I 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.

I don't think Amazon treats their employees badly. Warehouse workers aren't compensated like software engineers, but what do you expect?

I'm sure there are shitty managers at Amazon (in warehouses and in software) but by and large I believe blue collar Amazon workers have it about as well as blue collar workers everywhere. Maybe better.

I don't really see the problem here.

This works great in an orderly society, where most of the really mean stuff has already been successfully disincentivized, often at great cost. In the jungle, it takes dozens to hundreds of years to grow a tree, but only a few minutes to cut it down.

Everyone talking about this being out of touch with the present and how figures in proximity to Graham don’t fit the description of nice he’s referring to should think about this passage:

> For most of history success meant control of scarce resources. One got that by fighting, whether literally in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. For most of history, success meant success at zero-sum games. And in most of them meanness was not a handicap but probably an advantage.

What’s changed?

For a couple of decades, there were regulations that ensured market competitiveness. PG made a fortune during that time, but it's gone now.

I really wish Michael O. Church were still here.

A velvet glove conceals the iron fist.

It may be that successful mean people just hide it well enough to seem nice and the "x-ray vision" of the author's wife doesn't work on everyone. Once a mean person's position is unassailable, the velvet gloves come off. Alternatively, money is power and power corrupts.

The current crop of billionaires are at the pinnacle of success (depending on how you define it), but most sure don't seem very nice, and that's with a large PR team working overtime to hide the meanness.

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.

Or that the internet is full of mean losers. Your premise assumes anyone with an internet connection is successful and I very much doubt that assumption holds water.

Have a nice day!

Not really - I've seen some pretty mean people back in high school, because high school is one of the places where people are forced to be together, no matter what their preferences are.

But once one becomes an adult, there is a much greater leeway in choosing whom to interact with, so it is often possible to not interact with mean people at all.

What a total bunch of baloney.

This is PG before he discovered wokeism which was additional baloney.

He’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.

How do you explain Sam Altman's success?

I noticed that the media potrays Trump as a mean person. Help me reconcile this obseravtion with what you're saying?

Sadly, even if accurate, the exceptions (i.e. mean people who get power) can have an outsized impact because they don't respect norms and boundaries that prevent the worst abuses.

Also some strategies I'd call "mean" can be very effective: predatory pricing, monopolization, regulatory capture, disregarding externalities, lying, fraud, etc.

Thank you. I agree. Paul's general insight is probably true on an 80/20 split, but those who are sociopathic enough can and do wield power without any care for the destruction or disruption they cause. They can even get off on it. See: Trump, Sam Altman, etc.

I 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.

But didn't all those people you list fail at the end of the day?

Bill Gates is not just unfaithful, he even considered slipping his wife STD medication to avoid having to talk about his state of affairs. He's now alone and the only people willing to care for him are probably very few old friends he didn't alienate, yet. The rest is just after his money.

Steve Jobs was an infamously bad father and husband, just as Elon Musk and they both suffered from it. Elon Musks own daughter is attacking him online. Think about that.

Elon Musk is on top of that a seriously pathetic individual. That is pretty obvious, isn't it.

Sam Altman ... I mean, just the accusations are so cringe and ignominious.

None of those people strike me as authentically happy and fulfilled. They all overstepped the mark and paid for it dearly or are in the process of doing so. They all suffered from their habits of being reckless and lacking compassion.

If failing for you means being broke or "not rich", then yes. But that would be a very narrow interpretation. Certainly not mine. I seriously pity all of them.

    Sam Altman ... I mean, just the accusations are so cringe

Yeah.. sexually assaulting your sibling is "so cringe".

They 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,

This 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.

A sufficiently long diversion from the mean is indistinguishable from cultural norm. Ask Putin

So when will Trump fail?

> 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".

Yet sociopaths are successful and run this industry.

Yeah imagine a nice Steve Jobs would Apple be the same

There would be one more free handicapped space in the parking lot.

Funny where I work there's a C8 parked in a handicapped spot

They are good at simulating kindness

At his best. (And I don't mean business or politics per se but as a philosophical take to life.)

All people fail. We have examples on both sides of the spectrum. Let's not cherry pick.