What Silicon Valley Thinks About Politics – An Attempted Measurement | Hacker News Reader

What Silicon Valley Thinks About Politics – An Attempted Measurement

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37 pointssethbannon9 comments

This seems to be entirely: "What Silicon Valley (founders) Think(S) About Politics (and how close are they agreeing with 'general' Democrats)"

I was hoping for something more generic, at least 'what tech workers in silicon valley think' (given YC), not how a bunch of talking points line up to other talking points; but an actual sample of, 'here is a problem, what do you think the best solution(s) are?' (then ranked totaling them).

It also has that new media style that I /hate/ on websites, where there's some full-screen image delineating sections. Yet they absolutely cannot serve you some clean simple web page, it HAS to have full, you must scroll through them, big images and dynamically placed text.

Check the voting patterns for areas in the Valley to discover what tech workers think. They pretty much line up with the results displayed regarding founders. I noticed it myself while living there.

The people he quotes quite liberally in his piece, including Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andressen, Peter Thiel, all support Republican presidential candidates. He makes it seem as if their quotes are in support of Democrats. Also, only 129 out of 8000+ founders and investors responded. This doesn't scream selection bias? Maybe Republican founders and investors are less likely to respond to surveys, especially considering how the Brendan Eich situation went down.

There is something weird going on with the bar chart titled "An unequal big pie". The bar for "financial inequality is a bigger problem for a prosperous economy" is extremely small. The numeric value is 42%. As in, close to half of the sample of (very rich) tech founders agree that it is a huge problem (versus 59% of the general public sample, which incidentally still looks like less than half the bar). Yet the graph makes it seem as if few founders thought so.

Note that the alternative in the same graph is "mediocre growth is a bigger problem for a prosperous economy" and there the value is 48%. So only a few more tech founders[1] see slow growth as a big issue compared to those that mention income inequality (for the economy, not ethically, mind you).

There is a lot to be said about a future that arrives faster and is quite a bit more equally distributed, and which of the two matters the most. But that bar seems to me as misleading to strengthen the posts view on S.V. (wealthy founder) politics.

[1] 2 actually, given the sample size is 33

I noticed several irregularities in how the data was presented that gave me the uneasy feeling the author was trying to push a Democratic agenda using an appeal to the authority of SV founders. The quotes from Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick, while technically true, are anecdotal, highly contextual, and also don't align with what I've read about their views/actions from other sources. In addition, the author used the same graph twice in the article, which also seems very odd.

Normally the minimum sample size for political poll is 1k ideally 3k.

In all fairness, this is a poll of a very particular sub-population (Crunchbase founders and investors). The entire population is 8499 people, so a sampling size of 3k would be more than a third of the population. The sample size for most questions is 129 (but not random, since those were only the ones who responded). I just found that one graph weird, but admittedly I haven't looked carefully at everything else.

Across the Western world, the incumbent political parties are struggling to represent the changing alignments of the population - (I tried to give shorthand examples - I can't and that's the problem)

Silicon Valley's politics are perhaps more pronounced version of what you see in every major city and country - economics and tech are changing everything and the new alignments are going to be based around our inner chimp reactions to things - and those things are not clear yet.

For example, make suggestions below as a form of free form policy / word association.

> Internet founders believe the best role for government is competitive and direct funding for non-government agencies to solve social problems, whether it’s parent-run public charter schools, loans to immigrant entrepreneurs for an alternative energy startup, or scientific research at a public university.

I read this as founders believe they should receive support from the government. Maybe the difference between start-ups and traditional business isn't that big after all.

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