
What Silicon Valley Thinks About Politics – An Attempted Measurement - sethbannon
https://medium.com/@ferenstein/what-silicon-valley-really-thinks-about-politics-an-attempted-measurement-d37ed96a9251
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mjevans
This seems to be entirely: "What Silicon Valley (founders) Think(S) About
Politics (and how close are they agreeing with 'general' Democrats)"

I was hoping for something more generic, at least 'what tech workers in
silicon valley think' (given YC), not how a bunch of talking points line up to
other talking points; but an actual sample of, 'here is a problem, what do you
think the best solution(s) are?' (then ranked totaling them).

It also has that new media style that I /hate/ on websites, where there's some
full-screen image delineating sections. Yet they absolutely cannot serve you
some clean simple web page, it HAS to have full, you must scroll through them,
big images and dynamically placed text.

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fallous
Check the voting patterns for areas in the Valley to discover what tech
workers think. They pretty much line up with the results displayed regarding
founders. I noticed it myself while living there.

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qwerty85344324
The people he quotes quite liberally in his piece, including Mark Zuckerberg,
Marc Andressen, Peter Thiel, all support Republican presidential candidates.
He makes it seem as if their quotes are in support of Democrats. Also, only
129 out of 8000+ founders and investors responded. This doesn't scream
selection bias? Maybe Republican founders and investors are less likely to
respond to surveys, especially considering how the Brendan Eich situation went
down.

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lazaroclapp
There is something weird going on with the bar chart titled "An unequal big
pie". The bar for "financial inequality is a bigger problem for a prosperous
economy" is extremely small. The numeric value is 42%. As in, close to half of
the sample of (very rich) tech founders agree that it is a huge problem
(versus 59% of the general public sample, which incidentally still looks like
less than half the bar). Yet the graph makes it seem as if few founders
thought so.

Note that the alternative in the same graph is "mediocre growth is a bigger
problem for a prosperous economy" and there the value is 48%. So only a few
more tech founders[1] see slow growth as a big issue compared to those that
mention income inequality (for the economy, not ethically, mind you).

There is a lot to be said about a future that arrives faster and is quite a
bit more equally distributed, and which of the two matters the most. But that
bar seems to me as misleading to strengthen the posts view on S.V. (wealthy
founder) politics.

[1] 2 actually, given the sample size is 33

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spacecowboy_lon
Normally the minimum sample size for political poll is 1k ideally 3k.

~~~
lazaroclapp
In all fairness, this is a poll of a very particular sub-population
(Crunchbase founders and investors). The entire population is 8499 people, so
a sampling size of 3k would be more than a third of the population. The sample
size for most questions is 129 (but not random, since those were only the ones
who responded). I just found that one graph weird, but admittedly I haven't
looked carefully at everything else.

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lifeisstillgood
Across the Western world, the incumbent political parties are struggling to
represent the changing alignments of the population - (I tried to give
shorthand examples - I can't and that's the problem)

Silicon Valley's politics are perhaps more pronounced version of what you see
in every major city and country - economics and tech are changing everything
and the new alignments are going to be based around our inner chimp reactions
to things - and those things are not clear yet.

For example, make suggestions below as a form of free form policy / word
association.

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bko
> Internet founders believe the best role for government is competitive and
> direct funding for non-government agencies to solve social problems, whether
> it’s parent-run public charter schools, loans to immigrant entrepreneurs for
> an alternative energy startup, or scientific research at a public
> university.

I read this as founders believe they should receive support from the
government. Maybe the difference between start-ups and traditional business
isn't that big after all.

