The Competition Myth
intercollegiatereview.com
intercollegiatereview.com
"God does not exist”...is untrue
If you’re questioning Darwinism...you will get in trouble
Seriously? I am disappointed.
And about “God does not exist”. Strictly speaking it's untrue because we don't have any definition what “God” term means. So we cannot tell anything about this statement, it's neither true nor false.
> The reason it is hard to answer in the interview context is that the correct answer is one that the person asking the question is unlikely to agree with.
The question is personal. There's no wrong way to answer it yet we proceed as though there are only a few right answers. How does that happen? Well, what might happen if I were to give an answer that sounded like a creationists answer? You might be disappointed, associate my thinking with Kary Mullis, and call into question my intelligence as a whole. Conformity in this case gives me a more favorable option as I can answer your question in a way that has a high probability of being well received at the expense of an honest existence.
Thoughts?
I'm perfectly willing to grant him climate change - climate is very complicated and despite present scientific consensus, it is very possible that future discoveries will turn our understanding of the subject upside down. On the other hand, the theory of natural selection is firmly established by evidence (by experiment, even!) and any future corrections will come as Einstein's relativity came to Newton's mechanics - refinement not invalidation. To believe otherwise puts you on the same rational footing as HIV denialists, 9/11 truthers, birthers, and alien abductees.
It's not enough to be an iconoclast, you need to be an iconoclast with good critical thinking skills.
Crazy ideas do not make me uncomfortable. Crazy people make me uncomfortable because you never know when god/the prophet/the voices/etc are going to say "kill all the green eyed ones".
When people praise competition they are praising the conditions under which all people are able to complete for the same market ex ante. If one company develops a technology that renders others unable to compete, then they become a monopolist ex post. But it is the ex ante competition that allowed then to enter that market in the first place
Err, successful companies avoid competition avoid competitions in lots of other ways than "Being so much better than [their] opponents that [they] beat then easily".
Those range from:
1) buying out any startup that might threaten them in the long run
2) buyout out political influnce and having laws passed that stiffle competition
3) bullying their customers or suppliers (e.g. Microsoft making specific demands from OEM vendors in the nineties, "or else...")
to...
4) downright murdering business rivals in less fortunate countries (Latin America, Balkans, etc).
Yeah, just not in the traditional "free market" economic view of competition narration.
Instead in a "harmful for honest businessmen, jungle law" way.
>I argue that great companies succeed not by competing with everybody else but by differentiating themselves—by becoming so good at what they do that no other firm can offer a close substitute.
I wasn't addressing people who complain about things like yor points (1) to (4), I was addressing Peter Thiel's argument.
"If you’re questioning Darwinism or climate change, you will get in trouble."
kthxbye..
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/10/21/paypal-co-founder...
Questioning the theory of evolution (hint, it's not an -ism because it's not an ideological position, unless we're talking about the widely discredited concept of 'social darwinism') or the data on climate change is perfectly fine, but if you'd rather sling rumor and innuendo instead of backing up your claims with evidence then don't be surprised when people think you're a crank.
[1] http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape..., full study at http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape...
That being said, he doesn't really push anything new here - we've seen plenty of anti-college rhetoric, and the anti-competition theme strikes me as contradictory to his person (even today). Willfulness, deliberation - all the qualities that make even a 'heterodox' person successful all come from some innate obsession which can really be cast as a sort of personal competition. One doesn't create something for nothing - even if the end goal is to have created the thing, or to have done it for it's own sake - even this desire is born out of some inner need that can be cast as competition. I think what Peter and a lot of other leaders in the valley are pushing these days is the ability to be cautiously obsessive. What he calls anti-competition and anti-conformity is really just the ability to stick to one's vision despite initial signals and hardships that from the world that might make the greedily-optimizing man cast his die on a table where the odds appear better.
The whole essay reads as though the author's in his personal bubble, with the walls painted with his fantasy world. One such example is his belief that startup founders are basically Aspergers and can't hold a social connection - and yes, he uses the weasel word 'many' rather than 'most/all', but clearly he thinks that it's common enough to be an 'indictment on society'.
Then he finished up with silly libertarian extremism; hand-wringing over why it's harder to develop pharmaceuticals (where a bad product can kill people or leave them in lifelong pain) over a video game company (where a bad product takes a few dollars out of your pocket and bores you for an hour), because "ebil gummint regulations".
and concluding that current FDA policies are even remotely close to optimal.
HOLY FUCK, what a MASSIVE rephrasing of what I said. You're going to need Mjolnir to force those words into my mouth. Where the fuck did I say the FDA system was optimal? I said comparing pharmaceuticals to video games and demanding that they have the same level of regulation is stupid.
It's clear you have zero idea of what happens when pharmaceuticals go bad; anyone that talks of bad drugs only in terms of dead people really, really needs to educate themselves on the topic. The idea of doing that study you demand is nonsensical. I'm also not sure of why I'm the one who has to present it; if you want to change the status quo, you need to find your own references.
And if you did actually know anything about pharma, you'd know that 'wonder drugs' pop up all the time, only to have crippling side effects found later in testing - sometimes the 'wonder drug' actually turns out to be horrific (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_withdrawn_drugs has a few - and this is for released drugs). The problem is that "the feds won't release wonder drug X" is a better headline than "unreleased drug X has horrible side-effects, but they were found before the drug was okayed".
It's also worth mentioning that pharma started out with 'video game' levels of regulation, and it was the life-altering errors that brought in regulation.
TL;DR The FDA process may not be optimal, but they're a shitload better than no regulation.
Not only do we help our family, tribe, but we extend that to animals.
When hunting, we feel a kind of sadness when taking the shot which downs the prey. Most hunter-gatherers then give a short prayer and thank the prey.
I wonder is there any connection between pray and prey?
Instead, he argues that historically and in societies around the world, we didn't fundamentally 'trade' in this way, but rather we 'gave things' and 'got things in return' in the same way we exchange things with friends and family ('tribe?'). The basis was cooperation, not cold exchange. The same goes for democracy. Instead of majority rule, most(?) societies operated through consensus models, with majority vote as an undesirable last resort.
I don't know enough about the topic to agree or disagree strongly, but having lived in a more 'traditional' society for much of my life, it does seem that many of the problems in my current society (Holland) are a direct result of the 'transactional' model. The interconnectedness and gift-based economics I experienced in that society had many advantages, and the lack of this here is, in my opinion, a primary cause for loneliness, alienation, lack of cross-class interaction, and resulting increase in individualism and self-centeredness.
It's also interesting to me to see that my younger friends are much more interested in communal living and similar sharing initiatives, engage much more with the 'informal economy', and generally speaking dislike consumerism. In part they have no choice, but in part they seem quite happy with the results (despite difficulties finding jobs and getting a 'normal' career going).
You wouldnt survive a week or two if you had to compete with other animals and other humans.
Humans are the way we are because of co-operation rather than competition.
Humans are group living animals, we do not compete within the group or outside of the group - we co-operate so everyone, the group, can survive.
Humans are the way we are because we figure out a way to cheat.
Id like to see you go onto a wild horse with a spear or stick.
> Look at you, your legs, your nose, your fleshy hands, exposed ears ands eyes, soft belly. All soft targets, easily killed, unlike a snake, rhineceros or any animal with at least claws or fangs.
Right. Which is why we have complex language and hands capable of fine motor skills and an innate ability to band together in groups to fight off everything else.
Humans doubled down on the "big complex brain" strategy, then doubled again, then kept doubling until we were making marks to keep track of who owned how many cattle. It was a very short step, evolutionarily speaking, from that to the smallpox vaccine, Neil Armstrong, and the Eroica symphony. It was hardly a step at all, in fact.
Our brains were so successful that we didn't die of not having claws, fangs, or the ability to reliably have multiple offspring at once. In fact, human heads are pushing up on the size limits of what women can safely push out of the birth canal without endangering either mother or child.
In our way, our competitive strategy is just as specialized as a poison dart frog's: Whereas the frog is too toxic to eat, we're too smart to take down.
The fact a lot of our smarts comes down to the ability to cooperate within the species does not negate the fact we're competing with other species. Not so much now, perhaps, but I'd consider our competition with the polio virus to be rather heated. (Fairly one-sided, but heated.)
You're not so smart so you cant be taken down by yourself, your brain doesnt protect you from claws and fangs. Only as a cooperative group are we strong. Not when competing, but when cooperating.
Our brain is the cooperation centre. It has this capacity to feel with others, be it animals or humans.
Cooperating to do what? To compete against other species and groups of humans!
To answer your question; no, not to compete, but to find the answer to the meaning of all life and explore every corner and creek of this common planet, and together, to enjoy that.
Oh and good luck exploring the world if your species goes extinct because it got outcompeted.
When humans co-operate they become super apex predators, but even alone, unarmed, they are formidable.
Also, allowed humans to hold out in all sorts of climate zones of the world.
Do things succeed because they adapt correctly over a given time frame or do they succeed because the adapt correctly over a given time instance. The evaluation of whether competition successfully denotes success is limited to the scope of variables that the competition tests. If those variables cease to be indicative of success, then we have a lot of stuff that appears like it won the war, when in actuality it only won a very small subset of selective battles, much of what we only arbitrarily correlate to success (because without reproducing the conditions exactly, the data and information we can derive about the past is limited and/or subject to malleability).
We've evolved this far because we did. It's survivor bias.
It is entirely likely that there exist good things that are adapted for everything they purport to be, aside from competitive environments. If competition is eliminated, we can at least begin to separate the variables that are a function of the competitive process, and the variables that denote skill.
It is not necessary that we leave the survival of culture and ideas up to the same primitive mechanisms that determine whether a fish with smaller gills reproduces in a shallow pool rather than a deeper one - and make the inference that because it does survive, that it was because of the depth of the pool, and not because of the lack of sharks. Just because it has worked so far does not mean it will continue to work. Competition can cause emotions to control direction rather than objectivity over the data as it exists. When people want to win just because they want to win, .. Then competition becomes a measurement of competition, and not of the things it purports to select for.
Competition is a very real, and very lucrative phenomenon.
A famous & classic counter-example of how being more competitive than your peers wins out is Toyota.
Toyota won out in the 80s and 90s because their cars were priced more competitively, and were of a higher quality. They didn't make fundamentally different products, they just did it better.
One company practically euthanised both the US and the UK's car manufacturing industry, by producing the same product better.
Similarly, Google did web search, just like Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, Yahoo! They became dominant by doing it better -- by offering better results, faster, and therefore out-competing their peers.
For yet another example, take Apple's return to fame. They did it by taking the portable music player, something ostensibly already done by Sony and Creative, and making it significantly better than their competitors. They also sold an image to go with it, but competing on terms of marketing could be considered a valid competition strategy.
Consider Tesla; although the story isn't played out yet, Tesla is looking strong. Not because they provide electric cars (though that helps), but because the cars they provide are more economical, comfortable, safe, and so on.
Ironically, one of Theil's own businesses is a counter-example to his own claim: PayPal. We could already get money from one person to another, or from ourselves to merchants. PayPal just did it better, and therefore out-competed the banks for consumer and SME money transfers.
Time and again, businesses win, not by being the first in the field; but by looking at an existing field critically, and considering how to improve it. They then enter the field and out-compete the incumbents, beating them at their own game.
So it's not about being first, it's about being so good that you become a de-facto monopoly.
As seen done by Amazon, Google, Apple and other large companies. Competition is awesome, but unfortunately someone "winning" the race can quickly lead to them controling enough of the market to prevent good competition from forming.
Same for maps, free access to very satisfying service, not inventend at Google. Personally that's what made me love Google, they turned my computer into something more than office/game/medias, for "free".
It also ignores the companies that became monopolies with inferior technology - not least, IBM with the original PC, which was a dated and inefficient design even when it was introduced, but succeeded because of marketing and a ready-made sales force.
Likewise, arguably, for MS DOS and Windows. Windows 3.1 was about seven years behind the leading edge of personal computing when it shipped.
Home users had been buying computers with full multitasking and (relatively, for the time) excellent graphics and sound from around 1988. Win 3.1 was a big step back from that.
It succeeded because it was a PC product, and it could be sold to millions of technically uneducated PC buyers.
Mediocre product in absolute terms. But a huge market surface.
Even Google search could be improved. It's good enough, but it's not the last word in what's possible in search. (I don't remember it being a whole lot better than AltaVista. It wasn't worse either, so there was no big reason to swap back.)
You don't make a monopoly with bleeding edge tech. You make it by finding or carving a niche with a huge potential customer base, and having significantly more effective marketing.
The product itself can be mediocre. It's perception that matters.
Which is why I don't think Tesla will ever be a monopoly. The niche is too small - much smaller than the rest of the car market - and the big players have marketing experience and a dealer network that Tesla doesn't.
And Google will carry on dominating search until 'search' becomes a legacy product and leaves an opening for a smart startup.
This essay feels like Peter needs to step out and speak with real people who don't have a bank account to fall back on.
More interesting question, in a post-scarcity society where everyone has their basic needs met, how does this effect conformity?
I agree with the rest though. Progress requires chaotic element of "thinking out of the box".
"Whatever you think of the morality of nuclear weapons, building an atomic bomb is a far harder undertaking than building a website."
I disagree, Mr. Thiel. In building an atom bomb you have the laws of nature as a guide. Those laws are fixed ahead of time and do not change through the project. When you are doing something wrong, there is exactly one ultimate authority which will tell you so unequivocally. That kind of absolute feedback has value.
On the other hand, making a web site? No one knows what it should look like ahead of time because it doesn't exist yet. The managers also don't know, and the feedback they give about the project along the way will be either intentionally or unintentionally misleading, misinformed, and wrong. They may be trying to spare someone's feelings by giving some positive feedback. Nature doesn't have those kinds of problems with perpetuating false information.
The plutonium bomb required creating a sphere that would implode uniformly enough to trigger the reaction; this was significantly more complicated, but again a fairly bounded problem, probably the most significant challenge being the lack of cheap and available computing power to run the numbers.
The point is that the science was already almost completely known, the Manhattan project was primarily an engineering challenge. We are nowhere near that stage of maturity in software development yet.
My initial statement could have more simply stated that Mr. Thiel's statement contains a false analogy fallacy. Building an atomic bomb is not comparable to building a complex website for the simple reason that success of the bomb is decided by the forces of nature, which are absolute, whereas the success of a website is determined in part by the responses of humans, who act irrationally and are subject to various whims.