Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, because I absolutely agree with your assessment. But then I started a couple of thought experiments.

How about the reverse case? Would, say, Meg Whitman or Satya Nadella, for example, be able to act as a CEO or co-founder of a small company, say < 10 employees?

But then I thought about Bill Joy, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and, well, you hopefully get my point.

Which is, even though I agree that most startup founders probably would not be able to head the same company as it grew by multiple orders of magnitude, there are enough famous outliers that we know it can be done and can be done spectacularly well.

There must be a statistical name for this apparent paradox. (Or am I just experiencing confirmation bias?)

EDIT: grammar nits

View on HN

You're thinking of survivorship bias

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

It's entirely possible that some big CEOs can't do well with a small company of 10 employees or so. A lot of the skills they have are mostly focused on managing larger organized teams, which is not the same skillset for small teams. It's strategy vs tactics.

Maybe at one point they could, early in their career, but by now those skills may have atrophied.

I think the phrase you're looking for is "exceptions that prove the rule". For every CEO that took a company from nothing to 10k employees, there are so many more examples of the opposite that you can't even begin to name them. You're able to name the exceptions because there are so few exceptions.

That phrase is widely misused. The intended usage is where a rule is implied by the explicit stating of an exception. For example, a sign labeled "No Parking 9AM - 7PM" states an exception, and implies that parking is allowed outside of the time. The stating of the exception proves the existence of the more general rule.

In this case, the appropriate term would be "survivorship bias". Those who survive are noticed and used to generalize to the group, even if their survival is atypical of the group as a whole.

The word "prove" has largely changed its meaning, it doesn't mean "test" anymore, although a few usages from previous centuries survive, such as military "proving grounds." So yes, it's very interesting that an old phrase that once meant 'a circumstance that challenges or makes one doubt a rule', gave birth to the modern phrase that means pretty much the opposite: "makes one more confident of the rule, in the end, after all." But the latter phrase exists, the former is part of history.

Language changes constantly, and meanings often flip from one century to another. The previous meaning of "prove" doesn't obviate the modern usage inside or outside of the phrase in question or turn the clock back. That particular horse escaped the barn, long, long ago along with tens of thousands of other changes in the last few centuries. "Probable" existed before probability theory did, and it didn't refer to odds or math; it just meant "respectable."

I could follow your own suit, I suppose, and compliment you by calling your comment "smart", since that word used to mean "painful" in olde english and you prefer the old ways. But I won't. (I'll just say your comment was interesting, and not quite the full story.) I roll with the common currency: language as it is. Print greatly slowed these sorts of changes, and the internet will slow them even more, of course, as the decades and centuries roll on.

Most idioms I am fine with shifting, or being nonsensical when broken by time. I couldn't care less if people use "I could care less", as there is no mistaken meaning. My problem with the current use of "exception proves the rule" is that it is factually untrue. Not only that, but unlike other factually untrue phrases such as "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.", its current meaning promotes bad science. Exceptions are evidence against the rule, unless there is reason to discount the exceptions.

In general, I try to correct it in order to give the benefit of the doubt. Either somebody is misusing a phrase, which is a charitable interpretation, or somebody has a fundamentally flawed idea of how evidence works, which is rather uncharitable.

I thought I explained my usage pretty well. You should go back and re-read it, and also take a look at the Wikipedia page I reference, where it's explained in more detail.

Basically, you can name the exceptions off the top of your head, but you could never do that with the non-exceptions because they're so numerous. Kind of like how in your parking example, you don't need to name the hours that parking is allowed, because it's a rule. It's always allowed, with some exceptions. You only need to point out the exceptions.

I would take your charitable interpretation and say you're misunderstanding the phrase. Since there are examples of this usage all over the Internet and a very long Wikipedia page detailing the various forms, I hope we can move past this wildly off-topic conversation.

According to Wikipedia, there are multiple ways to use the phrase. The way I used it is listed under "loose rhetorical sense".

But it is worthy of note that right now, the top 6 largest companies (by market cap) in the US are or were helmed by their founders well into their fortune 500 status with many thousands of employees.

It's also worthy of note that these companies are extreme statistical outliers. Not every company is fortunate enough to have someone like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates leading them.

It's also worth noting that all these companies have experienced executive leaders who came on during the transition from 100 to 1000 people. They succeeded with a massive amount of support from experienced top executives. This seems to be the optimal approach, hire in top execs as COO or CEO (then later chairmen or other top advicer) while keeping the founders in the leadership team.

Meg Whitman ran eBay when it was 30 people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com