I would be willing to take a punch if it meant someone I did not like would receive two punches.
Sometimes there are people in this world who deserve to be punched because they behaved like assholes. It is important to a functioning society that assholes be punished, to prevent them from further inflicting their behavior on others. We are willing to incur personal costs to achieve our own version of justice. In fact, there are people who spend their careers doing this: Law Enforcement Officers.
Even in a world without cops, asshole behavior will eventually self-police: An asshole especially doesn’t want to be surrounded by other assholes.
Suppose we play a game of Prisoner’s Dilemma with multiple players who rotate opponents. To maximize the total group earnings, every player should always Cooperate. As an asshole who wants to maximize my own personal earnings, I want every player to always Cooperate…except for me. Then it is in my best interest to destroy the other non-Cooperative players, because if too many of these exist, the group as a whole will become distrustful and stop cooperating. And then I wouldn’t be able to exploit all the Cooperative players.
I am willing to expend personal effort to punish other assholes because I know that I will recover my costs when I later screw the Cooperative players. Altruistic individuals of course also want to rid the field of selfish players, but they are less willing to do so at personal cost.
Okay I doped, but Chris Froome totally doped harder.
Studies have shown that the individuals most inclined to cheat are also the most inclined to punish other cheaters. Every Tour de France cyclist accused of doping has accused multiple others. The Mafia reduces crime in the areas they inhabit, and cops shake down donut shops while keeping the burglars away.
We go out of our way to punish assholes because sometimes karma needs a helping hand. Karma gets the most help from assholes.
This was written by a 61-year-old (@lefsetz) and appeared in my Twitter feed after multiple retweets from 40-somethings (@pmarca, @chrisboden). That’s how far behind the curve I am.
Cars are the newspapers of today. Something oldsters can’t live without and youngsters can… Unless you’re willing to question all your preconceptions, you’re going to be left behind.
I guess we’re assuming that in the future, no one will live outside of SF and NYC. If you’re a rich 40-something (50-something?) having a midlife crisis, don’t buy a Ferrari to impress the barely-legal ladies. Instead, acquire a ton of Yo followers, or something.
Charles Darwin, a most rational fellow, made the decision by weighing the pros and cons of marriage. Here are his notes:
And a transcription:
Marry
Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — better than a dog anyhow. — Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one’s health. — but terrible loss of time.
My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.
Not Marry
Freedom to go where one liked — choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread. — (But then it is very bad for ones health to work too much)
Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool
He lists approximately 11 arguments in favor of marriage, and 13 against. Based on these counts, a very rational person ought to decide against marriage. However, six months later Darwin married his first cousin. Why did he arrive at this seemingly irrational answer?
I suspect that Darwin used a more complex modeling system than simply counting line items. Darwin adds “Conversation of clever men at clubs” as an argument against marriage, but suppose these clever men decided to get married? To ensure decisional accuracy, Darwin likely multiplied his total number of friends by their individual probabilities of marriage.
And then the children. Darwin had ten children with his cousin. As an evolutionary theorist, he must have considered the strong likelihood that many of his children would come out severely retarded. The “Loss of time” and “less money” arguments must have been compounded by additional losses incurred from caring for ten inbred kids.
Darwin contemplates college tuition costs.
Actually, Charles Darwin probably did not go through a complex technical analysis to arrive at his conclusion. Weighing pros and cons does not work, no matter how precise the calculation, because a single compelling cause trumps a million slightly-influential arguments.
Darwin’s pro-marriage list claims that a wife is “Better than a dog” — wow, if that is not the argument to end all arguments, I don’t know what is.
And they lived happily ever after. Until Charles died of a heart attack, which was probably caused by his nagging wife.
The ongoing complaints about the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley tech startups is growing louder. Most recently, Carlos Bueno criticizes companies for building uniform cultures where employers only hire their friends [1]. He points to Max Levchin’s following statement:
The notion that diversity in an early team is important or good is completely wrong. You should try to make the early team as non-diverse as possible [2].
Silicon Valley’s very monolithic culture is really made up of multiple components encompassing values, demographics, and priorities. Two of these are admirable; one is symptomatic of a more global problem that has little to do with Silicon Valley at all.
Values
When a business defines its company culture, it’s really talking about values — a code of conduct to guide decision-making as the company grows.
Amazon, for example, has a culture of frugality for the sake of bringing low prices to the customer. Someone who values extravagant hedonism would not do well there.
Zappos has a culture of delivering happiness. If they were to hire executives from Comcast, that would certainly add diversity but things probably wouldn’t work out.
Delivering Human Suffering
When it comes to company culture, there is no room for diversity. If team members have no values in common with each other, anarchy serves as the implicit catch-all.
Note that culture has nothing to do with demographics, although it is expected that people with similar backgrounds will have similar life values.
Priorities
Facebook’s Campus Ice Cream Shoppe
Tech companies are notorious for their bubbly perks: laundry service, designer bottled water, group parkour classes, on-demand call girls, and the like. These are not to be confused with company culture.
The perks are really indicative of priorities: The company wants you here at all hours of the day. We provide an on-site Disneyland so you have no excuse to ever go home. We recognize that you will eventually grow up and leave us so we intend to squeeze every last drop of energy out of you while you’re young.
When I started working at Intel, we had catered lunches every Wednesday and apples and bananas in the morning to encourage healthy eating habits. Budget cuts required that the catered lunches and fruit be terminated. Their priorities? We’re bleeding to death and have no intent to right this sinking ship, so maybe you should go home and spend some time with your family so that they don’t hate you when you’re laid off in a few months.
Bueno’s lambaste of a startup that discriminates against overdressed applicants and interviewees who don’t go out for drinks with the team has nothing to do with culture, but priorities. Will this person sacrifice their nights and weekends and lives for the company in times of need? A candidate who couldn’t be bothered to take 20 seconds to browse the company website photos and dress accordingly is unlikely to do so.
Demographics
The industry’s lack of demographic diversity spans gender, race, age, and academic background.
Some years back, I was on some Women in Computer Science committee at Harvard discussing how we might recruit more women for the graduate program. There are plenty of qualified female computer science students out there, said the Director of Admissions. We just need to work harder to reach them.
No, there are not. The nationwide percentage of female computer science undergraduates is hovering somewhere below 20%. No matter which way you slice it, women in the tech industry will represent a distinct minority. Study the ethnic makeup of computer science students and this goes a long way toward further explaining Silicon Valley’s demographics.
In the Valley, it’s hard enough to recruit any talent, let alone minority talent. As a female CTO, I would love to have more female engineers on my team, but I recognize that we can’t hire something out of nothing.
The Exclusion Principle
I don’t know if those who criticize Silicon Valley’s culture have ever worked at an early-stage startup, or assembled an organization of any sort. The whole basis for congregation depends on a common culture. Why would a group of individuals with nothing in common get together? They wouldn’t.
America today is diverse, but the thirteen original colonies were not. In fact, any diversity in our country’s early days was either enslaved or eradicated by smallpox. We became ethnically diverse because immigrants came over who want to be a part of the existing culture.
Max Levchin does a fine job of explaining his rationale behind opposing diversity: “At an early-stage startup, speed is your most valuable weapon…Diversity of thought in an early-stage team can be an inhibitor of speed.”
The early Paypal team, who coincidentally represent the same demographic distribution as Max Levchin’s college classmates.
A company isn’t born with a predefined culture, and a large part of building a startup is the process of evolving the culture from the early employees and their shared values [3]. If the early employees are sufficiently diverse in thinking, then culture evolves straight into a primordial soup.
What to do about diversity, then? Bueno points out that there is a large untapped talent pool neglected by Silicon Valley companies, because those in the pool don’t fit into existing company cultures. Why on earth are these people waiting to be hired by elitist young males? It’s high time they self-organized to form their own exclusionary startups.
Demographically-diverse teams can’t take a random walk down Sand Hill and raise a seed round off a vague pipe dream the way a team of Stanford CS grads can. They can, however, generate unassailable revenue and growth numbers. That would be a good culture hack.
This week’s Businessweek features a story about Michael Kennedy, a criminal defense attorney who is in the process of raising $300M for a new private equity fund.
Here is the cover illustration for the story:
Kennedy is the controlling owner of High Times magazine and his fund invests in marijuana-related businesses where you can purchase bongs and other marijuana-related accessories. The fund has an image management problem if this is the picture that publications associate with its partners.
High Times has an unfortunately stigmatized name. The entire industry does.
Cannabis was criminalized in 1937 largely due to its association with Mexican immigrants and public resentment towards that group during the Great Depression. Anti-marijuana propaganda driven by William Randolph Hearst and his newspaper empire furthered the public fear. Hearst allegedly had a vested interest in destroying the hemp industry because the raw material served as an alternative to wood pulp, threatening the value of his extensive timber holdings.
How many murders, suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, holdups, burglaries, and deeds of maniacal insanity [marijuana] causes each year, especially among the young, can be only conjectured. The sweeping march of its addiction has been so insidious that, in numerous communities, it thrives almost unmolested, largely because of official ignorance of its effects. –Harry J Anslinger, Head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1937
We have officially become less ignorant about its effects in the past seven decades. Cannabis is potentially an effective form of treatment for pain management, sleep disorders, muscle spasms, and many other ailments.
The FDA will not approve cannabinoids as a form of treatment without evidence of safety and efficacy from clinical tests, but this research struggles to proceed because the federal government will not allow it and few are willing to fund it.
Businessweek’s cover image is not representative of cannabis users. Many veterans suffer from PTSD and other critical maladies that are best relieved by cannabinoid medicines. Learn More: Veterans for Compassionate Care
Despite the medical and financial potential, cannabis investment is held back by its image problem. Alcohol was similarly demonized during the Temperance movement and subsequent Prohibition. The Volstead Act was enforced for 13 years; marijuana-legalization advocates have 77 years of censure to undo.
Alcohol and Prohibition shed their public taint as it became clear that everyone was drinking illegally anyway. It became even more clear that only lower-class poor were being prosecuted for possession while the socially privileged stockpiled alcohol with impunity. Sound familiar?
