I'm still surprised that he was hired by Apple (one of the world's most secretive companies), after disclosing so many secrets of a former employer. And he was only fired because by Apple after being retroactively cast as a misogynist in a woker age by people bad at parsing the license of creative non-fiction. Life is absurd, and our best predictions futile.
But what it tells me is that it is easier to go from tech worker to provocative media personality than to take the reverse route. He condemned himself to practice a sort of journalism, or, at best, to work for less visible companies.
And that is a great argument for the pseudonymous economy that balajis is advocating. So that people can speak their minds and maintain their livelihoods at the same time.
Briefly: many educational institutions were not designed to increase equality, but to protect professions by acting as gatekeepers through a process of cartelization.
I agree with this. The SEC cracks down on amateur inside-traders, because the professionals no how to cover their tracks: they have the resources to fight it in court; and the smart ones hire the SEC staff via the revolving door.
This case is hilarious, and for that I applaud the SEC, but it's also theater.
For those who have not read the piece yet, the starting paragraphs of Part 3 are especially good:
> In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.
> I find it obscene.
> There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.
We have all met those people.
It reminds me of something that PG said: fanboys become your worst haters. That is, it's a small step from intense love to intense hate.
He also said somewhere that there is a higher incidence of bad actors/sociopaths among founders of non-profits than for-profits among the teams he's met.
The way I think about it is: ideology is dual use. The two uses are collective good and individual gain. Those are often hopelessly entangled, because a good way to get ahead is by presenting oneself as selflessly working toward the common good. Cue Ayn Rand...
What that means here is we can criticize both Chimananda and her critic as "playing the game". It's possible to see their actions as selfish or selfless or most likely both at once.
The lesson I draw from Chimananda's story, though, is that people who are out to fight dragons (i.e. defeat the forces of evil in society) are liable to turn you into their next dragon. The revolution eats its own. It happened to Basecamp, too.
That is one reason why startups that want to thrive should not hire activists for whom being woke is central to their identity. They will outwoke you, too, no matter how woke you thought you were.
I have experience with party rounds. There are tradeoffs between them and rounds with a traditional lead. The problem is that the advantage of the party round is early, while the advantage of the traditional round comes later. (That dynamic leads to many perverse outcomes in different situations, because we all discount the future to some extent.)
The early advantage of a party round is that you can raise it at all. If you go for a traditional round with a lead investor, then everybody is waiting for a lead, twiddling their thumbs, hoping someone else will do DD, but maybe that someone never comes... The power is in the hand of the potential leads to say yes or no. That's a bad position to be in as a founder, and can lead to acute disappointments and wasted time during those periods when your startup is hot.
With a party round, the founder can put pressure on investors and create scarcity. A stream of checks comes in, and ironically, the more you raise as the party round progresses, the more people start offering you bigger and bigger, lead-size, checks. (This tactic should be combined with "moving the goal posts", or expanding the size of your round so there is always just enough left to be desirable, but so much that it is daunting. No one wants to the be the first money in, but many will compete to get the last slice.)
That is: Party rounds are a very effective way to create momentum in fund-raising and put the power in founders' hands.
But then you have the money, and you don't always have any single investor who is highly committed to you. I have also experienced this.
You should not underestimate the support that a skilled, experienced and committed investor can bring you. The problem is, most founders don't always know who those investors are, and there are a limited number of boards that they will choose to sit on.
> The company turned itself on its head by shutting down all discussion on the topic.
Maybe. Or maybe the company was already turned on its head due to the internal conversation. Such a radical reaction from the founders suggests to me that this was the case.
> I haven’t seen any evidence that anyone was calling for singers job before nor during the meeting.
Accusing someone of racism or white supremacy is effectively calling for them to resign or be fired.
> All that happened was that a bunch of employees formed a committee that brought a bunch of issues to the fore.
Right, but again, we don't know if those issues were valid or not. The "funny names" list is not nearly as damning as they seem to think. Given how much information has leaked to the media, I would assume that the strongest evidence they have of racism would already be public. And I have not seen strong evidence.
> All this amounted to the company backing up a senior employees behavior reflexively at the expense of lower level employees objections.
If "backing up a senior employee's behavior" means allowing him to disagree with others about whether his behavior is racist, especially in the absence of evidence that it is racist, then I think they were right to back him up.
Singer's resignation resulted from the show trial of accusations and media leaks, which is a well known playbook for advocates of social change.
I think that is possible and that one could prove it statistically.
I do not think that, just because such behavior can be shown to exist on average, that is necessarily exists in specific situations. If you want to apply an anti-racist remedy in a specific situation, you should have to prove racism in that situation.
And I think that the remedies to specific situations will differ a great deal, depending on unique variables. That is, if a person proposes a remedy, they should show how it will fix the specific problem.
I do not agree with one-size-fits-all remedies that try to fix a social ill by turning a specific company on its head without factual evidence of racism in that company.
> Ones entire interpretation of these issues relies on whether or not one believes racism exists as a structural problem or not.
I think you are right that that belief shapes how we interpret these issues. By racism as a structural problem, I assume you mean this:
> “people are treated differently by society as a whole, based on their race”
Society is not an actor. It is a collection of people, and the people are actors. Some of them are racist, and some are not.
I do not believe that every situation is permeated with structural racism that must be corrected, but I suspect that people who believe in structural racism tend to find it everywhere and use it to justify the changes they propose.
I don't assume that they had malicious intent. But I do think that they perceive situations through a distorted lens, which often leads to behavior that is harmful to the organizations where they work.
I think that Basecamp and Singer and most organizations and individuals deserve an assumption of innocence.
Racism has to be proven. Accusations must be backed up with evidence. And the burden of evidence is on the accusers. I think critical race theorists start with the assumption that racism is shaping the interaction.
It is not enough to say that structural racism exists and therefore we should believe that it shaped the behavior of people at Basecamp. You have to prove it case by case. Simply claiming structural racism does not justify enormous change.
Statistically, people of different races experience different outcomes in the US on average. But there is a huge standard deviation in those outcomes by race or gender; that is, any given individual may be doing relatively well or poorly relative to the average.
And I think that applying assertions about society and societal ills to individuals, their actions and specific situations is often misguided, because they may deviate wildly from the average.
But that is exactly what critical race theorists tend to do. They treat individuals as representatives of a larger social trend. A male represents the patriarchy. A Caucasian represents white supremacy.
But attacking an individual to remedy a larger statistical discrepancy is in itself a form of injustice. Especially when we diagnose the supposed cause of that discrepancy with vagueness, as a culmination of ways that society acts.
That is not enough to convince me of the claims being made against Singer and Basecamp, or of the rightness of the Basecamp employees in rebellion.
> With that framing, the perception of whether the list was racist does matter as it explains their motivation.
I don't think we know their true motivation. Anyone can claim to perceive something as racist. We cannot control their sense of offense. The act they claim to be racist may or may not be racist.
But what advocates of critical race theory have found is that, by claiming that something is racist, they can bring pressure on their employers.
That is precisely what happened here. Basecamp is now under tremendous pressure. Plenty of ire has been focused on the co-founders as well as Singer. Singer has quit, though we don't know the facts of the case. Accusations of racism are fatal to one's career, whether or not they have a basis in fact.
Another word for "revealed pattern" is "narrative." Many narratives can be told about the same set of facts. And many of those narratives are deeply subjective, or driven by ideology.
I could take many minor actions by Jane Yang and others at Basecamp and interpret them as a power grab.
To be clear, I know that some people and companies do act in racist ways. Such behavior is illegal and should be punished. But the evidentiary bar to establish that is high. That bar has not yet been met here.
In this case, we have very serious accusations and very little evidence, evidence that can be interpreted in several ways. But Basecamp and Singer have already suffered serious consequences, and the claims have been aired publicly.
So they were able to create a scandal without going through the effort of proving anything.
I think my assertions stack up pretty well with the facts.
The names list hasn't been clearly established as racist. If you have 10 times the European names as you have Asian names, is it racist against Asians, or were there "funny" names in all groups?
The perception of racism is not necessarily racism. That is precisely the point that is being argued. The claim of white supremacy does not mean that an organization is white supremacist. Big claims need big evidence. I haven't seen it.
Minor slights happen. They are inevitable in daily life no matter what your race, gender, sexual orientation or other identity. If you use minor slights to create an uproar in the context of your job, you are a bad employee who should be fired. Tying minor slights to genocide is one way of creating an uproar.
Singer had power and seniority at Basecamp. He once linked to a Breitbart page. While I differ with Breitbart on most issues, I do not see that as prima facie evidence that Singer is white supremacist or racist.
Just because Singer is a white male with authority does not make him, by definition, a white supremacist or a racist.
And if the only cure for that kind of "white supremacy" is replacing all the white males with any power or authority with people of other identities, then I'm opposed to that "cure," because it is a racist and discriminatory cure based on false generalizations about genders and racial groups.
This dynamic is playing out in thousands of companies and startups across the US. Many people in the US, the woke, have redefined "white supremacy" and "racism" to mean most inequalities and behavior that they don't like:
They do not accept non-racist environments, only anti-racist ones. They do not accept that businesses be politically neutral. Businesses must take political stances internally and publicly. To do anything less, or to remain silent, is to be complicit in what they see as white supremacy and systemic racism. And if you disagree with those people, you will be accused of being racist, as Singer was.
The irony, of course, is that Hansson and Fried built a reputation around righteousness and wokeness, and then it came for them, because they were two white guys with power.
And when they realized what was happening, they executed their cultural pivot very poorly. They came out with a hard ban on a bunch of people who have the talent to work elsewhere.
Coinbase, at least, had the good sense to focus on the positive, their orientation as a mission-focused company. At the same time, Coinbase was making its employees rich with options and headed for an IPO.
The two companies will be paired case studies at HBS someday about how to screw it up and how to do it right.
This has been discussed below. The reporter was giving Peltz non-public information about the stories he was going to publish, which allowed Peltz to better time his trades. The information flow was two-way.
Tying insider trading to a Bloomberg reporter is very rare, although it has happened before, and I linked to one instance above.
Because it is rare, it is newsworthy, particularly for the Columbia Journalism Review. Even if you don't care about journalism, the fact that one of the world's great news organizations and news wires has ties to insider trading should concern you and Bloomberg's top editors, because it's dirty. You just don't want your reporters abetting crimes if you can avoid it.
My guess is that Hammond will not last long at Bloomberg. This story is more about the reporter than about the insider trading. And it is less about the law, and more about journalistic ethics. It doesn't matter whether it is illegal for the reporter to tell Peltz that the story will come out soon; it is certainly against his agreement with Bloomberg.
I don't think they are prosecuting Peltz for getting the information from the reporter. They are prosecuting him for this:
"Peltz obtained material nonpublic information about the private equity firm’s interest in Ferro from a member of Ferro’s Board of Directors (the “Ferro Insider”), and/or the Board member’s fiancée (now wife) (the “Ferro Insider’s Fiancée”)."
I'm still surprised that he was hired by Apple (one of the world's most secretive companies), after disclosing so many secrets of a former employer. And he was only fired because by Apple after being retroactively cast as a misogynist in a woker age by people bad at parsing the license of creative non-fiction. Life is absurd, and our best predictions futile.
But what it tells me is that it is easier to go from tech worker to provocative media personality than to take the reverse route. He condemned himself to practice a sort of journalism, or, at best, to work for less visible companies.
And that is a great argument for the pseudonymous economy that balajis is advocating. So that people can speak their minds and maintain their livelihoods at the same time.