My experience with Israeli companies suggests that a culture which values intellectual achievement and competition is more widespread there.

Similar cultural enclaves exist elsewhere in the world and are presumably similarly effective, but they just aren't as large a portion of the population.

Even small cultural differences can have outsized effects because of pollination-- e.g. it's easier to learn from an expert in a domain if there are more experts around you.

I think your question isn't really that much different to asking why the bay area has "punched above its weight" in terms of producing successful tech companies compared to other regions around the US... or why other regions have had a lot more success in other domains.

My experience is the exact opposite. There is a culture of laziness and most offices are carried by a handful of outstanding people and propped up by significant foreign investment.

The difference with Israel, specifically in regards to hacking, is purely the amount of government support and protection independent actors receive for things that might otherwise be considered nefarious in other countries.

Also humans self-segregate. All else being equal a human who has property A will prefer to live with other humans who have property A, rather than humans with property B. Skin colour, favourite icecream flavour, late risers versus early birds - anything. We can deliberately make adjustments at policy level to reduce the harmful consequences (or of course, we can do stuff like red-lining to make it worse) but that's what they naturally do.

So these cultural affects will snowball.

Do you have a source to cite here, or can you refine what kind of properties you're talking about? I urinate standing up and prefer to live with someone who urinates while seated. This is the prevailing preference amongst people who urinate while standing.

This is colloquially referred to as "the big sort" in the United States - people moving to states where a higher portion of people share their political ideology. Your favorite search engine should point to many sources with this search term, though some are more dubious about the strength of the effect than others.

There’s only about 10 million people in Sweden and we’ve produced Saab, Ericsson, Volvo, IKEA, H&M, Spotify, Skype, MySQL to name a few.

I don’t think it’s that uncommon.

Well, Sweden is indeed one of the known tech powerhouses. But this just seems to prove the parent point, as there are many places in the world with similar population/quality of life/etc., but none of them come even close to Sweden/Israel/Bay Area in terms of tech.

It depends on how you define tech. The Netherlands are small (16m people) and world leaders in Agritech. We've got some decent tech companies in general (Philips, Booking, NXP, TomTom) and of course Shell / Unilever.

You can probably say something similar about Finland or Ireland.

Philips? The same company that sold me 15W grow lights while claiming they were 40w? I don't trust that company as far as I can throw it after that bit of outright fraud they pulled on me.

There is no reason why other well educated countries could being doing the same thing, but with the Israeli's, nothing is off the table. If a company in Israeli learns how to hack WhatsApp, that is seen as an advantage for the Israeli government. If an American company learns how to hack WhatsApp, they bound by ethics to let WhatsApp know and make sure the issue is fixed. Israeli culture thinks that is crazy to do that because they can use the flaw against their enemies.

Sounds like they are morally bankrupt. This is not something to be proud of in today's world.

I agree that it isn't a trait to be proud of, but show me a government that isn't morally bankrupt and I'll show you a government that you don't know enough about.

Being civilized seems to be a low priority in the civilized world.

The US also has export restrictions on crypto and other tech, which makes this kind of business harder for US companies. Especially with countries that aren’t strong Us allies.

When I worked in the radar business we couldnt just sell them to anyone.

Israel got about a million highly educated ex-Soviet immigrants who kick started the hi-tech industry in the early 90s. It’s slowly declining tho as Israel focuses more on educating kids about their “Jewish identity” than science and technology.

Other countries off-shoring their spycraft. <cough> <cough>

The Israeli army makes you code 12 hours a day for a year in some training programs.

Our punch is above our weight because of hard work and skepticism.

That's not the terrible stuff like NSO. NSO is just a clever way for the government (and the US government - don't forget) to export the military technology, regulate it and then claim they did not do it but a private company did.

Virtually everyone in NSO was in 8200, this is a way for the US and its allies to get around military trade issues.

I don't think they make anyone do that. The people who join these programs are predisposed to programming 12 hours a day (or more) in the first place. It's an effect rather than a cause.

High levels of investment, mandatory military service, and exceptionally good education.

If you ever get the chance to talk to someone from Israel, especially someone in tech who was raised in Israel, I recommend it. Ask them about where they went to school. You'll learn a lot.

> exceptionally good education.

Is that so?!

I’m an Israeli and I assumed that it’s the really bad education that is responsible for stronger skepticism and Chutzpah.

I have heard that Technion, huji, tau are good schools for cs/ee.

They are great, but academy is not the breeding grounds of NSO and its ilk.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about Israel, and that what’s really happening is that you don’t hear about the other firms in other countries, many of which are either more competent or have better tradecraft.

It's like everybody suddenly forgot about hacking team and vupen and whoever else.

I was told by a few people that their work culture is a sweatshop with "more work less bullshit" approach, is it true?

Not really. We work more hours relatively to some other countries, but generally don't work that hard. I Worked with people from other countries (Specifically, US, Germany, UK, France), in general they seem to work harder _when they work_ but they finish the day early and take more vacation days.

In any case, it's far away from being a "sweatshop", technology companies are a nice gig.

No.

If an American tech company tried to do something like this some employees would refuse and you would hear about the employee protests. I think because of the compulsory military service and their multi-generational dirty war Israel engineers don't seem to have these kinds of moral qualms.

(Normally I get flagged on HN for saying things like this, would love an explanation if it happens this time.)

I'm not going to flag you but I think you're drawing the wrong conclusions.

I don't have the numbers but I would be very surprised if the majority of Israeli cyber-ops ex-military sells spyware to authoritarian regimes. A few did do that but I don't think it's justified to blame the military service and whatnot for this.

Another thing to remember is that an Italian company also sold spyware to authoritarian regimes. The things they did was really similar to the Israeli one. Same excuses, same pr, same blabla... but without the compulsory military service and whatever reasons you listed.

There might be a certain degree of culture that helped.

For instance we tech worker share a very distinct culture from the general culture. Maybe the general culture/ a big subpart of the general culture in Israel is closer to the tech culture, and thus spurring more tech development.

Israel is beset on all sides by enemies of its state and has basically been at war since its creation. It has a very strong incentive to develop military industries. With support from the international community, they also have had the means to do so.

Natural selection.

https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jb...

Do they?

> On top of that, everybody has been trying to murder Jews during the entire history, so there's a lot of natural selection.

It doesn't seem plausible that war or murder leads to a positive force on someone's character or natural ability. There are many great tragedies where the flower of a nation's manhood has been lost in war and left the country in a worse off position to grow it's populace. The Battle of the Somme for one.

Most religions and ethnic groups has at least one persecution story if not centuries of them, I don't see the evidence that it leads to a uniform positive increase in outcomes.

> On top of that, everybody has been trying to murder Jews during the entire history, so there's a lot of natural selection.

Wow! Does it work too for the blacks? Maybe, blacks run fast to escape from whites on electric cars!! And women! Women are prettier than men to manipulate men!!

Please, don't do that. Please DON’T.

Lots and lots of outside money.

Yep especially US "aid".

Throughout history, Jews had to outsmart and outperform their peers in order to survive.

I guess it's part of their mentality. Just take a look at how many Jewish people have won the Nobel prize. Sure, most of them weren't even Israelis, but it seems that intellectual prowess is part of their heritage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates

I presume that most people will disagree with this but I believe that it is related to Jewish people on average being generally smarter than a non-jewish person. Consider for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates

> "Nobel Prizes[note 1] have been awarded to over 900 individuals,[1] of whom at least 20% were Jews, although the Jewish population comprises less than 0.2% of the world's population"

This is also true in my personal experience as well. A lot of my professors had Jewish ancestry and are some of the smartest people that I know. A lot of famous computer scientists have Jewish ancestry too (Sussman, Stallman, etc).

I don’t comment on the “Jewish are smarter” comment but I always attribute their success to their culture and work “mind”.

Sort of similar to how “Asian parents push their children to become doctors.” It’s not necessarily that Asians are smarter, but they do work hard to achieve what they want… statistically speaking.

Jewish do indeed account for a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes, among other things. At the very least, that seems to indicate that intellectual prowess is highly regarded inside the Jewish community and, as such, strongly encouraged as kids grow up. It's possible that the Jewish culture itself may provide members with a sense of structure and discipline that other cultures perhaps lack (at least on average).

Kindling this kind of provocative discussions should not be permitted here. The argument that x is smarter than everyone else without ever this being able to be verified is ridiculous. I don't suppose that a kid in Nigeria has the same access to education, resources, foreign aid, easy visa and an immense network as the average kid in Israel.

Of course, that is an extreme. But assigning intelligence to a "gene" and excluding any kind of environmental or societal/cultural reason for this kind of outlier is not very "smart"

> Kindling this kind of provocative discussions should not be permitted here

I simply and in good faith answered jonplackett's question based on my personal opinion and observations. My intention was not to provoke, although I do realise that this is a sensitive topic for some.

> But assigning intelligence to a "gene" and excluding any kind of environmental or societal/cultural reason for this kind of outlier is not very "smart"

Certainly, I do not believe that genetics is the only factor that affects intelligence. That being said, in the same spirit, I think that excluding genetics as a potential factor just because it makes some feel uncomfortable is not very smart.

Its a dangerous path - saying that one race is smarter directly implies that another race is dumber. That sort of dialogue is completely taboo at least in the US.

What about Obama's American exceptionalism speech? Seemed to be accepted fine.

Myths can be powerful things. Doesn't necessarily make them true.

Do you really not know the difference between nationality and race? There are people of every race and creed in the US.

I do actually, but in this context it doesn't really matter. Does any - not first generation immigrant - say I am 10% Irish, 10% Jewish from Russian Empire, 50% Welsh and 30% Italian? Maybe some people do but in reality you say you are an American. And for most of the world that's how it sounds anyway.

The problem is, because some misguided prejudiced people made up the bogus concept of "race" and used it to justify various forms of discrimination, we're no longer allowed to criticize the very real concept of "culture."

The people with the greatest influence over our language have succeeded in merging the two concepts, walling them both off from polite discourse for reasons known only to themselves.

Taboos are a way to hinder progress and science. I will not fall into that trap.

I could be wrong ofc, but I was under the impression that it is widely accepted in the scientific community that intelligence is at least partially affected by genes.

> saying that one race is smarter directly implies that another race is dumber

Note: I said on average.

The issue is not the average, but the extremes. When you have two identical distribution curves but one's center is shifted, the effect on the ends of the distributions are exaggerated.

A standard deviation increase in the average leads to a huge difference in demographics at the extremes. The population with lower mean will have the majority of the lower tail of the distribution, and the the other population will dominate the upper tail. In the highest 1% they will appear enormously over-represented.

In the middle is where it matters least, because near average people for both populations might have very similar iqs.

For a paper on the issue of specifically ashkenazi (rather than 'jewish') IQ I recommend this one from the University of Utah:

http://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbi...

Note the increased IQ is specifically for askenazi jews, as opposed to say sephardic jews. The paper identifies historical social issues that would make selection for intelligence a strong factor in ashkenazi history, explores possible genetic causes identified through unique mutations not present in adjacent populations, and goes into depth on IQ and IQ heritability.

A high level summary available from the economist behind a paywall but viewable here:

https://outline.com/XnhPWd

I hope you find it interesting. I think its scientific enough that few people should find it controversial, except those who believe that IQ is not a useful measurement of intelligence, which I don't think is an opinion you share given your previous posts.

The controversial part would be Jordan B Peterson talking about it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQHH6o9ual8

No matter your feelings on him, worth a watch.

Also in my experience (mainly business) I experimented that Jewish people are much smarter than the average non Jewish business people I've been dealing with. At best I could get a draw, never a business win. (I don't mean anything bad or implying anything more than what I've written. Please read my comment in a positive way).