I’m a fan of start-ups.
I like the energy, I like the enthusiasm, I like the idea of doing something new, moving fast and breaking things, hopefully getting something right in the end, and letting the market determine which products win.
But there is something I’ve noticed across several domains, perhaps most notably associated with start-ups and politics, but not restricted to those domains. And that is a high degree of arrogance of people at the top.
Maybe people don’t start out arrogant. Maybe, along the way, power corrupts. Maybe, along the way, people get surrounded by yes-men and sycophants, and no one tells them how dumb some of their ideas are.
Ironically, they may end up divorced from market forces, caught up in their own reality, until forced to notice a major mistake.
Or maybe arrogance is selected for. Maybe you have to be pretty arrogant to begin with, to pursue paths that are very unlikely to lead to conventional success. Maybe if you then attain that success you attribute it to some quality of yourself rather than to chance.
I see this in tech sometimes (much as I love tech). I see this in politics. I see this in various online and offline communities.
And it worries me, because arrogance leads to brittleness. Maybe there is some wisdom to the old saying “pride comes before a fall”. If you are arrogant, you’re not necessarily able to Bayesian update. You’re not necessarily going to put enough weight on things that can go wrong. And if there is also deference to power, for whatever reason, and your bad ideas go unchecked, then you will really be in trouble.
For many kinds of problems, democracy, norms, and rules serve to hold this in check.
And it’s very popular among some start-up crowds to say yes, but these things are inefficient. Constraints hold back strong leaders. Rules are too onerous. You can’t produce anything good under stifling conditions. But suppose the US took a more authoritarian turn – it might become temporarily more efficient, but it would likely become more brittle, too.
Too often people go all-in on efficiency. To think it’s better to be unconstrained because, after all, they are doing Very Important Work so constraints are more costly. To think it’s fine if something breaks because then they can just stop and do something else.
It’s a pretty brittle and risky mindset and it’s unlikely to pay off in the long run, and especially unlikely when you add in people’s natural tendency to overshoot and miss the mark, to take on too many risks, to concentrate the risks, to not even notice risks. In theory, on paper, maybe going all-in on efficiency looks like the best option, but in real life people are subject to too many biases and receive too little feedback and ultimately are unlikely to be able to evaluate the risks.
Some constraints are good, actually, given humans’ predispositions. Not too many, but some.
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