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The way YC closed ranks was my favorite anecdote from Chaos Monkey’s. I always find it interesting though YC leaders are extremely against cancel culture, but

The way YC closed ranks was my favorite anecdote from Chaos Monkey’s. I always find it interesting though YC leaders are extremely against cancel culture, but when it comes to business, its okay to threaten that someone will never work in the valley again if they don’t accede to their demands.

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
Standing against cancel culture is not the same as standing against social sanctions in any way, shape, or form. The problem with cancel culture is not that it's a social sanction. The problem is it's a particularly dysfunctional sort. "They're against cancel culture... so why didn't they invite me to their house party? What hypocrites!"
- downWidOutaFite 2y ago
  I disagree. There's no principle involved. It's all polarized partisan politics. Your "particularly dysfunctional" is extremely in the eye of the beholder. The rich and powerful silicon valley CEO/VC guys tearing the country apart over their woke crusade are just as ideologically irrational as the next twitter blue check.
  - shafyy 2y ago
    This. If you believe for one second that money and power hungry people have any kind of principles, you have not been paying attention. Cancel culture, woke, left, right, center, free speech – they will say whatever to get what they want on these topics, and change their opinion the next day without any real consequences. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
    - wslh 2y ago
      > Welcome to late-stage capitalism. Good reads/resources about this? I started reading "What's Our Problem" [1] but find it difficult to find "non-partisan" resources nowadays. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-problem https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-pro...
      - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
        I don't think there is any scholarly basis for the term "late-stage capitalism". It's just a meme that kids started using. Power-hungry, unprincipled people will exist regardless of a country's economic system. But people are very imaginative in attributing various social ills to capitalism in particular.
        wslh 2y ago
        Beyond the specific term, there is a "sign of the times" we are living. Nowadays the issue with political sciences and philosophy is the partisan, left-right spectrum view that it is difficult to break in in discussions (including HN).
        skulk 2y ago
        quick Google search shows that the term has been in scholarly use for at least 50 years now and means pretty much exactly what "the kids" are talking about.
        0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
        So we've been in the "late stages" for at least 50 years? Is there any sort of falsifiable hypothesis there? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=late-stage+capitalism&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=late-stage+cap... You can see from Google Ngram Viewer that there's almost no usage before the year 2000, and the vast majority of usage is post-2015. My guess would be that recent usage has only a tenuous connection, at best, to scholarly usage from 50+ years ago.
        kmeisthax 2y ago
        "Late-stage capitalism" is just "reimposing feudalism[0]" - i.e. going back to an economic system in which the vast majority of an economy's wealth is rents charged on the use of valuable property. "Capitalism" as is propagandized in capitalist societies is an economy in which the majority of wealth is profits earned as the return on a risk-bearing investment. Being beholden to a free market economy means you have limits to your power - not great limits, but limits none-the-less. In other words, capitalism is a necessary transition between feudalism and feudalism. [0] Insamuch as the term even has meaning. Medievalists and historical researchers will correctly call this out as an overloaded term.
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
      I think it depends on the person. Elon Musk changes his mind a lot, but PG generally seems pretty consistent. It's not necessarily a bad thing to change your mind, either. My guess is that if you carefully read PG's criticisms of woke culture, they are narrow enough that they wouldn't apply to what YC does against misbehaving VCs. For example, if you read between the lines, this essay does a good job of explaining some problems with woke culture: https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html But it doesn't really apply to misbehaving VCs as much. What's the specific critique of cancel culture PG made, that he's being hypocritical with? Can you give a verbatim quote that displays the supposed hypocrisy, to ensure that you're not misrepresenting his position?
      - throw4847285 2y ago
        My takeaway that I'll bluntly admit is based on being another one of those people who won't shut up about Robert Caro's book The Power Broker is this: the mark of true political genius is the ability to constantly take in new information that challenges your existing viewpoints, while also having the force of will to try and make your values manifest despite knowing that your views on the best way to do that will change over time. Robert Moses (the subject of the book) was an unparalleled genius when it came to enacting his will, but he was a complete idiot when it came to actually observing the world to see what the impact of his will would be. I think democracy at its best should prevent those kind of people from gaining power (but of course it doesn't). Elon Musk can be easily dismissed as someone who seems to be constantly changing his mind, but is actually deeply unwell, addicted to drugs, and surrounded by sycophants. His mind is about as interesting as his friends Kanye West and Donald Trump: he was very good at one thing, it made him extremely successful, it entirely broke his brain. Graham and his cadre of Silicon Valley pseudo-philosophers are more like Moses: I don't trust them to have enough contact with life outside a rarified bubble to be able to speak to issues that concern normal people.
        specialist 2y ago
        To your point: Moses never learned to drive, was chauffered everywhere. So he never directly experienced the horrors he wrought.
  - specialist 2y ago
    Yup. It's just another moral panic.
- LittleTimothy 2y ago
  I think the difference between cancel culture and just freedom of association is the difference between "I don't want to work with you because of X" and "I'm going to influence others not to work with you because of X". Whether that be anons on twitter calling up your employer to get you fired, or PG having a quiet work with his friends over at some VC firm, they're both the same strain of toxic.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
    I think there may be a few other differences. For example, are people ever given the opportunity to change their behavior before the sanction gets applied? Does the punishment fit the crime? Is there public shaming involved? Do we default to public shaming anyone who says a word in defense of the person who is being sanctioned? (I would say that's the single most pathological feature of cancel culture, actually.) Are the rules constantly shifting in line with social media fashions? Are our judgments carefully considered, or are they based on shallow pattern matching? Cancel culture applies to discussions of policy in the public square. The idea is that certain views should be silenced. You can be a believer in free speech, and disagree that those views should be silenced. And then you can work to punish malicious actors in Silicon Valley who violate important investing norms. I just don't think there's a contradiction!
    - uoaei 2y ago
      > Do we default to public shaming anyone who says a word in defense of the person who is being sanctioned? Defaulting to public debate on the matter isn't as stark a difference from this behavior as we want to believe, especially when the community in which you engage these points is so heavily biased in one direction. Discussions around "cancel culture" rarely take into account that the conversations being had are happening within a particular cultural context, one that depends on the venue in which it takes place. Too often I see public shaming framed as reasoned debate on this forum when the intention is otherwise abundantly clear. An amusing corrollary to this is that cancel culture as normally defined is implied to be the majority opinion. I don't think that's true, though, the nature of news media definitely amplifies certain voices over others, getting back to the point about venues above.
nabla9 2y ago
> I always find it interesting That's not interesting. That's not understanding capitalism. It's all about Incentives. The idea that business leaders can be ever considered genuine political or cultural voice or actor is the problem. Silicon Valley and hacker culture has created an atmosphere of business politicians and for some reason hackers take them seriously and don't laugh at their faces. The talk is just empty PR. Somehow smart people working for OpenAI, Google, keep eating it. Traditionally business people don't get into discussions of culture or politics directly. They might work in the background, but never directly. There is a good reason for that.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  If I have the choice of people from my industry or people not from my industry why would I ever choose the latter?
  - kevingadd 2y ago
    Because you know the people from your industry well enough to hate their guts? :)
    - fallingknife 2y ago
      It doesn't matter who I like. I am not in any type of personal relationship with these people, so it makes no sense to "like" or "hate" them anyway. It matters whose incentives are aligned with mine. It's also not smart to assume you would like someone else better just because you don't know them.
      - layer8 2y ago
        People can easily disagree even when their incentives align. Hopefully we aren’t beings who have to blindly submit to whatever incentives are out there, or assume the same of other people.
  - nabla9 2y ago
    You can choose people AND understand that they care only about money and not take their political talk seriously.
immibis 2y ago
"Cancel culture" is one of those buzzwords that can take on whatever meaning it needs to in a given situation. Related: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey > If by [noun], you mean [negative descriptors of noun], then of course [statement of lack of support/belief]. If, however, by [noun], you mean [positive descriptors of noun], then [statement of support/belief].
elktown 2y ago
The only consistency you'll find in business and politics is self-interest - perceived or real.
- tim333 2y ago
  I think that's a bit of an oversimplification. A lot of people are well meaning.
  - skeeter2020 2y ago
    Very few extend this to their own livelihood or survival. It's easy to do when you're not playing with your own resources, or they're just crumbs.
    - tim333 2y ago
      It's hard to disentangle motivations as treating people well is also usually good business too but in my experience a lot of people are motivated by doing good as well as making an income. If you look at the history of YC, Paul and Jessica started it primarily to help out the young would be founders without much expectation of making money. And in the story here it seems his main motivation was to stop the founders being screwed over rather than to enrich himself. The attitude that all business / political people are no good can be counterproductive as it can lead to not differentiating between the helpful and iffy ones.
      - maest 2y ago
        Hagiographies should be viewed with suspicion, particularity those that make claims about people's motivation (which is notoriously difficult to pin down/prove)
        fragmede 2y ago
        Only insofar as having a positive opinion is material. The chances on HN are drastically higher than elsewhere on the Internet, but most here will never have the chance to interact with pg, so having a positive or negative view of his motivations is immaterial. Most opinions are immaterial. Unless we're on a ship in the ocean, and we're using the stars for navigation, and you're the navigator, whether or not you believe the Earth is flat, what you believe doesn't affect me. So then it really comes down to world view - are you an optimists or a pessimist? Is that neat little story about pg a carefully coldly calculated PR piece, or just a neat little story that has no effect on anything other than some people feeling good, like chicken soup for the entrepreneureal spirit. Why not both!
lr4444lr 2y ago
A cartel protecting its interests is not cancel culture.
aguaviva 2y ago
Its okay to threaten that someone will never work in the valley again if they don’t accede to their demands. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, but care to cite some examples of them literally doing that?
- ta67961138 2y ago
  > Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, but care to cite some examples of them literally doing that? That would probably result in *never working in the valley again...*, so I wouldn't be surprised if GP would skip citing.

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

Standing against cancel culture is not the same as standing against social sanctions in any way, shape, or form. The problem with cancel culture is not that it's a social sanction. The problem is it's a particularly dysfunctional sort. "They're against cancel culture... so why didn't they invite me to their house party? What hypocrites!"

downWidOutaFite 2y ago
I disagree. There's no principle involved. It's all polarized partisan politics. Your "particularly dysfunctional" is extremely in the eye of the beholder. The rich and powerful silicon valley CEO/VC guys tearing the country apart over their woke crusade are just as ideologically irrational as the next twitter blue check.
- shafyy 2y ago
  This. If you believe for one second that money and power hungry people have any kind of principles, you have not been paying attention. Cancel culture, woke, left, right, center, free speech – they will say whatever to get what they want on these topics, and change their opinion the next day without any real consequences. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
  - wslh 2y ago
    > Welcome to late-stage capitalism. Good reads/resources about this? I started reading "What's Our Problem" [1] but find it difficult to find "non-partisan" resources nowadays. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-problem https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-pro...
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
      I don't think there is any scholarly basis for the term "late-stage capitalism". It's just a meme that kids started using. Power-hungry, unprincipled people will exist regardless of a country's economic system. But people are very imaginative in attributing various social ills to capitalism in particular.
      - wslh 2y ago
        Beyond the specific term, there is a "sign of the times" we are living. Nowadays the issue with political sciences and philosophy is the partisan, left-right spectrum view that it is difficult to break in in discussions (including HN).
      - skulk 2y ago
        quick Google search shows that the term has been in scholarly use for at least 50 years now and means pretty much exactly what "the kids" are talking about.
        0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
        So we've been in the "late stages" for at least 50 years? Is there any sort of falsifiable hypothesis there? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=late-stage+capitalism&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=late-stage+cap... You can see from Google Ngram Viewer that there's almost no usage before the year 2000, and the vast majority of usage is post-2015. My guess would be that recent usage has only a tenuous connection, at best, to scholarly usage from 50+ years ago.
      - kmeisthax 2y ago
        "Late-stage capitalism" is just "reimposing feudalism[0]" - i.e. going back to an economic system in which the vast majority of an economy's wealth is rents charged on the use of valuable property. "Capitalism" as is propagandized in capitalist societies is an economy in which the majority of wealth is profits earned as the return on a risk-bearing investment. Being beholden to a free market economy means you have limits to your power - not great limits, but limits none-the-less. In other words, capitalism is a necessary transition between feudalism and feudalism. [0] Insamuch as the term even has meaning. Medievalists and historical researchers will correctly call this out as an overloaded term.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
    I think it depends on the person. Elon Musk changes his mind a lot, but PG generally seems pretty consistent. It's not necessarily a bad thing to change your mind, either. My guess is that if you carefully read PG's criticisms of woke culture, they are narrow enough that they wouldn't apply to what YC does against misbehaving VCs. For example, if you read between the lines, this essay does a good job of explaining some problems with woke culture: https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html But it doesn't really apply to misbehaving VCs as much. What's the specific critique of cancel culture PG made, that he's being hypocritical with? Can you give a verbatim quote that displays the supposed hypocrisy, to ensure that you're not misrepresenting his position?
    - throw4847285 2y ago
      My takeaway that I'll bluntly admit is based on being another one of those people who won't shut up about Robert Caro's book The Power Broker is this: the mark of true political genius is the ability to constantly take in new information that challenges your existing viewpoints, while also having the force of will to try and make your values manifest despite knowing that your views on the best way to do that will change over time. Robert Moses (the subject of the book) was an unparalleled genius when it came to enacting his will, but he was a complete idiot when it came to actually observing the world to see what the impact of his will would be. I think democracy at its best should prevent those kind of people from gaining power (but of course it doesn't). Elon Musk can be easily dismissed as someone who seems to be constantly changing his mind, but is actually deeply unwell, addicted to drugs, and surrounded by sycophants. His mind is about as interesting as his friends Kanye West and Donald Trump: he was very good at one thing, it made him extremely successful, it entirely broke his brain. Graham and his cadre of Silicon Valley pseudo-philosophers are more like Moses: I don't trust them to have enough contact with life outside a rarified bubble to be able to speak to issues that concern normal people.
      - specialist 2y ago
        To your point: Moses never learned to drive, was chauffered everywhere. So he never directly experienced the horrors he wrought.
- specialist 2y ago
  Yup. It's just another moral panic.
LittleTimothy 2y ago
I think the difference between cancel culture and just freedom of association is the difference between "I don't want to work with you because of X" and "I'm going to influence others not to work with you because of X". Whether that be anons on twitter calling up your employer to get you fired, or PG having a quiet work with his friends over at some VC firm, they're both the same strain of toxic.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  I think there may be a few other differences. For example, are people ever given the opportunity to change their behavior before the sanction gets applied? Does the punishment fit the crime? Is there public shaming involved? Do we default to public shaming anyone who says a word in defense of the person who is being sanctioned? (I would say that's the single most pathological feature of cancel culture, actually.) Are the rules constantly shifting in line with social media fashions? Are our judgments carefully considered, or are they based on shallow pattern matching? Cancel culture applies to discussions of policy in the public square. The idea is that certain views should be silenced. You can be a believer in free speech, and disagree that those views should be silenced. And then you can work to punish malicious actors in Silicon Valley who violate important investing norms. I just don't think there's a contradiction!
  - uoaei 2y ago
    > Do we default to public shaming anyone who says a word in defense of the person who is being sanctioned? Defaulting to public debate on the matter isn't as stark a difference from this behavior as we want to believe, especially when the community in which you engage these points is so heavily biased in one direction. Discussions around "cancel culture" rarely take into account that the conversations being had are happening within a particular cultural context, one that depends on the venue in which it takes place. Too often I see public shaming framed as reasoned debate on this forum when the intention is otherwise abundantly clear. An amusing corrollary to this is that cancel culture as normally defined is implied to be the majority opinion. I don't think that's true, though, the nature of news media definitely amplifies certain voices over others, getting back to the point about venues above.

nabla9 2y ago

> I always find it interesting That's not interesting. That's not understanding capitalism. It's all about Incentives. The idea that business leaders can be ever considered genuine political or cultural voice or actor is the problem. Silicon Valley and hacker culture has created an atmosphere of business politicians and for some reason hackers take them seriously and don't laugh at their faces. The talk is just empty PR. Somehow smart people working for OpenAI, Google, keep eating it. Traditionally business people don't get into discussions of culture or politics directly. They might work in the background, but never directly. There is a good reason for that.

fallingknife 2y ago
If I have the choice of people from my industry or people not from my industry why would I ever choose the latter?
- kevingadd 2y ago
  Because you know the people from your industry well enough to hate their guts? :)
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    It doesn't matter who I like. I am not in any type of personal relationship with these people, so it makes no sense to "like" or "hate" them anyway. It matters whose incentives are aligned with mine. It's also not smart to assume you would like someone else better just because you don't know them.
    - layer8 2y ago
      People can easily disagree even when their incentives align. Hopefully we aren’t beings who have to blindly submit to whatever incentives are out there, or assume the same of other people.
- nabla9 2y ago
  You can choose people AND understand that they care only about money and not take their political talk seriously.

immibis 2y ago

"Cancel culture" is one of those buzzwords that can take on whatever meaning it needs to in a given situation. Related: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey > If by [noun], you mean [negative descriptors of noun], then of course [statement of lack of support/belief]. If, however, by [noun], you mean [positive descriptors of noun], then [statement of support/belief].

elktown 2y ago

The only consistency you'll find in business and politics is self-interest - perceived or real.

tim333 2y ago
I think that's a bit of an oversimplification. A lot of people are well meaning.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  Very few extend this to their own livelihood or survival. It's easy to do when you're not playing with your own resources, or they're just crumbs.
  - tim333 2y ago
    It's hard to disentangle motivations as treating people well is also usually good business too but in my experience a lot of people are motivated by doing good as well as making an income. If you look at the history of YC, Paul and Jessica started it primarily to help out the young would be founders without much expectation of making money. And in the story here it seems his main motivation was to stop the founders being screwed over rather than to enrich himself. The attitude that all business / political people are no good can be counterproductive as it can lead to not differentiating between the helpful and iffy ones.
    - maest 2y ago
      Hagiographies should be viewed with suspicion, particularity those that make claims about people's motivation (which is notoriously difficult to pin down/prove)
      - fragmede 2y ago
        Only insofar as having a positive opinion is material. The chances on HN are drastically higher than elsewhere on the Internet, but most here will never have the chance to interact with pg, so having a positive or negative view of his motivations is immaterial. Most opinions are immaterial. Unless we're on a ship in the ocean, and we're using the stars for navigation, and you're the navigator, whether or not you believe the Earth is flat, what you believe doesn't affect me. So then it really comes down to world view - are you an optimists or a pessimist? Is that neat little story about pg a carefully coldly calculated PR piece, or just a neat little story that has no effect on anything other than some people feeling good, like chicken soup for the entrepreneureal spirit. Why not both!

lr4444lr 2y ago

A cartel protecting its interests is not cancel culture.

aguaviva 2y ago

Its okay to threaten that someone will never work in the valley again if they don’t accede to their demands. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, but care to cite some examples of them literally doing that?

ta67961138 2y ago
> Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, but care to cite some examples of them literally doing that? That would probably result in *never working in the valley again...*, so I wouldn't be surprised if GP would skip citing.