zlacker

>>etc-ho+(OP)
Y... ikes!

It's about time Y Combinator has executives who aren't so busy with politics. It gives the whole incubator, startup scene, etc, a bad name.

The good ol' days are over. I still have in my mind Y Combinator of Paul Graham (a man wise with his words), but given that we've already had even Sam Altman in control of it.

I'm guessing YC nowadays is not that different from private equity/VCs like A16z, which enjoy having their fingers on everything. Typically, it is stuff they don't know much about and look plain stupid.

I hope PG can bring the good ol' days back someday, when it was about entrepreneurship, having people laser-focused on building disruptive companies.

>>thiago+r8
> GRAHAM: No, no, no, politics. The problems with San Francisco are entirely due to a small number of terrible politicians. It’s all because Ed Lee died. The mayor, Ed Lee, was a reasonable person. Up till the point where Ed Lee died, San Francisco seemed like a utopia. It was like when Gates left Microsoft, and things rapidly reverted to the mean. Although in San Francisco’s case, way below the mean, and so it’s not that it didn’t take that much to ruin San Francisco. It’s really, if you just replaced about five supervisors, San Francisco would be instantly a fabulously better city.

> COWEN: Isn’t it the voters you need to replace? Those people got elected, reelected.

> GRAHAM: Well, the reason San Francisco fundamentally is so broken is that the supervisors have so much power, and supervisor elections, you can win by a couple hundred votes. All you need to do is have this hard core of crazy left-wing supporters who will absolutely support you, no matter what, and turn out to vote.

> Everybody else is like, “Oh, local election doesn’t matter. I’m not going to bother.” [laughs] It’s a uniquely weird situation that wasn’t really visible. It was always there, but it wasn’t visible until Ed Lee died. Now, we’ve reverted to what that situation produces, which is a disaster.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/paul-graham/

>>amadeu+Hb
the sage wisdom of "the problem with politics is that the people who get the most votes win"

>>microm+ec
I get you are being sarcastic, but the real problem is people don't vote and you see this at every level of government office. Other than the president, it's hard to engage people (which I don't really fault them for) and so you end up with politicians - all across the field - who do nothing but pander to the most extreme voters.

>>nemoth+Tg
Compulsory voting is an option.

>>Affric+JE1
The issue is voters are uneducated. You get compulsory voting you get the same issue with the california prop system scaled out: where people are given a choice and vote on what feels right from the proposition name and two sentence description alone. Research and looking into bias be damned.

>>kjkjad+LR1
No, it's not.

Compulsory voting drives engagement. Representative democracy saves the public from themselves.

The vast majority of people vote for who they trust.

>>Affric+KX1
> Compulsory voting drives engagement.

Citation needed. I live in a country with compulsory voting, and I don't see any indication that it drives engagement. Lots of people only go voting because they have to. They simply vote for the man or woman they think looks best, or they have seen on TV and said something funny, or stuff like that.

> The vast majority of people vote for who they trust.

But in many many cases without really looking into who is trustworthy.

>>roelsc+3B5
Have you lived in countries without compulsory voting? Have you worked in electoral politics? Would the population be more engaged without compulsory voting? Different countries do not amount to controlled experiments. Brasil, North Korea, Belgium, and Australia are all very different countries. All have compulsory voting.

> But in many many cases without really looking into who is trustworthy.

> They simply vote for the man or woman they think looks best, or they have seen on TV and said something funny, or stuff like that.

These two things are largely linked. If one believes that one can view the true nature of reality and divine the future then one is in for perpetual disappointment with politicians. Trustworthiness can only be known a posteri. A priori we only have heuristics. The reason for the existence of representative democracy is so that politicians do the work of politics.

One may not always agree with the electorate but my experience tells me that compulsory voting does drive engagement. It changes how political parties spend money and who they use that money to try and influence. Engagement in countries with compulsory voting is different to how it would be in the same country without compulsory voting.

The average member of the electorate possesses no expertise in any single field and is ignorant of everything. The average member of the electorate holds no single opinion. This is a good thing.

Whether people's beliefs are right or wrong is one thing but what you don't want is a bunch of radicals (of any persuasion) who have made the leap of faith which prevents them from reversing course. When large proportions of a society is radicalised to hold extremist and exclusive political opinions, that's when voters cannot be convinced. This rarely ends up good for society and occasionally ends violently.