If the successful people you meet in real life are nice and you see lots of meanness on the internet, it probably just means that anonymity causes meanness.
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#12I like Paul Graham a lot but this is simply not true.
Look at the most successful people of recent times and you will quickly see a consistent pattern of meanness when you dig into how they work with others: - Steve Jobs - Bill Gates - Elon Musk - Sam Altman - Etc.
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#15> It struck me recently how few of the most successful people I know are mean. There are exceptions, but remarkably few.
Does Paul know Musk, Bezos, Trump, Thiel, etc., etc.?
It feels like this didn't age well. An optimistic product of its time. But perhaps it's a question of time horizon. Mean people eventually fail, but it's the political version of the saying, the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Or perhaps "don't be mean" primarily applies to the "little people".
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#16He’s saying growth mindsets “win” and zero-sum players, the mean ones, stagnate. This is true as a system— who wants to invest with someone intent on gouging you— and it’s true as a function of effort— if you spend your time on petty tricks and tactics, you will, in the long run, “grow” very little.
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#17They don't really. You have to hide the meanness on occasion to get ahead, sure.
I don't like the implication that all rich people (which is Graham's criterion for success) are nice. Didn't Musk and Thiel read drafts of his later essays?
Ruthless and diplomatic (where it matters) gets you ahead. Ruthlessness is often indistinguishable from meanness.
Is lying mean? You need to lie a lot to get ahead,
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#18This claim seems true largely because we cherry pick examples and because this is how we feel the world ought to work. Announcing this belief is just a way of signalling prosocial stance, a nostalgic mid-10s catechism to us all just getting along. Its the 2020s and mean is doing numbers.
Just wait. Mean reverts to the mean.
A sufficiently long diversion from the mean is indistinguishable from cultural norm. Ask Putin
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#19So when will Trump fail?
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#20I wish this was true. Yet, I think we all have some skin in the game to why this article rings false.
When it comes to getting an advantage, people often look the other way at meanness.
For example, it’s easy to complain about how Amazon treats their employees. Yet, we choose to buy from Amazon because it’s convenient, cheap, and everyone else is doing it.
We might see an organization treat someone else unfairly but when resources are scarce, we often look the other way because it feels like there is nothing one person can do.
I like the old black and white movie, The Invisible Man, to demonstrate the situation of a specific type of meanness that seems ever present today. The enemy is invisible and is only defeated when the entire community gets involved.