This fabrication is by the folks behind LendEDU (YC W16).
http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html
""" Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter.
Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications. """
At the margin, yes. LendEDU's behaviour, here, is far from the margin.
One element is in choosing sensible battles. Uber and Airbnb fought municipal governments. Zenefits got creative with states and Theranos with the federal government. They (EDIT: Uber and Airbnb) each also fought their battles in a way that made (a) investors money and (b) consumers happy. In this case, the ones being deceived are the consumers. In the process of being sold lending products. That's stupid, desperate rule breaking.
Pardon me, I mis-spoke. I was using Uber and Airbnb as (limited) examples of productive rule breaking and Zenefits and Theranos as counter-examples of imprudent illegality.
If you "break the rules that don't matter" and leave the resulting mess for others to solve, that's not "naughty", it's just plain amoral.
Uber undermined labor laws only in the sense that they tried to get states to overrule local labor laws that were crowding their ability to keep drivers as contractors. That's just normal business, calling it "undermining" is, again, disingenuous at best.
What's the Reason?
For if it prosper:
None dare call it treason.
--John Harington
Assuming that lawmaking systems are altruistic and incapable of folly. In practice that doesn't work
Again, all rules involve trade-offs. It may be that those trade-offs or preferentially unfairly benefit some special interest group or otherwise aren't worth the cost to society, but it's not up to profit-seeking hucksters to unilaterally make that determination.
(obviously, I'm not saying that no one should ever break an unjust law, but I don't believe for a second that we should allow profit-motivated companies to be good judges of what are just and unjust laws)
This isn't even a No True Scotsman, it's literally contradictory.
You first implied that there are plenty of rules that are completely pointless - mitigating no negative externalities. I challenged you to provide an example of a start-up whose business was based on breaking those kinds of rules - since usually the reason you can make money off rule-breaking in the first place is because you're externalizing the costs onto the rest of society.
I then said that rule-making is a trade-off, and that you don't get to unilaterally decide those trade-offs are illegitimate because you want to make money. In the case of medical marijuana, yes, obviously, there are negative social consequences to selling marijuana and there are people who would vigorously argue in favor of federal drug laws. But these clinics are not unilaterally operating in defiance of federal drug laws; they have the backing of the government of their states.
Of course, there are also plenty of profiteers who just break the law and then reinvest the profits in the task of forcing communities to accept their social irresponsibility and lawlessness as a fait accompli (AirBNB, Uber).
If you really want to think seriously about these issues, you need to move beyond just name-dropping 'logical fallacies' to try and win arguments.
I do want to think seriously about these issues, and I think that's exactly what my challenge accomplished.
As a further question: why is a startup imposing externalities on its surrounding communities (like those two) necessarily in the wrong, whereas a state can do the same (legalizing marijuana has effects on neighboring states) without moral qualms?
Is the problem really the law breaking, or that you just dislike the motives for doing so?
If it is, I apologize. I've re-read your first post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16928822) a number of times and sincerely cannot find it.
you're apparently now seriously arguing that there is no difference between handful of guys in a start-up making a decision to ignore regulations for profit and a policy decision made by a body of democratically elected representatives
I think there's a difference inside the territory controlled by that democratic body, but not outside. If a democratic country decides to dump pollutants on a river that goes to their neighboring country, is that action less wrong than if a company decided to do so? In my view, not really.
Honestly, I think this contradiction is a bad example to show a "rule that can be broken with no negative effect" and more a hint that you guys have some bigger problems that should be addressed.
But if you do take it as an example, I think it comes down to who decides a rule is "non-essential". In the marijuana case, it was itself decided by an established and elected body (the state administration) yet in the OP's case, it was the the rule-breakers themselves who decided that rule is OK to be broken.
Regarding the who decides, I agree that makes a difference inside the state itself. But what about its effects on the neighboring states, which had no say on the matter? To reuse my example in the other post, if a democratic country decides to dump pollutants on a river that goes to their neighboring country, is that action less wrong than if a company decided to do so?
And further, what if that company is a coop with a democratic decision model?
You crossed into personal incivility here and again later. Would you please not do that, regardless of how wrong someone else is?
Long tit-for-tat back-and-forths are tedious anyhow, and it's better to abstain from them on HN, though I know how hard that can be.
I want you to adhere to this principle only up to an admittedly subjective bar (e.g. circumventing a tyranical regime). But a lot of the "mischief" being described here is probably well within the threshold.
As opposed to assuming all those that will individually assess and decide what rules are worth following won't diverge in "interesting" (read as dangerous and life-threatening) ways occasionally as the inexperienced, the unethical, or the just plain stupid make choices we would all rather as a society they not.
For instance, it makes sense to all people to choose for themselves whether to smoke. It also makes sense to protect people from food poisoning. Does it make sense to disallow the sale of raw milk because somebody might get sick but allow the sale of cigarettes with a big sticker that smoking will kill you?
Sometimes the sense of something changes between the small picture and the large picture. So it is with deciding which rules are ok to break.
Concepts like validated learning and kaizen are more useful IMO.
This seems 100% true.