5 ms·

This is something you should really understand if you're starting a company. The board isn't your "friend" while individual board members may be, as an entity i

This is something you should really understand if you're starting a company. The board isn't your "friend" while individual board members may be, as an entity it probably isn't. The understanding that individuals can be "good" and the composite can be "bad" is usually encountered by most people when some government is doing something "bad" but the people who live where that government is in power are known to be "good." We see a lot of companies that have "good" employees but act in a "bad" way as a company. So with that in mind, you have to understand that none of your "friends" would fire you, but the "board of directors" (even if composed of people you consider friends) could easily decide to do that. Tom Lyon used to joke that it was only on your third startup that you funded yourself that you are really in control. The wisdom of that took a while to sink in for me.

anthropodie 5y ago
“A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone.” - Carl Jung
- mattkevan 5y ago
  “The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.” - Terry Pratchett
  - lostcolony 5y ago
    Also Pratchett, and mathematically probably more accurate (decreasing rather than increasing with the more people added) - "the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters"
  - toxik 5y ago
    Jung's statement is much stronger, more akin to 1/sqrt(N).
- ricksunny 5y ago
  So I think there’s a lot to this composite phenomenon and I wish it were studied explicitly. (Although I wouldn’t necessarily know), I’m not aware of social science / organizational behavior research that dissects the difference between an individual’s behavior and a group’s behavior that they are a member of. Yes we know about peer pressure and power dynamics (the Milgram experiment), but what are situations when an org will do something that all its constituent individuals would not but for fulfilling their respective unique responsibilities in the organization?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Now, think about the wisdom of a democracy :-)
  - lifeisstillgood 5y ago
    we don't ask the mob as the mob. we get the mob to go into a room one at a time and then ask
- interroboink 5y ago
  While I do think there's something of value in the idea here, boy do I find that quote unconvincing (: The second sentence essentially says "This is due to the fact that that's how it is." I'm sure Jung has a larger context and basis for these claims, but this quote just struck me as super hand-wavy.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    > I'm sure Jung has a larger context and basis for these claims, but this quote just struck me as super hand-wavy. No, no, don’t worry. Jung was already dismissed as completely unscientific and not to be taken seriously while alive. Sadly, psychology as a field mostly remains in a dire state and still has to shed part of its let’s generously say less than rigorous past.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  Of course, I invite readers to treat Carl Jung quotations as having a credibility proportional to the amount of efforts he made during his life to properly prove and establish the facts he was enunciating: not much.
  - omginternets 5y ago
    Just because it isn’t science doesn’t mean it isn’t true or interesting.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Not all insights come as ready-for-consumption statistics and prepared-for-you facts wrapped in a nice red bow, nor they always come with numbers and figures attached. Often, the most interesting insights come from experience and reflecting upon it. You know, old fashioned thinking.
    - Cpoll 5y ago
      > Often, the most interesting insights come from experience and reflecting upon it. You know, old fashioned thinking. That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed in much more than setting back the scientific method and thinking up all sorts of plausible things like "everything is made of air" and "the first humans were born inside a fish." The problem is that something can sound completely plausible, be internally logical, and also be completely wrong. Ironically, you don't need to look farther than psychology's reproducibility crisis to see this in action. Tons of great and interesting insights that came from experience and reflection, that led to some bad studies and are completely unreproducible. In fact, they were so interesting and insightful that most people still think they're true. See: Stanford Prison Experiment, most of the stuff in Kahnemann's book, anything Freud said, Myers-Briggs, etc. You know, making up some shit that sounds good.
      - coldtea 5y ago
        >That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed ... except at moving humanity forward regarding morality, understanding of society, politics, history, organization of civic life, philosophy, theater, poetry, arts, a few millenia forward, while spearheading democrachy, historiography and several other things besides, and establishing the whole basis for this "western civilization" thing... >That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed in much more than setting back the scientific method and thinking up all sorts of plausible things like "everything is made of air" and "the first humans were born inside a fish." The problem is that something can sound completely plausible, be internally logical, and also be completely wrong. I think an even more real problem is a lack of knowledge of history, and what exactly those pesky Greeks (and others before and after them) did, combined with a fanboy attitude towards the "scientific process" (as if it emerged wholesale somewhere around the 16th century or so).
- polishdude20 5y ago
  I wonder if this is a consequence of the shared qualities a large group has. In a large group, there are lots of people with different ideas. The only thing that is the most similar between all of the people are their base animal instincts because we are human. Thus, the base instincts are accentuated in the group.
- munificent 5y ago
  I intensely dislike the cynicism of this and other similar statements. It's a truism of American culture that any group of people is somehow stupider, meaner, and more hurtful than any of its individual members. Yet our lived daily experience is that often our most rewarding, beneficial, and joyful experiences come when being a member of a group. I mean, we are a group right here and right now in this thread and I assume everyone participating still feels it is a net positive for them to do so. The idea that all groups become bureaucracies, mobs, or totalitarian regimes is this weird extreme perversion of American values. Call it toxic individuality. I think a value-free and more accurate observation is that emergent properties exist: a group can have observed properties that are counter to the intentions of any of its individual members. The aggregation process itself can be dynamic, iterative, and complex in ways that break a simple coupling between invidual intent and total outcome. This can be bad, when otherwise sane reasonable people get riled up in a mob. Or it can be good, when a choir's tone sounds more in key than any of its individual singers. It's highly dependent on both the individual members and the communication structure of the group.
  - butwhywhyoh 5y ago
    The quote is likely referencing large in-person groups. I would argue HN is absolutely _not_ a group in any meaningful sense. We are a bunch of individuals sharing individual thoughts asynchronously. We don't act in unison. 4chan, on the other hand... Using the combined tone of a group of singers as a counterexample seems like quite a stretch. Again -- the original quote: "... the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche." He talks specifically about the emerging psyche, not some arbitrary emergent property of a group. Can you name one organization that became MORE ethical / smarter / nicer the larger it got?
    - sergiomattei 5y ago
      I believe it's a group: Hacker News is a community. That we don't act as a hivemind is a result of our contrarian community culture.
  - kragen 5y ago
dcow 5y ago
This is also why it's very very important for early employees to have their own lawyer review employment agreements. The CEO may be your best buddy and may promise to never fuck your over, but at a certain point they will report to the board and no longer be in full control. You should be weary of promises that simply cannot be kept. Your only option is to make the employment agreement 100% explicit even if it costs the company an extra round trip with legal. (Similar if a company offers to have their lawyers go over the employment agreement with you to save you some $$... there's an intense conflict of interest here that I'm surprised is even allowed.)
- szundi 5y ago
  As a CEO of a company, I think this is one of the most important thoughts here. I was the owner too, hired a lady as CEO, later I fired her. It was very tiresome for me to keep wtf kind of promises she made just to maintain the credibility of the company and not to alienate people. Of course it payed out and I loved all the people, but boy... it would have been much easier to just tell the people that these are new times and those promises were against the company or whatever - pretty sure lots of people would choose the easier and cheaper way in "hard times". I told to directors in multinationals several times that we have to sign this because it is not evident for their eventual successors that it is in their best interest etc. Trust, but always be careful and assertive.
nabla9 5y ago
Good board needs to be able to act independently from the CEO. One reason for bad corporate governance in America is boards made from the friends of the CEO.
- boringg 5y ago
  That's a high minded goal not really connected to the minutiae of the situation. Also relates to larger companies as opposed to early stage VC companies. Think about it from a founder perspective with a bit of reality: who in their right minds would you hire an antagonistic board for the high-minded goal of making corporate governance in America better when you don't even know if your company is going to make another year? People work for companies for three reasons: mission, people or money. If you enjoy working with the people at your company at least you have that covered. Most corporate companies don't have a real mission people can get behind and money is in the long run for founders.
  - lmeyerov 5y ago
    I'm mixed: Hard to have it both ways Tech grows big & fast, and a lot of today's problems can be traced to VC-backed boards noping out of ethical responsibilities. Startup board members are generally (rightfully) worried about growth or survival, until that's on rails and by then it's too late to fix the monster they've grown. Today's trends of founder friendliness, wide participation, and big checks makes these trade-offs even more extreme. Startups are so messy that the industry hasn't figured out how to juggle it all yet, or even if the relevant stakeholders even want it to.
    - boringg 5y ago
      I would agree that I am mixed about it. It's not binary but it does seem to be difficult to build a board around a hypothetical fantastic growth trajectory. That said I don't think it's the boards sole responsibility on ethical choices - that's the management team and rolling up to the board. It feels a bit how HR is complicit in the company outcome and is a fraught position. The board of directors is the same. Maybe the rest of the world has thought about the board of directors in the wrong way in that they have assumed that they represent an ethical, independent thinking group of people with different incentives then how boards are actually set up. Not using this as a scape goat of responsibilities but more observing how things seem to be in the real world.

anthropodie 5y ago

“A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal, which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably sinks to the level of mob psychology. If, therefore, I have a so-called collective experience as a member of a group, it takes place on a lower level of consciousness than if I had the experience by myself alone.” - Carl Jung

mattkevan 5y ago
“The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.” - Terry Pratchett
- lostcolony 5y ago
  Also Pratchett, and mathematically probably more accurate (decreasing rather than increasing with the more people added) - "the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters"
- toxik 5y ago
  Jung's statement is much stronger, more akin to 1/sqrt(N).
ricksunny 5y ago
So I think there’s a lot to this composite phenomenon and I wish it were studied explicitly. (Although I wouldn’t necessarily know), I’m not aware of social science / organizational behavior research that dissects the difference between an individual’s behavior and a group’s behavior that they are a member of. Yes we know about peer pressure and power dynamics (the Milgram experiment), but what are situations when an org will do something that all its constituent individuals would not but for fulfilling their respective unique responsibilities in the organization?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
WalterBright 5y ago
Now, think about the wisdom of a democracy :-)
- lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  we don't ask the mob as the mob. we get the mob to go into a room one at a time and then ask
interroboink 5y ago
While I do think there's something of value in the idea here, boy do I find that quote unconvincing (: The second sentence essentially says "This is due to the fact that that's how it is." I'm sure Jung has a larger context and basis for these claims, but this quote just struck me as super hand-wavy.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  > I'm sure Jung has a larger context and basis for these claims, but this quote just struck me as super hand-wavy. No, no, don’t worry. Jung was already dismissed as completely unscientific and not to be taken seriously while alive. Sadly, psychology as a field mostly remains in a dire state and still has to shed part of its let’s generously say less than rigorous past.
WastingMyTime89 5y ago
Of course, I invite readers to treat Carl Jung quotations as having a credibility proportional to the amount of efforts he made during his life to properly prove and establish the facts he was enunciating: not much.
- omginternets 5y ago
  Just because it isn’t science doesn’t mean it isn’t true or interesting.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Not all insights come as ready-for-consumption statistics and prepared-for-you facts wrapped in a nice red bow, nor they always come with numbers and figures attached. Often, the most interesting insights come from experience and reflecting upon it. You know, old fashioned thinking.
  - Cpoll 5y ago
    > Often, the most interesting insights come from experience and reflecting upon it. You know, old fashioned thinking. That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed in much more than setting back the scientific method and thinking up all sorts of plausible things like "everything is made of air" and "the first humans were born inside a fish." The problem is that something can sound completely plausible, be internally logical, and also be completely wrong. Ironically, you don't need to look farther than psychology's reproducibility crisis to see this in action. Tons of great and interesting insights that came from experience and reflection, that led to some bad studies and are completely unreproducible. In fact, they were so interesting and insightful that most people still think they're true. See: Stanford Prison Experiment, most of the stuff in Kahnemann's book, anything Freud said, Myers-Briggs, etc. You know, making up some shit that sounds good.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed ... except at moving humanity forward regarding morality, understanding of society, politics, history, organization of civic life, philosophy, theater, poetry, arts, a few millenia forward, while spearheading democrachy, historiography and several other things besides, and establishing the whole basis for this "western civilization" thing... >That _sounds_ nice, but the Ancient Greeks (and others, but I've got to pick on someone) tried it and didn't succeed in much more than setting back the scientific method and thinking up all sorts of plausible things like "everything is made of air" and "the first humans were born inside a fish." The problem is that something can sound completely plausible, be internally logical, and also be completely wrong. I think an even more real problem is a lack of knowledge of history, and what exactly those pesky Greeks (and others before and after them) did, combined with a fanboy attitude towards the "scientific process" (as if it emerged wholesale somewhere around the 16th century or so).
polishdude20 5y ago
I wonder if this is a consequence of the shared qualities a large group has. In a large group, there are lots of people with different ideas. The only thing that is the most similar between all of the people are their base animal instincts because we are human. Thus, the base instincts are accentuated in the group.
munificent 5y ago
I intensely dislike the cynicism of this and other similar statements. It's a truism of American culture that any group of people is somehow stupider, meaner, and more hurtful than any of its individual members. Yet our lived daily experience is that often our most rewarding, beneficial, and joyful experiences come when being a member of a group. I mean, we are a group right here and right now in this thread and I assume everyone participating still feels it is a net positive for them to do so. The idea that all groups become bureaucracies, mobs, or totalitarian regimes is this weird extreme perversion of American values. Call it toxic individuality. I think a value-free and more accurate observation is that emergent properties exist: a group can have observed properties that are counter to the intentions of any of its individual members. The aggregation process itself can be dynamic, iterative, and complex in ways that break a simple coupling between invidual intent and total outcome. This can be bad, when otherwise sane reasonable people get riled up in a mob. Or it can be good, when a choir's tone sounds more in key than any of its individual singers. It's highly dependent on both the individual members and the communication structure of the group.
- butwhywhyoh 5y ago
  The quote is likely referencing large in-person groups. I would argue HN is absolutely _not_ a group in any meaningful sense. We are a bunch of individuals sharing individual thoughts asynchronously. We don't act in unison. 4chan, on the other hand... Using the combined tone of a group of singers as a counterexample seems like quite a stretch. Again -- the original quote: "... the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche." He talks specifically about the emerging psyche, not some arbitrary emergent property of a group. Can you name one organization that became MORE ethical / smarter / nicer the larger it got?
  - sergiomattei 5y ago
    I believe it's a group: Hacker News is a community. That we don't act as a hivemind is a result of our contrarian community culture.
- kragen 5y ago

dcow 5y ago

This is also why it's very very important for early employees to have their own lawyer review employment agreements. The CEO may be your best buddy and may promise to never fuck your over, but at a certain point they will report to the board and no longer be in full control. You should be weary of promises that simply cannot be kept. Your only option is to make the employment agreement 100% explicit even if it costs the company an extra round trip with legal. (Similar if a company offers to have their lawyers go over the employment agreement with you to save you some $$... there's an intense conflict of interest here that I'm surprised is even allowed.)

szundi 5y ago
As a CEO of a company, I think this is one of the most important thoughts here. I was the owner too, hired a lady as CEO, later I fired her. It was very tiresome for me to keep wtf kind of promises she made just to maintain the credibility of the company and not to alienate people. Of course it payed out and I loved all the people, but boy... it would have been much easier to just tell the people that these are new times and those promises were against the company or whatever - pretty sure lots of people would choose the easier and cheaper way in "hard times". I told to directors in multinationals several times that we have to sign this because it is not evident for their eventual successors that it is in their best interest etc. Trust, but always be careful and assertive.

nabla9 5y ago

Good board needs to be able to act independently from the CEO. One reason for bad corporate governance in America is boards made from the friends of the CEO.

boringg 5y ago
That's a high minded goal not really connected to the minutiae of the situation. Also relates to larger companies as opposed to early stage VC companies. Think about it from a founder perspective with a bit of reality: who in their right minds would you hire an antagonistic board for the high-minded goal of making corporate governance in America better when you don't even know if your company is going to make another year? People work for companies for three reasons: mission, people or money. If you enjoy working with the people at your company at least you have that covered. Most corporate companies don't have a real mission people can get behind and money is in the long run for founders.
- lmeyerov 5y ago
  I'm mixed: Hard to have it both ways Tech grows big & fast, and a lot of today's problems can be traced to VC-backed boards noping out of ethical responsibilities. Startup board members are generally (rightfully) worried about growth or survival, until that's on rails and by then it's too late to fix the monster they've grown. Today's trends of founder friendliness, wide participation, and big checks makes these trade-offs even more extreme. Startups are so messy that the industry hasn't figured out how to juggle it all yet, or even if the relevant stakeholders even want it to.
  - boringg 5y ago
    I would agree that I am mixed about it. It's not binary but it does seem to be difficult to build a board around a hypothetical fantastic growth trajectory. That said I don't think it's the boards sole responsibility on ethical choices - that's the management team and rolling up to the board. It feels a bit how HR is complicit in the company outcome and is a fraught position. The board of directors is the same. Maybe the rest of the world has thought about the board of directors in the wrong way in that they have assumed that they represent an ethical, independent thinking group of people with different incentives then how boards are actually set up. Not using this as a scape goat of responsibilities but more observing how things seem to be in the real world.