Tiny nitpick: Benjamin certainly would not want to become a sociopath, but the incumbent sociopaths would doubtlessly love to promote him into their ranks, surreptitiously. Confidence in the power of power to corrupt! (Usually misplaced, thankfully, despite media)
(To abuse a Ridley Scott favourite: slip a Marechal’s baton into his rucksack)
[this is opposite of the Rabinovich “strategy”, which hints that YC are not sociopaths]
EDIT: I dont think this is comparable to Steve Jobs’ 100-Person Retreat without more insider data, e.g.,
Would be interested to know if anybody got promoted as a result of these retreats, my hunch is, no, because everybody knows about the 100-person retreat.
EDIT 2: another system to compare with, kind of the opposite of Rao’s model, is the Lambeth race, thats more like openly favouring the tortoise? So that no rabbit would sign up in the first place.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41468567
SPJ’s innovation, was to keep it bipartite and below— making sure type IIIs didnt feel like they were a higher class & everyone else was type II (Imagine an army with only NCOs and officers, but the NCOs are type IIIs) No proles (grunts) in the orgchart of a very large design agency..culturally, designers often happy to work like grunts anyway! (Painters = painters)
This trouble with the proles (app store, actual store, icloud, contractor relations, PR screwups.. ) ultimately stems from that failed pancreas transplant, so that they no longer had an IV to keep entropy in its place..
[plus maybe the programmers n ee types started to feel they werent fully designers (Bret Victor, later, pple like Lattner?)]
[Check out the wwdc videos.. the sw engineers dress like.. they havent read the canon]
> So that no rabbit would sign up in the first place.
I liked Добро пожаловать, или Посторонним вход воспрещён (1964), in which the summer camp director plays a very soviet version of an Eric Berne Transactional Analysis* game, "Everything I do, I do it for you".
According to wikipedia, it's infamous in russian for the lines:
— Children, remember! You all are the owners of the camp. [All of] you! What do you all [therefore] need?
Thx for Equoid! Not having started in on it yet, all I have for now is pedantry, for the commenters on Stross' blog who are making horse analogies (as well as the wonderful Unicorns From Hell vid) are way off base: horses are Perissodactyl, but unicorns are Artiodactyl.
* I'm not sold on TA, but learning to tune out as soon as you notice the opening moves of a TA game? That's sanity-preserving material right there.
PS. I've lost the source for the roman trichotomy; plz remind?
Currently trying to read^W skim Pynchon’s buddy Farina to get an 1960s inside outsider’s perspective on that..
>the second kind is capable of indefinite extension
Rather i took the hint from here. But his third class does seem to have some overlap with [my intended] type IIIs. E.g. (esp?) technicals from the cadet branches who feel (attribute guilt? stereotype threat?) the need to do some legacy-laundering..
(Compare with the social origins of SPJ)
Stronger connection to founder mode is that YC is in their own words (having a hard time locating exact quote) modelled after Harvard. So while the coarse-grained view from the POV of hoi polloi does look like your music video, our “local deities” were inside-outsiders, once upon a time in New England (as well as Ithacan transplants, for a couple of them)
OK, technicals, even cadet technicals, don't fall into my type III, precisely because they tend to stay active (although then they choose projects by interest instead of profitability).
For me, type III starts when one can not only stay in bed all monday and tuesday, but even go sailing across the pacific, without impacting one's income stream in any way — and is confirmed when one actually does so. ("Did nothing in particular / And did it very well")
The circles which I find are enriched in these type IIIs are also very geek-poor.
I think HN's stereotype of financial independence is of someone who's made a successful exit, but (or is this just my parochialism talking?) imx most of my type IIIs were born with it or married into it.
(BTW, I have trad Sand Hill experience, and therefore only the haziest idea of YC. I've been holding off on another, "riding herd", model of what I suspect may be a different sol'n to bigco hires than founder mode, because it'll take a great deal of explanation, but maybe if you're willing to explain the distinctive parts of YC to me I can attempt to explain why I think it's possible bigco hires could very well have been successful under a two-decades-of-sales CEO but tank under leadership that came up through engineering — if so, there's another [imnsho better] alternative to founder mode)
Ive known a maybe a half a dozen of born into money types who have technical obsessions. Imagine the Duke of Montrose still hacking his own lisp while VCing on the side to compliment his hobbies. (The guy who built the titan sub also comes to mind). Plan was to lasso some type of liminal nerd, approximating weirdpro gentlemen scientists of our neoEdwardian age?
(BTW)
most distinctive part is that the first gen, and maybe the 3rd gen*, take time out to consider whether things are still working in theory. But i suspect you only care about the practice.
An insanity inducing game that i’ve sometimes had the misfortune of playing is when I try to discern whether a particularly hard-to-parse paper by people i only know in passing in my subsubsubsubsubdomain (classified by dot product of tags) in a highish impact journal is spam or advertising. Wondering if that feeling approximates what you feel when encountering Yarvin. (Luckily, these havent ever appeared on the HN fp - but there were a few close calls)
re: Farina I'm guessing you're younger but if you were ever around SV during Sun's heyday, John Sundman has a half SF-thriller/half roman à clef. His non-African foreign settings* are a bit cringe, but his Bay Area and Boston are spot on.
* "And [it] was very calm. No-one was being oppressed." — exactly
Dark Benjamin is a productive characterisation. Here are a few more snippets, from a world with a few less Midichlorians:
I. [Benjamin is attending an Animal Farm wedding with his mare friend from a neighbouring farm, Kay.]
— and Napoleon assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.
— ...
— That's a true story. That's my farm, Kay, that's not me.
II. [After the death of Napoleon, the younger pigs took out a mortgage from the human bank. Pinkeye meets Benjamin to discuss some financial aid the latter provided for recent payments.]
— Com.. Mr. Benjamin, of course we pigs are very grateful for your assistance with affairs of farm, and so we thought we should give you a quick heads-up. You're an animal of the world, you know how unforeseen things happen; we'd like to repay you on the original schedule but our accountants are saying we might have to get creative and renegotiate. I don't know what we might do, that's for others to decide, and unfortunately it didn't get discussed at the last committee meeting because we were too busy drawing up this list of the new government ministries. Would you care to see it by any chance?
— Don't worry about negotiating with me; you should be worrying about negotiating with your Maker for breaking your word, when you come before Him to have Judgement passed on your soul...
— Mr. Benjamin, surely you of all animals know that we pigs live quarter to quarter and have no time to waste on something so far off as that?
— Allow me to repay your kindness by giving you a quick heads-up. You're an animal of the world, you know how unforeseen things happen. I'd like to be flexible but my investors are impatient. If we don't get repaid by Friday, you might be meeting your Maker on Saturday.
III. [Years later, Benjamin, having since officially taken over from the pigs, has scheduled a "working holiday" at a secluded fishing spot with the president of the bank]
— Ben, how do you do it? These skeeters are as loud as the outboard and I'm slathered in DEET but still getting eaten alive. Yet they don't bother you?
[Benjamin twitches his ears back, and lifts a hind hoof ever so slightly off the aluminium deck. In the sudden silence, the president can hear wavelets rippling along the gunwales of their fishing boat.]
(To abuse a Ridley Scott favourite: slip a Marechal’s baton into his rucksack)
[this is opposite of the Rabinovich “strategy”, which hints that YC are not sociopaths]
EDIT: I dont think this is comparable to Steve Jobs’ 100-Person Retreat without more insider data, e.g.,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41416275
Would be interested to know if anybody got promoted as a result of these retreats, my hunch is, no, because everybody knows about the 100-person retreat.
EDIT 2: another system to compare with, kind of the opposite of Rao’s model, is the Lambeth race, thats more like openly favouring the tortoise? So that no rabbit would sign up in the first place. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41468567