Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

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since you are good at politics, here is a question for you - something I always wondered about.

How do you become good at politics - not the making speeches to a crowd bit, the backroom wheeling and dealing and backstabbing bit? Is it a totally inborn skill or something you can learn ?

(fwiw, I've personally found that once I put on my 'cynicism' hat and evaluate a situation totally in terms of completely disbelieving what everyone says and thinking solely in terms of "everyone is out to get something for himself/herself irrespective of what they say, let me try to figure out what", I get a surprisingly accurate and actionable reading of the situation. Helps a lot in understanding and utilizing corporate politics, for example, a skill most hackers don't have.

However, thinking this way, and "seeing" things this way makes me feel slimy and in need of a bath even when it is effective in mapping the terrain, and so requires a deliberate act of will to engage in. I suspect politicians have to work this way all the time, constantly evaluating, indulging and trading with some nasty people).

I believe that the most successful politicians, as well as those who are successful at the petty politics of the office or in social settings, are able to bifurcate their minds, and operate along two entirely independent tracks. Track one is filled with sincere ideals, and assumes that other people are telling the truth most of the time, and have good intentions. Politicians use that track to talk to people about their problems, "feel their pain" and so on. This track allows them to gain support and become popular enough to win elections (or gain popularity in whatever circumstance).

Track two is strictly Machiavellian game theory to the max. Everyone is a two-faced, scheming bastard (including the politician thinking this way). Ends always justify means. Most situations are zero-sum games, with a winner and a loser. If you have more knowledge than the other guy, you will be the winner, and they are the loser. This is how the world works, and all blatherings to the contrary are just the attempts of other cynical bastards to try to make you the sucker. This is the track they use when they want to get something done (other than gain popularity).

Political types can switch between these two tracks seamlessly, in an instant. They can almost think along them both simultaneously. They feel no hypocrisy thinking both ways -- to them it's apples and oranges. You use the right tool for the job at hand -- what's the problem with that? It's purely rational.

Unfortunately for most of us (or fortunately, you decide), this two-track thinking is unnatural at best, or just flat out impossible to achieve. But to those few who seem to have the gift, it's just second nature.

Do you have any evidence to back up such a vicious attack on politicians, other than your personal feelings? I'm not saying politicians are saints, but your depiction of them makes them out as devils. The truth is certainly between those two extremes - like for everyone else.

I don't consider this a vicious attack, nor does it make them devils. My evidence is a large amount of anecdotal observation, close up and personal, of various people I've met, and correlating their levels of success in their chosen professions with my perception of how their minds work. I then apply some pattern matching to relate what I've seen with my own two eyes to the patterns of speech and behavior I see in public figures. I can't prove my hypothesis but I find that it is a very good working theory, ie it has strong predictive value.

I think everyone is like this to some extent -- we all have some level of double-think going on in our lives. But for some of us, that fact is deeply troubling, and we expend a lot of effort to stamp out whatever we see as hypocrisy in our own thinking and actions. My premise is simply that that urge is pretty much mutually exclusive with regard to certain levels of achievement in various walks of life, including (at a minimum) politics and business. Art and entertainment are a bit trickier, because to some degree they demand a level of sincerity to be successful -- though there are plenty of obvious cases of hypocrisy there as well.

[edit: two examples of politicians who do not work this way are Ralph Nader and Ron Paul. These are clearly people who walk and talk their ideals without regard to more pragmatic political calculations. Compare their level of success with, say, Mitt Romney, who in my opinion is willing to send any neural impulses to his body that he thinks increase his chances of being President some day. I just don't believe in our political environment, there is any possible way to get to the top if you are a pure idealist.]

Funny, I think this mentality applies to entrepreneurs as well. On one hand, you have to give the aura you're doing good. On the other, you have to be vicious and be a grey hat if you wish to thrive.

Of course, then there are those of us who avoid having to use the second track as a deliberate strategy. Honor, established and maintained diligently, is in fact a fairly powerful attribute to wield.

Is it inherently dishonorable to talk about values that you aspire to, but simultaneously to acknowledge pragmatically (to yourself at least) that it is not possible to successfully match those values with actions in the environment you find yourself in, due to the mendacity and ruthlessness of others?

Having a clear, ethical goal helps; things always get muddy in the implementation.

Example: I want to cure cancer. In order to cure cancer, I have to hire the right people to develop the IP. In order to hire the right people, I need to obtain the financial resources, either through a big-company budgeting process, a political process, talking to investors, etc.

At bottom, it's all about power: who has it, how to get it, and how to wield the tools of influence. It's hard to accomplish anything involving other people without understanding how to wield this toolset effectively.

If you're looking into how to hire salespeople, check out this post I made on how WePay hires: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3864412

The best way to become good at politics is to have serious political goals and possess IQ and EQ to really analyze how to achieve those goals.

There's also a red herring here - politics (in life, work, government), to me, is a proxy concept for ambition. People generally aren't political just because they like the game in and of itself - it's because they have something to prove, something to achieve, or something to gain.

The real question is: why are some people more ambitious than others?

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