If you read Peter Thiel's latest book, his argument is for monopoly over competition.

Which is just another way of saying, all competition must fail.

So far, it's worked for Facebook. They have trampled their competition, or they just buy them.

I read a piece by a (very reasonable) VC explaining the detriments of excess LP cash in the VC industry. The premise was that if 100 companies get funded in a space (say, local delivery) where normally, 10 companies would have, then even the ones who under normal circumstances would have "out competed" the others through superior service and product will have a tough time vs the torrent of cost cutting and "competition" from the slew of competitors, thereby making the entire industry unprofitable.

In a way, it reminds me of the consumer electronics market, especially the laptop PC market. Fierce competition forced down profits, and now seemingly every company is focused on cost cutting rather than making something we actually want to use. Both consumers and producers have lost out (woe is me who cannot buy a quality thinkpad anymore!).

This. So many software markets have this problem.

The only way out of it is if a clear leader breaks away eventually, or else a new market will disrupt and subsume the capabilities of the old one mired in cost competition.

Makes sense. If I remember my economics correctly, with efficient markets and competition, profits should approach zero over time. But, if there's no competition....

Yea, this I don't like this whole "it's legal--I'm just a great Entrepreneur(Winner!). Make your money, but don't step on the little guy. Oh yea, a hand shake means more than a contract in my world. I hope it's not a generational thing? I've been no angel on my life, but I have never taken advantage of someone poor, or naive. I know a few very wealthy Winners. They have all the toys, but very few friends, and even the third wife really doesn't give a chit about them. Oh, once their kids realize how daddy/mommy made all that money--the love turns to co-dependent despise wrapped in a smile. That said, there are financial and personal heros--Wosniak comes to mind?

No it isn't. If people keep throwing around these kind of assertions, these very serious psych diagnoses will lose all specificity and become useless.

Isn't there an important distinction between a sociopath and psychopath?

(or perhaps you are asserting that the generous use of xxxxx-path cheapens the gravity of the situation for those suffering from mental illnesses)

This is a popular misconception, they are interchangeable, being two words for the same concept of different origins. Some authors make minor distinctions, but they are not widely recognised.

Yes, whether or not you make the distinction, neither applies. I take it people on Hacker News don't dig Ellison. For all I know he is a sociopath. The above is not evidence for that.

They are both Antisocial Personality Disorders but a sociopath and psychopath are different in their planning ability.

A psychopath reacts, a sociopath manipulates.

That's the most succinct explanation I've heard on the subject. Thanks!

Whaa?

I was told a variation of the original quote by a chess master at age < 8 (I loved chess as a kid and took some advanced classes). Thankfully, I don't recall ever acting on such advice.

Maybe sociopathy is adaptive in the modern world.

The traits are definitely overrepresented in the executive suite.

This was the main message of American Psycho.

Only if we let it be.

That's not really true. There's a very serious collective action problem and limits on what humans (can) find genuinely attractive.

Which is why I added "in the modern world." In a tight-knit community sociopathic traits are probably much less beneficial than in an atomized, largely anonymous society.

We address some collective action problems, with varying degrees of success (certainly, some things we fail horribly at are collective action problems).

My statement wasn't meant to say, "Oh, it's simple, we just X!" Just that it's not necessarily outside the realm of things we could address. In particular, "adaptive" - when it comes to humans - is only relevant at time scales of many generations. Much changes over those time scales.