Benquo
The tone and implications of comments along the lines of “this wording is going to cause a lot of people to believe specific proposition X, when it seems to me like what you would actually be willing to defend narrower proposition Y” is very different from that of “this wording is inappropriate because it is likely to upset people.”
An important feature of the first comment is that it actually does some work trying to clarify, and is an implicit ITT.
Someone deceiving with conscious intent can apply more compute / intelligence and other resources for optimizing and maintaining the lie, which means the deception can be much bigger and more consequential, thereby causing greater damage to others.
Unconscious deception is hard to distinguish from innocent mistakes.
Surely someone consciously intending to deceive can apply some of that extra compute to making it harder to distinguish their behavior from an innocent mistake.
Altman’s belief is explicitly that he does not know what the next company should look like, what area it should be in, and what problem it should solve, and so I think he mostly thinks that good people need to be very reactive to their environment
I expect this to be good at many things—he’s probably not wrong that Napoleon would make a good YC founder by his standards—but I expect it’s not the mindset that can develop substantive new tech. And sure enough, it seems like substantive new tech is mostly not being developed.
No.
I didn’t use the word scam in the post. Cousin_it’s comment was defending YC by saying, substantively, don’t worry, it’s just a pretend gatekeeper, so I tried to make that more explicit. How, precisely, does that not constitute being a scam?
Are we supposed to be at war with lions now? What’s wrong with apex predators?
Either it matters a lot for a good startup’s success, or it doesn’t.
If it does, then the gatekeeper narrative is true. If it doesn’t, then how exactly isn’t it a scam?
This is such an obvious point that I’m worried that I’m confused about what’s really going on in this conversation.
Yeah, it would be pretty cool for PG to more overtly admit that YC is a scam. As it is, it’s not actually harmless, since it does attract a lot of attention from people who think they’re paying attention to a nonscam.
Y Combinator could very easily (if not for the apparent emotional difficulties mentioned in Black Swan farming) have instead been organized to screen for founders making a credible effort to create a great product, instead of screening for generalized responsiveness to tests.
Approval Extraction Advertised as Production
OK but what’s actually being done is a one-off ban of someone with multiple credible public rape allegations against them. The specific policy goal of developing better immune responses to epistemic corruption is just not relevant to that and I don’t see how anyone on the mod team is doing anything best explained by an attempt to solve that problem.
Graham’s implying that at least for the vast majority of person-test combinations, the spirit of passing tests is hacking them:
Even though I was a diligent student, almost all the work I did in school was aimed at getting a good grade on something.
To many people, it would seem strange that the preceding sentence has a “though” in it. Aren’t I merely stating a tautology? Isn’t that what a diligent student is, a straight-A student? That’s how deeply the conflation of learning with grades has infused our culture.
[...]
If getting into college were merely a matter of having the quality of one’s mind measured by admissions officers the way scientists measure the mass of an object, we could tell teenage kids “learn a lot” and leave it at that.
I don’t see how, specifically, to distinguish this sort of thing from what Hotel Concierge is saying, unless you think Hotel Concierge is against trying at anything. As far as I can tell Hotel Concierge isn’t saying you shouldn’t try to be happy, or achieve outcomes you care about via delayed gratification, or be smart, or learn a lot, just that it’s a problem when people are pushed to optimize for performing simulacra of those things.
Currently writing this up at more length, I invite anyone to remind me if I forget to post a link here within a week. The short version is that Graham is implying that his behavior is aligned with the values of his essay—people are likely to trust Y-Combinator to help them learn to do real things, since it’s a Paul Graham creation and he wrote this essay—while in fact he is doing the opposite and set up the world’s best, most prestigious school for Succeeding by Passing Tests.
It’s not that this essay is wrong. It’s just that it’s a rehash of what Hotel Concierge covered better and in more depth in The Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment, and it’s dangerously misleading advertising for the VC fund / cult Graham started, Y-Combinator, which is the current apex predator of the real-life Stanford Marshmallow Prison Experiment.
It was originally marketed as a health tonic, but its apparent curative properties were due to the powerful stimulant and analgesic cocaine, not any health-enhancing ingredients. Later the cocaine was taken out (but the “Coca” in the name retained), so now it fools the subconscious into thinking it’s healthful with—on different timescales—mass media advertising, caffeine, and refined sugar.
It’s less overtly a scam now, in large part because it has the endowment necessary to manipulate impressions more subtly at scale.
Maybe more specifically an ingroup that takes over a potentially real, profitable social niche, squeezes out everyone else, and uses the niche’s leverage to maximize rent extraction, is a gang.
Coca-Cola produces something about as worthless as Theranos machines, substituting the experience of a thing for the thing itself, & is pretty blatant about it. The scams that “win” gerrymander our concept-boundaries to make it hard to see. Likewise Pepsi. JPMorgan Chase & Bank of America, in different ways, are scams structurally similar to Bernie Madoff but with a legitimate state subsidy to bail them out when they blow up. This is not an exhaustive list, just the first 4 that jumped out at me. Pharma is also mostly a scam these days, nearly all of the extant drugs that matter are already off-patent.
Also Facebook, but “scam” is less obviously the right category.
I have a background expectation that the most blatant kinds of fraudulence will be caught.
Consider how long Theranos operated, its prestigious board of directors, and the fact that it managed to make a major sale to Walgreens before blowing up. Consider how prominent Three Cups of Tea was (promoted by a New York Times columnist), for how long, before it was exposed. Consider that official US government nutrition advice still reflects obviously distorted, politically motivated research from the early 20th Century. Consider that the MLM company Amway managed to bribe Harvard to get the right introductions to Chinese regulators. Scams can and do capture the official narrative and prosecute whistleblowers.
Consider that pretty much by definition we’re not aware of the most successful scams.
Related: The Scams Are Winning
I don’t understand how the second paragraph follows from the first at all.