I cannot fathom how Sam Altman thought that it would be a good idea to be a source for this article, let alone provide the specific quotes that he did. How does YC benefit from this? How does public policy benefit from it? "The Silicon Valley President in every way except the ideology is flipped"? "He did everything we tell our startups to do"?
You're the CEO of Y Combinator. When you tell a New York Times reporter that Donald Trump is "the Silicon Valley President", you're speaking for all of YC --- even if you don't want to be. What the hell is the matter with you?
Why shouldn't he be a source for it?
His comments on Trump were insightful and very far from an endorsement. Vilifying everyone tangentially associated with Trump failed spectacularly during the election. At this point it's just beating a dead horse without any particular goal in sight.
Sama realizes full well that he's speaking for all of YC, as a YC founder I'm glad he is. I agree with him here.
They were more than normalizing. They were suggesting that the single most frightening thing about the Trump administration --- which is not that they're Republicans, but that they're crazy --- is, to the extent it's true, actually an asset.
I worry about digging too far into this because it's just going to generate a political debate. I just want to be clear about why I think this article and Sam's decision about how to participate in it is so alarming.
I am less disturbed by Trump's Republican supporters, at least the level-headed ones. At least they believe what they're saying. I am far more disturbed by someone who claims to be in the opposition but rather than publicly opposing continues to give every sign of being in fact a quiet supporter of the administration. Why should I have to worry that that's true? What was the upside for YC here?
Silicon Valley has for a long time lauded "crazy" ones. Andy Grove's book is titled "Only the paranoid survive." Steve Jobs's first Think Different commercial was "Here's to the crazy ones". YCombinator has stated on several occasions that they're looking for "extreme" personalities who "see the world differently", a16z says explicitly to "hire for strength rather than lack of weakness", and Chris Sacca loves to parade out Travis Kalanick's Wii tennis story and talk about how he's not a normal person.
The reason for this is because "crazy" is usually an appellation that the rest of society sticks on you for being "not normal". Silicon Valley is looking for the crazy person whose "normal" will become the normal for the rest of the world. You can't change the world if you think the world is already pretty good as-is.
My concern about Trump (and his few Silicon Valley supporters) is that they're applying ideas outside of the domain where they're sound. Most crazy people are, in fact, crazy, and not great visionaries who will bring the world to a higher level of being. A crazy startup founder will at most hurt himself and his investors if he's completely detached from reality; he requires the consent of his customers to do anything significant. A crazy POTUS could literally destroy humanity, so the stakes are a little bit higher.
I think we are in rather violent agreement substantively here, and quibbling over details, but:
> I am far more disturbed by someone who claims to be in the opposition but rather than publicly opposing continues to give every sign of being in fact a quiet supporter of the administration.
Taking the quote at face value, Altman seems to endorsing Trump's approach to governing but not the ideological goals it is directed at; this isn't supporting Trump but in some ways it might be seen as worse—the usual anti-Trump message that unites liberal, moderate, and the notable conservative voices skeptical of the regime is that normal political ideological questions aside, Trump's approach is a danger to the viability of American democracy (obviously, as you move roughly toward the left, that process critique is leavened with increasing opposition to policy goals of the Trump Administration.)
>I am far more disturbed by someone who claims to be in the opposition but rather than publicly opposing continues to give every sign of being in fact a quiet supporter of the administration. Why should I have to worry that that's true?
You're stating you believe Sam is a Trump administration supporter?
The evidence would suggest he's more a supporter of the style of populist authoritarianism embodied by Trump, but a dissenter from the policy goals which Trump is using that to advance.
"He’s an outsider. He took on a system he thought was broken and then disregarded the rules, he got to know his users well and tested his product early and iterated rapidly."
An outsider who disregards the rules is the polar opposite of an authoritarian. Rather, I think he's admiring Trump's bias toward action and disregard for conventional wisdom, as well as for people who have a vested interest in the conventional wisdom.
They're hardly outsiders once they've become the leader of the country.
Trump is in a similar position now: he was an outsider during the campaign, but now that he's won, he's the consummate insider. The same phenomena applies to successful Silicon Valley startups: Google, Facebook, and Uber were all scrappy little startups until they became huge, at which point they became giant multinationals which need to be feared and resisted.
This I think illustrates the paradox in Sam's quote: in my read, Altman is referring to candidate Trump, while your outrage is devoted towards President Trump. As Obama said in one of his farewell addresses, "campaigning is very different from governing". Tactics that can be very effective (even necessary) on the campaign trail can become dangerous threats to democracy within the government.
> They're hardly outsiders once they've become the leader of the country.
A formal position of authority doesn't stop you from being an outsider in an institution; that's one of the reasons that purges happen: to recast institutions in which the leader is an outsider into ones in which he is not.
What I'm trying to highlight is the distinction between the struggle for power and the exercise of power. Campaigning for election is a struggle for power. So is purging your political opponents within the government. So is founding a startup.
Governing is the exercise of power. Deporting all immigrants and closing the borders is the exercise of power. "Grab 'em by the pussy" is the exercise of power. Leveraging a monopoly is the exercise of power.
Power struggles are usually looked at favorably by those whose interests align with the ascendant power structure, and unfavorably by those whose interests are entrenched. The naked exercise of power is usually looked at with distrust by everyone, on the theory that if they bully someone else, they could bully you next. There's a fairly wide grey area in-between; for example, I've categorized Trump's immigration orders as the exercise of power (which probably both you and tptacek would agree with), but someone who just lost his job to an immigrant would probably categorize it as a power struggle where Trump is fighting the immigrants oppressing him. And similarly, not everyone would buy your claim that a dictator committing a purge is an "outsider" in his government. The key point though is the relative power differential between parties: it's a struggle for power when the active party is the underdog, and the exercise of power when the active party is dominant.
The way I read Altman's quote, he's casting Trump's campaign in the same terms as the struggle for power that all startups have to go through. He's specifically not endorsing what Trump has done with that power once he attained it.
> What I'm trying to highlight is the distinction between the struggle for power and the exercise of power.
I'm not sure there is the kind of distinction here you are trying to draw; a struggle for (future) power is one context in which (present) power is exercised, they aren't opposing or conflicting concepts.
> An outsider who disregards the rules is the polar opposite of an authoritarian
Revolutionary authoritarians are, almost without exception, outsiders who disregard the pre-existing rules, both formal rules and merely conventional ones. The very few exceptions are insiders who disregard rules in the same way. Lenin, Hitler, and Napoleon, among others, were many things, but followers-of-rules-set-by-others wasn't high on the list for any of them.
I think you are confusing being the opposite of a willing subject of authoritarianism with being the opposite of an authoritarian.
What is interesting about Trunp's canpaign is that he was able to win while spending significantly less than his opponent[1]. Given this, I would say that sama's on point with his quote.
BTW, calling the Trump administration "crazy" is kind of a lazy ad hominem, don't you think?
You're right. It means: "Rather than [criticizing] a person’s premises or reasoning, one asserts something about the person’s character, ... mental health, likes or dislikes."
I'm just surprised the first rhetorical tools you decided to use are emotional appeals and being dismissive of anyone who appears like they're remotely not toeing the party line.
> BTW, calling the Trump administration "crazy" is kind of a lazy ad hominem, don't you think?
It's not ad hominem, but it may be missing that much of the apparent craziness of the Administration is deliberate propaganda strategy (even if that strategy has been chosen as a key one for the Trump camp because Trump himself is actually crazy, and so there is an incentive to find an approach that works with that fact rather than foundering on it.)
Attacking the subject of an argument on account of their skin color is not an ad hominem argument. It's a dumb argument to be sure, but it's not ad hominem.
An ad hominem argument is one in which you attempt to dismiss someone else's argument (or their standing to rebut your own argument) based not on any attribute of the argument itself, but on an attribute of the person making the argument.
If we're arguing about whether Donald Trump is crazy, and you say he's not, and I say, "you wouldn't know whether he's crazy or not because you're crazy", that's an ad hominem.
Attacking the argument on the basis of skin colour, or any other irrellevant basis: gender, religion, sexuality, are classic ad homs.
And, if I do happen to be crazy and that's a legitimate basis for my not being able to assess another's insanity, that's a valid impeachment of my credibility.
If I'm not crazy, it's an untruthful assertion on your part.
This idea of not "normalizing" Trump is ridiculous. When 63 million people vote for you you're normalized. Sama talking to a reporter about him doesn't do anything those 63 million voters didn't. The only way to see it as abnormal is to believe that those 63 million voter's opinions shouldn't count in terms of what's normal and what's not.
This is now a complete tangent, but I find it fascinating that Nixon could've won the largest popular vote margin in history [1] both before [2] and after [3] committing treason against the American people. Similarly, other terrible presidents [4][5][6] have been widely popular during their term, with people only turning against them several years later, once it becomes clear what went on.
It should be comforting, though, that so far they have always turned eventually - as the evidence for Watergate became overwhelming, the public made it clear there were some lines that could not be crossed. I suspect we will see something similar with Trump once it becomes clear that things are not going to get materially better for the people who voted for him, but it may take several years and possibly a second term. In the meantime, those of us see just how shitty & insane the Trump administration is will have to be content to be Cassandra.
It should be comforting, though, that so far they have always turned eventually - as the evidence for Watergate became overwhelming, the public made it clear there were some lines that could not be crossed.
Nixon did not really do anything that previous presidents hadn't done. Those lines had already been crossed plenty of times. See It Didn't Start With Watergate -- https://archive.org/details/LaskyVictorItDidntStartWithWater... Or read Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johson and read about all the blatantly illegal things Johnson did. Also -- the flip side of the Nixon story is that the FBI and perhaps CIA almost certainly got away with breaking the law and illegal wire taps -- https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/death-deep-throat-and-crisis... Should we be comforted if the unelected branches of government can break the law to expose the elected branches?
Americans didn't vote for Nixon in the specific hope that Watergate would happen (last I checked at least; I wasn't around back then). Americans did vote for Trump in the specific hope that Trump's craziness and antics would happen. That's probably the key difference here.
As others have said, the idea that "normalizing" has any meaning whatsoever for a man who ran as a presidential candidate for a major party and won the office is absurd.
Supporting Donald Trump and his policies is normal. You may not agree with the man or his policies and that's perfectly fine - and also normal - but to hold the position that they are not "normal" makes no logical sense.
> You're the CEO of Y Combinator. When you tell a New York Times reporter that Donald Trump is "the Silicon Valley President",
> What the hell is the matter with you?
You're completely overreacting to this and misrepresenting Sam's quote, which is this:
"Trump is the Silicon Valley candidate in every way except that the ideology is flipped,"
"He’s an outsider. He took on a system he thought was broken and then disregarded the rules, he got to know his users well and tested his product early and iterated rapidly. That’s the start-up playbook. That’s exactly what we tell our start-ups to do"
This seems like a pretty accurate assessment of events to me.
I think it was the very recognition of this pattern that led so many in Silicon Valley to fear Trump during 2016 far more than the conventional wisdom allowed. The Clinton campaign, piggybacking as it did off of Obama's campaigns, was a textbook example of the innovator's dilemma.
>This seems like a pretty accurate assessment of events to me.
So where exactly does pandering to racists, fear mongering against the "other", and demonizing the powerless, feature in the SV analogy? Is that "disregarding the rules"? Rules meaning, being civil, ethical and sane. I suppose under a certain Machiavellian light, slavery could also be considered as "disregarding the rules".
Maybe SV should start adopting political tactics too. Robocalls that ask you how you would feel if you knew that Google employees were "perhaps" looking at your teenage daughters pictures. Demonize php developers while lying to win32 developers about bringing their jobs back, etc.. :)
I said later in the article I thought Trump was a bad outcome of the effects of technology.
I think that our side should be ashamed we got beat with out own playbook and not let it happen again.
I also think if we don't realize what happened, we will not win future elections. So I hope we learn this very painful lesson soon.
I could just refuse to comment for these articles, but I'm more interested in us winning elections in the future than not facing criticism. It's important to me to engage and point out what I think is important.
We did not get "beat with our own playbook". The Trump that won in November was the same product launched on that golden escalator the previous year, so much so that political pundits faulted him for it in the run-up to the election. He didn't iterate. He didn't test his message carefully. He barely even won --- he lost the popular vote by a greater margin than any candidate in US history.
But nobody who reads that article will realize that. They'll imagine instead a dynamo who "seized the playbook" of Silicon Valley and used it to cruise to an Silicon Valley-style 10-bagger victory.
You should refuse to comment on articles like these. You have no special insight into why or how Trump won. You chose to be the CEO of Y Combinator. You can't ask for our sympathy when your words, freely given to the newspaper of record, have an impact you didn't intend.
"I am far more disturbed by someone who claims to be in the opposition but rather than publicly opposing continues to give every sign of being in fact a quiet supporter of the administration. Why should I have to worry that that's true?"
- tptacek, 2017
Sam Altman single handedly started the tech industry's opposition to Trump with one blog post. And here you are accusing him of being a quiet supporter.
"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness… Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
> He barely even won --- he lost the popular vote by a greater margin than any candidate in US history.
This point unfortunately plays into the messaging that you're criticizing sama for. The electoral college was the winner take all victory. They actually call it a genius masterstroke that he "focused" on winning in the most strategic and economical way.
Besides, it's not enough dismiss him or the strategy as having "barely" won. If things had gone the other way in those determining districts then he would have "barely" lost. He lost the popular vote by millions but it was still within ~2%. With a candidate like Trump you need to do better than that by far. He should have been defeated unambiguously, and yet he managed the astonishing feat of just barely eeking out a win.
He also talked quite openly in a piece for The New Yorker (1). While many people I know in the Bay Area thought "wow that's neat!" when I spoke to siblings and friends from other parts of the country, one person's exact response was "what the fuck is wrong with that person?" It was a long piece, but there was enough there where people could find things to like and dislike about him and Y Combinator in general. Sometimes I think people in Silicon Valley aren't aware of the microcosm they live in.
I've twice had the pleasure of fundraising in pre-YC SFBA. I admire and respect what Paul and Sam built. I viscerally appreciate it. But stuff like this makes YC extraordinarily difficult to defend. Not worth defending. It's table-flip upsetting.
> Sam is providing a different perspective for looking at Trump's presidency, which he's made it clear he's not happy with.
Those quotes might be reasonable on the context of an essay by Sam aimed at providing a "different perspective on Trump's presidency" (though Sam's own comments here suggest to that they wouldn't be much better in that context, but that's another discussion.)
In the actual context they appear, they are normalizing of Trump a d suggest, at best, an extraordinarily naive approach to the media in his position.
Against Donald Trump? The word "super" doesn't capture it. But don't just look at me. Before the election, Paul Graham said that if Trump won, he would join the resistance.
(You misleadingly edited your comment after I wrote my response. I would not agree that I have a visceral distaste of anything conservative. In fact, I think that's an accusation more accurately leveled against Donald Trump.)
You don't need a "visceral distaste towards anything conservative" to have issues with a president who gets his political news from a guy who literally thinks that alien lizards control the world. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-news-source-a...
Shouldn't we give Altman points for being honest about one of Silicon Valley's core mentalities? In any case, quotes are chosen by the reporter. Sam may have followed up "The Silicon Valley President in every way except the ideology is flipped" with an hour-long dissertation about how SV's mentality is not at all applicable to the federal government, and how it comes to bite even the hottest SV stars that don't mature, etc., we don't know, and Altman doesn't know how he will be excerpted.
As for Altman agreeing to even be interviewed: it's clear that he's passionate about civic affairs and is willing to speak out despite possible risk to reputation.
I'm sure Altman said dozens of mitigating things that were not included in the story, just as I'm sure that Altman knows how reporters work. Did he think the things he had to say about the Trump administration were so interesting and important that the risk of giving what is effectively an endorsement was worth it?
My take is that he's looking at the mechanics of the operation rather than the politics of the operation/governing style. From that perspective it would seem he made a reasonable statement.
I strongly disagree. The closer you look at the argument, the worse it gets. It simultaneously makes positive, normalizing claims about Trump while calling the startup ethos itself into a kind of disrepute. It is, to shoplift from a much better writer than me, a fractal of bad analysis.
I think you've nailed something profoundly rotten at the core of Silicon Valley, venture capital, and YC.
Though also note the final paragraph:
“I think all of this — the current start-up revolution, Trump and lots of other things — is largely a consequence of the internet breaking down traditional barriers,” Mr. Altman, the Y Combinator executive, wrote in an email. “This societal openness has some great consequences in my opinion, like the start-up boom of the last 20 years, and some bad ones, like Trump.”
Also, in Silicon Valley, there a social convention of saying controversial, potentially wrong ideas for the sake of discussion. Maybe Sam is engaging in this, with caring that he's being interviewed for a major newspaper.
It is in no way true. It's dignifying Trump and his staff in ways that make it very hard to distinguish Altman from a supporter. The idea that Trump's success is in execution in any sense, let alone in the way a startup's is, is something you'd have a hard time selling in the pages of The National Review.
I'm going to break my policy of avoiding commenting on downvotes, especially of my own posts, just to say that my experience is that discussions that touch on currently hot political issues see an unusually high volume of voting activity, and I wouldn't read a lot about the level of discourse from a comment that tocuhes on those kinds of issues getting a few early dowbvotes, even if you view them as unfair downvotes. (Now, if comments get unfairly buried and stay that way, that's a cause for concern.)
Refusing to take Trump seriously and treating him as a joke is how he got elected in the first place. Trump is a masterful demagogue whose innovations will be studied in political science for decades to come. He is also a profoundly evil, shallow, and narcissistic man who is in no way capable or qualified of holding the level of responsibility he has attained. But he's far from the first malignant narcissist to master the arts of demagoguery.
The most concerning thing to me is that after recognizing the parallels between the Trump campaign and the Silicon Valley ethos Altman's response wasn't to be introspective and consider if SV culture has been too boorish but rather to (seemingly) pay compliment to Trump's craftiness.
The EO wasn't struck down as unconstitutional, it simply had a preliminary injunction issued against it, pending an actual trial on the merits.
Retract and revise to reset that process to square one and avoid a final outcome on the merits is not a parricularly novel legal strategy; it's actually well-known, often abusive approach.
Trump had rallies daily during his run, sometimes 3 times a day, he met with business leaders big and small constantly. He even started his campaign right after getting elected so he can continue to speak to the people. He runs national surveys to ask the people (his customers) how they like the product (his presidency). Trump moves quickly and has implemented many of his campaign promises within the first few weeks of his term. He runs lean, his healthcare bill is about 1/8th the size of Obamacare. He runs under budget, he has returned a large portion of the funds allotted for his inauguration because he didn't need them. He moves with the wind, shifting his polices to the reality on the ground. He knows that social media is important and spends time engaging in that. If that isn't startup behavior what is?
I'm sorry the truth may put him in a good light on this, but if Sam had lied in his response many people would have lost all trust for him.
"I cannot fathom how Sam Altman thought that it would be a good idea to be a source for this article, let alone provide the specific quotes that he did. How does YC benefit from this?"
@tptacek follow the money. The key to understanding this [0] is the YC relationship with Thiel. It has long been my opinion that Thiel is a protected species with YC. It was obvious almost 100 days ago on ^Political Detox^ day. (message to HN, 'don't make waves for us when Thiel is meeting president) [1] A key test: Positive political stories like this one are supported, negative ones flagged.
When governments "break things" they are usually life or death things - Like Healthcare, Environment, Clean Water, Nuclear Weapons, etc.
The Trump WH could be spun as some well thought out scrappy disruption of Politics as usual, which it is not.
It very much is a chaotic mess led by a massively narcissistic man-child and the cynical and dangerous people he seeks advice from. I am amazed at Sam Altman for providing anodyne quotes which almost seems like he admires the chaos that Trump is causing. The disruption is causing massive REAL damage to the US and its allies - exactly unlike a start-up that improves choices for customers - not destroys the market itself.
While that may work for Facebook, we're seeing what happens when applied to national security and good governance.
Also, there seems to be this revisionism towards the Trump Campaign as something of a savvy, hidden genius operation. But this election was not won by Trump as much as it was lost by Hillary. There is nothing particularly remarkable about Trump's win as a Republican candidate.
> But this election was not won by Trump as much as it was lost by Hillary.
But both Trump partisans (who want the credit) and Clinton partisans (who don't want the blame) have an interest in the Trump team's unusually tactical genius being seen as the cause of the outcome.
A good philosophy for businesses that deliberately take on risk to maximise reward, and where the worst case outcome of "breaking things" is insolvency and loss of jobs and investor's money.
I've always taken that phrase to mean , be more productive. I've never been in an environment where I have heard that phrase and they were cool with the live site going down. Does anyone echo my opinion ? Or am I wrong ?
I might be more inclined to go for a startup-style government if startups had a better success rate. Sure there are a few great success stories, like Theranos or Uber, but...oh, hm.
The difference between breaking things in the private sector and the public is that in the latter you don't have the luxury of declaring company bankruptcy and going home safe-and-sound to your penthouse.
When states break things, people can suffer and die.
> Ironically, rarely are there examples from private industry who screw up as much as governments tend to, especially in safety-critical missions.
Governments have the power to compel individuals under threat of violence. Private industry does not.
People can choose not to do business with a company, limiting the impact of that company's actions on their lives and the lives of others. Individuals have no choice in government.
In which case, you are no worse off for choosing not to do business with them than you would be if they did not exist.
Pharmaceutical companies often have monopolies because of patents - but then, you're back to a government intervention again.
Also note that I said "limiting the impact", because it's possible for a third party to impact you without your entering into a voluntary contract with them. For instance: if there is a river running through your property, if someone upstream diverts the river that is going to reduce the value of your property. If you were using that river to power something that enables you to fulfill a pre-existing contract then the common law concept of "tortious interference" comes into play.
Actually, there are plenty of fields of private enterprise that have the same risk, though sometimes government has regulatory structures designed to (whether or not they work effectively in the face of unexpected strategies) mitigate those risks.
As I noted shortly after the election, "move fast and break things" is a fundamentally fascist philosophy.
Nov 23, 2016
I've been reading Umberto Eco's essay "Ur-Fascism" which has been circulating of late, as well as definitions of demagoguery, among them the idea that the demagogue is a leader who is relentlessly advocating action -- usually immediate, violent, and without deliberation.
Having just run across that at Wikipedia, I turned to Eco's essay and found his comment on futurism and fascism -- a possibly unlikely pairing as one of the "weak arts":
Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great respect.
It's helpful to realise that Futurism here refers to the Italian artistic movement,[1] not the general concept of future-directed optimism. Though with the strongly similar features of both, this also raises some interesting concerns over techno-optimists, generally.
With Facebook's decision to provide censorship services to the Chinese government, having so ably demonstrated its capacity to influence and control political movements within the US, UK, and Arab worlds, I realised that this celebration of speed, violence, and risk was precisely embodied in Facebook's motto, "move fast and break things".
That is, Facebook's core design philosophy is fundamentally aligned with fascism.
I absolutely agree, but only in so far as it applies to politics or the public sphere. When it comes to code, I have a hard time correlating it much with fascist dynamism.
If your code doesn't affect others, then moving fast and breaking things is fine.
More generally: if you've created a sandbox or playground where you can move fast, break things, and not screw with others around you, that's a Good Thing.
Moving fast and breaking things in the context of an active government, with livelihoods and souls at stake, is another matter entirely.
As is the rather common practice of pushing out code on live projects and screwing with it in prod. The better firms (Google comes to mind) are pretty good at avoiding this, at least for technical issues. Rather less so for UI/UX.
You're the CEO of Y Combinator. When you tell a New York Times reporter that Donald Trump is "the Silicon Valley President", you're speaking for all of YC --- even if you don't want to be. What the hell is the matter with you?