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The Ronco Principle

paulgraham.com

311 points_pius243 comments

This reminds me of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing[1], in a funny way (bear with me).

In pricing, if you have features in common with other vendors then those features are commodities and basically valueless. But the features you have that no one else has - those make you priceless.

For example, S3's uptime record makes it a different product than e.g., DreamObjects, even though they are API compatible.

Similarly, while VCs are all providing the ultimate commodity product (dumb money), its the features which no one else has that make investors like Ron Conway priceless. There's plenty of other VCs, but they are not substitute products for Ronco.

Finally, the way to find these unique, priceless features is to look for extremes:

    - Cloud hosting with not just 99.99% uptime, but 100% uptime
    - Email inboxes with not just a lot of storage, but *unlimited* storage
    - Photos developed not just faster, but *instantly*
    - A VC with not just a great track record of doing the right thing, but a *perfect* record

And as a consumer, these are the companies you want to do business with: the Rackspaces, the Ron Conways, and the Stripes of this world.

[1] If you read one business book this year, make it The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. If you don't think a book on pricing can change your life, you haven't read this book. Protip: get an older edition and save a ton of dough.

Old like 1994 old? Thanks for the recommendation.

I have the 4th edition (2005 update), which is only $8 used on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Tactics-Pricing-Growing-Profi...

But honestly any edition is great - its sold as a textbook[1], so they seem to make periodic, cursory updates, but the substance remains unchanged. I suspect the 1994 edition is fantastic as well, and perhaps available in your local library.

I hope you like it, and get as much out of it as I have! And thank you for taking my recommendation, that made my day. :)

[1] That its a textbook is perhaps my favorite meta-lesson of the book itself. How do you charge $100 for a book? Call it a text book!

Thanks for the recommendation. I just grabbed myself a copy of the 2005 edition from Amazon!

Happy to hear that :) Going to get my copy as well.

For what it's worth, Seth Godin's book All Marketers Are Liars also covers the material in your specific example. It probably doesn't cover most of what's in the rest of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, though imho the idea of 'going to the extremes' is so important that it's really worth reading an entire book just on that idea.

That's a great book too - I like Seth's writing style. I believe he calls this "finding a edge".

TSATOP is different because teaches you to actually quantify the value delivered to the customers. i.e., how much, in real dollars, is 100% uptime going to save us over 99.99%?

It seems like a small difference, but its not: 100% uptime unlocks new business models that don't work with "only" 99.99% uptime (e.g., banking software or API companies). That's what TSATOP really explains - how to quantify the seemingly minute differences in your offering, and how to communicate that value to the customer so that you can charge accordingly.

To use an example actually from the book, how much money will a DNA testing kit that requires 10% less sample material be worth to a customer?

Well, first that depends on who the customer is - its a lot more valuable to a pharma company than a university, for example. But how much more? The book would do something like calculate the number of new drugs the pharma company can release each year based on having this better DNA testing kit, and calculate how that affects the customer's bottom line. Eventually this would result in something like: every time you use our product instead of our closest competitor, it puts $50 in your pocket.

Seth Godin's writing is awesome for motivation and to get your brain moving, but this book really drills down on the nuts and bolts of pricing, and provides templates and worksheets for performing your own Economic Value Estimation of your product. Both are really useful, but this one is more like a textbook, whereas Seth's is more like a (very) motivational speech.

Nice, I'll definitely go through this. For a typical freemium product, do you see it as being most useful when one is ready to start building out monetizable features, or do you see it as being essential for building an mvp and finding the most basic level of product-market fit? (Given that understanding the implications of pricing would probably be useful immediately, but learning it would also take time away from building the product.)

I think pricing is the very first thing you should think about, before features. Once you know what's actually valuable to your customers, it'll be easy to figure out what features to build to deliver it.

This book probably isn't an excellent fit for freemium pricing models. Its more about pricing B2B products, instead of consumer products. But you should still read the book anyway, because it teaches you to understand your customers' problems (and the value of solving those problems) at such a deep level that you would never be willing to part with that much value again for free.

Furthermore, and this is the big takeaway from the book, you're[1] looking at the problem backwards. The question is not, "can I find someone to whom my product is worth at least X" - that's flawed from the start.

The correct process is this:

1) Find a customer with a problem

2) Figure out how much its worth to the customer to have that problem solved ($X)

3) See if you can design and a product for less than $X

For example:

1) The local cab company wants to grow its business

2) It is currently making $300,000 per year. A 50% increase would be worth $150,000 (naively)

3) Could you create a white label Uber that would increase ridership by 50% for less than $150,000?

Thinking about it that way, there's no room for freemium. If you're thinking about freemium, you should find a new customer base or a new problem to solve.

(BTW, I love talking about pricing. Please shoot me an email any time if you'd like to talk more. I have a new SaaS that I would love feedback on, and I would be happy to offer my feedback on yours as well.)

[1] the proverbial you're (including me!)

With freemium, would the question be: How much, in real dollars, is it worth to my premium customers if I added a free tier?

Qeorge, I also recommend Principles of Pricing by Vohra. I'm taking his class right now at Kellogg, fascinating stuff.

http://smile.amazon.com/Principles-Pricing-Analytical-Rakesh...

Thank you so much Brian! I'll start reading it right away.

The class sounds great as well, and I hope you enjoy it. If you find yourself compelled to share anything in particular, I'd be very interested to hear it. Maybe you could do a blog post?

Thanks for the book. Just bought the kindle version!

It seems there are two books with the same title but different subtitles. Are you referring to "A Guide to Growing More Profitably" or " A Guide to Profitable Decision Making"?

"And yet he's a super nice guy. In fact, nice is not the word. Ronco is good."

So good he supports torture http://blog.sfgate.com/cityinsider/2014/12/09/ron-conway-bla...

If you're really trying to say that torture is 'bad' (and not illegal -- which it sort-of is), you need to really flex some intellectual muscle and not merely just claim it.

It's a been a pretty hotly-debated issue in (politico-)philosophical circles for the past 400 years; so don't think it'll be easy.

It was my impression that the torture debate was settled after World War II: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions

Torture is wrong, bad, illegal, and ineffective. In a modern world it shouldn't be supported, even from an "Old Testament" sort of good guy.

Small correction: the Geneva Convention says nothing about the effectiveness of torture, although other sources may.

And the philosophical debate is far from over; it is ongoing: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/ Reading some of the literature can be quite fascinating.

Ouch, the down-votes :(

You're getting down voted because, knowingly or not, you're using conversational terrorism [1] techniques.

Wary minds see/hear these words and immediately ignore any of your content. Think of it as a debating equivalent of pulling a godwin.

[1] http://www.vandruff.com/art_converse.html

What conventional terrorism technique have I used? Here's an analogue of what happened.

Bob says: yeah it's pretty easy to see that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes.[1]

I say: not so fast, you can't just claim things like that. I mean it might be intuitive or 'generally accepted' (and even stochastically probable!), but the truth-value of such a statement is difficult to prove.

[1] Goldbach's conjecture.

I'm not sure philosophers debating is a useful signal about whether an issue is settled. I'm having a hard time thinking of a topic on which philosophers would not debate.

I'm perfectly happy claiming lots of things which have been hotly debated in (politico-)-philosophical circles for a long time. And so, I imagine, are most people, including (politico)-philosophers themselves. That everyone doesn't agree with me on everything doesn't lose me sleep.

Why is this post being downvoted so much? Although I don't agree w/ the author's position, torture and its effectiveness are still debated.

Actually, I never even stated my position!

For the record, I'm pretty sure torture is usually morally wrong. But I also think that there are many cases where it may be permissible, e.g. the ticking time-bomb thought experiment.

(Detractors of the ticking time-bomb experiment will argue that it's a fabricated scenario which never happens in real life. I don't think that's true.)

How about: torture is always wrong. But sometimes I will sacrifice my immortal soul (torture somebody) to save somebody I love. And its still wrong, and I will be prosecuted for it. But my child will live, or whatever.

How about we actually use philosophical argument and not this weak wishy-washy stuff. Perhaps contextualism is true? Perhaps actions themselves have no moral connotation but rather moral decision can only be made within a contextual framework.

I think to say "torture is always wrong" is just something to say to fit in socially. I don't think you can make moral decisions about any action murder, theft, etc; there must be a contextual framework and hierarchy of values.

That's a way to analyze it. But not all moral frameworks are going to yield to academic dissection. I'm not so worried about finding a chapter in my philosophy text to label it; we can instead explore our existing moral foundations and answer honestly.

If you must rationalize it, go ahead. But you can argue yourself into any number of conclusions. In the end that's a game with no winner.

> How about we actually use philosophical argument and not this weak wishy-washy stuff.

His argument is clearly based on the philosophical framework of Virtue Ethics. You can refer to the literature on that, if you want the arguments. Though I can tell you now, contextualism is quite orthogonal to Virtue Ethics.

FWIW, I don't think it's "wishy-washy" at all, definitely less so than stating "I'm against torture mostly, except for <contrived hypothetical situation>".

> I think to say "torture is always wrong" is just something to say to fit in socially.

This is just assuming bad faith. People that base their moral framework on things like Virtue Ethics definitely don't do it for social acceptance.

> I don't think you can make moral decisions about any action murder, theft, etc; there must be a contextual framework and hierarchy of values.

In theory, maybe. In practice, similarly to utilitarianism, it is completely unworkable. It's the wrong way out, morality is not a matter of engineering, fortunately there are other options.

'Ticking time bomb' isn't even effective in theory let alone practise. It's just a weak and puerile excuse for sadistic bullying.

This thread speaks volumes about the low moral character found in people like 'Ronco' and much of the SV wannabe culture.

I don't think you understand the ticking time-bomb thought experiment. It's well-bounded and presents a very compelling argument for the moral permissibility if we're virtue ethicists or requirement, if we're utilitarians, of torture.

The only counter-argument is, does it actually happen in real life? Some say yes, some say no.

The counter argument is that it's based on a moronic assumption that the person being tortured is guilty and yet will reveal the correct location and instructions on how to disarm the device while the clock is still ticking. That holds water for nobody but a sadist looking for cover or a dimwit who has seen too many episodes of 24.

That exact scenario has occurred many times in real-life.

For example: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/world/kidnapping-has-germa...

The assumption is not at all moronic.

That's a completely different scenario with different motivations and no bearing on the ticking time bomb one. (And even in that case note the information came too late to save the victim.)

In a ticking time bomb scenario, a suspected terrorist might or might not give up the correct location of the device in many circumstances - could be a lead pipe, asking nicely, bribery, being attractive, making a convincing moral argument, or they may be unwilling, or unable in the event that they are innocent. Clearly none of those can be assumed and it won't be the same each time.

So even if one were to look at it from a purely amoral utilitarian viewpoint - even on those kind of sociopathic terms it is still absurd and very telling for an individual to seize on torture as a magic bullet for obtaining success. When we also consider that torture is widely documented as ineffective for gathering information, we are left with sadists, stupids, and immature creeps whose understanding of the world is based on action movies.

It is documented by people trying to make an emotional point that it is ineffective. It is so obvious that I cannot believe intellectual people fall for the idea that because we find torture morally disgusting that is must be "ineffective." That is purely an emotional argument to make us feel better about our emotional decision. When does torture become ineffective? Why is it that threatening a child with going to bed early or a criminal with jail time to give up co-conspirators can be effective but "torture" cannot? Where on the spectrum does it become ineffective? Such a delineation does not exist and we all know it. If we want to ban it on moral grounds then fine but let's not delude ourselves. It makes us feel nice to say it doesn't work. No one argues it is this perfect mechanism, neither is sending your kid to bed early, but to say it wholly does not work is spurious.

This is the big lie. In fact it's documented time and time again by experienced interrogators that it's ineffective e.g. http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/an_fbi_interrogator_on_the_...

On the contrary, the only people proposing torture are doing it from a purely emotional standpoint. And what a disgusting and shameful emotional standpoint they are revealing themselves to have.

Nonsense. You are claiming it is ineffective and your proof is an op-ed written by one FBI interrogator.

Did you actually read the original article [1]? Nowhere does Ali Soufan really make a case that torture is actually ineffective. Soufan makes claims that digging through receipts and conventional methods were more effective than whatever "torture" the CIA actually did but nowhere is the claim "torture is not effective" substantiated.

You are showing your emotions by claiming that anyone that could think torture could be effective (setting aside the decision to use it based on moral grounds) must only be doing so because of emotions. Is thinking that digging through someone's receipts during an investigation also an emotional position? What you have made is a non sequitur.

Take the emotion out of it. Where is the actual evidence or theory of why it cannot possibly work? The problem you have is that any example of torture yielding the intending information disproves your position entirely. You will really make that claim? As well, I asked what is the delineation because everyday parents as well as police use the tactics on the spectrum of discomfort to yield results often-times (nothing is perfect) the results are obtained. So where is this magical line of delineation? I don't think it exists. You are only proving the point that the fact based decision of whether or not torture can be effective in yielding information is being made based on emotion rather than reality. The Mexican military have used the tactics of torture to discover information that they were trying to find and in instances they did yield that information. [2] Again, any instance that shows that it "works" disputes directly your claim. Now, again, this is separate from our decision not to use such tactics because they are wholly disgusting and morally despicable but we are being coy if we claim it does not work because we want to make ourselves feel better.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/opinion/06soufan.html?_r=2... 2. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07...

> Where is the actual evidence or theory of why it cannot possibly work? The problem you have is that any example of torture yielding the intending information disproves your position entirely.

You are missing the point entirely. Sure it can sometimes work (hence my lead pipe comment). However, it is widely documented as one of the poorest methods available for getting accurate information. The only reason left for favouring it therefore is simply an emotional one - and a deeply nasty emotion at that.

Your pseudo-utilitarian line of argument could just as well be applied to rape or murder. But these are cultural universals - the fact is that all societies consider these things, including torture, to be immoral and crimes (and yes they still occur of course). To be debating 'both sides of the argument' in these issues as if it were somehow a reasonable activity is therefore objectively a sign of individual and societal sickness.

Don't fool yourself, the systematic practise of torture is no different from the systematic practise of murder or rape (indeed it often includes those acts even in modern times) - to be an apologist for this is something that will shame you to your grave. To paraphrase Father Phil from The Sopranos, now you can never say that nobody told you.

All this hatred directed at Ron Conway, whom I don't really have any opinion, in a thread about an article Paul Graham wrote that has nothing to do with torture ...

This smacks of the kind of inane, conversation drowning behavior of PETA. What is theoretically wrong with the "ticking time bomb," since you wrote that specifically? What is the lapse in logic or the shaky philosophical flaw in the "theory?" And then you go and besmirch the whole "SV wannabe culture" because they don't have the same thoughtless moral certainty that you do.

Reasonable people can disagree and it does not mean one side is evil or one is stupid, necessarily. I think it is a bit much to say Ron Conway is despicable or whatever because of this.

Wow, a rare sane comment in this whole subthread. What are you still doing on this site?

Ticking time bomb covered in other comments.

It's not quite about torture per se (which is actually a clear moral good vs evil issue - after all you don't hear people saying we need to consider both sides of the rape argument to reach a balanced view).

Point here being that PG wrote a feelgood piece about the SV great and good that will be lapped up by many who are engaged in tech. Central to the piece is that Ronco's success was down to his great character so it is entirely on topic to discuss. But (a bit like Google's "don't be evil") when you scratch the surface of the subject there's a quite different story which reveals the article as a bit of a propaganda piece (whether or not unwittingly).

tl;dr Ron Conway posted these tweets:

https://twitter.com/RonConway/status/542383330193190913

https://twitter.com/RonConway/status/542404171865927681

Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon, are boring.

Ron Conway's tweets about the CIA are not really interesting.

Ron Conway's actions to deliver funding, connect people, and general effect on the Silicon Valley startup atmosphere are very, very interesting.

Obligatory disclaimer: I strongly support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and am shocked! Shocked I say! -- that Obama has not yet closed Guantanamo Bay after this many years in office.

your tl;dr leaves this out

"Interestingly, it was just several weeks ago that Feinstein was the one expressing her distaste for one of Conway’s projects. He’s a big backer of AirBnB, and Feinstein penned an opinion piece in The Chronicle urging Lee to veto the Board of Supervisors’ legislation allowing short-term rentals in private homes. Lee sided with Conway and AirBnB."

"Here are your winnings, Sir."

The movie was Casablanca.

Right after the line

> am shocked! Shocked I say

was the line

"Here are your winnings, Sir."

Someone didn't like/know that movie?

Most like, HN doesn't encourage random pop-culture references that don't actually add anything to the conversation.

My post did "add to the conversation" -- it was the rest of the irony of the statement I responded to and its suggestion about the OP.

It's not a "random" reference, to pop-culture or otherwise; instead it's a famous statement about public posturing and image and now solidly part of US culture and, thus, fully relevant to the OP.

If you want something that at first glance looks more serious, read my post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8920204

in this thread. There I reference Goffman, about the most serious source there is on public image. The quotes from Casablanca are nearly as good.

But if you want something much more serious, sure, see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8919311

on non-linear duality theory and Lagrangian relaxation as an improvement on simulated annealing.

"Here are your winnings, Sir"

competes with both Goffman and duality theory for relevance.

I mean, you did see the movie, right?

It is uncharitable and silly to believe that a good person could not have those positions in good faith. You may disagree with it, but "torture is sometimes permissible" is not an evil opinion held exclusively by evil people.

> "torture is sometimes permissible" is not an evil opinion held exclusively by evil people.

... for a rather arbitrary definition of "evil" (and "good"), one I don't share. Doesn't it make you think a little when every depiction and description of hell contains various forms of torture?

> It is uncharitable and silly to believe that a good person could not have those positions in good faith.

Imagine someone who just straight up punches people in the face without any warning for using the n word. Can that ever be in good faith? At what point is it OK to physically hurt others?

This doesn't justify torture, but I can imagine many situations where it physical violence can be good. I would say it is ethically good to physically harm someone if that harm prevents then from harming others, for example.

There are tons of questions surrounding when it is OK, but to say that physical violence is never appropriate is to live in a fantasy world where evil doesn't exist. There are some forms of aggression that cannot be successfully resisted without resorting to violence.

You know that it is just a slippery slope away from supporting violence against charlie hebdo, right?

It's really easy to come up with hypotheticals when violence stops other violence, with no other ill effects and no risk.

Real life isn't as pretty. You meet violence with violence and all you're guaranteed is violence. You may 'win', you may not, but all you're certain to achieve is perpetuating the cycle.

That's debatable. Remember the Geneva Convention?

Good faith and good intentions are not enough to create good in the world.

Oh yes it is

I think the only way it is possible to hold it "in good faith" is to be unconsciously bigoted. That is, you don't realize you're a bigot, probably because you haven't examined your underlying beliefs.

To see this most clearly, try to imagine a situation where you would find it acceptable for an American soldier to be tortured by some foreign power.

First, thank you for providing a thought experiment that challenged my own beliefs on the topic. Something like that is rare.

Given the social climate surrounding the issue, it seemed appropriate to switch to a throwaway. I'll strive to keep the discussion interesting and thought-provoking.

I'd like to followup with you and get some insights. Thinking over your example leads me to conclude, "There is no such thing as what's 'acceptable,' only what's effective."

Do you feel that's true, or off the mark?

Torture has been shown repeatedly to not be "effective" - people will say literally anything to get it to stop.

This makes it useless for getting a confession to a crime with no corroborating evidence. However, if you have a method of independently verifying the information you get, you can get useful information.

Note: I oppose torture, but effectiveness is orthogonal to my opposition. Something can be effective and still evil.

Not that effective for gathering reliable intelligence in a timely manner, but very effective for other purposes: To punish, to instill fear in potential enemies, to satisfy a need for revenge.

The "gathering intelligence" excuse is used only because it allows "good people" to convince themselves they support torture for rational, "good" reasons. Nobody would openly say they support torture because they want to see the enemy writher in pain and fear and be forced to eat their own shit. Even if this is the real reason.

I think we care about what's acceptable/unacceptable because we need a collective line in the sand for what would be self destructive.

I think if some concepts are not marked as non bargainable, they will eventually be common.

Torture and terror falls in this camp for me. If we agree there are cases it's ok to use them, eventually we'll have a neighbor tortured because of some other thing society abors.

I think Post-911 and the Bush Administration making statements that in order to save lives and prevent more terrorists attacks they had to torture terrorist suspects.

It is a kind of the ends justify the means, the type of road that leads to tyranny. Which is why the Patriot Act got passed and hasn't been repealed yet.

You know that terrorists will use torture and everything they got and won't stick to laws and rules to get their ends to justify their means.

So what prevents us from becoming just like the terrorists we are fighting? Does it really need a fight fire with fire, and it is not terrorism when we do it? Are there better ways to fight terrorism that we haven't considered yet?

> So what prevents us from becoming just like the terrorists we are fighting?

'prevented', not 'prevents'. That's a passed station now, it's official, it's documented and it's absolutely horrible.

You see, when a bunch of deranged idiots does something there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances, but when a nation state does something there are none, unless you want to claim they too are deranged idiots.

Ironic that US Special Forces trained the Taliban to fight the USSR in the 1980's and then later on their leader founder Al Qaeda using the same tactics to fight the USA.

I think US failed foreign policy helps create a lot of terrorist networks. We pulled out of Iraq and Syria too fast and then ISIS/ISIL took over in the power vacuum there. So in trying to end the war too soon, to score points for people back home, we actually made it worse in Syria and Iraq.

In leaving Afghanistan we gave control back to the Taliban.

So the US war effort in the Middle East has failed as terrorist networks just take back control.

The USA won't admit to the things it does, it covers up the Prism NSA spying system, it covers up the torture, it covers up murdering people with drone strikes, then it goes after the news media that reports on all of the bad things the USA is doing to censor it.

Maybe we cannot prevent being a tyranny, maybe it is too late? We had to become a police state with the Patriot Act and Prism in order to fight the war on terror and then what have we become over that?

rephrasing to remove definition-paint-shedding-whatever

Does there exist a scenario where you are personally OK with a soldier from your country being tortured by another?

If we're talking about effectiveness, you then have to define what's the criteria that you're optimizing for - that's mostly the difference between morality frameworks. Certainly there is argument that was made within utilitarianism that if 1 people are tortured so that hundreds of millions of people can avoid having a speck of dust in their eyes, it's still a net gain for happiness (and so it's an acceptable, even preferable scenario to happen).

The fact that it's impossible for human agreeing on the criteria to be optimized asides. Normally there are many reasons that we almost never make morality argument based on effectiveness (unfortunately, I'm not articulate enough to summarize those reasons in a comment). The trolley problem is a good example: if it was a straightforward effectiveness argument, we all know what the "rational" decision should be.

There are multiple morality frameworks, most including torture, and very few that don't. Western Christianity (ie. "New Testament") and it's "atheist variant" Humanism are fully opposed to torture (unless you count banishment as torture, which some do), but most other ideologies aren't.

Take the old testament, which is certainly a moral framework. Or, when it comes to frameworks in use, islam's moral framework, for example, specifies torture as punishment for crimes (whippings, beatings, certain prescribed forms of execution, forcing children to witness execution of convicted parents, ...). But this is not the exception, most religions support torture, mostly only as punishment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da%E1%B9%87%E1%B8%8Da_%28Hindu_...

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Punishments_in_religio...

It's not limited to religions either. For instance, most or all person cults support torture.

A lot of people have serious trouble with the concept of multiple moralities, yet of course that's exactly what different religions are. People seem to find it easy to tolerate, oh going to temple instead of church, but if you disagree on marriageable age, slavery, or punishment then you're a monster. Never mind that by that standard, the majority the planet's population fails.

> Take the old testament, which is certainly a moral framework.

The Old Testament (and ditto with the New Testament) is not a "moral framework"; it is a set of stories which have been incorporated as part of the justification or inspiration for numerous moral frameworks, many of which conflict deeply with each other.

Can we construct a situation where that would be appropriate? Well, let's get as close as we can, factoring out as many moral variables as possible, to make the question more concrete.

Let's imagine that it's the 1980s, during the Cold War. And let's create an inverse Dr. Strangelove setup.

Let's say that the United States, based on erroneous intelligence, has become convinced that a nuclear attack from the USSR is imminent. To prevent annihilation of the population of the United States, authorization is given to promptly and preemptively attack the USSR and the protocol is started.

Now, let's say that there are a number of persons who are able to disarm these attacks, and that one of them has fallen into KGB hands. The KGB has just one hour to prevent a nuclear holocaust.

To factor out another variable, let's assume that the general being held by the KGB is located somewhere that will be within the blast range of the mutual destruction, such that should the reciprocal attacks take place, the general will in the coming days die of a mix of radiation poisoning and starvation, no doubt a gruesome way to die.

How far is the KGB ethically entitled to go to try to extract the cancelation codes?

Now, "utilitarianism" was mentioned below, and the simple utilitarian would answer, as noted, that if there was even any chance of a small discomfort being removed for a great many, than it would be worth incredible pain for a single person. Such is a common attack on utilitarianism -- that it allows for persecuting the innocent.

However, that's a very superficial view of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism also considers that in trying to maximize the happiness (or some proxy for it) within society, that people care very much about some basic presumption of justice within that society. For instance, I would not expect a society which tortured suspected jaywalkers to be optimized for happiness. It gives us a sense of security and comfort to know that there are certain guarantees in our social systems.

There's also the argument from the perspective of justice (i.e. an argument from rights rather than outcomes). The notion there is that you can construct a set of rights by supposing a "veil of ignorance" in which you do not know where you would fall in a society or situation. For instance, if nobody knew if they were the torturer or torturee, they might both agree that torture is wrong and that it should not be practiced. The "veil of ignorance" is basically what the grandparent's question on transposing nationalities was trying to get at.

The utilitarian viewpoint doesn't lend itself towards as clearly defined of a set of rules for right and wrong. On the other hand, a strict set of rights can draw questions at the extreme ends of the ethical spectrum.

In the abstract that's all fine and good but we're talking about some very concrete situations here that go nowhere near those extremes. Extremes are nice to come down on something 'in principle' but barring extraordinary concocted up scenarios to expose the weaknesses of having a pre-set mind about anything at all it is still very useful to come down to some ground rules that everybody lives by, for instance, laws and in this case the Geneva convention.

The idea is that then if someone decides to cross those lines that you try them in court to see if a judge sees it the same way, if not off to the slammer you go.

I agree. But sometimes thought experiments can be useful in sussing out why we hold certain values. Torture I don't actually consider to be one of those that's particularly opaque, but asking "Why do I think this is wrong?" and looking at the edge cases is often an enlightening process. (And I've been reading a good bit of political philosophy lately trying to resolve some dissonance on other topics where I found my own views inconsistent.)

It's the engineering mindset at work: reduction to extremes can give you a good idea of whether or not something has a discrete solution or if it is multi-valued. In this case it seems to me that it is likely to be multi-valued but only in non-real-world scenarios and for all intent and purposes you might as well treat it as discrete: torture == bad.

If you're inclined to go down that path: the Japanese treated US POWs terribly, and the US still dropped two nukes as a weapons test (there was credible intelligence Japan was in the process of surrendering because of the "regular" fire-bombing campaigns - but dropping nukes was seen as a great deterrent against Sovjet. And as a great opportunity for a field test).

Note: I'm mentioning this because you're scenario isn't quite as hypothetical as one might hope - for neither those bombed nor for the abused POWs.

Do very many people do this thought experiment and say "Wow, I'd totally let the European guy keep the codes to disarm the bomb, but I'd torture the brown one."?

edit: It's a serious question. The claim is that people who support torture do so because they're "unconsciously bigoted." That seems silly so I've posed a counter question: How many people's belief in torture falls apart if they imagine the subject looking like them/sharing their religious views/etc? I don't imagine it's very many.

It's a good question, I have no idea why you are being downvoted.

Consider a person who's moral principles are based on empathy. Empathy is well known to be racist - we simply don't feel equally bad is a black person gets pricked with a needle than a white person. (Errors like this are why I believe empathy is a terrible basis for morality.)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108582/

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Now consider path dependence. If you first think about a brown person being tortured, you (statistically) are more likely to accept it - you simply feel less empathy for this person. Then when you generalize to the case of a white person, you'll similarly support torture.

Conversely, if you first think about a white person being tortured and then generalize to a black person, you'll oppose it.

So it doesn't happen that belief in torture falls apart, what happens is the example you think of to start with determines that belief.

I still think that's a bit simplistic and maybe politically motivated. Of course groups have different feelings towards their members and non-members.

First study: why in the world didn't they report their findings of how black people felt watching white people get hurt? That's a pretty bad bias.

Second study: are these people just fishing for proof that white people are racist?

> The less privileged the target seemed, the less participants thought s/he would experience pain. In other words, participants associated hardship with physical toughness. Importantly, target race (Black vs. White) was no longer predictive of pain ratings once we controlled for participants’ perceptions of the target’s privilege,

but they just sidestep that part for the conclusion:

> The present work demonstrates that people assume a priori that Blacks feel less pain than do Whites. This finding has important implications for understanding and reducing racial bias. It sheds new light on well-documented racial biases. Consider, for instance, the finding that White Americans condone police brutality against Black men relative to White men

How am I supposed to take these people seriously? Experiment 5 showed that blackness only correlates with a deeper, more predictive factor but they ignore that to go on a socio-political rant about the plight of black Americans. They do everything they can to fit the results into a preconceived narrative. This isn't science, it's social activism masquerading as science. 90% of their "conclusions" was about things that weren't even part of the experiment.

This isn't bringing us any closer to understanding how and why people are able to do awful things like commit torture, which should be the goal here. Instead we have to put that question aside and ask why such political bias isn't being called out in science.

For the purposes of the original question, namely how the perceived race of the victim might lead someone to support torture, these questions are moot.

However, they are useful questions more broadly. Ultimately the issue is that people motivated by empathy are going to be inconsistent and biased. While this probably won't lead them to change their opinion, the example use case they first think of may drive their original opinion.

> To see this most clearly, try to imagine a situation where you would find it acceptable for an American soldier to be tortured by some foreign power.

Sure: If a company of US soldiers has infiltrated an area and is planning to blow up a church during a wedding, and one is captured, it might be acceptable to torture him for the information of the plot, so it might be averted. "Might", only if that is the very last resort and has at least some chance of success.

The reason it's hard to come up with such a scenario is that probably most of us assume American soldiers are acting on orders, and those orders are at least well-intentioned, even if they end up doing wrong.

That's not bigotry - it's perhaps naive.

edit: clarify the end

> "torture is sometimes permissible" is not an evil opinion held exclusively by evil people

I took air to mean that support of torture eliminates a person from the top strata of the category of "good person" - by itself a handwavy categorization - that should be held up as some kind of exemplar of virtue, as pg has done.

It's a point I happen to agree with, and regardless of whether or not you think Dante would create a special place in hell for rich guys who provide political cover for torturers, it does undermine to some extent the premise of of pg's article.

Writing an article like this about someone you actually like is dangerous. As Pappy Boyington said, "Show me a hero and I'll show you a bum."

Good people can't ever support anything with (moral) downsides?

By most definitions, a good person cannot support evil actions ("moral downsides", really?), no.

Considering that most choices -- and all hard ones -- have such downsides, then no such people exist and the term as you've used it is not useful.

It's not the moral downsides so much as torture is a race to the bottom. It's like, which side can be more awful.

Did you even read the first sentence I wrote?

Indeed I did; it's precisely what I was replying to. No matter how good a person is, they will encounter moral dilemmas (or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them) with no good option. For any one of these situations you can say "OMG! I'm so indignant that they chose A" ... And the same for B.

By that standard, there cannot exist good people.

> No matter how good a person is, they will encounter moral dilemmas (or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them) with no good option. For any one of these situations you can say "OMG! I'm so indignant that they chose A" ... And the same for B.

It's as if you believe every moral choice, including the choice to support or oppose torture, is a choice of equal moral consequence such that a person deserves praise whichever way they choose. I don't intend to sign on to this new ethical theory of yours.

I do not see a similarity between the critique I gave and the position you attributed to me. Could you reply more directly to the point I made?

Okay, let's start over. I'll pick things apart as well as I can.

> Good people can't ever support anything with (moral) downsides?

"Moral downsides" is not, as far as I know, a term of art in ethics or religion so it is hard to know what you mean, but I'm pretty sure you've been downvoted for underplaying the importance of a decision to support something many of us believe to be intrinsically evil.

> Indeed I did; it's precisely what I was replying to.

You were replying to post where I indicated that having chosen to support torture removed Ronco from the category of person so admirable we should hold him up as an example for the rest of us to follow. This is - usefully, I think - a lot more specific than dividing the world into "good people" and "bad people."

> No matter how good a person is, they will encounter moral dilemmas

That is part of the human condition, yes.

> (or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them)

There also exist math problems that could be posed to them. I wonder why you've gone all hypothetical here.

> with no good option. For any one of these situations you can say "OMG! I'm so indignant that they chose A" ... And the same for B.

There are, hypothetically, moral dilemmas such that every outcome is equally bad.

The decision to support torture is not one of them. I do not believe even a supporter of torture would characterize the decision to engage in torture or not to engage in torture as a decision such that deciding one way or the other will result in equally bad outcomes.

> By that standard, there cannot exist good people.

Whatever.

>Okay, let's start over.

Sure thing; I hope some of it will make more sense now.

>"Moral downsides" is not, as far as I know, a term of art in ethics or religion so it is hard to know what you mean,

First of all, I never used that term; I referred to downsides, and clarified the context in a parenthetical. Because so much of grandstanding about torture is apparently from a deontological perspective (cf. your insistence on things being "intrinsically evil"), this was simply to clarify that the "downsides" were with respect to a moral calculus, not e.g. some CBA of material costs.

Second, certainly you can compose concepts together, even when that combination of the words is not formally enumerated in some lexicon?

Third, it feels much like you're calling me ignorant by unnecessarily drawing attention to specific phrases and complaining about them not being in the official lingo. Now that you know what I'm referring to, could you either a) give the standard term for it which you would not have complained about, or b) apologize for the insinuation, or c) explain why you were unable to infer meaning of a new term the normal way?

>but I'm pretty sure you've been downvoted for underplaying the importance of a decision to support something many of us believe to be intrinsically evil.

That would be a bad reason, since I never "underplayed" the importance of this, which would suggest some sort of "well, yeah that's bad, but no big deal". I'm complaining that, if you are going to write someone off every time their decision has a downside, they can't win, no matter how good they are, and so the existence of such downsides isn't a strike against their goodness at all, any more than a politician is evil for recognizing the existence of tradeoffs between funding for hospitals and funding for schools. (Can you believe (Jack|John) (John|Jack)son? He supported reduced funding for (school|hospital)s! Does he not thing (education|health care) is important?)

>>(or at least, there exist moral dilemmas that could be posed to them)

>There also exist math problems that could be posed to them. I wonder why you've gone all hypothetical here.

That was simply to avoid the (slimy) trick of refusing to engage moral dilemmas -- i.e. consider someone praiseworthy simply because they never had to encounter a hard choice. Is that a reasonable caveat?

>There are, hypothetically, moral dilemmas such that every outcome is equally bad.

>The decision to support torture is not one of them. I do not believe even a supporter of torture would characterize the decision to engage in torture or not to engage in torture as a decision such that deciding one way or the other will result in equally bad outcomes.

Why the focus on the case of the outcomes being equally bad? A "supporter of torture" can (and usually do) agree that torturing people is bad, but not as bad as letting millions die when the bomb goes off. (This is where people usually muddle the distinction between "it wouldn't work" and "it would be bad even if it did work".) They simply don't regard the badness of that option as a dealbreaker. (There's no requirement that the options be equally bad for the logic to apply.)

That's the same thing I'm criticizing on your part. You could equally well play the game of "he advocated letting millions of people die! Bad!" Well, sometimes you can't win. The very best people can be placed in that dilemma, and their having to take one bad branch should not be a strike against them.

The point I was trying to express in one line originally.

> I never "underplayed" the importance of this, which would suggest some sort of "well, yeah that's bad, but no big deal".

Okay, you don't think you're underplaying the importance of a person's support of torture, but in saying things like this you are lumping all a person's transgressions together:

> if you are going to write someone off every time their decision has a downside

This is absolutely not "every time," this is the time the guy used his influence to provide public support for the institution of torture by America instead of using his influece to condemn it.

Incidentally, I'm not talking about writing someone off. I'm talking about excluding him from the very enthusiastic category person we should admire as an exemplar of good which pg created for Ronco. (seriously, he invoked the Bible)

> they can't win, no matter how good they are, and so the existence of such downsides isn't a strike against their goodness at all, any more than a politician is evil for recognizing the existence of tradeoffs between funding for hospitals and funding for schools.

I agree that if we regard all moral transgressions as being equally serious then it makes no sense to draw the distinction between good and bad acts, or perhaps even good and bad people. I just think that is an absurd premise.

> Why the focus on the case of the outcomes being equally bad?

A choice between equally undesireable alternatives is usually what is meant by "dilemma." Some of that is just the dictionary, but more intuitively it's just not usually worth arguing about the cases where one choice is regarded as worse than another.

> That's the same thing I'm criticizing on your part. You could equally well play the game of "he advocated letting millions of people die! Bad!"

In much the same way that I do not believe all moral transgressions are equally serious, I do not believe all arguments are equally sound.

I really appreciate your response, but I think there is a problem with our mental model of a moral paragon.

Is it really smart to believe that childlike simplicity of purpose is morally admirable? That never being seen to take a side in an ugly situation with horrible tradeoffs on all sides is a prerequisite for being a top quality "good person"?

My sense is that rather than courageous, it is extremely easy to take sides like opposing torture in all forms at all times. Such positions receive automatic praise and require little complex thinking. That does not necessarily make them wrong, but we should subject them to an extra shade of rational skepticism.

Relatedly, it is obvious to me that when Ronco takes a pro-torture position, it is not out of personal weakness or malice, as people seem to imagine, but could only be the result of serious careful thought. A sociopath, for example, would never ever take a position so likely to garner knee-jerk criticism for no personal gain. I suppose a troll might, but he is extremely obviously not a troll.

> Is it really smart to believe that childlike simplicity of purpose is morally admirable?

I don't have any idea what you're talking about but I'm guessing we like "smart" rather than "childlike simplicity."

> That never being seen to take a side in an ugly situation with horrible tradeoffs on all sides is a prerequisite for being a top quality "good person"?

On the contrary, regardless of how you define "good person," I suspect having taken a side would be a necessary factor. The more relevant factor would be having chosen the correct side.

> My sense is that rather than courageous, it is extremely easy to take sides like opposing torture in all forms at all times. Such positions receive automatic praise and require little complex thinking. That does not necessarily make them wrong, but we should subject them to an extra shade of rational skepticism.

I don't think the amount of effort or risk involved in reaching a moral decision can be considered an indicator of that decision's correctness. We would not consider someone who took one second to decide to help an old lady across the street to have acted more morally than someone who had to take a little more thought to make the decision based on the same reasoning, after all. And plenty of decisions to choose ethical conduct over unethical conduct are quite easy for most of us to make - you can think of your own examples. Effort isn't any sort of reliable indicator.

"Good", "evil" and "good faith" are all too ill-defined to be used in a philosophical discussion like this: you will have to define them. It's fine for pg to used, because a) He's almost using good as the opposite of mean, and b) He's not discussing about morality. When it comes to morality discussion, a lot more bets are off and you have to be careful on what basis you're defining "good", "evil" and the like.

To be more on point, there are a lot of "evil" people that are acting on good faith - the comical image of an evil genius who's hell bent on taking over the world for his own greediness or for fun doesn't really exist in real life. You can truly believe that the best way to win a war for your country (and help your fellow country men) is to exterminate the other country, so you make an order to massacre everything that move. That would be evil acting in good faith.

Perhaps he could have the opinion that, as he tweeted, "the CIA saved American lives" in good faith. But he was criticizing a 525-page Senate report on the same day it came out, December 9th. This report has a lot of details on CIA misrepresentations on how they "saved lives". I doubt he read the report before he tweeted.

I don't think that's in good faith.

It is in good company, as Dick Cheney admitted he hadn't read the report, while still asserting it was "full of crap".

Let me give a single example of the kind of CIA claims about the effectiveness of torture that the report documents. On page 188, the report describes a briefing George Tenet and a CIA lawyer gave to some White House officials. (See footnote 1101 for a partial list of attendees.) Their slides included the claim that their torture techniques helped identify Richard Reid.

Richard Reid was arrested before the CIA tortured anyone under this program. This program could not have helped catch Reid unless it also involved the use of a time machine.

You may think this is a silly example, but the report documents dozens of instances of this level of misrepresentation. Footnote 1393 demonstrates another causality inversion that the CIA thinks they caused, in which they tortured someone in 2003 to get enough information to disrupt a plot in 2002.

Check it out for yourself; you can read the Senate report's 525-page executive summary here:

http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf

and the CIA's response here:

https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/CIAs_June2013_Response_t...

Maybe I'm wrong about torture, and maybe I'm misreading or misunderstanding the report. But I think Conway's dismissal of the report without reading it is in bad faith.

Except he doesn't say "torture is sometimes permissible". He supports the specific actions of CIA where torture were used, but didn't lead to reliable intelligence of value. So it was not a "ticking time-bomb scenario", it was "torture because we have the power to do it".

> It is uncharitable and silly to believe that a good person could not have those positions in good faith.

No it is not. Certain things are just incompatible. "good person" and "supporter of torture" are a good example of this.

The illusory "effectiveness" of torture doesn't matter, you may as well ask if slavery is profitable, as others have pointed out. If you're asking that then you have already lost your way.

If this upsets you, then that's on you.

In fairness, he'd probably be really nice to any torture victims if they ever pitched their startup to him.

And if he didn't invest in their startup and made sure no one else invested either, he'd probably be really nice about showing them the door.

A good person can still be "wrong" (for any given definition of it). Feinstein is wrong about AirBnB, and Conway is wrong about torture. I was a big fan of Christopher Hitchens' yet I think on balance he was wrong about the Iraq war.

For me, the main objection to torture is not that it often yields unreliable intel, or that innocents end up getting tortured to death, or that it produces more terrorists - all of which are true. I recognize torture sometimes saves lives, and I'm not unsympathetic to the emotion that it carries a somewhat satisfying vengeance component against an enemy who, in their own words, values death more than we value life. Yet my objection is about what effect torture has on us as a society. It's a plague on our house.

You don't object to innocent people being tortured to death?

If there was no societal impact, would those objections be enough for you to oppose torture?

"My main objection to driving drunk is not the whole 'running over pedestrians' thing, which does happen, but more the effect that it has on my paint job - I come home with all sorts of scuff marks."

> You don't object to innocent people being tortured to death?

Yes, I do object to that. Every single point I made against torture, I obviously support.

But hinging the entire anti-torture argument on innocents isn't going to be enough, sadly. Because of ambiguities about who exactly is innocent, and because of the relative ethics of torturing one possibly innocent victim in order to save potentially huge numbers of other innocents, a more profound argument is needed - one that covers the entire spectrum where torture is used.

In my opinion, this argument has to be about what torture turns us into.

Your interpretation of my comment is both very uncharitable and factually wrong.

Ah, I see. I misinterpreted your comment, apologies.

Would you mind elaborating on what societal impact you think participating in torture has on the US? I'm curious to hear the viewpoint of an American on this.

(From the perspective of a heathen foreigner, the US military has done despicable things for decades, so to some degree this is just business as usual.)

> I'm curious to hear the viewpoint of an American on this. [...] From the perspective of a heathen foreigner

Hey, that makes two of us ;)

But I'm also European, that means apart from the religious aspect, we're pretty much in the same boat as the US, and often times that boat is a heavily armed gunship. In the end, countries are not monolithic entities, or even single ideologies for that matter. People in power are susceptible to atrocious ideas, wherever they live.

> Would you mind elaborating on what societal impact you think participating in torture has on the US?

For what it's worth, I think the impact is that we (US and allies) become a society of torturers, as banal as that may sound. Once we internalize the fact that we are people who torture, our entire values compass becomes skewed.

So "good person" just means "one of us" and has nothing to do with ethics.

I am totally opposed to torture but I have no problem believing someone is "good" even if they think the CIA's actions were correct. Similarly, I try not to fall into the trap of thinking that people who disagree with me are either lying or stupid.

He said the CIA saved lives and that Feinstein should listen to her experience vs political staff. That's not a defense of torture. Even assuming you're opposed to any torture in all cases, you can still criticize the torture report and defend organizations involved.

Anyhow, I'd like to think that our goodness as people is not necessarily determined by our political tweets.

There is a lot of discussion in this thread if torture theoretically could be morally justified - ticking time bomb scenarios and so on. But his support is not for some theoretical scenario. It is for the actual CIA actions where people were tortured, where it didn't result in reliable intelligence, and where the CIA lied about the effectiveness of the torture.

Of course, even if the torture didn't lead to intelligence of any value, it still might have been effective. The purpose of torture when used around the world is not primarily to produce intelligence. The primary purpose is to punish, to instill fear into the enemy, and to provide satisfaction. You can still support torture even if you know it does't provided intelligence of value, if you believe the other purposes justifies it.

Bu can you really be called a "good person" if you support torture for the sake of the fear and the pain and the satisfaction? I guess you can - if you are rich and influential enough.

I just don't see where he made any of these arguments. My take is that he generally supports the CIA and does not like Feinstein. That's a perfectly reasonable stance. I take issue with the idea that torture is ok or produces anything of value. But in this case, the most disturbing part for me is that it was government policy.

He linked to http://www.ciasavedlives.com which includes these lines:

The SSCI Majority would have the American people believe that the program was initiated by a rogue CIA that consistently lied to the President, the National Security Council, the Attorney General, and the Congress. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing.

... Congress was in the loop. The so-called "Gang of Eight” of top Congressional leaders were briefed in detail on the program. The briefings were detailed and drew reactions that ranged from approval to no objection to encouragement to be even more aggressive. Again, none of this context appears in the Majority's report.

I think those are fair points. If I had only 140 character to make this comment, maybe I'd be perceived as a bad guy too?

If you look closely enough at anyone, you will find something to dislike about them. Funny thing about people. Funnier thing: if you look closely enough at anyone you dislike, you can find something to like about them.

People are probably mostly the product of their environment and I doubt anyone here knows Ron Conway well enough to discuss his position on torture. Let his actions speak for him; you can be opposed to torture under pretty much any circumstances, as I am, and still regard someone with a different point of view as basically good.

I really wish your comment didn't get so much of the attention in this thread, it's a bit of a distraction from what should've been the main point of the article.

Yes, it does rather take away from endlessly extolling the virtues of the man.

Cool, so we're People magazine now, only with a SV focus.

"Silicon People".

Wow, that really works in more than one way.

HN's been a pretty shameless gossip site for a while, nice to see folks finally dropping all pretense about it.

Bluntly, People magazine does more in-depth coverage of its subjects than pg's post does of this guy. They would have felt compelled to give a number of examples of things he's done that a reader might actually see as good, as opposed to just asserting it a few times.

Beyond that, the post is just some hand-waving about a claimed trend with little support. That's why the torture thing blew up - it was an actual, specific ethical matter involving the guy instead of a generic business hagiography (he's good, but you wouldn't want him mad at you, blah blah blah).

Everyone responding to this comment is arguing as if "good" and "bad" are provable facts. It's an opinion. You can't disprove it.

Well that is an interesting point of view.

My experience so far( early 30's) has been exactly the opposite, most people/bosses I've meet that were successful in business were complete assholes, with several nice people working for them exclusively for the money.

That has in fact made part of my life very miserable because I really don't expect anything from anybody anymore. If been tricked/robbed/scammed so many times by people I trusted that my trust is mostly gone for now, and I only expect bad things from people when I depend on them for something. (If something good happens it's awesome, but I don't count on it)

Maybe I trust people more than I should have done, maybe it's the place I live... I don't know.

That's really unfortunate. Sorry to hear that.

Out of curiosity - where do you live, and what industry are you in?

1. Brazil 2. IT

Don't take this the wrong way, but if everyone you are encountering is screwing you...you have some hard questions to ask yourself.

My experience has been that when someone "only expects bad things from people when they depnd on them" it means one of 3 things.

1. They have a hard time accepting responsibility and taking ownership of their own problems.

2. They are running with a really bad crowd, and need to go to the library to make some new friends.

3. They project an image that lets people walk all over them.

Everyone has problems that come up in their life, but if you haven't experienced nice people as being the norm... there is a better that 66% chance its something YOU ALONE CAN AND MUST CHANGE.

I have a problem with your point 3. With all respect but I think I heard that argument before in the context of women being sexually assaulted and the way they dress being to blame...

The correlation to this instance would be..."If someone is constantly sexually assaulted to the point where they EXPECT EVERYBODY to sexually assault them..."

In that case, I would offer this same advice... ask yourself if you are projecting an image that leads everybody to sexually assault you.

I am not justifying the behavior of walking over people (or assaulting people...)

I am simply offering a strategy to improve your lot if people are screwing you constantly.

There is a definite correlation between the image you project, how you are perceived and ultimately how you are treated.

Ignoring that reality is just being naive.

We are also talking about someone who is constantly being screwed, not someone who was assaulted once.

Robert Ringer, in his book "Winning Through Intimidation" postulates that the result you get from a negotiation is inversely proportionate to how intimidated you are."

just think about the last time you had to talk to a big VC or someone you were initimidated by, and consider whether you stood up for yourself or whether you were too scared to stand your ground.

Branding and image building is all about exactly this. Creating a deliberate impression on people before they need your product.

This is actually really great advice - albeit a bit harsh. #2 makes sense, but any advice on solving #1 and #3? Is this yours or did you read about this somewhere?

#1 - Go through psychotherapy until you root out your self defeating behaviors.

#3 - There is a ton you can do to foster and project and image the leads to more positive results. I would recommend reading up on human perception and branding to better understand how to project the right image. Robert Ringers, "Winning Through Intimidation" is a good anecdotal strategy... Dan Kennedy's takeaway selling is another..As is Jay Abrahams Law of Preeminence.

The basic idea is to not care that much about the end result. When you raise VC money when you don't need it, you are in a much stronger position to negotiate. So too with Image, create the impression that you don't need the opportunity, deal, or whatever you are getting screwed out of and you will be in a position to demand the protections you need.

Shouldn't any group of people who will walk over you just because you project some image be considered a bad crowd?

If someone is running with a bad crowd, then (as you point out) #2 is the problem. If they aren't, then #3 shouldn't be a concern anyways.

In a utopian world you would be right...But in the real world, even the good guys might screw you if it ever turns into a situation of You Vs. Them.

Ultimately, if having to choose between feeding my family or feeding yours, the choose is obvious even to nice guys.

Especially when you consider that sometimes being nice to one person is being cruel to another.

The key is to protect yourself...when dealing with bad people you know where you stand, so you have strong motivation to demand contracts, etc...

When dealing with genuinely nice people, whom you would never dream could possibly screw you, thats were you are most vulnerable, because you are less likely to demand the contract and protections you need, and when it comes to them vs. you, they will often choose themselves...

Semi Related - I read a quote from Warren Buffet that really resonated with me, "Honesty is an expensive gift. Don't expect it from cheap people."

How about this quote?

"I've got my family to feed" - Latrell Sprewell

I hate when people make it like its a feed my family choice like they live in a hut somewhere. Above a certain level of income the "feed my family" excuse is simply that. An excuse for otherwise inexcusable behavior.

Just be nice to people, its not that hard. The world especially the tech world isn't a zero sum game.

I used to work for a guy who cared deeply about all his employees to the point where he bought me a car when mine broke down. Than the recession hit, times got tough, he had triplets, got a divorce and even had to lay off half his company.

He made promises to me when times were good that he couldn't keep when times were tough.

He cared about me, and yet, for a long time I thought he screwed me when he went back on a deal he made with me.

Lots of people are nice, but back them into a corner (even only in their own minds) and their survival instincts will kick in.

It is simply naive to think otherwise.

Protect Yourself, especially with Nice people who you trust.

Look deeply at yourself here.

> But in the real world, even the good guys might screw you if it ever turns into a situation of You Vs. Them.

Then I guess the "good guy" in your world is only a seemingly good guy (as PG may state it) in my world, since it would be at the core of my definition of a good guy to be fair even in a "you vs. them" situation.

> Ultimately, if having to choose between feeding my family or feeding yours, the choose is obvious even to nice guys.

It is rarely as easy as that. How about feeding your family involving you screwing me over vs feeding my family involving nobody screwing anyone?

Again, in a utopia you would be right, but in the real world, there are legitimate conflicts of interest, and times where its a question of who to screw not whether to or not.

Even the nicest guys when backed into a corner will kick into survival mode.

Like I said, sometimes being nice to one person is being cruel to another.

> Ultimately, if having to choose between feeding my family or feeding yours

Employing this kind of (misleading) imagery is an unworthy tactic. Don't do it.

I would imagine no one ever does this unless they feel they have no choice.

I am not talking about opportunistic jerks waiting to screw you...I am talking about good people in bad circumstances... It is a very rare breed that can maintain perspective when their home is in foreclosure, etc...

That you're still saying things like "survival mode"† suggests that you're not absorbing what's being said. Call it maintenance mode (as in, "to maintain(2)"‡) if you want, and I'll buy that. But survival mode is far, far off.

† https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8920187

‡ http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/maintain

You got me on a semantics issue... I think my point is still valid though.

Even really nice and good people might act in their own self interest when faced with a conflict. The perception of the magnitude of that conflict is relative, and a nice and good guys self-interest mode might be different than a jerks, but...

I still believe it's naive to think that when someone truly FEELS like they are backed into a corner, they will rationalize acting in their own self-interest, even if from someone elses perspective they are screwing them over.

We all have priorities, where we draw the line might be based on how good or bad we are... but everyone has a breaking point.

> You got me on a semantics issue

As of this writing, there are three responses to the comment of yours that I first replied to, each of them posted near-simultaneously with respect to each other. It's important to point out that all of them are calling you out on the same thing here.

(You downplay the issue when you throw out the "ah, semantics!" style resignation. This kind of comment is almost designed to frame it as if you were engaged in a debate over something and I caught you on a minor technicality that doesn't have any real importance to the actual topic at hand.)

Look, I'm not interested in "winning", or points-scoring, or something juvenile like that. What I am interested in is seeing the feeding-my-family "move" eliminated from honest discussion among reasonable people. This is precisely because the "I have to feed my family" refrain is dishonest and–as I said before–an unworthy tactic.

I don't know how to make you to understand this if you don't by now.

> I don't know how to make you to understand this if you don't by now.

I feel the same frustration as you :)

> This is precisely because the "I have to feed my family" refrain is dishonest and–as I said before–an unworthy tactic.

One last time I will try to explain my point. I agree, This argument might be dishonest, and should be eliminated...

but... That doesn't change the reality on the ground that many people, when feeling like they are about to lose something important will view it as a You vs. Them Scenario.

Not taken, but don't get me wrong. I don't mean friends/family/coworkers. I've got plenty of those that I can and have trusted.

I mean Bosses and people that I've done business with on a you pay me level. In those cases there was almost nothing I could do besides filling a lawsuit and spending large amounts of money, time and sanity. I settled with the understanding that they had the upper hand and I was a fool for trusting my money/time to them.

One case:

Owner "Shit you are leaving??? Who is going to do XXX? Can't you stay at least until xxx so we can deliver xxx and save our asses? That is our only client right now."

Me "Hum... I really need to start next week, but I will do my best"

I stayed for one month more that I needed in contract, my new employer was pissed but agreed with it. In the end the Owner didn't pay me my leave that was due and was agreed to be paid and delayed the pay of that last month for 15 days. I had to threaten them with a lawsuit to get that last month payment.

For me that is about people being scumbags.

But valid points nonetheless.

> I settled with the understanding that they had the upper hand

Sounds like #3 is your primary concern. While some situations are beyond your control, you should put some effort into understanding perception and how you can manufacture the perception that you have the upper hand, not them.

The simplest example of this is Dan Kennedy's takeaway selling technique..Basically you make it seem like you are unavailable to work with them, and because people want what they can't have, they stop thinking about whether they want you but rather how to get you. This puts you in the drivers seat.

That sucks. I thought I was the only guy who had to have those kinds of experiences. :-)

In my case it was years ago, and since then my situation has improved dramatically. The things that seemed to help were:

1) Identifying the kinds of people I worked well with in the past and pitching those kinds of people on projects (I did some of this by learning the Meyers-Briggs function stack, which unfortunately doesn't have an axis of evil but is otherwise helpful in finding new clients who are somewhat similar to clients I liked in the past; ENFPs are a perennial favorite)

2) Identifying non-profits and other less rip-offy types of clients and showing them how I could help them

3) Saving enough money that I didn't have to work with any given client

4) Establishing firm policies like "You will pay 100% down if X and Y conditions are not met or do not apply, or if the total is below $N; otherwise 50% down and 50% prior to delivery"

5) Doing background-checking on all new clients, especially if they have fired one of my kind before (I usually call up the fired guy).

#4 really rides on your reputation, so you may wish to have references on hand to give to potential clients.

I'm celebrating my ninth year as a solo freelancer in rural California and things couldn't get much better, so I hope this helps you somehow.

Thanks you. I will think about those points.

I worked in an industry which was tightly squeezed by government regulation. Every business I know which was run honestly and reputably had to close.

Those that remain are exclusively run by people who are willing to break any rules and any laws as it suits them and are intelligent enough to do so when they can get away with it. I feel very jaded by this experience. Is this what people really mean when they talk about 'hustle'? Is it not possible for an honest person to run a business?

In another context you would call these people sociopaths. They are happy to screw employees - and the conditions are currently just right for them to do that.

Good people who have skills or personal interest in that industry now have to work for that kind of person. They have no realistic choice.

You alone can and must change - we can agree - but your three options are not true to life.

Now I'm curious what industry that might be, and how government regulation killed it?

What about?

4. You've been burned badly/recently enough by your interactions with a minority of jerks, and your perception is biased.

Might be it... time will tell.

I work in finance, and the process by which senior executives are selected literally screens to ensure assholery. It's like a job requirement.

Like Ebeneezer Scrooge? Low on humanity and cheer, high in greed and making people work extra hours for no extra pay?

I suspect, as someone early in his career, what you interpret as "asshole," pg interprets as niceness. From pg's perspective, those whip-cracking middle managers are getting the productivity they need to make his or Ron's investments increase in value. You're on the receiving end of some harshness, but the money-men don't care. Why should they?

Its amusing when we play the moralism card in business. I'm fairly personable and I'm sure would be considered nice, but if tomorrow I opened the worst sweatshop in Vietnam and turned $10,000 into $1m I would be praised. pg or my investors wouldn't care about the social issues of the young people working in my sweatshop, or if they cared, it wouldn't be enough to deem me a villain. They get to meet a fairly nice guy who can turn a little money into a lot. I'd brand myself a fashion entrepreneur, write some pretentious blog postings careful to never address labor concerns, and be done with it. The nitty gritty isn't on a level where investors and other money-men care about. They care about my workers as much as they care about the electrons in my CPU that powers my website. Its works, right? It makes money? Fine. You're "nice." No, I am absolutely not. I own an abusive sweatshop.

This is one of the problems of judging people by their forward facing personality. Its easy to be personable and charismatic when you have money or social capital. I have people below me who have to be mean. I don't need to be. The same way Putin kisses babies and tells jokes on TV while his troops murder civilians and annex land in Ukraine with impunity.

There's a meta narrative here that's concerning as well. Programmers tend to be INTJ males. We have bad social skills and are often naïve. What does this say about charisma and those who can use it effectively? Are we easy to game? I think so. pg's essays are usually top notch except when they're about soft social skills. These last two are questionable, at least to me. I feel the niceness question is a bit more complex than pg suggests, and often it fits not only into a hard game-theory framework but also a soft social skill framework that encompasses everything from salesmanship to how we talk to power or act when we are the ones with power.

A thousand times that.

And we are being conditioned to think of niceness in the personal level, and even worse judge with superficial BS like nice clothes, clean appereance, etc.

A well behaved rich person will immediately strike as "nicer" (with the meaning of "good" too) than a poor guy on the street or a homeless person, even if the latter has a heart of gold and the first is a huge negative for society. If the rich person is also famous, it's as if people lose their mind to its "aura".

This is probably because as a species we were "evolved" to look for immediate personal threat (attack etc), which looks more probable with a homeless person than with a well dressed oil baron or ruthless businessman. But the glitch is that we use that to also judge for "goodness" and morality.

Our entire economy is predicated on the notion that people get money by doing good things for society and the money is their reward. In that sense more money should correlate with more service to society. (Whether it does....)

We're also selfish, "good" is subjective. A homeless person can be as kind as they want but how much can they do for you? A rich person can benefit you in many ways and it may not cost them very much.

>Our entire economy is predicated on the notion that people get money by doing good things for society and the money is their reward.

Yeah. It's an idea of protestant origins (initially: wealth is a kind of reward for the fair from God), and one that, as someone from a non-protestant country, abhor.

>A homeless person can be as kind as they want but how much can they do for you? A rich person can benefit you in many ways and it may not cost them very much.

People are more often screwed in the large by rich persons than by homeless persons. For starters, homeless persons don't start many wars, nor do they get trillion dollar bailouts for collapsing the economy...

> pg or my investors wouldn't care about the social issues of the young people working in my sweatshop

I think it's rude to accuse people of hypothetical malfeasance. If there's evidence that someone is callous, show us the evidence. If you think you know of scenarios in which they would be callous, then just tell us what evidence led you to that conclusion instead.

Considering pg praises Ronco's investing background without even mentioning his controversial high-profile political background, I think its fair to say that pg probably isn't too concerned with the social issues at play here. None of his essays seem to address labor rights either. I'm certainly using him in a hypothetical for my argument, but its not an entirely fictional and unfair strawman. I think on the investor level, at least from my personal experience, skill workers are just cogs. They are part of a money making machine, and their concerns are very much at the lower end of importance. This is why we can have things like secret deals not to poach engineers and the H1B problem.

I think by the standards of casual internet commentary, my comment is perfectly acceptable and appropriate and using high-profile characters in hypotheticals to make a point is fine. If NVIDIA did something displeasing to the FOSS community and someone wrote, "Oh man, Linus is going to full asshole on them tomorrow," I doubt you would be white knighting him. Lets maybe turn down the pg fandom a bit, eh? He's certainly not above criticism.

The recent support pg gave to expanding the H1B program is arguably prima facie evidence of this "hypothetical malfeasance" behavior. Except I wouldn't characterize it as malfeasance. It is human nature to shy away from fractally complex issues, and supply chain ethics are very fractal. It would be a sufficient nightmare to validate the ethics of a lead pencil supply chain (cf., classic essay, "I, Pencil" [1], leaven with healthy critiques [2]), not to speak of programmer labor markets and laptop manufacturing supply chains.

It is counter-productive to use a binary evil/not-evil bit switch here. Rather, once you realize we all value our time, and an "I can't be bothered with those details" is an expression of that time preference (albeit in a manner that can be interpreted as malicious), it becomes easier to understand why we see this behavior. This doesn't mean you have to condone it and throw your hands in the air; understanding is the first step in debugging.

The line-crossing and bit flip can happen when someone else performs the dogged time-consuming legwork, assiduously gathers the evidence, and presents it on a silver platter, and the response is still a reflexive "I can't be bothered with those details". When that happens, at the very least Upton Sinclair's pithy observation is at play, and yes, at the very worst the basest of human nature is on full display.

There are nuances beyond all this of course, but that's a wall of text I shan't inflict upon you.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=i%2C+pencil+criticism&ie=utf...

[3] It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it! From I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ISBN 0-520-08198-6.

Well those doesn't look like most of my cases.

Mine was more like: Owner "Shit you are leaving??? Can't you stay at least until xxx so we can deliver xxx and save our asses?"

Me "Hum... I really need to start next week, but I will do my best"

I stayed for one month more that I needed in contract, my new employer was pissed of but agreed with it. In the end the Owner didn't pay me my leave that was due and was agreed to be paid and delayed the pay of that month for 15 days. I had to threaten them with a lawsuit to get that last month payment.

I've had harsh managers and 2 of them are my friends now. That is nothing related to that is about being a scumbag.

For what it's worth, I know exactly the type of thing you're talking about. So I wanted to chime in and say "No, you're not crazy, even though everyone else in this thread seems to be trying to convince you that you are."

> Mine was more like: Owner "Shit you are leaving??? Can't you stay at least until xxx so we can deliver xxx and save our asses?"

Dude, you gotta learn to say no. I would categorize this as letting people walk over you.

I understand the desire to do a good job and help out others as much as you can but keep in mind that when you help someone the overall net outcome needs to be positive. If your helping someone results in more harm to you than help to the other person, you need to walk away.

I guess you are right and thanks for the tip, but at that point it looked like it was.

The problem was when that guy broke the promise he made to make me stay ( pay my non used leave days )

I hear you but I also want to elaborate a little.

I got the impression from your post that you made a commitment to your new employer that you're going to start on a particular date. And your old employer wanted you to break that commitment because they had some deadlines of their own to meet.

At this point you if stay longer at your old job, you're inconveniencing two entities: (a) yourself because you're not going to look professional to your new employer if you make a commitment (or even give the impression of a commitment) to join at a particular time and then not deliver, and (b) your new employer because they may have made certain plans based on your availability.

In theory, it's possible that the work you were going to do at your old place is so important that this situation could result in a net positive even if you broke the commitment you made, but I think it's unlikely. And in any case, even if your old employer really really really wanted you around, they need to compensate the new place too, not just you!

The way I would've dealt with this would be to tell my boss something like this: "I can't stay longer because I've made a commitment to the new company and they have made plans based on my availability. However, if you think that having me around is very crucial, let's bring them into the loop as well and we can work out some terms under which you can compensate them and me for being more flexible in my leaving dates."

At this point, my guess is that a scumbag will backpedal because any stunt they pull will now be documented by multiple people.

This shouldn't be downvoted.

If your boss says "Before you quit, stay and do X at the usual pay rate", this is probably a boss that doesn't respect your decision to quit in the first place. (Probably you quit because you don't want to continue doing Xs at the usual pay rate). The correct answer is either "No" or "Sure, but it will cost you $TEXAS".

Getting To Yes, if you haven't read it, might be a good read for you. It's specifically about negotiating, but in general, the theme of the book is mutually beneficial arrangements are vastly superior to one sided arrangements.

I've been in similar situations to the one you described and I wish I had some of the knowledge and skills I have now. I could have helped the dude out and negotiated for some more money while doing it.

http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Yes-Negotiating-Agreement-With...

pg's theory is that transparency and unpredictability is what is supposedly making nice investors successful in startup-land. Maybe your industry is not sufficiently transparent or unpredictable to help the nice people rise to the top.

My albeit limited experience suggests to me that there's a U-shaped curve with super-rich / powerful / "effective" people. One end of the curve is "pathological sociopath," and the other is "extremely benevolent."

I don't have enough experience to tell you which side is higher than the other, though the fact that we do not live in some kind of absolute hellhole suggests that the curve is tipped toward the right (benevolence). Yet I do get the impression that it's one extreme or another.

The sociopaths do tend to burn themselves out eventually though. There seems to be some kind of what's effectively karma, which probably comes from peoples' lies eventually catching up with them. It's overall better to be benevolent.

In the big picture, mutually beneficial cooperation works. That's what civilization is, and why we still have it. What we consider sociopathic is often highly cooperative, in an absolute sense. It's just that our standards have risen so high that that basic level of cooperativeness isn't enough.

Illustrative example: hooligans riding loud motorbikes stopping at red lights.

Hooligans riding loud motorbikes are at least riding together, too. Most problems don't come from sociopaths because individual sociopaths can only do the work of one person, and are only motivated by their own personal gain. Most problems come from groups of people working together and against an outgroup, either for their perceived collective benefit or for some ideological or religious cause.

I like the traffic lights example, because it demonstrates civil obedience; cooperation with their fellows in society, in general, regardless of their relationship, or agreement on ideology or religion.

I agree on in-group/out-group (and, eg, monomanical movie villains, abusing their blindly obedient minions, are unrealistic). I'm claiming the benefits of civil cooperation are so enormous that these in/out-group clashes will occur on an increasingly higher base of mutually beneficial cooperation. Because an in-group too separated is too weak.

I think that's mostly true, although there's also the case of the pathological sociopath that after making their pile of money, decides to whitewash their legacy through philanthropy, in order to appear to jump over to the other side of the U.

Armchair psychiatry is unwise. It's very possible for someone to be extremely ruthless in business while still being a genuinely empathetic and kind person in general. Not all sociopath-seeming executives are actual sociopaths.

I agree. It's important to keep in mind that non-sociopaths can be as ruthless as sociopaths to people when they don't think of them as people.

People are what they are, in business or private, there is no such thing as 'another person'. Unless you're suffering from some form of multiple personality disorder.

Most people act differently in different contexts. (Do you tell your wife "Before I agree to take out the trash, I just want to make sure we're on the same page on what compensation for this will be?" Do you tell your investors "Shit, my investors are assholes. I'm getting reamed on this deal") It's not uncommon that different people will have different perspectives on whether someone is a nice guy or an asshole.

They even use Hitler as an example of this... "The evilest person, but he was good to his grandchildren" etc

That's a questionable point, whether it is ethically right to be an "asshole" through your career and then donate it all once it ends.

I would say it (up to a point) is right. Donating/helping early in your life has a low impact, so the main reason I think it's reasonable to argue that way is that not everyone will donate at the end of their lives. So by gaining leverage early on (not contributing to philanthropy, not helping, etc) you will compensate for those who wouldn't donate and help make the world a better place once they got rich.

If you look a the billionaires out there quite a few will sit on their growing pile of cash until they die.

If PG is right, then sociopath's will be fairly indistinguishable from nice people.

True sociopath's don't care about your feelings, either positively or negatively, they just care about advancing their own agenda.

If the best way to advance their own agenda is by being nice to people, then that's what they'll do. That's what vegabook got mercilessly downvoted for saying.

And as PG said, lies are really expensive, so smart sociopaths won't use them.

So maybe Ron Conway is a sociopath. But who cares why he's doing so much good? What matters are the results, not the inner reasons.

While sociopaths can plan ruthlessly they're not necessarily more longterm oriented than non-sociopaths (since they bore more easily I would even expect them to tend to be less longterm oriented). So I consider it highly unlikely that a sociopath would play nice to everyone for years and years.

I'd like to see more nuance to the argument.

What does 'nice' actually mean? It's famous for being a low-entropy word.

In fact not everyone agrees that Conway is 'nice', or that everything he does and says is good:

http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/09/eruption-over-sf-housing-an...

Or even:

http://www.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2014/12/09/ron-conway-twee...

So it matters whether or not Conway or anyone is a sociopath, because IMO the only useful definition of 'nice' is an inclusive one. The more inclusive, the better.

Being a charming marketer while benefiting yourself, your network, and primarily yourself and your network, doesn't make you nice, it makes you an exemplary professional.

There is a difference, and it's not a trivial one.

That Ron Conway SF housing debate clip is so mellow, I mean, only a west coast millenial could call that an eruption. ;-)

But seriously, I am all for challenging the notion that anyone who defends torture is "nice." However, if that is an example of Ron Conway angry, he really is one of the nicest dudes I've ever seen. They are discussing a topic that matters, and where ideas matter. Regardless of who is right, it is much more "not nice" to allow flawed thinking to propagate in matters of public policy, and shouting from the back of the room may be the "nicest" thing a person could do. An asshole would just snicker to himself and count his money.

> What does 'nice' actually mean? It's famous for being a low-entropy word.

Brooke Allen got a bit of attention on HN recently with a post he wrote (incidentally called "How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire"), but that's not the one I mean to point to here. Instead I mean to point to an earlier one in which he touches on the fickleness of "nice". < http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-... >

"My albeit limited experience suggests to me that there's a U-shaped curve with super-rich / powerful / "effective" people. One end of the curve is "pathological sociopath," and the other is "extremely benevolent.""

Time also changes people for better in many cases.

Want to add that something that I have noticed is that people may start out one way (assholes or very self centered) and then move toward "extremely benevolent" when money, fame or power is already "in the bag" and as they age. At that point they will become more generous and it's quite possible that people that they didn't treat nice are no longer around or visible to tell the story. Not taking a jab at Ronco here but do we really know what he was like in his 20's on the way up? (It's only a question for discussion so everyone keep calm..)

I can think of at least one person in the valley who is very well respected now and more or less a father figure that was viewed as quite the asshole back in the 90's when he actually was still working hard to make his mark on the world. (This isn't the only example actually the others were more or less meat and potatoes business people who wouldn't give anyone the time of day if there wasn't any benefit to them).

You may not care but that curve you are talking about is called a bimodal distribution. Just writing for information not pedantry. :)

This seems to be the follow up to http://paulgraham.com/mean.html where pg refines his argument.

I'm glad he did, I felt that his "Mean people fail" essay to be one of his weaker essays, and judging by the comments it got when it was released so did pretty much everyone else on hacker news:)

I tend to agree with him that good people get further along in life. In my industry, finance, I tend to see that the good people do much better than the assholes, contrary to what hollywood would have you believe:)

I think the reason for this is similar to what pg pointed out, finance is a very information and relationship driven business, the better caliber of friendship you cultivate the more people there are who will give you the first call, or preferential treatment on new issues.

My gut feeling is that personalities are not fixed, and there are feedback cycles in action here. For example, I find it believable that the more successful a person becomes, the less likely they are to feel a bunch of emotions that might cause them to behave unkindly (e.g. desperation, jealousy, and so on).

> But if Ron's angry at you, it's because you did something wrong.

An example of Ron Conway being angry at someone (video at the bottom of the article): http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/09/eruption-over-sf-housing-an...

Disclaimer: I don't know enough about the personalities, politics, finances, or economics involved to have a substantive opinion on the matter under discussion.

This felt similar to me to the academic world. I'm a lowly graduate student, but one thing I've been consistency surprised by is the way the most senior people in the field are often the nicest. Sure—there are assholes everywhere. But when you hear horror stories of a professor mistreating their advisees or writing horrid reviews or submitting trash papers, they are often the junior folk. Partly because this behavior doesn't pass muster in the community, and so people who act this way don't get tenure; partly because senior professors have tenure and thus less to lose by acting nice; and partly because, just as I think in the startup world, being nice actually carries large benefits. In fact, I might argue that recognizing the benefits of niceness—valuing future rewards, trusting other persons—requires intelligence, so that maybe nicer people are in fact more intelligent as well.

But maybe that is Berkson's paradox: I'm more likely to hear about mean or successful researchers, so they appear anti-correlated even if they are in truth independent.

Having dealt with a wide range of great to a-hole scientists, I think you're subtly onto something here.

Great scientists propagate through having a strong lineage. They effectively train, nurture, and then spin out more great scientists. The a-holes drive their progeny away from science. They effectively kill their own future. The great scientists end up promoting and extending their work through their academic children and grandchildren. I've seen both patterns up close and personally.

The big difference with investors is where academic progeny are closely related, usually in one field, investors are challenged by investing in closely aligned companies, given the many conflicts of interest. That's not to say an investor can't have a sector bias. But even companies close to one another are unlikely to benefit from each other.

Quote from Prof. Donald Sadoway

"The point of University professors is to take graduate students and create new professors."

Great barn storming Ted performance, highly recommend just taking 15 mins or so for it.

http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_...

This is a general principle; the meanest people are, as pg once put it, "the nervous middle classes" on a status hierarchy:

"Another reason kids persecute nerds is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks."

"If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes."

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

In this case, though, I would object to this idea of bullying being a bad strategy. I think the general consensus of literature on adolescent bullying in US and US-like countries, including some not, like Japan and China, is that bullies are among the most popular people in the school context.

There are also studies showing that bullies experience protective effects against some psychological issues, such as social anxiety and loneliness.

Also, both bystanders rate bullies as the most popular people, and they also list them as the most desirable people (victims do too, which is very unintuitive).

Also very interesting: bullying behaves like a social position, with people moving in and out as bully one year, but not the next, whereas victimhood is more stable, like an identity, and may persist from school to school and to online social contexts.

Here's what I'd like to know. Since I haven't read a shred of literature on adult workplace bullying, I'm curious to see if bystanders still behave the same way. Because if they do, that means backstabbing, mudslinging, and office politicking are still vibrant strategies, because it's bystanders who bring the rewards of bullying. The people emote to the tyrant emperor their whims regarding an office gladiator.

It has to do with confidence. The nicest scientists are often very old, without anything to prove, and genuinely passionate about their subject.

Hotshots that are mid career have a bimodal distribution - there's some incredibly nice ones, and there are some sharks that enjoy pushing their students to the brink of exhaustion to crank out another paper so they can feel bigger than the person with the office next door.

The meanest people tend to be mean not out of malice or spite, but out of insecurity and a constant need to prove themselves.

If Napoleon was good at judging people, they are driven by 2 things only: greed and fear. The most successful people career wise have to be greed-driven, confident, and mentally strong. The meanest ones are typically fear-driven, insecure and mentally weak. My life lesson is to stay away from those driven too much by fear, who are usually losers in Darwin's game in the long term.

Anyone interested in reading more on this topic should check out Adam Grant's Give and Take.

Incidentally, one of the interesting takeaways from the book is that if you look at plot of people mapped to career success, you'll find that benevolent givers dominate -both- ends of the distribution. The theory goes that those who are in the left tail got there by being too preoccupied with others' needs, to the exclusion of their own success. Conversely those in the right tail got to where they are both by helping others and by consistently asking others to help them. In the latter scenario these folks have harnessed benevolence as a strategy for career growth, and the collective goodwill "out there in the ether" nets out to measurable success over the long-run.

Excellent summary and thank-you for the book recommendation.

The first chapter is conveniently available as a free PDF from the book's site.

It seems like something for those people who are grinding away, doing good work at a great value for their investor/employer/client/customer, but remain underpaid and undervalued; a sort of self-defeating benevolence.

Let me just state that like people with autism I have a mental illness that affects the social part of my brain. It makes it hard to make friends as I lack people and social skills. It gave me an advantage to make me high functioning enough to learn programming at a young age and work with math and science better than average.

I am not a mean person, when people get to know me I am nice. But I have few friends because I lack social and people skills. I cannot seem to emotionally connect with people and what friends I have are also with a high IQ that I connect to intellectually.

When I worked, I worked with some mean people. They found high functioning coworkers of mine and pretended to be their friend and then stabbed them in the back and forced them to quit because they were competition. They took credit for their work and then decided to target me next. Calling me a nerd and geek, making fun of me, bullying and harassing me even with threats of violence trying to force me to quit. I ended up stressed out and developed a mental illness and was forced on disability.

Based on Linkedin those mean people who did all of that still have their jobs. They have social skills and people skills and use it to manipulate people, and then black-stab them and climb the corporate ladder of success. Until they make it to management where they can bully and harass people to do their jobs. All the while keeping their dark side hidden.

If you ever worked for Steve Jobs, you would say he was a jerk, he was abusive to his engineers to get things done just right. He had anger problems too. But he had the social skills and people skills to be well liked. There are a lot of people like Steve Jobs out there.

I'll most likely never work again due to my mental illness, but I am not a mean person, I don't treat people with disrespect, I don't bully and harass them. But due to lacking people and social skills, I'll never have enough friends to become a success.

Sorry about your illness, but I don't understand why it would keep you from ever working again?

After 911 there is a medical background check, once a company learns I am mentally ill I get the rejection letter that says "overqualified" that rejects me.

I had a hard time trying to find work, with a history of being mentally ill on the records and my background. Most people hide it and don't see a doctor and go undiganosed because of the social stigmas of being mentally ill.

I happen to suffer from schizoaffective disorder which is rare less than .05% of the population has it. It is like bipolar and schizophrenia combined.

When I did have a job as soon as they learned I was mentally ill from my communications, I was bullied, harassed, and picked on, and then eventually fired when I had a panic attack from the stress.

I am sure if I found the right company that wouldn't treat me that way or understand mentally ill people and don't let their employees pick on, bully, and harass them.

I used to earn $150K/year as a programmer, but now they say that is too much money to trust to a mentally ill person. In all honesty it was never about the money, I just loved programming and happened to become good at it in Visual BASIC and Active Server Pages, which are 13+ years out of date now. But I still try to keep up and learn.

My wife doesn't want me to relocate, or else I've have worked for Google in 1999, and I might have avoided the stresses I had that made me mentally ill in 2001. So I am sort of stuck in St. Louis MO and what companies there are here to work that don't like mentally ill people working for them. We tend to drive up health care costs for their insurance and when they think of disabled people they think of people in wheelchairs not the mentally ill. They tried to justify firing be by having a software contractor work $100/hr to do my job while I was in a hospital claiming that none of my coworkers could operate at my level of work. This fits the undue hardship clause of the employment law.

I had about three employers do that to me in a row, and my doctor put me on disability because I couldn't get a stable job.

I was usually hired to debug software to get a company to the next level. I optimized ADO recordsets, SQL Server tables and stored procedures, optimized Crystal Reports reports, and fixed broken Visual BASIC code so it wouldn't crash the machine and it runs faster. I also did web development in Active Server Pages using VBScript and HTML and CSS and JavaScript.

But like I said, no company wants to hire me now, and if they did it would only be temporary to use me to get to the next level and then fire me after I got them there. I feel like a third stage rocket booster.

I've heard YC has an internal VC review database (somewhat alluded to in the 2nd footnote). I'm curious, has any consideration been given to making it public or semi-public? Or at least to publish a list of "The X best-rated VCs/seed funds/angels" every once in a while to gamify better behavior?

Exactly my thought. The scatterplot he mentions in Footnote 1 seems uniquely in their wheelhouse.

It is in their wheelhouse, but this information is probably deemed to be part of the "secret sauce" which would be hard for any "information economy" company to part with.

Agreed. That said, I think sharing a "top 50" list would be helpful to the community + encourage good behavior for investors who want to get on the list, but at the same time the full list would be even more valuable and would be proprietary to YC and its alumni.

I thought this was going to be about Ronco, as in Ron Popeil's infomercial products company.

I definitely thought pg had written about the slogan, "Just Set It and Forget It" before clicking through to the post.

"Good does not mean being a pushover. I would not want to face an angry Ronco. But if Ron's angry at you, it's because you did something wrong. Ron is so old school he's Old Testament. He will smite you in his just wrath, but there's no malice in it."

... like when smiting everyone who doesn't work in Tech or agree with him in SF by subverting democracy?

This is an example of where PG has a bias and we part ways.

Keep writing essays about software, and I promise I'll try to learn LISP, PG! ;)

Silly me, I thought this essay was going to be about Ron Popeil (http://www.ronco.com).

Cue the obligatory Weird Al reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BX56syrmWQ

"It slices.."

"It dices..."

"LOOK AT THAT TOMATO!"

"You could even cut a tin can with it, but you wouldn't want to!"

Ah, good childhood memories.

For those who might care but don't know, Lisa Popeil (Ron's half sister) sang backup vocals on that song. Pretty funny.

With apologies to anyone too young to know about Ronco TV commercials ("Now how much would you pay????")

:-D

Me too, I was expecting some kind of Malcolm Gladwell style realization based on some quirky thing Ron Popeil did in his infomercials!

But wait, there's more!

It is no coincidence Ronco is the most coveted Angel in the Valley - he epitomizes integrity. This value is the most desired aspect an entrepreneur will strive for in finding early stage investors. We, especially in the early stages of building our company, need people who will do the right thing.

I remember one example of Ranco's unyielding integrity: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/09/24/angelgate-ron-conway-...

I wonder if pg's view of top investors as 'good' or, maybe more accurately, consistently moral has changed since he has gotten to know more of them personally? Not a charge of corruption or cronyism, but sometimes one has different standards for friends than for people one doesn't know.

Conversely, one might not realize that "famous investor X" is actually a really awesome, caring human until getting to know them in person.

So, I'm trying to see whether this applies to us in academia, whether the "nice-but-no-push-over" types are more successful than the sociopaths. Unfortunately, I can't think of one either in real life or from anecdotes shared with me.

I think it's different when the system isn't run on money, but pride.

EDIT: Actually, I am able to think of one. It is of worth to note that he is pretty clever and a natural born talent and was a child prodigy.

Terrifying thought: what if the causality goes the other way? What if all the bad are bad because "that's just the way the business works" and "hard choices"?

I think working hard also helps with luck. Here's a story. This goes back to the first ever tc discrpt Hackathon. I was a 19-year-old college student then. I used to go to this NYC resister hackerspace in brooklyn.

So we are doing our hack - a bunch of nyc resistor dudes - it's about 10pm. Here comes Ron Conway with Michael Arrington - checking out the hacks. They come to our desk. See the scrapy robot with wires coming out of it. And here Ron hands over a couple of business cards to our fellow hackers.

I was a total noob back then. I was just like these two guys are checking some stuff out. Without knowing who they were.

While other investors would be out enjoying their weekend, Ron was out on a Saturday night meeting hackers. Even after so many big wins he was out in the trenches to source the next big thing.

This article is dumb because it doesn't explain why Ron Conway is so good. Maybe this is written for a silicon valley insider audience that knows what he does that is so great. It feels like pg's writing was more interesting when he was the outsider taking on the status quo.

Part of it is that he has his fingers in every pie, and a contact list that contains pretty much "everyone" that matters in tech in SV, and he's not shy about using it to help connect people to make things happen.

Part of it is that he is very good at coming across as likeable, and charming. I would hope that is representative of how he is, but I've only met him once, briefly (as he had a tiny amount invested in a company I was involved with) so for me I'm going by first impressions and reputation.

Basically he's done favours for a massive amount of people in SV (by pulling strings and connecting people, and making a massive amount of small-ish investments) and been nice and charming enough that most of those people, and many more who know him by reputation, would drop whatever they're doing pretty much instantly if he called to ask for a favour partly because he comes across as a nice, likeable guy that you'd like to help out, and partly because they know by reputation that he's likely to return the favour if/when you need it, and the odds are it will be well worthwhile for you.

> If you can't tell who to be nice to, you have to be nice to everyone.

This (more or less) works the opposite way, too. Taking an example I know about, in Brazil, you can't often tell who is going to try to take advantage of you (in business) but enough people have tried in your past that you come to the conclusion that everyone will at least try in the future, and therefore you act accordingly.

It's really frustrating to have to treat people with your guard up when signing a contract or talking through specifics during a deal, but you learn to recognize advantage-takers and even to pretend you are one, too. In doing so, the other person will recognize they can't pull the wool over your eyes either, which puts you both on a 'level' playing field.

This isn't just something I've experienced but also something I've been told by many others in Brazil. There's even a 'law' about it, called Gérson's Law [1], which essentially states "if there's an opportunity to take advantage, go for it".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rson%27s_law

I think, even though it's a bit sad, the assumption that mean people won't be successful, is incorrect.

For the assumption that success is correlated with how kind someone is, there are just too many examples of previous and current startups/CEOs that are/were hugely successful. Actually, my impression is that there are very few of those, who I'd consider genuinely good people that I would really trust.

The thing is, you can be a really good person or you can be an a-hole, you will enter an industry or create a startup that will fit your personality and then it just comes down to IQ and persistence of how successful you will become. This way, a bad/nasty person can create a startup or make money just as much as a really kind person can. In other words, you can create a huge startup either way, the valuations would be the same, irrespective if you are a good person or not.

However, the startups would also be completely different in nature. The nasty startup would be always fighting, receive bad press and its employees would be led by fear. The good startup would be awesome, change an entire industry for the good and its employees don't work for the money, but because they are inspired by its mission and by its CEO.

Both startups would be huge and probably end up having the same valuation, just that their nature is different.

For that reason, as a founder you need to ask yourself what kind of founder you want to be. You can be nasty or you can be kind and awesome. It "doesn't matter" what side you choose, you will be equally successful either way.

However, you need to understand the implications and if you want to be a person that makes people worries or the person that inspires people and creates good in the world.

You can be good or bad, you'll still be successful, however, after you have built the startup, 10 years after you have sold it even, it's the way of how you did it that counts.

I must say, Paul Graham is a really good writer. His posts are very eloquent and convey interesting ideas without extraneous fluff. Too often people credit famous individuals with talents they don't actually deserve, but in this case the quality stands independent of the fame.

The problem with this as a strategy, and problem is a strong word, is that it is insanely hard to replicate.

I can happily not steal money or diamonds all day long, I can always not persuade a founder to sell me his stock for pennies because deep down being dishonest is not how Mrs Brian raised her children.

But not dishonest is different from good. Good is active - not bad is passive. I know people who have righteous anger on their side - they actually find dishonesty offensive, something in need of fixing. Conway sounds like that - someone who goes past not being bad and over to trying to fix a world gone wrong.

Good is a hard balance - you need to know right from wrong, and believe that if you confront wrong, the world has your back.

Scary

Like I said, hard strategy to follow.

This Ronco Principal, as Paul describes it, reminds me of a vision for a world in whereby the contract of a business deal is second to the word of your partners & colleagues. Where honor, trust and values trump contracts, laws and lawyers.

Why? Not only is this hypothetical business world a more natural and less expensive place to do business, but another advantage is that un-invited third parties can't easily interfere with your deals.

Some might say that defining terms on paper creates a record that can be used against you.

Shaking hands and trusting in your partners that they will follow through on their word - that type of deal is more difficult for the state to compromise, exploit, or create laws against.

Interesting thoughts. The basic idea, it seems, is that people help out those who they like, and people generally like good people. So, it would seem that the amount a person benefits from being a good person is directly related to how much they depend upon relationships with other people. In the VC world, which is massively relationship driven at the moment, I could see how being a likable person would be extremely beneficial. But perhaps, then, the Ronco principle isn't that good people succeed, but that likable people succeed.

I view this in the light of the Prisoner's Dilemma.

In a one player game, it pays to be nasty. It only pays to be nice in an ongoing game.

Ron Conway seems to have been playing the ongoing game long before increased transparency made it fashionable, and has reaped the benefits of it. I have never met him, but he seems to be the one guy people universally acclaim for support, integrity and doing the right things. It's easy to see why he's Call #1 for folks seeking an angel, and he's the call who entrepreneurs take.

[1] I'm not saying that if you sort investors by benevolence you've also sorted them by returns, but rather that if you do a scatterplot with benevolence on the x axis and returns on the y, you'd see a clear upward trend.

[2] Y Combinator in particular, because it aggregates data from so many startups, has a pretty comprehensive view of investor behavior.

Why can't YC, of all firms, publish this scatterplot? Wouldn't it hold people accountable in a way that nothing else would?

First, because there's no objective measure of benevolence, and second, because ranking VC's on a spectrum of benevolence vs. malevolence would strain the relationship between YC and these VC firms. You get a lot more traction making general statements like pg does here than you do by calling out individual firms.

Asking YC companies to crowdsource benevolence is hardly earth shattering. I'd be surprised if they don't already. The difference is offering this guide as a public resource. The risk is that firms could still treat YC companies well then treat others less well, but as pg notes, this type of duplicity is hardly worth the trouble.

It just seems like a distraction. YC probably has more important things to do than becoming the US News and World Report of venture capital.

What exactly would be the point? No two people would agree on the measure of benevolence.

Even if they anonymized the subjects you'd be able to reverse engineer the outliers.

Because it would be just as handwaved as the article.

I was really hoping this was about Ronco, Ron Popeli, or something related to that business. It's too bad because Ronco is an interesting business story in its own right.

I am amazed it is OK to say "the CIA saved American lives" as opposed to "the CIA saved lives". Are American lives worth more than non-US citizens' lives? Would it be permissible for 9/11 to happen if the only people who died were undocumented immigrants? What a shitty person and what a shitty attitude! I guess Paul Graham is a shitty person if he associates with shitty people like Ronco.

"I'm not saying that if you sort investors by benevolence you've also sorted them by returns, but rather that if you do a scatterplot with benevolence on the x axis and returns on the y, you'd see a clear upward trend." PG/YC, have you tested this hypothesis? Precision would be difficult, but a back of the envelope attempt could be interesting and perhaps reveal unexpected correlations.

Reminds me of The Evolution of Cooperation, sounds like Ron is a nice strategy with a solid retaliation response... How is he with forgiveness?

I think the Beatles had this principle down when they sang "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." Clearly, they had to make it fit a lyric, but I think the idea is very similar.

Sometimes when I hear stories of mean people getting ahead I wonder how accurate the sentiment could be. Its good to see a case where doing good over time results in success.

A book about the related, long-term trend of decrease violence explained with different angels:

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

(Religious extremists, totalitarian regimes notwithstanding.)

The world of business has a reputation for being full of assholes, yet perhaps the most successful businessman of all is Warren Buffett, who seems like a genuinely nice guy. It seems that acting with honesty and integrity pays excellent returns in the long run.

> "there is a clear trend among them: the most successful investors are also the most upstanding."

This is also true in many aspects in life. Good people are rewarded, not always, but more often than not deserving people are successful and happy.

I see transparency in markets and governments as a "movement" in the making. My hunch is the next 10-20 years will be very interesting in this regard.

Is being nice a choice? I don't think so, it should be the default. But if I need money for my startup I would definitely go with the nicest investor.

More generalized, compassion and integrity seem to be in a positive feedback loop with drivers of technological and economic growth.

TLDR:

The Ronco Principle: In a sufficiently connected and unpredictable world, you can't seem good without being good.

A bit surprised article with so little "content" gets so many upvotes.

Yes Mr Graham, many people are just "nice". It is weird that you sound so surprised. Perhaps it would be worth moving out of the money circles. Unfortunately, in my experience there is a correlation between those who are genuinely nice, and the people who are wealthy. Afraid to say, the correlation is negative. Ronco must be very nice indeed.

> If you can't tell who to be nice to, you have to be nice to everyone. And probably the only people who can manage that are the people who are genuinely good.

No, being nice to everyone is not being nice. It's being a liar. Nobody likes everyone (though there are many kind souls - few in positions of power - who try hard). The only people who are (superficially) nice to everyone are the ones who are in it for themselves. And that's not nice.

> In a sufficiently connected and unpredictable world, you can't seem good without being good.

Sometimes might be surprised on this point!

Some people in some relatively small, conservative, apparently highly ethical, responsible, competent, serious, and hard working communities manage totally to pull the wool over the eyes of just about everyone else, including the members of their own families. They can look totally like a sweet, angelic church lady while, actually, plotting against others and slowly but effectively sabotaging them.

How? One way is to be a very talented, determined, bright, mentally energetic actor/actress. The act can take a lot of mental energy to negotiate all the daily events and situations while keeping the act totally believable while actually it is totally false.

There's more on such things in the now famous E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

Sorry, PG, there's a fundamental problem here: As in some recent research (wish I'd kept the reference), already in the crib, the girls are thinking about people and the boys, things. While the boy is trying to hack the latch on the crib and install Linux in the toy firetruck on the floor, the girl is trying to elicit protection and care taking from adults, especially her father.

"If a girl is smart, she doesn't have to have brains." and can get others, especially Daddy, to do things for her. A boy might work and work and work, say, to get his iPhone synchronized with his MacBook while his sister can get it done with just one frown and one tear, and often don't need the tear.

A girl can be really good at it, by age four have Daddy totally wrapped around her little finger and manipulated so that he can never tell her no. And, in later years, she can get much better, much, much better at it.

They can be highly talented and very mentally energetic and seem to be sweet, darling, adorable, precious angels while they are actually determined, selfish, even dangerous, masterly manipulators.

Never ask a nerd male to evaluate the real, inner thoughts or intentions of a masterly female -- he just doesn't have the basic qualifications for the job!

You just learned this lesson here for $0 tuition. I paid full tuition, and you don't want to do that; trust me this time! Uh, there are no college loans nearly big enough to cover the tuition I paid.

For Ron Conway, I can't forget his short advice to entrepreneurs in the Sam Altman course at Stanford last fall -- "bootstrap". Okay, message received loud and clear!

I do believe that PG can evaluate Ronco; good to know I can take Ronco's advice seriously!

I agree about the general position that girls are more socially focused, but you put a sad and cynical twist to it...

Not all girls are as "sad and cynical" as I described.

But the statement I was responding to was

> In a sufficiently connected and unpredictable world, you can't seem good without being good.

So, this statement seems to claim to apply broadly. So, I just said essentially that the statement claims too much, that, for some counterexamples, there are people with behavior that contradicts the claim, e.g., some females, say, adults, using some of what they learned as children, starting even in the crib.

I didn't claim, and don't believe, that the behavior I described, say, that you are describing, appropriately, as "sad and cynical", is common among either males or females. But to counter PG's quite broad claim, I just need some, say, counterexamples; I've seen too many of them.

More generally, from some of what I saw. in a very "connected world", some of the complexity of Presentation of Self in Everyday Life can be just astoundingly involved and complicated -- some very bright, determined people work really hard at such presentation.

I would add, a very "connected world" can lead to more complexity, posturing, manipulation, difference between reality and presentation, etc. than a less connected world. E.g., a person from such a more connected world can feel much better, and act much more like themselves, posture, pretend, and manipulate less, in a big city where they have some anonymity. Presentation in a "connected world" can be one heck of a lot of hard mental work!

Love this. Viva Ron Conway!

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