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Everyone talking about this being out of touch with the present and how figures in proximity to Graham don’t fit the description of nice he’s referring to shoul

Everyone talking about this being out of touch with the present and how figures in proximity to Graham don’t fit the description of nice he’s referring to should think about this passage: > For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage. > That is changing. Increasingly the games that matter are not zero-sum. Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things. What’s changed? Edit: The paragraph after should be included also, I think

marcosdumay 9mo ago
For a couple of decades, there were regulations that ensured market competitiveness. PG made a fortune during that time, but it's gone now.
siriusastrebe 9mo ago
An abundance of resources and opportunity?
wat10000 9mo ago
Has anything changed? He's not correct about the past metric always being about zero-sum games. Railroads are pretty obviously not zero-sum, and wars are generally negative-sum. How many successful merchants existed in ancient times? I'm sure there were plenty. And there's plenty of zero-sum in success today. Politics is the most obvious example. I can't be a Senator without excluding someone else from being a Senator. Your startup might be creating value, but the funding it needs is funding that can't go to other startups. The economy is not zero-sum because things have different value to different people, but money is zero-sum aside from banks playing tricks. The idea is patently absurd in any case. There are plenty of successful mean people out there, including one extremely successful mean person who became particularly successful after this essay was written and is so notorious that I don't even have to name him for you to know who I'm talking about. This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to. I accept that the successful people pg knows are nice to him. Maybe they're even nice in general. But extrapolating that to "being mean makes you fail" is absurd.
- tolerance 9mo ago
  Let’s disregard your first three paragraphs that treat his point about zero-sum games categorically. He does hedge against that interpretation in the passages I referenced. > This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to. Think about the names tied to Graham, the ones who appear in this very essay even. I think you’re making a gross understatement here—a slight even—of the massive influence of the likes of Dan Gackle.
  - wat10000 9mo ago
    Sorry, I don't really know what point you're making. I have no idea what "the massive influence of the likes of Dan Gackle" is referring to. Does he do something important besides run HN? Because running HN is important to the likes of us, but is utterly insignificant for the wider world.
    - tolerance 9mo ago
      You must be on to something, heh, thanks.

marcosdumay 9mo ago

For a couple of decades, there were regulations that ensured market competitiveness. PG made a fortune during that time, but it's gone now.

siriusastrebe 9mo ago

An abundance of resources and opportunity?

wat10000 9mo ago

Has anything changed? He's not correct about the past metric always being about zero-sum games. Railroads are pretty obviously not zero-sum, and wars are generally negative-sum. How many successful merchants existed in ancient times? I'm sure there were plenty. And there's plenty of zero-sum in success today. Politics is the most obvious example. I can't be a Senator without excluding someone else from being a Senator. Your startup might be creating value, but the funding it needs is funding that can't go to other startups. The economy is not zero-sum because things have different value to different people, but money is zero-sum aside from banks playing tricks. The idea is patently absurd in any case. There are plenty of successful mean people out there, including one extremely successful mean person who became particularly successful after this essay was written and is so notorious that I don't even have to name him for you to know who I'm talking about. This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to. I accept that the successful people pg knows are nice to him. Maybe they're even nice in general. But extrapolating that to "being mean makes you fail" is absurd.

tolerance 9mo ago
Let’s disregard your first three paragraphs that treat his point about zero-sum games categorically. He does hedge against that interpretation in the passages I referenced. > This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to. Think about the names tied to Graham, the ones who appear in this very essay even. I think you’re making a gross understatement here—a slight even—of the massive influence of the likes of Dan Gackle.
- wat10000 9mo ago
  Sorry, I don't really know what point you're making. I have no idea what "the massive influence of the likes of Dan Gackle" is referring to. Does he do something important besides run HN? Because running HN is important to the likes of us, but is utterly insignificant for the wider world.
  - tolerance 9mo ago
    You must be on to something, heh, thanks.