Jessica Livingston (2015)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
I wonder how much wisdom has been lost bc of this effect.
I feel like society needs to create a much larger incentive for thoughtful people to share their wisdom. Today, you stand to gain status & wealth, but a lot of thoughtful people like Jessica don't care about that.
I think the only solution is to somehow protect them from the disincentive (backlash from the internet mob), but I don't know how.
Basically I don't think it's something you can do in the presence of a thing like twitter because of the participants whose goal isn't communication.
Which is fine. The wisdom isn't lost, its just not as widely available.
It's not fine though. Our political and economic spheres have been run by the swine for too long, and the planet's back is breaking. The second order effects of only giving the brash and thick-hided a voice in society are everywhere, causing permanent harms.
Let's start making space for the wise and sensitive types, and make pearls abundant.
Print the wisdom on thinly-sliced trees and place it in a location which requires someone to get out of the house and engage with their community.
You seem to be implying that this is a recent phenomenon of some kind though and I don't think it is. Just something to keep in mind! Not intended in the spirit of a damning critique or reason not to try.
Pretty recent, in the scheme of things - only the last few thousand years or so.
I do think we can turn it around; I mean, we fuckin better.
But there's no chance of truth nor justice once the Internet Hate Machine really gets going.
Here’s a more recent, gossipy take: https://news.yahoo.com/y-combinator-entrepreneurs-were-kicke...
But all too often people express opinions publicly, then receive criticism of those opinions publicly, and conclude “wow, these days you can’t even express opinions any more.” This is especially common with wealthy and/or powerful people who are not accustomed to receiving criticism from the public.
"""Not surprisingly, the juiciest targets for this sort of willful misinterpretation are organizations and people who are successful. They have power, and power makes them both interesting and envied; I teach founders they all have to be prepared for this as their startups grow.
In my blog post, "Subtle Mid-Stage Startup Pitfalls" I said:
You can't prevent yourself from being a target. It's an automatic
consequence of being successful. So the best you can do is react
in the right way when people attack you. To some extent you have
to resign yourself to letting people lie about you.
> Thirteen years later, that's my default plan. There’s just too much downside for me to get distracted with others’ opinions of my opinions. [1] It's not that I'm afraid of expressing my opinions. I just think, "Why bother?"
Is it really true that she's not afraid though? It's a perfectly natural reaction to be afraid of the internet mob shouting you down -- the first time I went through this, I was extremely distraught.
The reason I ask is bc we should be honest about the problem, so that we can solve it.
Perhaps the solution is to teach the good people around us how to have thicker skin, so they don't have as strong of an emotional reaction to internet backlash. But, detaching yourself from ego is actually a really hard skill to teach & learn. It almost seems like a hopeless endeavor when you're talking about creative people who are already very busy.
Questions like "What did she actually say?" and "What was the reaction?"
Luckily both have been answered in the comments and it's a bit more clear that not everything someone feels is worth sharing is automatically "wisdom".
I highly recommend it if you haven't come across it yet: https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...
Funny note: I went to jail for 10 years. One of only about three sites (out of thousands I had accounts on) that I could log into when I was released was delicious. Sadly 99% of my bookmarks now pointed to dead wood.
Frustratingly the worst ones were the biggest accounts, e.g. Google, because most of these companies were now boasting that they had rid themselves completely of human support and that if you could no longer access your account then you should simply create a new one. Years or decades of stored data be damned.
Thank you Jessica for everything you've done and do.
It seems to me that one reason for her success is that's she's able to exist in the limelight. Give her a higher profile and I'm not sure that the her approach as described in PG's post would work as well.
I'm not convinced that everyone wants much attention - I know that I don't.
A manager at a past job also had a similar "x-ray vision".
During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe.
Over 5 years of working with her, every single person she said we should hire turned out great. Every person she said was no good, turned out to not be great.
This was particularly fascinating to watch when she was the lone dissenter either way. e.g. there were times where 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass", she said "hire" and she was always right.
The first time I read pg's essay about Jessica, it immediately reminded me of my old manager.
It also reminds me of a story from, I believe, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about the tennis coach who knew before a tennis player served if they would double fault.
Some people have either a natural gift or their brains have picked up a set of weights for their internal neural network that make them fantastic at this kind of thing.
Definitely agree with your point that some people have a gift for this kind of thing, so just genuinely curious how the 7 of 8 thing worked.
The whole point of a committee is to reach consensus. I've flipped my beliefs on many candidates before after hearing what other interviewers think. I think most of us understand that interviews aren't exactly the best way to judge a candidate - at least I think that way. So I'm pretty open to forming consensus when I'm "weak" and they are "strong" in opinion (especially if I respect their judgement).
1. First, only select few interviewers with a great track-record could be a "champion".
2. If this interviewer was going against the rest of the interview panel, they could choose to be that interviewee's "champion". This means they are essentially saying "I have such a strong conviction that this person will do well that I'll put my professional reputation on the line for them." E.g. this person agreed to be that person's mentor when they started, and if things went south they would carry the burden of additional mentorship or finding the least problematic way to fire that person.
Different groups requiring different skillsets certainly isn't unusual.
I do also agree with you that "only one person gets to decide" is a bad idea in general (and is usually a red flag for someone trying to be a dictator).
I'd honestly be a little unnerved by this as an interviewee. I've seen interview shadowing before for people first starting to interview (and in the past have both shadowed and been shadowed), but having someone watch me like that not to learn how to interview but to just focus on monitoring me would feel very different. I definitely have an above average amount of social anxiety though, and one of the biggest things that induces it for me is not getting feedback about whether I'm communicating clearly, so maybe this is specific to me and not generally how people would react,
My past few jobs required interviewer training, which involved observing interviews. So pretty much any interview I was involved in had an observer.
As a one time sprinter, i read that, knew it totally false, and it invalidated my trust in reading further. So i wasted money buying that book.
If one publishes so carelessly, it’s sad.
Imagine if we applied this kind of thinking in courts. We would convict a lot of innocent people. We wouldn't feel that we need to wait for all the facts and evidence to come in, because our radar for people is so good. We don't do it that way, because it's nonsense.
What this manager did isn't practically different from what all interviewers do, except the particular manager wasn't the specific target of the usual manipulations[0] candidates will do to seem better. The manager is likely to have a better understanding of how the candidate bullshits (or if they do) when they're not the target of the bullshit.
[0] Used as a descriptor; e.g. "manipulating" someone to decide they should see a doctor for their toe infection isn't bad.
There's merit to this argument.
Consider people who get scammed or catfished -- it's obvious to an outside observer. You're less likely to fool yourself when you have no skin in the game.
(that doesn't mean we should do it in courts to convict people)
If we treat this kind of thing as an oracle rather than admit that it's a flawed heuristic, even a good heuristic being ultimately flawed, I think that's pretty dangerous. One has to be extremely humble at the task of evaluating people, because it's difficult and error-prone.
E.g. if the manager in this story said "no" and that person wasn't hired, how would you know she was correct?
I will say that there was a non-zero number of "she said 'no', person was hired anyway and it turned out to not be good". As sister/cousin threads have pointed out: this might be a self fulfilling prophecy.
That's why people who claim to have this ability almost never do. Its not in the nature of someone who can to really talk about it this way.
I'd also argue that courts are definitely not the place to have this. There's good reasons why this is likely to fail in a stressful setting (convicting someone of a crime or reviewing evidence) vs a situation of neutrality. Once you start mixing in other factors I imagine this gets blurry real fast. Its all very context dependent.
To tack on further, courts by structure also have a burden of proof aspect to limit / remove the human element as much as possible (in theory anyway) and that is very important.
See the whole criticism section.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
With the four discrete variables in MBTI, I can type people with 90% accuracy after a conversation.
The problem is that each letter comes from splitting a normal distribution in half right at the middle where maximum likelihood is. So most people won't be very strongly attached to most of their letters.
Hasn't Myers Briggs been debunked as a load of pseudoscience shit?
Have you never heard of someone being a good judge of character?
I’ve heard of people claiming to be a good judge of character, or claiming other people are, usually without evidence and as an excuse for actions which involve disregarding objective indicia of character as it relates to the decision at hand, and very often as an excuse specifically for making decisions that seem to amount to disregarding objective criteria to favor their own and/or a generally-socially-favored race, ethnicity, subculture, etc.
Dragonwriter, now that's a good name, you'd have a shot for sure.
Not so long ago, I would have certainly agreed with you until I met this one girl.
So we started dating and, a couple months in, sometimes, as a joke, I use to say to her: "the first time I saw you, blablabla beautiful blablabla a star in the sky blablabla". I did that not only once but many many times. And every time, every time, she would have the exact same answer. She would say: "the first time I saw you, I thought 'oh bof'" (meaning she thought I was mediocre). So you know, I thought she only plays hard to get, like women do. That didnt bother me. Time passes and I kept going with my "the first time I saw you .."s. Kind of know she liked it anyway. And she kept on having the same answer.
At one point I thought something was strange. She kept on having those exact same words again and again. 'Oh bof'. Again and again. I could sense she was actually trying to tell me something entirely else.
Until I realised what she was saying. When I did realised what she was saying, I was shocked.
The first time I saw her... what I really thought was... 'Oh bof'. This is literally word for word what I thought the first time I saw her. I thought in my head: 'Oh bof'. But not only the words matched perfectly, the ton as well.
I pass on the details but let me tell you that girl knew exactly my state of mind even when I was in the next room.
Thats the time I learnt some people can tell exactly what you think just by looking at you. This is frightening. They can because they started observing people at a very young age. They love to observe people. Exactly like it is said in that pg's post: they observe.
Your x-ray vision manager: what (interview) questions or criteria did she use?
>she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe.
He advocates for teams of people handling a negotiation with the most experienced negotiator just observing.
The reason: it's incredibly difficult to be process, crafting and delivering responses in real time. If your primary goal is to observe the other side, that should be your sole focus. It's also incredibly valuable to have that observation hence why you should negotiate in teams (or at least pairs).
INFJ: https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/understanding-infj-intuitio...
I happen to be in a new leadership role and in the middle of a hiring decision.
What this article and discussion shows is less of a “some people are magic” phenomenon and more of a “a lot of evaluators and leaders have huge blindspots” phenomenon. Most all panels bias towards false negatives; there’s a lot of support for having too narrow a perspective on any given candidate.
Extraverted (E) vs Introverted (I)
“E” generally means gaining energy from other people, while “I” means people drain your batteries. This one is not always immediately obvious for people. In general "E"s talk more when with groups of people and "I"s think more. Even though I spend a lot of time at home with my wife, I'm an E - I get energy from social interactions.
Sensing (S) vs Intuiting (N)
This is about how you process new information. S people see what's actually in front of them - they think and talk more in specifics. In general, S types are better at detail oriented work.
N types intuit things, so they sometimes aren't great at focusing at what's in front of them, but are great at coming up with ideas and next steps based on what they see.
Feeling (F) vs Thinking (T)
Everyone feels and everyone thinks. A good way to judge this is people's reactions to situations. Feelers react with empathy first, thinkers react with problem solving first.
Very basic example: Your friend comes in with their arm bleeding. Is your very first reaction?
"Oh no! What happened?" - Feeler
"You should go to the hospital!" or "Let me get something to wrap that", etc etc.
In general feelers are more likely to feel empathy for someone, even if they they think they are dead wrong or disagree with them.
Judging (J) vs Perceiving (P)
This is about how you make decisions. And it has nothing to do with the dictionary definitions of judging and perceiving.
Some defining traits of Js:
Achieving the goal is more important than the process.
You are comfortable making decisions with limited information.
For Ps:
Being true to your moral system is more important than achieving the goal.
You prefer to collect more information before making decisions.
The side effect of these two things means Js tend to have steadier lives with more commitment, while Ps tend to have a broader range of experiences and a bigger variety of life experiences.
---
Lastly, the temperaments:
ExxJ - Organizes people
IxxJ - Keeps systems running, also good at absorbing and teaching information.
ExxP - Collectors of experiences, achievements, pleasures, etc.
IxxP - Being true to your convictions
---
Now, people who study function stacks are going to shit on this comment, saying the letters don't mean anything, its all about functions like Extraverted Thinking, etc. But I find these letter rules make a great shortcut for 97% of people.
What about someone who is strong intuitive, but starting the next moment they're very detail-oriented, and also the person you'd most trust for meticulous coding that had to work?
> But I find these letter rules make a great shortcut for 97% of people.
Do we want to try to hire people who have qualities that would spanning these headshrinker buckets? If so, maybe we're dealing a lot with that missing "3%", so trying to pigeon-hole people would frequently be counterproductive?
Intuitors just start with the big picture as their basic instinct, then fill in the details. Sensors start with detail and build up to the big picture.
For example, in some empirical behavior research, person A seemed to have better snap decisions but poor at follow-though, and person B seemed to be asking about details... Has that nailed some key innate difference in how A and B actually think, or merely -- for purposes of, say, assigning military conscripts to jobs, or a huge corporate hiring machine that can't care beyond commodities -- at least it's a classification?
Maybe it's better than chance at predicting exhibited behavior (absent training), and we don't know that it reflects the actual cognitive mechanics?
Just noting: that situation around that assessment can affect the outcome.
For example, hired person appreciates the opportunity/faith extended to them, or otherwise picks up on the need to rise to the occasion.
Or a manager or other staff sees/treats the person differently because of the circumstances (e.g., gives the hire more guidance because they think the hire will need it, wants the hire to succeed because a founder has blessed them, or just sees the person more favorably because they trust the opinion of someone else).
I don't think it would make sense to tell a hired person "you barely got in here, everybody hated you except for one interviewer".
"Jessica is the reason we hired you - she says you'll be great here and when she says that she's always right" technically says "we weren't going to hire you", but also "we all believe in you".
(And it was unfortunate that she wasn't listened to more, because a higher-ranking person would more often miss cues about customer thinking, or would come out of a meeting seeming to feel a gist biased more towards what they wanted it to be.)
For that skill/quality and others, I later tried to recruit her as a startup CEO.
I believe it was from watching the serve, but not seeing where the ball went. As someone who has played tennis for many years (but not remotely professionally), it always seemed to me that the coach could simply be reading the player's expression. When you're serving, you can typically tell based on how the contact felt, and the sound it made, whether your serve was going in. It wouldn't be surprising if that could be 'read' from your face.
sed 's/women/everybody who does not come across as an extroverted, eloquent, assertive, attractive white(-ish) male (of the correct age, social class, educational background, etc.)/g'
Humans are, sadly, extremely good at twisting things to allocate most of the power, wealth, opportunities, rights, and credit to a small subset of the population - which they either are a member of, or closely identify with. It's not merely a sexism thing.
The article mentions specifically in the note about backlash and vitriol that feminists need to give room for someone like her to 'exist' in the public eye.
There is also the important fact that this was written by her husband and founding partner.
Ah yes, "growth" in our economy is all because of a select few of super special amazing people. It seems obvious to me this is a post facto rationalization.
This line stood out to me in particular: _It's not just because she's shy that she hates attention, but because it throws off the Social Radar. She can't be herself. You can't watch people when everyone is watching you._
No matter what you get acknowledged for I think it's so important to always be yourself but to know what makes you strong is so challenging.
But an automated script (AnomieBot) tagged that article because it met or rather didn’t meet certain guidelines. It’s a stub article and lacked certain citations.
Why not just flesh the article out?
The “Notability” tag on Wikipedia has a different meaning than “notability” in the dictionary.
Either way, it seems like someone already removed the tag manually with the justification “clearly notable” and uploaded a better photo.
There’s still a lack of information though.
Editors often upload bad photos, even if better alternatives exist in the public domain or are fair use.
But the thing that grates me more than anything is Wikipedia uses elderly photos of famous figures that were at the peak of their careers in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. The appearance of these public figures changes, and sometimes the changes are so dramatic that I have to question if these are the same person.
Wikipedia should have multiple photos in the top info box, but if not, they should focus on photos of subjects when they were in their peak of public activity.
Good:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_Presley
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Moore
Bad:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Ramis
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Murray
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Fisher
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Simmons
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Turner
There are far worse examples, and a lot of them. I'm having trouble finding them on the spot, though.
Edit: Another super weird case of this is articles on famous child actors that didn't go on to act later in life, but their photo is of them in their 40's or substantially after their heyday. There's so much of that. They're easy examples to find:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Thomas
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Lloyd
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Mazzello
Note that most of your good examples are deceased and most of your bad ones are living.
I learned this when Elizabeth II passed, and her photo was updated very quickly to a much older portrait.
But if you get me the photos, I'll take care of the rest. We can't make it the infobox because they're still living, but we can add the photo to show what they were like at the time, which is notable since that's what they're famous as.
In addition, for all the child actors except Lloyd, we don't have any free photos of them as children (and that childhood photo of Lloyd isn't very good – the one in the article is the only one we have).
As for Carrie Fisher, our only 1970s photo of her sucks (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carrie_Fisher_with_W...), and anyway she did do a lot of noteworthy acting well after Star Wars (look at her awards section).
For Harold Ramis, we have pretty slim pickings: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Harold_Ramis
AnomieBot put a date on the tag, it didn't add it. The tag was added without a listed reason by an anonymous user while not logged in: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jessica_Livingsto...
But even though a valid reason wasn’t listed, it appears that valid reasons did exist. “Valid” based on guidelines not personal opinion. The anon user still could have done this based on personal opinion and/or ill intentions.
Because they're there, but they seem few and far between.
I would cite Coinbase. But if you don't agree that it is a grift, what have we shown?
Also I would be very curious to know about female founders that Jessica selected. According to [1], companies with at least 1 female founder has <10% of valuation compared to YC companies with all male founders[2]. Just on casual looking all female founder companies is <2% compared to all male founder companies, which is below average for VCs.
Combined Valuation (all companies): $600B Combined Valuation (Companies with women founders): $45B
Still unbalanced, but closer to 15:1 as opposed to 49:1.
That's also a comparisons that is totally useless without the base rate. If half the companies had female founders, it might be valid to say "why are the companies with women raising at a lower rate" but I'd be willing to bet that the application pool is heavily skewed male, and thus that the accepted pools are also heavily skewed male. It wouldn't shock me if that skew were on the order of 50:1. It also wouldn't shock me if it were trending in a more balanced direction; that would lead to a fundraising bias towards older companies that have raised more money over time and are more likely to have only men as founders.
Also I am not arguing whether female founders experience discrimination or not, I am just arguing YC's female ratio is not significantly higher than other VC's which pg hints at due to Jessica.
For example, let's say probability of being successful is due to random chance, and effects both genders equally. Then ratio of successful women to successful men would just reflect the ratio of women to men. Now imagine if the actual valuation of successful companies is exponentially weighted, so that the top 1 or 2 companies make up the bulk of the total valuation. Again, these two companies are more likely to be founded by men given the base gender rate, and now the percent of valuation attributed to men would completely dominate the valuation percent.
To get the real effectiveness of female founders, we need to account for the low probability of success and low probability of being female.
I think both can be achieved with Bayes theorem:
p($_high|f) = p($_high) p(f|$_high) / Sum_i[p($_i) p(f|$_i)]
p($_high|m) = p($_high) p(m|$_high) / Sum_i[p($_i) p(m|$_i)]
Note: p($_i) represents a sequence of valuation probabilities subdivided to reflect low valuation, moderate valuation etc. I think this should account for the exponential distribution of valuation, but someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Isn't it straightforward to just look at percent of female founders?
Totally agreed. I couldn't find the numbers though.
Its' start: """ I recently heard one of the more interesting insights about Silicon Valley I'd heard in a while. It explained something I’d wondered about for years.
But I can't tell you what it was.
There's too much downside in sharing any opinion that could easily be misinterpreted online. Even facts are dangerous to share if they don’t align with what people want to believe.
There's a lot of concern about "fake news" lately. That is a real problem, but there's also the opposite problem: true things that aren't being said.
Some of the most useful things I've learned about startups over the years are also things I'd never share publicly. Not because the ideas are necessarily controversial in their own right, but because anyone could twist them to seem controversial if they were sufficiently motivated to. And when that happens I immediately regret having said anything. It's a massive distraction. I have two young kids, and I have hundreds of startups to keep track of. I don't have time to fight with people who are trying to misunderstand me. """
It's easy to swept away in "love" and all that but the reality is that 50% of marriages in Western world ends in divorce. Always remember that people change over time.
On the other hand, it would be hard to argue that Lucas, Bezos or Gates wives had same contributions in Lucas Films, Amazon and Microsoft. When I look at their cases, I feel they cashed out with massive windfall taking advantage of broken laws.
Livingston will have no trouble maintaining a Wikipedia article; she's had profiles written about her in mainstream sources.
A big chunk of complaints about Wikipedia notability come from people who don't quite grok the dynamic of how biographical articles like these get added to WP. Usually, someone writes a stub article with few sources and no clear statement of what the person is notable for. Those are bad articles! They actually need the notability tag! That's how they turn into better articles!
From the examples I've encountered over the years, once an article is deemed irrelevant, it is deleted permanently with little to no opportunity for recovery (unless some event makes the subject suddenly more noteworthy). The reality is the most active Wikipedia editors make great contributions to the world's knowledge, but aren't exactly the most representative sample of humanity.
My experience with this is quite simple: it is really fucking easy to do all these things but that 1% rule is real https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
Most people cannot do things. They simply cannot. There's always a reason they can produce: "Oh it'll just get deleted", "oh I don't want to get into a fight", "oh the editors will delete me". You can see this because they cannot provide situations where this happens because they cannot try. They will Google to show "there is some evidence this is happening" and produce some newspaper article where the reporter has not tried it either.
But the reality of the thing is that they cannot do it. The faculty it takes to see a problem and make it not a problem is not available to them. Presumably, at work they are told what to do and they just do it - execution agents incapable of autonomous operation.
Of course pg cannot modify his wife's page. But I see it a lot.