Brainwashing youths to this or that habit of thinking and then to use them for a great good is an idea as old as humanity. All sorts of religious sects, political fractions even hobbyists are doing this.
What is going on around YC is absolutely nothing special from a psychological point of view. "If you want loyal workers pay them less, so they would escape from the pain of cognitive dissonance by leveraging the big idea" a textbook says, and goes on about in-groups dynamics and notion of us versus them.
What is interesting is that all this was not created and orchestrated by the evil mind of Paul Graham, and it is not even a sect with him as a great guru. The whole thing was bootstrapped applying that very same bottom-up process he advocated in his technical books about Lisp.
Another part why the whole thing works, which was not mentioned in the pamphlet, is analogy to insider trading. PG has reputation and connections so he could sell teams and/or technologies to "friends".
So, YC is rather remarkable example that good ideas work, while banal practices of housing young naive fools are exactly the same in investment banking or politics or whatever. And it is not risk offloading, it is mere business among connected guys in a valley.
One more subtle difference. Contrary to investment products, which is a cheating by definition, teams and technologies YC selects and sells are "fair" and we could see and use them in our everyday life. We also could see CDS and HFT and mortgage and stock market scams all over the place. This is the difference between finance and tech - it is much more difficult to cheat, and hence succeeded in tech.
YC is the same kind of success based on proper ideas as viaweb was at its time, you like it or not. The analogy with banking is selling piles of java crap to ignorant fools.
What is going on around YC is absolutely nothing special from a psychological point of view. "If you want loyal workers pay them less, so they would escape from the pain of cognitive dissonance by leveraging the big idea" a textbook says, and goes on about in-groups dynamics and notion of us versus them.
What is interesting is that all this was not created and orchestrated by the evil mind of Paul Graham, and it is not even a sect with him as a great guru. The whole thing was bootstrapped applying that very same bottom-up process he advocated in his technical books about Lisp.
Another part why the whole thing works, which was not mentioned in the pamphlet, is analogy to insider trading. PG has reputation and connections so he could sell teams and/or technologies to "friends".
So, YC is rather remarkable example that good ideas work, while banal practices of housing young naive fools are exactly the same in investment banking or politics or whatever. And it is not risk offloading, it is mere business among connected guys in a valley.
One more subtle difference. Contrary to investment products, which is a cheating by definition, teams and technologies YC selects and sells are "fair" and we could see and use them in our everyday life. We also could see CDS and HFT and mortgage and stock market scams all over the place. This is the difference between finance and tech - it is much more difficult to cheat, and hence succeeded in tech.
YC is the same kind of success based on proper ideas as viaweb was at its time, you like it or not. The analogy with banking is selling piles of java crap to ignorant fools.