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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

They were more than normalizing. They were suggesting that the single most frightening thing about the Trump administration --- which is not that they're Republicans, but that they're crazy --- is, to the extent it's true, actually an asset.

I worry about digging too far into this because it's just going to generate a political debate. I just want to be clear about why I think this article and Sam's decision about how to participate in it is so alarming.

I am less disturbed by Trump's Republican supporters, at least the level-headed ones. At least they believe what they're saying. I am far more disturbed by someone who claims to be in the opposition but rather than publicly opposing continues to give every sign of being in fact a quiet supporter of the administration. Why should I have to worry that that's true? What was the upside for YC here?

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Silicon Valley has for a long time lauded "crazy" ones. Andy Grove's book is titled "Only the paranoid survive." Steve Jobs's first Think Different commercial was "Here's to the crazy ones". YCombinator has stated on several occasions that they're looking for "extreme" personalities who "see the world differently", a16z says explicitly to "hire for strength rather than lack of weakness", and Chris Sacca loves to parade out Travis Kalanick's Wii tennis story and talk about how he's not a normal person.

The reason for this is because "crazy" is usually an appellation that the rest of society sticks on you for being "not normal". Silicon Valley is looking for the crazy person whose "normal" will become the normal for the rest of the world. You can't change the world if you think the world is already pretty good as-is.

My concern about Trump (and his few Silicon Valley supporters) is that they're applying ideas outside of the domain where they're sound. Most crazy people are, in fact, crazy, and not great visionaries who will bring the world to a higher level of being. A crazy startup founder will at most hurt himself and his investors if he's completely detached from reality; he requires the consent of his customers to do anything significant. A crazy POTUS could literally destroy humanity, so the stakes are a little bit higher.

I think we are in rather violent agreement substantively here, and quibbling over details, but:

> I am far more disturbed by someone who claims to be in the opposition but rather than publicly opposing continues to give every sign of being in fact a quiet supporter of the administration.

Taking the quote at face value, Altman seems to endorsing Trump's approach to governing but not the ideological goals it is directed at; this isn't supporting Trump but in some ways it might be seen as worse—the usual anti-Trump message that unites liberal, moderate, and the notable conservative voices skeptical of the regime is that normal political ideological questions aside, Trump's approach is a danger to the viability of American democracy (obviously, as you move roughly toward the left, that process critique is leavened with increasing opposition to policy goals of the Trump Administration.)

>I am far more disturbed by someone who claims to be in the opposition but rather than publicly opposing continues to give every sign of being in fact a quiet supporter of the administration. Why should I have to worry that that's true?

You're stating you believe Sam is a Trump administration supporter?

The evidence would suggest he's more a supporter of the style of populist authoritarianism embodied by Trump, but a dissenter from the policy goals which Trump is using that to advance.

Sam's quote:

"He’s an outsider. He took on a system he thought was broken and then disregarded the rules, he got to know his users well and tested his product early and iterated rapidly."

An outsider who disregards the rules is the polar opposite of an authoritarian. Rather, I think he's admiring Trump's bias toward action and disregard for conventional wisdom, as well as for people who have a vested interest in the conventional wisdom.

What? No they aren't. Kim Il-Sung was an outsider who disregarded the rules. So was Pol Pot. You've made a category error.

It might be the case that history's most effective authoritarians are disproportionately likely to be rule-breaking outsiders.

They're hardly outsiders once they've become the leader of the country.

Trump is in a similar position now: he was an outsider during the campaign, but now that he's won, he's the consummate insider. The same phenomena applies to successful Silicon Valley startups: Google, Facebook, and Uber were all scrappy little startups until they became huge, at which point they became giant multinationals which need to be feared and resisted.

This I think illustrates the paradox in Sam's quote: in my read, Altman is referring to candidate Trump, while your outrage is devoted towards President Trump. As Obama said in one of his farewell addresses, "campaigning is very different from governing". Tactics that can be very effective (even necessary) on the campaign trail can become dangerous threats to democracy within the government.

> They're hardly outsiders once they've become the leader of the country.

A formal position of authority doesn't stop you from being an outsider in an institution; that's one of the reasons that purges happen: to recast institutions in which the leader is an outsider into ones in which he is not.

No major disagreement there.

What I'm trying to highlight is the distinction between the struggle for power and the exercise of power. Campaigning for election is a struggle for power. So is purging your political opponents within the government. So is founding a startup.

Governing is the exercise of power. Deporting all immigrants and closing the borders is the exercise of power. "Grab 'em by the pussy" is the exercise of power. Leveraging a monopoly is the exercise of power.

Power struggles are usually looked at favorably by those whose interests align with the ascendant power structure, and unfavorably by those whose interests are entrenched. The naked exercise of power is usually looked at with distrust by everyone, on the theory that if they bully someone else, they could bully you next. There's a fairly wide grey area in-between; for example, I've categorized Trump's immigration orders as the exercise of power (which probably both you and tptacek would agree with), but someone who just lost his job to an immigrant would probably categorize it as a power struggle where Trump is fighting the immigrants oppressing him. And similarly, not everyone would buy your claim that a dictator committing a purge is an "outsider" in his government. The key point though is the relative power differential between parties: it's a struggle for power when the active party is the underdog, and the exercise of power when the active party is dominant.

The way I read Altman's quote, he's casting Trump's campaign in the same terms as the struggle for power that all startups have to go through. He's specifically not endorsing what Trump has done with that power once he attained it.

> What I'm trying to highlight is the distinction between the struggle for power and the exercise of power.

I'm not sure there is the kind of distinction here you are trying to draw; a struggle for (future) power is one context in which (present) power is exercised, they aren't opposing or conflicting concepts.

> An outsider who disregards the rules is the polar opposite of an authoritarian

Revolutionary authoritarians are, almost without exception, outsiders who disregard the pre-existing rules, both formal rules and merely conventional ones. The very few exceptions are insiders who disregard rules in the same way. Lenin, Hitler, and Napoleon, among others, were many things, but followers-of-rules-set-by-others wasn't high on the list for any of them.

I think you are confusing being the opposite of a willing subject of authoritarianism with being the opposite of an authoritarian.

Pretty sure you already crossed that line.

What is interesting about Trunp's canpaign is that he was able to win while spending significantly less than his opponent[1]. Given this, I would say that sama's on point with his quote.

BTW, calling the Trump administration "crazy" is kind of a lazy ad hominem, don't you think?

[1] - http://fortune.com/2016/12/09/donald-trump-campaign-spending...

"Ad hominem" doesn't mean "argument that hurts someone's feelings".

You're right. It means: "Rather than [criticizing] a person’s premises or reasoning, one asserts something about the person’s character, ... mental health, likes or dislikes."

I'm just surprised the first rhetorical tools you decided to use are emotional appeals and being dismissive of anyone who appears like they're remotely not toeing the party line.

You're misusing ad hominem.

Attacking, hypothetically, a president on account of his skin colour is an ad hom. It has no bearing on his governing capability.

Noting that a president is not in full possession of his mental capacities is a statement of fact. It bears directly on his governing ability.

http://www.skepdic.com/adhominem.html

Attacking the subject of an argument on account of their skin color is not an ad hominem argument. It's a dumb argument to be sure, but it's not ad hominem.

An ad hominem argument is one in which you attempt to dismiss someone else's argument (or their standing to rebut your own argument) based not on any attribute of the argument itself, but on an attribute of the person making the argument.

If we're arguing about whether Donald Trump is crazy, and you say he's not, and I say, "you wouldn't know whether he's crazy or not because you're crazy", that's an ad hominem.

Attacking the argument on the basis of skin colour, or any other irrellevant basis: gender, religion, sexuality, are classic ad homs.

And, if I do happen to be crazy and that's a legitimate basis for my not being able to assess another's insanity, that's a valid impeachment of my credibility.

If I'm not crazy, it's an untruthful assertion on your part.

> BTW, calling the Trump administration "crazy" is kind of a lazy ad hominem, don't you think?

It's not ad hominem, but it may be missing that much of the apparent craziness of the Administration is deliberate propaganda strategy (even if that strategy has been chosen as a key one for the Trump camp because Trump himself is actually crazy, and so there is an incentive to find an approach that works with that fact rather than foundering on it.)

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