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I suppose what has happened to my HN account (artificially high latency, aka "slowbanning", and personal penalties in comment placement, aka "rankbanning") prov

I suppose what has happened to my HN account (artificially high latency, aka "slowbanning", and personal penalties in comment placement, aka "rankbanning") proves this. If you actually challenge VC-istan (as opposed to Graham-esque incremental improvements) on its moral fundamentals, you've gone too far. More generally, creativity (in particular, I'll focus on social humor) has a status effect. Let's put social status on a scale from -1.0 to 1.0. Below 0.0, you're an at-risk member who may be expelled from the group. At 1.0, you're an unquestioned god-king of it (most groups' leaders are 0.5 to 0.7). When you're above +0.4, you can't really use humor (which I'm taking to be a microcosm of creativity) except of a stunted kind, because most good humor is partisan or offensive, and not "presidential" or "leader-like". That, I would argue, applies to creative expression in general. Below 0.0, you're a disliked member of the group and your ideas (or humor) will be rejected just because they come from you and are therefore taken to be unskilled displays and desperate attempts to improve status. Between 0.0 and +0.2, your jokes might be well-received, but it's not worth the risk, because you don't have much status capital to spend. This leaves a narrow range of the status spectrum-- 0.2 to 0.4-- in which humor (/creativity) can bring improvement. However, people at +0.3 to +0.4 aren't high enough to end up climbing corporate ladders-- you need +0.6 to +0.7 to play that game, and you need to achieve that status reliably (at each level of the executive hierarchy)-- and doubling down on humor typecasts you as "the funny guy", which isn't the image you want and limits you at the +0.4 ceiling. The problem isn't really that people individually dislike creativity. It's that social groups become increasingly anti-intellectual and focused on self-preservation (which requires excluding the "different") as they get bigger.

drunkpotato 13y ago
I like your contributions here and follow your blog. I think this particular post is being downvoted because it seems a bit out of place and not your usual intelligent response to an article or comment.
tbrownaw 13y ago
I suppose what has happened to my HN account (artificially high latency, aka "slowbanning", and personal penalties in comment placement, aka "rankbanning") proves this. If you actually challenge VC-istan (as opposed to Graham-esque incremental improvements) on its moral fundamentals, you've gone too far. Are you sure it's not just your presentation that does that? Also keep in mind that morality of systems is complex. Just because bad outcomes can be traced back to $FOO, does not mean that not-$FOO would result in less bad outcomes and so does not mean that $FOO is wrong or immoral. Some VC-istan companies having asshole managers who react poorly to conceited employees, does not necessarily mean that all of VC-istan shares bad management philosophies. It doesn't even mean that that one company has bad management policies, it could be that anything else (or anything else they've tried) results in more asshole managers or other worse problems. The problem isn't really that people individually dislike creativity. It's that social groups become increasingly anti-intellectual and focused on self-preservation (which requires excluding the "different") as they get bigger. How can a group best maximize the well-being of its members? Suppose interesting new ideas from a group member are nomally distributed, with a mean that varies by the member's skill/intelligence (approximated by status), a standard deviation that varies by the member's creativity, and are adopted by other group members based on some combination of status and approximate value. Whether you personally get better ideas (and can help the group more) by rolling the dice yourself vs collecting the best ideas from others (and vs spending your time implementing ideas from a single cheap/fast source), depends on how many others there are and how relatively skilled/intelligent you are. As the number of creative people increases, the value of your being creative decreases. As the group size increases, the percentage of the group that needs to be creative decreases (the absolute number of creative members should still increase). Mistrusting new ideas is not necessarily anti-intellectual. Mistrusting complex ideas because they're complex would be anti-intellectual. Wanting to see a larger sample size so you have a better approximation of someone's cool new idea isn't.
tptacek 13y ago
People challenge venture capital all the time on HN to apparent ill effect. I'm certainly no VC champion. Not only that, but I've repeatedly annoyed Paul Graham, talked down YC, complained about the moderation on HN, and suggested conflicts of interest. You very consistently manage to mine personal conflicts out of threads and stories that have no apparent connection to you or your beliefs. It's a worrisome habit, in the "I almost worry about criticizing you because I'd feel bad if it turned out that you were actually ill" sense. Broken record: I really think you need to relax and let some of this stuff go, or, at least, if you're totally dedicated to the idea of promoting your vision of the evils of startup culture, find a more coherent way to do it. Perhaps your ideas would be better carried in long-form essays.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  You're being ridiculous. You're making this about me, and I am frankly not a very interesting topic to 99+ percent of the readers here. It's not that I am especially important; however, my encounter with HN moderation has shown one of the mechanisms by which VC-istan protects its reputation. That is all. By observing those mechanisms, we can possibly make inferences about its health. If what is said on Hacker News actually matters to VC-istan, then it's not a very robust system. I really think this should be the end of the conversation. Leave the inane personal attacks out of it.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    You're not making things less worrisome by strenuously arguing that there's nothing personal about a comment that starts with "I suppose what has happened to my HN account...", and then going on to suggest that your "encounter with HN moderation" shows a "mechanisms by which VC-istan protects its reputation". The reality is that VC-istan, whatever that is, probably does not give a shit about you or me. You are not being persecuted. It is reasonable to be worried about what your comments, taken as a whole, imply about where you're coming from. It's totally possible that I'm wrong and you're just very shrill (you'd think that as a fellow shrill person I'd have a radar for that). But it is not crazy to ask the question. Are you OK?
moron4hire 13y ago
This is why I view social status as currency to spend on speaking my mind as I see fit.

drunkpotato 13y ago

I like your contributions here and follow your blog. I think this particular post is being downvoted because it seems a bit out of place and not your usual intelligent response to an article or comment.

tbrownaw 13y ago

I suppose what has happened to my HN account (artificially high latency, aka "slowbanning", and personal penalties in comment placement, aka "rankbanning") proves this. If you actually challenge VC-istan (as opposed to Graham-esque incremental improvements) on its moral fundamentals, you've gone too far. Are you sure it's not just your presentation that does that? Also keep in mind that morality of systems is complex. Just because bad outcomes can be traced back to $FOO, does not mean that not-$FOO would result in less bad outcomes and so does not mean that $FOO is wrong or immoral. Some VC-istan companies having asshole managers who react poorly to conceited employees, does not necessarily mean that all of VC-istan shares bad management philosophies. It doesn't even mean that that one company has bad management policies, it could be that anything else (or anything else they've tried) results in more asshole managers or other worse problems. The problem isn't really that people individually dislike creativity. It's that social groups become increasingly anti-intellectual and focused on self-preservation (which requires excluding the "different") as they get bigger. How can a group best maximize the well-being of its members? Suppose interesting new ideas from a group member are nomally distributed, with a mean that varies by the member's skill/intelligence (approximated by status), a standard deviation that varies by the member's creativity, and are adopted by other group members based on some combination of status and approximate value. Whether you personally get better ideas (and can help the group more) by rolling the dice yourself vs collecting the best ideas from others (and vs spending your time implementing ideas from a single cheap/fast source), depends on how many others there are and how relatively skilled/intelligent you are. As the number of creative people increases, the value of your being creative decreases. As the group size increases, the percentage of the group that needs to be creative decreases (the absolute number of creative members should still increase). Mistrusting new ideas is not necessarily anti-intellectual. Mistrusting complex ideas because they're complex would be anti-intellectual. Wanting to see a larger sample size so you have a better approximation of someone's cool new idea isn't.

tptacek 13y ago

People challenge venture capital all the time on HN to apparent ill effect. I'm certainly no VC champion. Not only that, but I've repeatedly annoyed Paul Graham, talked down YC, complained about the moderation on HN, and suggested conflicts of interest. You very consistently manage to mine personal conflicts out of threads and stories that have no apparent connection to you or your beliefs. It's a worrisome habit, in the "I almost worry about criticizing you because I'd feel bad if it turned out that you were actually ill" sense. Broken record: I really think you need to relax and let some of this stuff go, or, at least, if you're totally dedicated to the idea of promoting your vision of the evils of startup culture, find a more coherent way to do it. Perhaps your ideas would be better carried in long-form essays.

michaelochurch 13y ago
You're being ridiculous. You're making this about me, and I am frankly not a very interesting topic to 99+ percent of the readers here. It's not that I am especially important; however, my encounter with HN moderation has shown one of the mechanisms by which VC-istan protects its reputation. That is all. By observing those mechanisms, we can possibly make inferences about its health. If what is said on Hacker News actually matters to VC-istan, then it's not a very robust system. I really think this should be the end of the conversation. Leave the inane personal attacks out of it.
- tptacek 13y ago
  You're not making things less worrisome by strenuously arguing that there's nothing personal about a comment that starts with "I suppose what has happened to my HN account...", and then going on to suggest that your "encounter with HN moderation" shows a "mechanisms by which VC-istan protects its reputation". The reality is that VC-istan, whatever that is, probably does not give a shit about you or me. You are not being persecuted. It is reasonable to be worried about what your comments, taken as a whole, imply about where you're coming from. It's totally possible that I'm wrong and you're just very shrill (you'd think that as a fellow shrill person I'd have a radar for that). But it is not crazy to ask the question. Are you OK?

moron4hire 13y ago

This is why I view social status as currency to spend on speaking my mind as I see fit.