Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelochurch | Hacker News Reader

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The only "nasty allegation" toward a "specific person" was that Lucas Duplan is a sociopath. And if you wish to call that choice of wording out specifically, fine. Neither the chicken-hawk nor I would know enough about him to make any valid psychiatric judgment.

I can say: from the way he runs his business, he seems like a psychopath. (That's not hard proof, but more than "a shred of evidence.") I can only make a superficial impression, because that's all I see: his actions, not his psychological state. But his appeal to a chicken-hawk is also based seeming like a sociopath. So perhaps I should replace "chicken-hawks seek young sociopaths in order to live vicariously through them" with "chicken-hawks seek young people who seem like sociopaths in order to live vicariously through them", but I thought it was already implied that an investor-level chicken-hawk is not qualified to diagnose psychopathy per se and therefore is, quite obviously, making such determinations based on impressions rather than (illegible, at that level) facts of psychological state. I thought that this was so obvious that I didn't have to say it.

My assertions about the motivations for funding him are not directed at "specific people" since I have not named specific backers, and have neither the intention nor the requisite fine-grained knowledge to do so. However, as a general explanation for why people like him get funded, chicken-hawking is very often correct. I know it, you know it, and as long as I'm not calling out investors by name and saying "I'm 100% sure that this is what's happening in this exact case", I don't see any harm in drawing attention to the fact that it exists and is pervasive, and that, while I don't have the fine-grained knowledge that would be required to call out specific investors by name, I can be over 99.99% sure that it was a dominant contributor to his rise in Silicon Valley.

As your claims get more and more lurid, they get less and less persuasive. This chicken-hawk sociopathy stuff may be fun to write, but it isn't doing you or the site any favors.

Your use of psychiatric language is annoying. Especially because, as you admit, you don't know what you're talking about.

You seem to think it's acceptable to call someone a psychopath because of the way you perceive their behaviour.

It is not.

You clearly mean to use the term psychopath as an insult, and as dang has repeatedly told you personal insults are not allowed. But I don't care what you say about some rich guy. I do care how your lazy, careless, ignorant use of psychiatric language perpetuates stigma against a wide range of disenfranchised powerless people.

I don't think that psychopathy is necessarily a mental illness. I would never encourage harassment or stigma toward people with biological mental illness.

Psychiatry is still trying to understand why some people are bad. Psychopathy is some attempt at a post facto analysis. Personally, I'm not convinced that a biological "bad person" gene or experience pattern exists. I think that free will exists and that some people (some with mental illness, most without, and those we call "psychopaths" being typically in the latter category) are just rotten.

> I do care how your lazy, careless, ignorant use of psychiatric language perpetuates stigma against a wide range of disenfranchised powerless people.

This does not seem fair. We're talking about people like Zuck and Spiegel who actually are screwing up people, who literally joke about peeing on women and literally brag about violating people's privacy purposely. We're talking about founders of companies whose primary means of income is duping people by advertising. Calling them psychopaths is not unfair by any stretch of the word. Personally I'm not a fan of michaelochurch's wild outbursts either, but it's clear he isn't the one attacking powerless people, the situation is actually quite the opposite of that.

> Calling [founders of advertising businesses] psychopaths is not unfair by any stretch of the word

That's beyond unfair; it's absurd. But yes, of course calling individuals psychopaths with no substantive basis is a personal attack, and a nasty one. Many people enjoy that kind of thing. Many also enjoy the Jerry Springer Show. It doesn't belong on Hacker News. This is not a borderline call!

More generally: the problem with the comments we're objecting isn't that they're untrue. The odds of this type of thinking arriving at truth don't seem high, but I don't know, and neither do the commenters. The stuff isn't verifiable. What is verifiable is that the signal/noise ratio is low. Why? Because the excitement of indignation is noise, and when you take that out, and take out persuasive-sounding but empty rhetoric, there's nothing or almost nothing left.

I have no problem with critiques of VC as such and have made my own share of digs against suits. But shrill, vacuous rhetoric is outside what the HN guidelines call for, regardless of what it advocates. Repeating it often and loudly doesn't change that.

> That's beyond unfair; it's absurd. But yes, of course calling individuals psychopaths with no substantive basis is a personal attack, and a nasty one

I personally think monetizing via advertising is unethical, but I'll concede on this point. I realize I'm in the minority here so I accept that by currently ruling norms advertising is not a psychopathic activity.

> I'd say the odds of this type of thinking arriving at truth aren't high, but I don't know, and neither do the commenters. The stuff simply isn't verifiable.

Here, I strongly disagree. This stuff is very verifiable... by just going to news outlets (prestigious, established outlets, not just blogs) which have verified documentation of chats in which Zuck calls users of his site "dumb fucks" for having trusted him with private photos, SSNs, etc. We have documented proof of Evan persuading drunk women to perform sexual favors for his friends (no, it's not referring a friend to a friend, it's not innocently hooking up a date, it's getting drunk women to "give blowjobs" to his friends), in chats he is describing peeing on women, doing cocaine, about installing strip poles in places he owns, etc. This is documented in places like NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/magazine/whats-really-at-s...

What's more, Spiegel himself admitted this, Zuck similarly has recognized the chats to be true (not that such proof was needed -- it was validated by prominent journalists independently).

These folks need to be called out. At present we see a pattern of young brash founders who are misogynistic and disrespectful getting their way. Per the persistence of the patterns this kind of behavior is becoming normalized as being okay in society's eyes, one way to stop this is to do anything we can to stigmatize the non-consensual peeing on women, the violation of people's privacy, etc. It's by saying it's bad. Otherwise, what would-be entrepreneurs are internalizing is they can get away with this, that hustling in this way is just part of the game, that it doesn't matter that you're living life without recognizing others' dignity.

Bringing up Zuckerberg calling his users "dumb fucks" is so, so, sooo weak. Remind me never to make any self-deprecating comments around you.

But yes, of course calling individuals psychopaths with no substantive basis is a personal attack, and a nasty one. Many people enjoy that kind of thing. Many also enjoy the Jerry Springer Show. It doesn't belong on Hacker News. This is not a borderline call!

I had substantive basis: the history of how he ran his business is fairly public.

You have every right not to like what I say. You have every right to say that you don't like what I say. But your high horse posturing is tedious, counter-productive, and, because you are HN's moderator, it does more damage to this place than I ever could.

You see behaviour that you don't like and don't understand and your instinct is to ascribe that to mental illness / neuro-atypicality, rather than just call an asshole an asshole.

So, all those people who do have mental illness / neuro-atypicality now have to cope with the stigma of people thinking that their diagnosis means they are violent or assholes or whatever.

That's a good point, thanks for bringing this up. From now on I will think of Evan as an asshole rather than a psychopath.

Don't sweat the down votes. You're describing real things.

A lot of people are still in denial about the fact that our industry has become populated in recent years by the sorts of high-powered uber-alpha sociopaths that dominate finance.

Only 20 years ago -- maybe less -- computing still had a "hobbyist and hacker" feel. People were making money, sure, but it wasn't a place where people go to become instant millionaires or billionaires. Finance and high corporate MBA stuff was where you went to do that.

Now that's changed. An app can make a fortune, quite literally. So now our industry is attracting an increasing number of "wolf of Wall St." types.

Nerds and old school hackers just don't know how to deal with this personality type, and many deny its existence outright. It's tough to even describe to someone who hasn't encountered it in its natural habitat. I also think people deny its existence because they want to believe in a rational, meritocratic world, not an irrational emotionally-driven shitshow like the real world we actually live in.

It's really nasty because our industry is not hardened against this stuff. In a way, those folks are less destructive in finance because the financial scene expects, understands, and knows how to deal with them. Your typical mildly Aspergers-ey nerd is fresh meat, and our industry's institutions aren't "psychopath-hardened" either.

I've been in a good number of VC pitches and have met many. They are not all bad people by any means, nor do they tend to be dumb. A few of them are "wolf of Wall St." types, but the negative dynamic I see more often is someone who wants to be this type but really isn't. This leads to what you humorously call "chicken hawking," and also to cases where VC types can themselves be taken for a ride by these predators. When you encounter a true high-powered psychopath, it's really dangerous not to treat them like a rabid mountain lion. Any affinity you might have, or naivete, or desire to live vicariously in some way through them is something they can "use."

I actually don't blame people too terribly much for sort of wanting to be one of these predators... our culture glorifies it. How many movies do we have about the happy go lucky cop who blows people away and makes jokes, or the glamorous con man who pulls off the big heist, or the endearing mobster? In reality these sorts of people would all be monsters. There's no glamour, no romance, just ugliness and destruction.

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