[gargarplex]

On the one hand, you have a renaissance man (RISD-trained painter and Harvard-minted CS PhD) who authored On Lisp and started up and exited successfully with some of the most respected technologists as partners (Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris). On the other hand, you have the author of Founders at Work, someone who not only thoroughly interviewed tons of successful founders (& bootstraped a pattern-matching capacity) but also has a reputation for a world-class EQ that built community and kept bad apples away.

So, yeah, the DNA of the founding team matters a lot. Seems like for scaling companies (like Y Combinator, itself, is a company – and by Sam's definition of creating more value for others than itself, has become a platform) – traits are extremely heritable (not so much the case with children!)

[throwaway1984zz]

> traits are extremely heritable (not so much the case with children!)

This has been conclusively debunked.

https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/2016-plomin.pdf

> All psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic influence

> Most measures of the “environment” show significant genetic influence

> These are “big” findings, both in terms of effect size and potential impact on psychological science

[arrel]

Here’s a nice takedown of Plomin’s theory. I’m not a geneticist, but there seem to be a lot of holes in it. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06784-5

[throwaway1984zt]

I just read the whole thing, how is it a takedown? Plomin's paper is a meta-study which discusses results that are robustly replicated because there is a crisis of reproducibility in this domain and replication is the arbiter of the scientific method. This article you linked is essentially an opinion piece about Plomin...

edit: Did I get shadowbanned for this?! Post not showing up on different device..

[mcguire]

It's a review of Plomin's book, Blueprint, including putting it into context with the history of similar works.

"Like much of that literature, Blueprint plays fast and loose with the concept of heritability. Sometimes Plomin treats it (correctly) as a variable property of a population in a given environment. As population geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out in a scathing critique of Jensen’s approach in 1970, in times of plenty, height is highly heritable; in a famine, much less so (R. C. Lewontin Bull. Atom. Sci. 26, 2–8; 1970). But elsewhere, Plomin, like Jensen, treats heritability wrongly as a property inherent in a trait."

...

"The most troubling thing about Blueprint is its Panglossian DNA determinism. Plomin foresees private, direct-to-consumer companies selling sets of polygenic scores to academic programmes or workplaces. Yet, as this “incorrigible optimist” assures us, “success and failure — and credit and blame — in overcoming problems should be calibrated relative to genetic strengths and weaknesses”, not environmental ones. All is for the best in this best of brave new worlds.

"Plomin likes to say that various components of nurture “matter, but they don’t make a difference”. But the benefits of good teaching, of school lunches and breakfasts, of having textbooks and air-conditioning and heating and plumbing have been established irrefutably. And they actually are causal: we know why stable blood sugar improves mental concentration. Yet Plomin dismisses such effects as “unsystematic and unstable, so there’s not much we can do about them”."

[samatman]

you did, I vouched for it.

I wouldn't jump straight to foul play. New throwaways are probably pretty sensitive to downvote/flagging/etc, it's unlikely you were moderated out of existence.

[michaelkeenan]

I wish that writer had spent fewer words describing Plomin as undemocratic, insidious, discredited, simplistic, and regressive, and more words actually explaining why he thinks Plomin is wrong.

[mcguire]

Well, the history of the idea that your ancestors determine who you are does have a certain smell to it.

[sbierwagen]

Smell is also not a terribly good argument for Plomin being wrong.

[awaythrowgang]

Someone sent me this screenshot and asked to post to see if this was some kind of spam filter or if HN mods are actively hiding it (trying to invoke the Streisand effect I guess). She said the first post was also hidden until it re-appeared with your response. I am now also very interested because as far as I can tell this doesn't violate rules, just makes some people uncomfortable or something.

https://imgur.com/T7GzfeE

[croissants]

> RISD-trained painter

Not super relevant, but it's funny that the guy who has famously criticized credentialism [1] also thinks the best way to describe his artistic achievements is "studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti" [2].

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html

[eldavido]

This is called being pragmatic. pg is excellent at this.

If the rest of the world operates on credentialism, you either go with the flow and just play along, or refuse to acknowledge how the rest of the world works, and get caught up in a lot of stupid arguments.

It's important to understand, there's a cost to being unconventional. I think pg understands this better than most. Sometimes that cost is worth it. A lot of times though, it isn't.

[croissants]

Isn't pragmatism about choosing actions with a clear eye toward their practical effects? My perception is that if he can't even stick to his principles on credentialism when talking about a hobby, he either takes extreme care to shape others' opinions of his hobby or doesn't really personally buy anti-credentialism.

(I don't mean to pick on Paul Graham, but it's kind of hard to resist with all the essays.)

[andrewflnr]

Maybe he has a clear eye toward the practical effect of mentioning his "painting credentials". To say he wasn't sticking to his principles, I think you would have to say he was allowing his own decisions to be unduly influenced by credentials, not just mentioning his own.

[lazyjones]

Mentioning facts about your education in your bio isn't the same as "describing your artistic achievements". You wouldn't buy one of his paintings because of where he studied and neither would he try to sell you one purely on those facts.

[srtjstjsj]

I've never seen one of his paintings. Unless, did he paint the cover of http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html ?

[croissants]

Doesn't seem like it [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_of_Babel_(Bruegel)

[xapata]

Within a field, among other practitioners, credentials matter little. Outside the field, what else do we have to go by?

[whatshisface]

Accomplishments.

[rtlfe]

I personally have no idea what painting accomplishments exist and how much they mean, but I do have a vague idea of what RISD is, so that's more useful to me.

[whatshisface]

If you wanted to hire a painter, you would have an idea of what task you wanted to accomplish, and understanding that would allow you to compare painting accomplishments against your intended goal. If you want to hire a painter but don't know what you want them to do... that is not a recipe for commercial success!

[NateEag]

Bach was not recognized as a world-class composer until over a hundred years after his death, IIRC.

[bogomipz]

No composers were world recognized in the Baroque era. How would they be? There were no recordings and no music publishing industry. Bach was not well-known as a composer until after his death because he worked as a church organist as opposed to traveling and staging concerts. His employer St Thomas Church didn't release his composition until 1850. He was certainly well-regarded in Germany as an organist though.

[NateEag]

I did not say "world recognized", I said recognized as world-class.

I believe his church was disappointed that they didn't get Purcell, when he was first hired. I may well have that wrong - it's a vague memory.

My point was that experts don't necessarily do a good job of recognizing which other experts are great quickly. It can take a long, long time for the best to rise to the top.

[whatshisface]

Why would someone in Bach's era needed to have recognized him as a world-class composer? If his music appealed to them personally they would know, and if they were a "record label," the fact that it wasn't popular at the time is all they would need to know.

[NateEag]

My point was that Bach accomplished more than just about any composer before or since.

Some people put Mozart and Beethoven up there (I think he was better at his best and I believe more prolific generally, but YMMV).

The point is, though, that almost no one in history has rivaled Bach for his compositional feats, yet it took a hundred years after his death before people really started to realize that.

If that was true for him, I question whether it's realistic to count on human ability to recognize accomplishments as a useful metric.

[aardvark291]

I appreciate Maciej Cegłowski's perspective here:

https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

[simonebrunozzi]

Agree, YC is a company. Instead of owning 100% of IP and products being developed, it owns 7% of it. More thoughts here (from 2016): [0], also in comparison to Alphabet.

[0]: https://medium.com/simone-brunozzi/y-combinator-and-alphabet...

[benjohnson1707]

Rather a platform, isn't it? Matches founders with VC for a stake of 7% as fee.

Platforms thrive if you match supply and demand in a highly relevant way, and once they thrive, they generate network effects.

So PG & Jessica were sort of the equivalent of the seller terms and conditions on the Amazon marketplace platform haha. They were able to spot and shape promising founding teams.