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What is exactly that moves people to venerate, defend, and even battle for venture capital multimillionaires who wouldn’t take a minute to expend y’all as neces

What is exactly that moves people to venerate, defend, and even battle for venture capital multimillionaires who wouldn’t take a minute to expend y’all as necessary casualties, if that would push their agenda and their wealth forward? I’m not dismissing their cultural relevance, I’m just constantly baffled at the fideism, and it honestly scares me a bit, as if people were prey to a global hallucination making them believe that by appreciating and praising such figures then one day, maybe, they could be like them?

dang 4y ago
As I explained above (in a later edit), this gets the arrow of causality backwards. In pg's case, all the qualities I am commenting on were completely in place before he ever invested in anything. Not only that but I admired and commented on them years before he became known for YC - because I had been turned on to his programming essays before that (thanks Joel Spolsky!) So I don't have to ask myself if I'm being a "fideist" - I know I'm not! As my sister in law used to say, you barely ever get that. What I'm defending are qualities that I love and admire because they're admirable and which people are wrong to dismiss. Net worth, btw, is a terrible criterion to judge an individual by, even if wealthy people do bad and class dynamics are a thing. If a good and smart person becomes rich, do they instantly cease to be good or smart? Of course not. Edit: I just noticed this part: > wouldn’t take a minute to expend y’all as necessary casualties On what basis can you possibly say that? Do you think this is true of everybody?
- camillomiller 4y ago
  Fair answer, thanks. I am profoundly triggered by all the Musk veneration that Twitter keeps on feeding me these days, I guess. Re the latter comment: a commendable trait of a good capitalist is to take hard decisions aimed at growing wealth or a business. If that comes at the expense of expandable humans, well tough luck. Not having this trait inevitably makes you a bad capitalist, or one that won’t succeed as fast or so greatly. Pg is an excellent capitalist.
  - dang 4y ago
    He's also a sentimental softie, but I had to be around him a while before noticing this. Edit: I take your point about capitalism, but sometimes optimization is suboptimal. That is, sometimes narrow self-interest ends up limiting you, and sometimes going against self-interest (as currently perceived) leads to greater outcomes—like navigating through a narrow waterway and ending up in an ocean. This is what happened with YC. The YC founders (not just PG) did things that the rest of the industry thought were dumb. For example, if the founders of a startup wanted to get acquihired, YC would say "great, do what you think best", where other investors would say "over my dead body" because they weren't making money on the deal. YC's attorneys in those days would send the paperwork back because they thought there must be some mistake. It turned out that optimizing for founders optimized for YC as well, but this was not obvious at the time. Why did pg and YC do that? it wasn't because they were "good capitalists". It was because of the kind of people they were and the ideas they thought were cool. That turned out to be massively more profitable than being a ruthless capitalist would have. So in the end it gets a bit hard to draw these distinctions. Sometimes being a good capitalist makes you a worse capitalist!

dang 4y ago

As I explained above (in a later edit), this gets the arrow of causality backwards. In pg's case, all the qualities I am commenting on were completely in place before he ever invested in anything. Not only that but I admired and commented on them years before he became known for YC - because I had been turned on to his programming essays before that (thanks Joel Spolsky!) So I don't have to ask myself if I'm being a "fideist" - I know I'm not! As my sister in law used to say, you barely ever get that. What I'm defending are qualities that I love and admire because they're admirable and which people are wrong to dismiss. Net worth, btw, is a terrible criterion to judge an individual by, even if wealthy people do bad and class dynamics are a thing. If a good and smart person becomes rich, do they instantly cease to be good or smart? Of course not. Edit: I just noticed this part: > wouldn’t take a minute to expend y’all as necessary casualties On what basis can you possibly say that? Do you think this is true of everybody?

camillomiller 4y ago
Fair answer, thanks. I am profoundly triggered by all the Musk veneration that Twitter keeps on feeding me these days, I guess. Re the latter comment: a commendable trait of a good capitalist is to take hard decisions aimed at growing wealth or a business. If that comes at the expense of expandable humans, well tough luck. Not having this trait inevitably makes you a bad capitalist, or one that won’t succeed as fast or so greatly. Pg is an excellent capitalist.
- dang 4y ago
  He's also a sentimental softie, but I had to be around him a while before noticing this. Edit: I take your point about capitalism, but sometimes optimization is suboptimal. That is, sometimes narrow self-interest ends up limiting you, and sometimes going against self-interest (as currently perceived) leads to greater outcomes—like navigating through a narrow waterway and ending up in an ocean. This is what happened with YC. The YC founders (not just PG) did things that the rest of the industry thought were dumb. For example, if the founders of a startup wanted to get acquihired, YC would say "great, do what you think best", where other investors would say "over my dead body" because they weren't making money on the deal. YC's attorneys in those days would send the paperwork back because they thought there must be some mistake. It turned out that optimizing for founders optimized for YC as well, but this was not obvious at the time. Why did pg and YC do that? it wasn't because they were "good capitalists". It was because of the kind of people they were and the ideas they thought were cool. That turned out to be massively more profitable than being a ruthless capitalist would have. So in the end it gets a bit hard to draw these distinctions. Sometimes being a good capitalist makes you a worse capitalist!