We detached this (lame rehash of a perennially tedious) subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10678391 and marked it off-topic.

Reasons at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10675203 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9722096, if anyone cares.

> Those of you who disagree are invited to imagine the world repeating the most misconstruable thing you said when you were 19.

Having known him at the time, I will assert that this is not some random cherry-picked chat fragment of him being a dick. It just happens to be one of the few times he explained his thought process in the open.

I think it highly unlikely that he changed this much while no one else I knew at that age did. Among dozens of people of the same background, university, age, cohort, and activity, none have had such a remarkable transition from devil into saint. Their personalities are intact. And his?

You are assuming people's personalities remain static over the course of their lives.

EDIT: Then again, they might not vary. I'm not a personality expert.

It irks me that you would rebut this guy with this argument simply because I know that the empiricism strongly leans toward personalities remaining very stable throughout the lifespan, and that changes move together as a population than within-individual. Academics might not have yet built consensus on a general personality theory (Big 5 is more a descriptive research framework than a theory), but there is consensus on personality empiricism.

Surely there is another angle of counter. I don't believe in winning argumentation by any means, especially by scientific disinformation without empirical cause.

I think the guy just grew up. People say dumb stuff when they're young. Not much need for empirical backing when the heuristic (in this case: people mature as they grow older) explains it well enough.

Your narrowly crafted argument is the proper response, but this guy made an empirically testable statement relevant to the sciences. You might not have clicked his profile, but he's also a PhD student of the sciences, meaning he has institutional access.

You won't find adequate empirical backing on personality change over the lifespan, because the ecology of the evidence suggests that personality is stable. Disciplined speech is difficult and worthy.

Fair enough. I was just suggesting a possibility.

Show me someone whose personality has changed without significant personal struggle and I'll show you a lobotomy.

And who are you to say whether Zuck has had that struggle? Furthermore, who are you to assume that one chat log from college is representative of Zuck's personality as a whole, and a fair datum to use against his character forever?

People do mature, and people do change.

Isn't the onus of proof on you in this instance? That's what Paul Graham just came and told me. (Who are you to say he didn't?)

I'm not making any assertion about Zuck, so no. Your comment implies that he didn't have the struggle that you referenced. I was indicating only that this implication is unfair, not that Zuck had necessarily had it.

That's true, you're right.

This is a fair point, but why do we as hackers and entrepreneurs place so much importance on what's in a company's "DNA" then? Because right here, you have a pretty damn stark view of the founder's mindset at the genesis of his startup before and as it was taking off. It isn't like he was chastened by external forces along the way or since - ostensibly everything that's happened since has only been positive reinforcement (A billion+ users, 45 billion dollars).

I'm not saying he still feels this way or didn't or couldn't change his thinking and attitude. Common decency would behoove him to and it's reasonable to grant that. I'm happy for him and his new family, but away from all that and his foundation (which sounds very positive), It's hard not to view a lot of what Facebook does with its users through the kind of cavalier attitude embodied in that old chat log. In fact, it helps makes a lot more sense of some of their moves if you do.

Counter evidence with counterevidence; it could be a good assumption. Even if someone's personality is not static, it doesn't mean that the variation is large enough to be significant, either.

We are all young and foolish in our lives. That's why we go through life - to learn, grow as an individual, and be the best version of ourselves we can be.

I don't think it's fair to judge anybody by their college/young adult years. Those years are some of the most influential and character changing any young adult goes through.

Go back and read something you wrote 5 years ago. I promise you will find something where you sit and think, "What could I have possibly been thinking about at the time...I wouldn't say that now." A lot of my facebook 'memories' appear at the top of my feed and sometimes I'm shocked I said something 5 years ago, no way I'm going to re-share that.

Without disagreeing with anything you've written (I agree!), what if a bad/foolish attitude you had when you were young led to you becoming an extraordinarily successful billionaire?

What life lessons would one learn from that? I've always tried to imagine how Mark himself really feels about it, because even if he's embarrassed, it's not untrue. Today, over 1/7th of the world does just "trust him" and its made him a billionaire. He was no dummy back then.

EDIT: Kudos to him (and Gates before him) for trying to give back now.

Although sometimes being reckless can lead to a reward, I think it can also cause you to lose the reward just as fast.

At some point in the growth of Facebook, Mark realized that what he had said back then was wrong and he is accountable for all the information people were giving Facebook. If he had continued with his attitude of people being "dumb" for giving him all the data after that point, I don't think Facebook would have succeeded as it has up until today.

So I guess you don't always have to 'fail' to learn a life lesson, but as you gain different perspectives on things you also learn from that.

I think a perfect example is politics. When you know only a little information about a topic, it's easy to say, 'just do this', or 'why are the idiots in office not doing it this way.' However, once you get more involved, and you see the repercussions of every decision you make, etc., you have a very different view.

So your point is that he liked to make himself sound edgy when he was in college?

He must be near about the only person in the world who has cause to grimace when they think back to how they used to act when they were younger.

I saved my AIM chat logs, I know of what I speak.