Reminds me of Basho's chief architect (the Riak company), who advised at Ricon's closing keynote that you should lie and misrepresent yourself to anyplace doing interesting things, as he did at Apple (where he got to write a distributed filesystem), Akamai, etc.
Once in "the real world", we discover that corporations and governments routinely lie, cheat and steal. Because it's effective. Does anyone honestly think Steve Jobs was averse to sociopathic behavior, or went unrewarded for it? We live in institutions which reward such sheer winning over obeying rules. (Regardless whether those rules are important or terrible.) The people who make the rules themselves are subject to such pressures. The mass of cheaters here on HN simply are too wise to speak up and admit it.
I say that as someone who never cheated on a school test or homework. I don't begrudge those who did, because the mainstream educational systems are disgusting. I have no fear that a cheater will make my worklife hard, because that's what interviews are for. I'm more concerned about play-by-the-rules people who've stuck to conventional wisdom all their lives, and defer to bosses.
Really? I'm not sure I've experience of this. Might be a geographic/cultural thing, I guess, but business and governance in the UK doesn't seem to be particularly corrupt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC
See "Money Laundering".
When an institution is at its core about lying, cheating and stealing, then it redefines the rules to make these actions just and moral... part of its own natural functioning. This filters down into all its sub-institutions, like its economic and educational systems.
(Then "lying, cheating and stealing" becomes anything which goes against its functioning. For instance, "terrorism" is redefined to include defending your country against the terrorists some foreign power sent to control you.)
Nonetheless the upper echelons of the corporate world in the UK probably resemble those in the UK in that sociopaths are ten to twenty times more common in the executive class than the general population. I can't see any reason politics would not favour the same group in the same way.
For further reading see gwern's notes on psychopaths and the psychology of power.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/fzy/notes_on_psychopathy/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/dtg/notes_on_the_psychology_of_power...
I have also heard good things about Ashok Rao's Psychopaths, Losers, Clueless series.
That would be Venkat Rao's Sociopaths, Losers, Clueless series.
You should read up on the City of London Corporation.[1][2][3][4]
[1] - http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/04/mysterious-residen...
[2] - http://streebgreebling.blogspot.com/2011/04/state-within-sta...
[3] - http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2011/02/london-corporati...
[4] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation
Read any issue of Private Eye and you might form a different opinion.
It's a prisoners dilemma thing. It works while they are suckers to cheat, but the refutation of that entire way of thinking comes when everybody cheats and everyone suffers.
After all in you world of non-cheating companies you would have to be strictly agains the business practices of companies such as Uber or Airbnb. After all they were certainly breaking the rules when they first started out and are still facing some serious legal battles.
I believe that everyone has the personal responsibility to challenge the rules, to question them, to demand answers why they are there and whom do they benefit. If the answers are unsatisfying it comes down to the personal evaluation: Is it better to follow the rules, challenge the rules, or break them.
While I haven't done it, I have recommended it to various people to lie on their resumes if they think it is the resumes preventing them to get a job. I was lucky to enter the work world in a time that they accepted just about everyone, but I see very smart folks nowadays scrapping for a job because they don't 'cheat' the interview process.
I didn't say "lie and misrepresent", I said "BS and charm". It was a rephrasing of an earlier tweet of mine:
https://twitter.com/argv0/statuses/222618738250350592
My main point was that all this stuff can be learned without a degree, but should always be learned, and that these jobs mainly require skills not taught in school; that charm goes a long way, etc.
Your parsing of what I said is unfortunate and your characterization of what I was espousing ('sociopathic', 'cheaters') is wrong.
EDIT: Try to interpret what I said in a positive way.
I was talking about personal intellectual growth, not obtaining things you don't deserve via lies.
I was talking only about bootstrapping yourself into a career you want - of course you must then master whatever it is you have set out to do or will be found out and fired.
If you want a job and know you can learn it, then obtain that job however you can and prove yourself.
I'm from India and 70% of people in my class think that cheating is fine. They'll copy assignments, cheat in tests and even exams. Though situation is not so bad here that people DEMAND for cheating but everything else is same.
I guess this is because of society and pressure. I don't know about China but in India, professions are like fashion. When doctors seem to be making money, there is a large portion of students wanting to be doctors and there is pressure from parents and society as a whole. Academic qualification is treated as the ONLY thing that one will be judged on and this also leads to parents stopping kids form going into sports, music and arts.
And poor kids who can't cope up with all this have to cheat.
The way many things work in Chinese societies is deviated far away from common knowledge, moral standard and laws. It is an eternal mystery how and why something is done for anybody outside of certain society. Although schools I attended never encouraged cheating, but the teachers did mention that gaps existed between the social reality and textbooks.