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Comment by BigHatLogan | Hacker News Reader

Nicely said. While I do think being realistic about things is overall good, I'm not a fan of the pessimism / cynicism that I see in startup culture. Anytime somebody says, "Here is how I did X", it's immediately flooded with "survivorship bias", "born rich", and all the other tired responses. While those may be true, pointing them out on their own is boring. Like Paul Graham has said in the past: Is this the most interesting takeaway? I find the "survivorship bias" and related responses to be a cover for admitting you don't want to take a risk, do the work, put yourself out there. Which is fine, but just say that upfront alongside the survivorship silliness. We are all aware that startups have low success rates. /rant

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From what I've read, usually the criticism boils down to, "you had an unfair advantage which I don't have". Which makes a lot of sense since that is what startups are built on.

However, it also means that saying things like "take a risk, do the work, put yourself out there" does not make sense for most people because they lack an unfair advantage.

"Here is how I did X" stories are almost always useless for 99% of people because they gloss over unfair advantages like e.g. went to Stanford/Harvard/other, have VC connections, worked at X company, etc. Most people cannot replicate the initial state of these startup stories, let alone the end result.

I totally agree, but this is less true for people who are already on this forum, who are presumably interested in startups (since this is a forum owned by Y Combinator of all organizations). If this was being posted routinely on the NYTimes Food and Recipes page, I would agree with you wholeheartedly. But that sort of content is, I assume, what people visit this website for. Imagine going to a weightlifting forum and decrying people for sharing their fitness routines, saying that not all people can afford gym memberships, have limbs to lift with, etc. It would be silly.

The difference is that the unfair advantages a lot of people who start successful startups have are not easily attainable.

There is no comparison here with a gym membership or having limbs. Both of those are many orders of magnitudes easier than say, getting accepted into Harvard or passing an interview loop at Facebook.

I read very few startup stories that I can actually relate to.

That's fair--I appreciate that. I was being a little flippant with my examples, you're correct.

To add to this, even in a level playing field where founders lacked rich parents or Harvard, they'd still stand on the shoulders of those who previously developed tech that can now be exploited for profit. e:g dot-com boom was made possible by development of the internet itself with public money. Not to mention individuals' mental ability at certain types of problem solving, which isn't equally distributed. And large element of luck, being in the right place at the right time. So, while hard work and entrepreneurship, so long as done ethically, should be celebrated and rewarded, at the same time people who are "average" should not in any way denigrate themselves. Also, some big successes in startups come at the expense of everyone else. AirBnB being a classic example where some people have benefitted massively but at the expense of neighbourhoods, community, ability of locals to afford housing etc.

Survivorship bias card is worth holding up when people try to teach the secrets of success and are potentially misleading with general statements interpolated from an N=1 sample.

Same goes for working at Google as your only job then writing a definitive book about how SWE is done, without further research on what else is out there.

Maybe for the general public, but the posts that are written here are USUALLY written in good faith, not snake oil marketing. I just personally find it tired and played out, similar to how on Reddit I frequently see people adding things like, "in my / your opinion, <insert statement that is obviously an opinion." Yes, yes, we get it. If I say The Last of Us is the best game of the past 10 years, it is obvious that that is my opinion. We don't have to be so dull with our language. The corollary here is that if a founder writes about how he or she found their first 100 users, it should be obvious to anybody on HN to apply some discretion instead of assuming this is now a universal truth applicable to all startups until the end of time.

Why teach otherwise? It is a strong signal to click the [-] next to that comment thread. Strong ignore signal is as good as strong read signal. It's only weak signal that is problematic.

It's sort of like all those Amazon reviews that used to say "In exchange for an honest and unbiased review, I received the product". Before Amazon auto-removed them, they were a strong negative quality signal.

I would prefer if we preserve high comment SNR by encouraging people to use standard comms patterns so that my automatic comment bucketing will allow me to skip non-useful comments, e.g. correlation is not causation, survivorship bias, etc.

Haha good point--the "correlation is not causation" is another one that annoys me.

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