Justin Kan: Hack your culture | Hacker News Reader

Justin Kan: Hack your culture

techcrunch.com

87 pointscwan17 comments

This really hits home with me. The university where I go to school is very bureaucratic, and I think it lacks a strong community. After a year of not doing anything about it, I finally found people who feel the same way, and after talking briefly we're actively trying to "hack" our culture into something we want.

Even though we haven't changed anything at our school, we now have this tiny community of people who want to build things. But the only way to start is to figure out that there is a problem. I think that's the best message of this article: Figure out what you want, and you're already most of the way there.

It's only in the last 3 months that I can really appreciate the argument that Jason is putting forward. I left Ireland and its risk-averse conservative culture behind and have tried to surround myself with entrepreneurial types ever since. The change in attitude and the drive for greatness is infectious. When you find yourself with people who are doing things that you thought out of reach your previously "crazy" dreams become so much more achievable.

Where did you move to?

Ok, I'm going to assume that this article draws from the work of Christakis and Fowler on social networks and happiness, obesity and depression. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.165...

This is really interesting work (and i would love it if it were true) but there are some concerns about the statistical methods used in these claims. See Lyons - the spread of evidence poor medicine: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.2876

To sum up, this idea that you can affect behaviour and outcomes based on your friend group is very controversial.

There are two possible explanations: homophily - you surround yourself with people similar to you, and contagion - your opinions affect your peer group. The biggest problem is that these explanations cannot be distinguished on the basis of the kind of studies (retrospective observational) reported by Christakis and Fowler. To do this, you would need a prospective controlled experiment tracking friendships and outcomes over a number of years.

That being said, I would like to believe it, but the evidence is not strong enough for this to be accepted uncritically.

It's a difficult effect to do a controlled experiment for because of the way homophily acts as a confounding variable. Anecdotal evidence suggests the effect is real though- as Justin said in the article, he didn't actually start riding a motorcycle until he met other people who did.

Its doable though. You recruit over a number of years at a college, get them to indicate who their friends are and ask them to fill out some personality questionnaires and demographics. Follow them for their college career, repeating the measures and asking them for their closest friends at each time point (say every month or semester). It would be expensive, but its very achievable.

Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence is not particularly useful when dealing with people, given that we tend to reinterpret our pasts based on our presents among other memory biases.

This. But while in friend circles, homophily can be a strong factor, the sibling and spouse relationship measurements are interesting since homophily cannot affect those to the same extent.

Sibling I'll give you, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that people choose spouses who are more similar to themselves, so I'm not sure how much of a role contagion (if its real) can play in this effect.

Being conscious of biases is really important. I guess the most important thing to know that you probably have a bias to be risk-adverse. As long as you aware of your biases, you can work to counter them.

As an example, I know that most people are influenced by selection bias, so it influences me less than the average person, just because I'm aware of it. I think the same thing could apply to the culture bias that is presented in the article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority

http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...

"100% failure rate at trying to change a company's culture." - Buffett, http://billflagg.blogspot.com/2010/05/berkshire-hathaway-201...

Yes, for the kind of companies which where part of the sample.

Which where no doubt the kind of companies that Buffett likes to invest in.

Which are not the tech start-ups that people who come here wants to start.

It is possible to change the culture for a small company especially if it is you and your friends. It is properly not possible to deliberately change the culture in MS.

On the contrary, Buffett actually likes to invest in companies in which he can stay hands-off and not have any influence on the culture at all. He just likes to find real winners and help them keep winning.

That's the significance of that quote, and that's why the personalities of the founders are so very important. You either have a great culture set from the start which lasts, or you have a broken one, which is largely irreversible later on.

The article is more about changing the culture that a given individual finds himself in.

I included that Buffett piece not to argue against Justin Kan's write-up, but in full support of it. That Buffett quote goes to show just how resilient culture is for the long-haul in organizations, and how very important it is to set it right or "hack it" from the beginning.

"Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are"

It's funny, ancient systems of metaphysics from the east have been saying this for countless years.

But we all rush to the entrepreneur's words because he conforms to our idea(s) of success.

In one word: 'satsang'

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