not founders in particular, but just some people in general.
unfortunately, in a society where relationship debt is replaced with financial debt, this is inevitable - i.e., tribal societies sees less sociopaths because you cannot be "anonymous" and suffer no punishment for sociopathic behaviour, while in modern society, the externalization of costs and harm means there isn't anyone to "blame" when shit hits the fan, so sociopaths can take advantage of this and insert themselves into a position to take advantage of others without repercussion.
And the sad part is, a sociopathic strategy is successful (where success == money earned), because we don't measure things like ethics ("everything is ethical as long as it is legal").
It is the other side of the filter that was used to select them through a dozen of layers of competitive management (or, in the case of pure founders - through several DDs, investment rounds cofounder struggles, not to mention the market competition).
I too have observed this attitude from tech managers.
Sociopaths will exist, in a Nash equilibrium with their population, just because the genetical building blocks for reemergence of this phenotype continue to float in the general population. Indeed, if one looks for it, one finds that "dark-triad" personality is found to be sexually appealing. What else needs to be said about us?
... The individuals in question will be drawn to zero sum struggles of the power process, just because they are well equipped to navigate this landscape.
The meager expected improvement of having my personal life less influenced by this human type was enough for me to avoid immigrating to the USA and focus on the EU instead. Yes, it is poorer, but the socially-democratic political sensibility doesn't allow american management types to bloom in their full capacity.
At some point of intensity, the zero sum struggle grinds everything into the low-trust cesspool. It is a force of nature to be acknowledged.
Which evolutionary strategy succeeds is entirely dependent on the environment. Capitalism and the modern metropolis is the perfect environment for sociopaths to thrive, and research on sociopathy shows it is increasing in the West.
The simple fact of the matter is that when a sociopath is discovered, the discoverer will avoid the sociopath but WILL NOT WARN OTHERS due to fear of retaliation.
Fear keeps the sheep in check, and allows sociopaths to move from one sucker to the next. Each sociopath may only get to exploit a given mark (Mark1) two, three, or five times, but then that sociopath moves on to the next mark, and a new sociopath takes advantage of Mark1.
In this way sociopaths in our anonymous, private society run amok and their evolutionary strategy is highly successful. Sociopaths are found in large proportions among those who worked their way to wealth - ruthlessness and a willingness to exploit is highly lucrative in our private culture that has no accountability.
Dr. Martha Stout in The Sociopath Next Door gives the example of a sociopath who lied and blackmailed her way into a position as a clinical psychologist in a mental hospital despite having no qualifications.
Colleagues and patients became aware of the sociopath on multiple occasions, but when they would complain to the administration they hit a stonewall because the forward-looking sociopath had sexually blackmailed key individuals.
The sociopath worked as a psychologist for 14 years before a wealthy and connected patient was exploited and harmed by her, upon which time the wealthy patient's father threatened the hospital with a public lawsuit if they did not pay him.
The hospital administration paid a settlement to the wealthy client and fired the sociopath, but did not report the sociopath to ANYONE, including its own staff. The sociopath then simply went and worked at another hospital.
Over and over again in our society the pattern of the sociopath is that when they are discovered they simply move on to the next sucker.
This did not happen in traditional cultures. Dr. Martha Stout explains how in Inuit culture sociopaths would be ritualistically murdered by a group of men in the tribe. In 19th century America, if a sociopath scammed some people in a town, those people would capture and lynch the sociopath even if they did not engage in strictly illegal behaviour.
This selection pressure prevented the proliferation of sociopaths, but now our society rewards sociopaths and has no protective mechanisms. More often than not, sociopaths use their lack of conscience as a business advantage and rise quickly in organizations through charm, blackmail, politics, and ruthlessness.
We live in the age of the sociopath. Bad people are not punished but rather rewarded at every turn. A huge proportion of corporate and government leaders are diagnosed sociopaths, and they got to where they are because the good people they fucked over along the way either did not speak up or were ignored and ridiculed when they did.
The most accurate summation of one's behavior is to see what happens when they believe they are not being watched. Asking the children of these startup founders would offer a different perspective, surely. There's hundreds and thousands of stories of famous people that behaved completely different at home than their public and professional images would suggest. In fact, sociopaths typically doing well in business very much helps explain the motivating factors for why people can be regarded so well professionally but hated by their families. But even at home we are probably different than how we are professionally anyway regardless of personality and I'm even different from employer to employer and for the purpose of the thread, that's really all that matters, doesn't it?
Just talking to people at a party or a business dinner is not enough to get any semblance of character judgment aside from some pretty stylistic ones (small cues that say more about preferences than worldview, for example). Even playing golf together can hide monstrous raging alcoholics and serial killers from us all because these people have developed almost split personalities after decades of manipulating people. It's not necessarily conscious either but almost a personality trait like being really energetic, quiet, paying attention to detail obsessively, etc. I say all this as the son of someone that's got the cult leader personality type and how he works has framed how I absolutely refuse to work. Some might argue I'm doing better but I don't think so in terms of the original article context at all.
It should also be noted that pg's sample is somewhat biased against Fortune 500 companies and dysfunctional yet still-in-business organizations that employee so many but repel those like pg and perhaps those he knows as well. Furthermore, the kind off folks that are attracted to in dysfunctional orgs are similar to men that prey upon insecure women. There's similar equivalents for business folks too.
So, in short I think pg has been blessed to still have this optimistic view of any flavor of meritocracy. It's nice to be able to turn away from companies where failure is constant, rampant, and extensively rewarded to these kinds of people that don't do well as leaders in start-ups and even finance. I used to hold his view but after my career I regard it as an idealistic notion.
"in any company, some people chug along, some people work hard, and some people are in it to win, and they have the following dynamics"
That's an oversimplification.
Sociopaths are not just "in it to win". They will do whatever it takes to win, and trample as many people under foot as it takes takes them to get ahead without a twinge of conscience.
The clueless in the article aren't merely working hard, they're also true believers in the organization who "build up a perverse sense of loyalty to the firm, even when events make it abundantly clear that the firm is not loyal to them."
Unlike the clueless, the losers see clearly and do the bare minimum to get by and will (like the sociopaths) abandon the ship when it starts to sink, unlike the clueless, who will loyally sink right along with it. While they're in the organization, "they traded freedom for a paycheck .. mortgage their lives away, and hope to die before their money runs out."
While the losers have no more loyalty to the company than the sociopaths "they do have a loyalty to individual people, and a commitment to finding fulfillment through work when they can, and coasting when they cannot."
> Many (most?) of our morals also happen to be game-theory optimums that you would raitionally see value in even as a true sociopath.
Yet our sociopaths are all up running companies that destroy the environment. They seem to entirely gravitate towards the very behaviors the person you're replying to is afraid of (i.e., self-serving philosophies, domination and exploitation of others, etc.).
The problem is that the only scale that matters to a logic-only person is the scale of their personal life. And you can build yourself a pretty nice life while walking all over other people and not care at all that this will only survive for one generation, because then you'll be gone.
There are lots of other problems here, such as lack of the veil of ignorance. There's no mechanism to prevent the logic-focused mindset from gravitating towards castes if they think they and their children are safe from being in the bad castes.
Game-theory optimums are available to people through emotions and intuition. They're not available through logic (immediate logical processing is self-focused and therefore plays right into the worst parts of game theory: it doesn't have enough time to arrive at your thinking here). That's why people without these things tend to... uhh... have trouble adjusting, and the people who have enough mental processing to simulate and adjust tend to do pretty awful things.
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