Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No Brilliant Jerks

leadershipnow.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 66 posts

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#11

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

blfr wrote: post #4

We have seen decades of general stagnation compared to decades of new inventions and growth before that. [Just imagine a bunch of quotes from Peter Thiel here. You read or heard the argument already.] Good chunk of it is probably due to our societies getting physically older. But how much can be attributed to the culture of being nice, getting along, not rocking the boat, undermining people, etc? OP ironically even a…

Innovative companies like DEC, Bell Labs, and Xerox Parc (not so much IBM) ran on playful maturity, not on jerkish narcissism.

Generally they were not terrible places to work - unlike the kind of startup that's a playground for dark triad people with emotional handicaps.

The latter are destructive. A small minority get shit done, but only some proportion of the shit that gets done turns out to be truly beneficial. The rest is just a toxic mess of bullshit, lies, self-aggrandising posturing, manipulation, and empathy-free exploitation, sometimes with a side order of overt fraud and criminality.

And there's been a lot more of that in recent decades than in the real-adults-but-at-play innovation powerhouses of the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#12

Post by api »

blfr wrote: post #4

We have seen decades of general stagnation compared to decades of new inventions and growth before that. [Just imagine a bunch of quotes from Peter Thiel here. You read or heard the argument already.] Good chunk of it is probably due to our societies getting physically older. But how much can be attributed to the culture of being nice, getting along, not rocking the boat, undermining people, etc? OP ironically even a…

I like turning it around and asking: why do human beings seem unable to achieve these heights without a jerk pushing them?

I have a loose hypothesis of my own.

Most of us are wired for a vastly slower and quieter pace of life with very little change and very few large opportunities. Think hunter gatherers or simple agriculture, the environment and evolutionary pressures at play for 99.99% of our history.

Now we have a very different environment: fast, lots of change, and lots of opportunities for huge gains everywhere.

By the standards of this environment we basically all suffer from low grade depression and anhedonia. We are literally wired to watch the corn grow.

But there are freaks. There are manics, bipolar people, high functioning psychopaths, people who are wired for fast opportunity grabbing and risk taking. Unfortunately these freaks being outliers are also often burdened by mental illness that comes with the package they got, and the odd way they are treated by society (as either gods or devils but never just peers) distorts their personality formation.

They are wired in some ways for this environment, but they are socially deeply maladjusted. Jerks.

We sort of use these people in an odd way. We make them leaders and via the mirror neuron effect borrow some of their drive. Then when their jerkish behavior gets too severe or things are not going well, we sacrifice the king.

This seems to be how regular people are able to adapt to the present fast forwarded hypermodern environment.

The other way is drugs. There are drugs like amphetamine that seem to allow regular humans to retune their brains for the current environment without borrowing motivation from a jerk. Unfortunately these come with major side effects and due to habituation the effects are not sustainable and stop working after a while.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#13

Post by [deleted] »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #11
blfr wrote: post #4

We have seen decades of general stagnation compared to decades of new inventions and growth before that. [Just imagine a bunch of quotes from Peter Thiel here. You read or heard the argument already.] Good chunk of it is probably due to our societies getting physically older. But how much can be attributed to the culture of being nice, getting along, not rocking the boat, undermining people, etc? OP ironically even a…

Innovative companies like DEC, Bell Labs, and Xerox Parc (not so much IBM) ran on playful maturity, not on jerkish narcissism. Generally they were not terrible places to work - unlike the kind of startup that's a playground for dark triad people with emotional handicaps. The latter are destructive . A small minority get shit done, but only some proportion of the shit that gets done turns out to be truly beneficial. T…

[deleted]

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#14

Post by luckylion »

dabbledash wrote: post #8
luckylion wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated to the content of the comment, but since this comment was immediately dead (saw it at "0 minutes ago"): what's with the new moderation technique of just marking comments of some users as dead from the moment they post? I've seen this more and more recently. Is that a new approach to shadow banning? Is that automatically applied when multiple comments are flagged by some amount of people? Are the affected us…

Are you talking about draw_down’s comment? Doesn’t look dead to me.

Argh, I should've mentioned that of course, sorry. It was dead before I vouched for it.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#15

Post by akudha »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #2

Not directly related to the content of the article, but... There are jerks everywhere, and there always will be. Like diseases, tornadoes and mosquitoes, they are part of life. I think our energy is better spent creating an env that empowers nice people and encourage them to defend themselves. An env that calls out bad behavior. It's way more durable.

Society has mostly tolerated jerks - Bill Gates was a jerk during his Microsoft days, Steve Jobs too, etc. Hollywood has a long list of jerks, bordering on criminal level behavior. Somehow they were (are) tolerated by society, many people even believe one needs to be a jerk at certain levels to succeed.

If a junior person on a team is a jerk, he'll be called out quickly vs a boss who is a jerk. Like everything in life, one can get away with a lot of bad behavior if they are high up in the food chain.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#16

Post by DanBC »

luckylion wrote: post #6
draw_down wrote: post #3

The only thing that matters is who determines what a “jerk” is. The same behavior may be excused in one person and condemned in another. It’s one thing to write this, but quite another to actually rein in a CEO with a ton of clout and success at their back (Adam Neumann 2020 is not the same as Adam Neumann 2018). Hand waving “oh well you have to curate the culture” isn’t enough.

Unrelated to the content of the comment, but since this comment was immediately dead (saw it at "0 minutes ago"): what's with the new moderation technique of just marking comments of some users as dead from the moment they post? I've seen this more and more recently. Is that a new approach to shadow banning? Is that automatically applied when multiple comments are flagged by some amount of people? Are the affected us…

> what's with the new moderation technique of just marking comments of some users as dead from the moment they post?

That's not new, and most of those people have been told that they were banned.

People can vouch for individual comments (click the timestamp, click the vouch link) to undead them. If you think a person is being unfairly moderated I guess you can email the mods to let them know.

dang has spoken about shaddowbanning here (and lots of other posts too) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23253674

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#17

Post by keenmaster »

Edited [1]: Ironically, one sign of brilliance is the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in your head. I think many people who interacted with Steve Jobs would classify him as a jerk. However, if Apple was more inclined towards mitigating his jerky behavior, it might not be where it is today.

Reality is complicated. You don't get at the truth by finding the absolutist statement that is correct most of the time. You have to conduct a more holistic analysis than that. What causes this person to be a jerk? Has the very behavior that caused them to be a jerk also led to the founding of this company? Would they lose their passion if we tried to cage them like a pet bird? If so, how critical is their passion to this company? What if they're absolutely, 100% right about something and they're being a "jerk" because they are trying to communicate precisely how much they think they're right and how wrong everyone else is? How right have they been in the past?

On top of asking the right questions, you need to do a first principles analysis. What drives this company to be profitable in a competitive context? Why do we want to reduce tension in this company? Is it because that tension is bad for profit? Are you sure?

[1]: I removed the following from the top of my comment: "There are "No" brilliant jerks? Absolutely none? What evidence is that based on?" because a below commenter is right that it doesn't really fit the primary meaning of the headline. My core point remains pretty much the same though.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#18

Post by [deleted] »

keenmaster wrote: post #17

Edited [1]: Ironically, one sign of brilliance is the ability to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in your head. I think many people who interacted with Steve Jobs would classify him as a jerk. However, if Apple was more inclined towards mitigating his jerky behavior, it might not be where it is today. Reality is complicated. You don't get at the truth by finding the absolutist statement that is correct most of…

[deleted]

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#19

Post by tafox »

api wrote: post #12
blfr wrote: post #4

We have seen decades of general stagnation compared to decades of new inventions and growth before that. [Just imagine a bunch of quotes from Peter Thiel here. You read or heard the argument already.] Good chunk of it is probably due to our societies getting physically older. But how much can be attributed to the culture of being nice, getting along, not rocking the boat, undermining people, etc? OP ironically even a…

I like turning it around and asking: why do human beings seem unable to achieve these heights without a jerk pushing them? I have a loose hypothesis of my own. Most of us are wired for a vastly slower and quieter pace of life with very little change and very few large opportunities. Think hunter gatherers or simple agriculture, the environment and evolutionary pressures at play for 99.99% of our history. Now we have…

There are good people with high energy too, it isn't something reserved for just the jerks.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#20

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

hirundo wrote: post #5

I have a problem with Nassim Taleb. On the one hand I think he has been a colossal jerk to many good people who don't deserve it. On the other hand he keeps dropping pearls of wisdom that I value highly. If I were an employer I wouldn't want an employee with his level of toxicity laying waste to morale. But it could be exactly that kind of employee who could make the company profitable with the power of one brain. So…

It's very difficult for me to separate the brilliant from the jerk in Taleb's writing. When he says "you can't make that inference because the distribution has a fat tail and you're a dumb fuck" I can't tell whether the sentiment embedded in this statement is clouding his judgement. So ultimately all the drama surrounding the brilliant jerk makes him far less useful than you might initially think.
Post reply on HN