase. Then of course you just have the reality that plenty of the love coming their way is just... well... ass-kissing for favors, status, money, or in some vague hope of some of those. Until or unless enough talented people figure out that they'd have better odds playing the lottery than aiming to become an SV oligarch/plutocrat, there will continue to be a culture of this intensely covetous "worship", that almost inevitably morphs into loathing and resentment. That's just the "in" people... the public at large is either subjected to intense marketing and PR, or unaware of such people.

rhizome 10y ago
It's not really hero worship Here's a thought experiment: what was Marc Andreesen's last idea? How much ego was in it: none, some, or a lot?
- M_Grey 10y ago
  I'm not really disagreeing with the point that I suspect you're making, I'm just saying that it's a lot more cynical than "hero worship".
  - rhizome 10y ago
    Do you mean "insidious," in that the tech celebrities that people use as role models might be charlatans?
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      ...I didn't say "insidious" at all.

nostrademons 10y ago

So I'd agree about taking the hero worship out of SV. The history of SV is one of successive technology waves, each of which certain people happen to spot & ride first, and then because they make a lot of money on those waves, everybody else idolizes them. And then the next wave happens and it's inevitably someone else who spots them and rides them, and suddenly we all have new heroes. But when it comes to building a society that benefits everyone - how? That's always the question. Pretty much everyone agrees that it's a good goal, but when it comes down to figuring out "What would peoples' lives look like in a society that benefits everyone", nobody agrees.

throwaway91111 10y ago
Wealth distribution is a hard problem, but it is a MASSIVE problem that most productivity gains flow to a subset of society.
zepto 10y ago
Right - so this is actually a hard problem worth solving, unlike many of the problems that SV solves. Let's acknowledge that and stop treating these people like Heroes because they got rich.
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petra 10y ago
Leaving aside disagreements by people(who a lot of them are politically motivated and maybe not the result of deep thinking and rational thought or aiming to benefit everyone), doesn't the research tells us about what interventions benefit everybody ? For example, that socialized medicine is the better method to reach that goal ?
- SolaceQuantum 10y ago
  The difficulty with this is also convincing people that the research is valid and itself not politically motivated/without rational thought. As much as I would like research on what benefits societies in general (sociology?) to feed into how social policies are generated, I feel that there is also significant questioning on the validity of the research and how such research is conducted. Given that there are no real ways to fully account for all variables in the scope of this study, there may always be the argument that such research is shoddy and can't be replicated. (I'm not actually arguing that such science is shoddy, only that the perception that they are shoddy and invalid is a strong disincentive to listen to any research on this matter. It's actually really disheartening to me that this is the case.)

ryandrake 10y ago

The hero worship of successful people is just survivorship bias in action. Out of a population of people flipping coins, we (after the fact) find the ones who flipped heads 10 times in a row and fawn over them, asking them how they became such great coin flippers and what we can do to improve our coin flipping skills. See also: Good To Great or any similar business book.

enraged_camel 10y ago
The other possible explanation is that there is a formula for success. It's just extraordinarily complex and we haven't figured it out yet, so we just attribute it to this thing called luck, the same way ancient people didn't understand thunder and attributed it to gods expressing their anger.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  I think we have enough examples of people being paid a fortune to run a company into the ground to dispel the myth of some link between compensation and success. Unfortunately many many people still conflate the concepts, since compensation is generally meant to indicate success. I don't see a lot of people doubting that someone like Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates figured out a viable pathway to success, for which luck plays(played) a role, but is not the only factor. The problem is that for every Buffet you have dozens of clowns with platforms, massive egos, and cults of personality.
  - acdha 10y ago
    Bill Gates is a tricky example since while he certainly worked hard, a key element to his success was his mother being on the board at IBM when they were negotiating the DOS license. Other companies could have been just as good, worked just as hard, and still gone down a very different path - as evidenced by Digital Research.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  There isn't a formula for success because "success" doesn't have a firm definition. I would argue that a person that has a happy home life and feels comfortable and sufficiently compensated in their work is a success. There are hundreds of millions such people. This doesn't seem overly complex at all.

Keyframe 10y ago

I like how 'these tech oligarchs' seem to know everything about everything and flap their gums giving advice left and right. What made them experts on everything? Because they seem to have some money? Is it the same thing when we laugh at people for listening to actors and musicians talk about politics?

bambax 10y ago

Yeah. > Self-driving cars, for example, could potentially put 5 million people involved in transportation jobs out of work. And creating 5 million new jobs for them seems impossible with net monthly job gains typically in the hundreds of thousands. “Five million jobs seem like a lot of jobs. It is a lot,” Andreessen says. But looking at the big picture shows that “every year in the U.S. on average about 21 million jobs are destroyed and about 24.5 million are created,” Andreessen says. “So the real answer to how do you replace 5 million jobs is, we already replace that in less than a quarter [of a year] today.” This is disingenuous, bordering on stupid. If a McDonald's closes and another one opens, 20 jobs are destroyed and 20 new ones are created, but they're the same! What we are talking about with self-driving cars is an entire category of jobs being destroyed, and 5 million people doing the same thing, becoming unemployed at the exact same time (a time when their job doesn't exist anymore). Very different from the normal life of the economy.

petra 10y ago
And actually, 5 million jobs are just a tip of the iceberg, some estimates talk about 40% of jobs being automated - and even that may be a low-ball estimate, since it doesn't include jobs that would be indirectly replaced with something more efficient(meat -> plant based meat, cars that don't need maintenance , i.e electric vehicles, etc), and jobs that we don't know how the tech will look in 10 years(creative jobs, natural language, etc).
- moojah 10y ago
  In developed countries 40% of the jobs from 40 years ago are almost certainly automated at this point. And we're richer than ever before if you look at absolute richness (not in relatives, but that's an entirely different discussion).
moojah 10y ago
Not really. The effect of self driving cars may be larger than "normal tech evolutions", but we have been continually re-inventing ourselves at a pace that is not particularly different from what it has been over the last 200 years. 200 years ago 95+% of all people worked in agriculture. In developed countries, now barely 1-2% do so. 100 years ago the vast majority worked in manual labour jobs. Now people are moving on to service jobs. Macro-economically speaking, those were much larger and more rapid changes than what we're seeing right now. This is not new. It's normal economic development. Nothing unusual at all. People have to stop portraying this negatively, and Marc is correct in seeing this as a positive to humanity. His argument is that we need to manage this shift as a society. Some countries pro-actively do so (European social security comes to mind), others do not (USA). I tend to agree with him that it does need to be managed.

whack 10y ago

I only came to HN somewhat recently, around 2 years ago, but I've started to notice a very major change in the culture of this forum lately. There is so much vitriol and blanket insults being levied at anyone and everyone. The linked article is almost always a sideshow, and simply acts as a prelude for the battle in the comments section. A battle which has little to do with what the article itself says, and is simply a dumping ground for the prior beliefs and soapboxing that people actually come here for. This above comment is a perfect example. I don't know much about Marc, but where I'm concerned, he's just a guy who has experience in the VC scene, was invited to talk at an event, and agreed to share his personal thoughts and strategies. I read through the article, and nothing that he said really stood out in any way, good or bad. The thing about self-driving cars was just him saying "look at the potential upside for people who're currently wasting time in daily commutes" and "don't nitpick so much on the things that can go wrong, that you lose sight of the potential for things to go tremendously right". A little platitude-like, sure. But not really objectionable in any way. I certainly don't think anything he said in the article warranted a ranting about "hot air coming out of money-grubbing share-diluting quality-of-life-ruining tech oligarchs whose feet we're worshipping". If you really want to have a discussion about this tangent, write your own blog post, submit it, and let's have a discussion there. But it's sad to see the comments thread get hijacked by such superfluous soapboxing. I realize that me posting this isn't going to do anything. This is a lost cause, and my venting is more cathartic than anything. The culture of this place has changed, and I don't think we can ever go back to how it used to be. I guess it's time to start looking for another place to frequent.

hathawsh 10y ago
This effect always seems to come with popularity. Once upon a time, Slashdot had some amazingly insightful discussions, leading to a growth in popularity, which led to increased noise. That noise led to increased cynicism and eventually burnout. The same thing has sadly happened to every popular tech news site I know of. The secret is to keep searching for a new place to have high quality discussions. You never know where it will pop up. (If it's a place where people expect to find it, then all the popular kids will go there and make noise.) I wouldn't give up on HN yet though, it still has quality discussions most of the time.

voidhorse 10y ago

It's really a fascinating phenomena when you think about it. Technology has warped and dominated our world and culture to an extent it never has before. I like to imagine a little scene: a primitive man bows at the feet of another who fashioned a knife out of a mammoth tooth. That's more or less what we still do today. The technological and scientific have replaced the religious as the ruling dogma and organizational frameworks of the world. Just as many folks in the middle ages probably couldn't conceive of the radical changes that would happen were religious hegemony toppled, it's hard for us to conceive of a world where the ruling technological caste loses their influence. But what a wild world it might be. What bothers me the most about our current age is our lack of questioning when it comes to technological progress. We have a sort of close your eyes and jump philosophy when it comes to technology--we seem to go ahead and create new technologies before a. considering the full scope of their possible effects, and b. developing the requisite social, political, and economic structures to support the shifts they'll bring about (e.g. in the case of self driving cars and automation of work in general we will have to switch to an economic model other than capitalism if we are against a very slim few having the majority of the world's wealth, more so than is already the case, which is hard to imagine.) Of course, it's not possible to predict all of the side effects introducing new technology will have--for example, I doubt Tim had any notion of the extent to which the internet would change the world when he came up with an idea that let you view the documents your buddy had on his machine, but here we are. Still, I think we have a bad tendency to accelerate change in the technological sphere while social, political, and economic structures remain woefully antiquated.

ivm 10y ago
When ethical progress lags behind technological progress it ends up in an enormous bloodshed every single time.
cookiecaper 10y ago
>I like to imagine a little scene: a primitive man bows at the feet of another who fashioned a knife out of a mammoth tooth. >That's more or less what we still do today. 100% yes. Psychology is a thin veneer on top of biology, and evolution is a slow process. Let none of us believe we are so beyond our forbears that their problems, difficulties, and sins are behind us, or that their thoughts and lessons are irrelevant to us.

archagon 10y ago

> I know that sounds harsh, but we seriously need to stop the hero worship in SV culture and begin building a society that benefits everyone, not a society that works itself to the bone just to eat the cake of a larger corporation and enrich the early investors. This sort of oligarchy is probably emergent from the way we structure our economy on a base level. What factors incentivize corporations to form into pyramids, with most of the wealth accruing on top? Can we instead incentivize smaller, cooperative-style companies with more democratic managerial styles and more equitable distribution of wealth? It wouldn't work for every business, but it's barely been tried at all, and I'd love to see the kind of SV culture that would emerge from these parameters. (I guess Valve is a notable example, but I can't think of many others. I suppose the OSS community?) Unfortunately, I don't think telling people to stop hero worship is going to do the trick. Things are going to have to change on a more fundamental level.

stagbeetle 10y ago
> What factors incentivize corporations to form into pyramids, with most of the wealth accruing on top? Most people are incapable of managing high-level responsibilities. Those on the lower rungs assign/relinquish (depending on how you look at it) their responsibilities, and the fruits they bear, to those they perceive more capable than them. So now instead of having a smooth slope of compensation, it's top-heavy. In layman's terms: The bulk of people who work are not motivated by the company's direct prosperity. They're motivated by other factors such as "work fulfillment," "passion", "making the world a better place", all of which don't align intrinsically with profit. > Can we instead incentivize smaller, cooperative-style companies with more democratic managerial styles and more equitable distribution of wealth? This is paradoxical for a few reasons. First, lead-by-many is much more inefficient than lead-by-few(usually one). See: democracy vs. democratic republic. Second, good leaders have "ego," in the way that they have a certain modus operandi and goal they won't deviate from. Thus, if you were to populate your ranks with good leaders, it would be a shit-show. See: in-fighting nobility. Third, incentives have always been abused. Take a look at any industry with "incentives" and subsidies. The companies are built around that subsidy, not upon being a successful business.
- 10y ago

v45h 10y ago

Perhaps SV has a lot of hero worship but I feel as though comments such as these commit the same folly. They're focused on Andreessen and not the ultimate point being made. Andreessen's base point is that whether you like it or not, millions of jobs are going to get taken away and millions more jobs are going to open up elsewhere. The question is, how do we get society to be better at adapting to this change? If you truly are concerned about building a society that benefits everyone, this is the question that should be discussed/answered.