Sometimes?
Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
41–50 of 165 posts
Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
#42Something I've learned is that in a certain social strata when people do audaciously stupid, its rarely because they lack the common sense to have covered their tracks. Its because they've learned they don't have to. No one is working hard to try and catch them, and even if by some miracle someone does (and people believe them), no government or regulatory body is really interested in punishing them anyway. This broa…
In my experience, people of every social strata sometimes do audaciously stupid things, and it's not because they get special treatment. It's often the people who have gotten in trouble the most that do audaciously stupid things the most frequently, despite experiencing past punishment.
Your observation matches what we would see if those people you speak of were just stupid for no reason and committed crimes that aren't caught as often. If a crime is only caught 10% of the time, they probably won't get caught the first few times. You can interpret that as them learning they can get away with it, but the person who just does stupid stuff for no reason will do the same thing, it isn't evidence one way or the other.
And they'd still be stupid the first time they committed the crime, before they've learned they can get away with it. And if they get convicted eventually, it was still stupid in the end. And if they don't get caught, we usually don't know about it, which makes it hard to argue that it's actually worth it for them to do these seemingly stupid crimes; we know of their failures but not their successes.
Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
#43[deleted]
Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
#44One thing I'd highlight is that the mechanism the OP notices in all the actors is a low-cost way of reducing uncertainty.
At each step, what does it cost to admit uncertainty or error vs what is gained from doing so? For a powerful person, appearing decisive often has a lower immediate cost than being indecisive. For a committed supporter, doubting the figure they've invested in has social, psychological and identity costs that outweigh any benefit of changing their beliefs.
When the local cost of uncertainty is higher than the perceived benefit of being right, people resolve toward certainty.
So the phenomenon could be seen as a cost-minimizing collapse where beliefs and actions settle on whatever preserves stability, even if it means denying something real.
So: Benefit(belief update) certainty collapse -> people believe weird shit
Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
#45The challenge with the world is that it requires nuance, ad hoc thinking, and effortful thinking. The human brain doesn't like putting effort into thinking. It's uncomfortable. It's easier for us to just have one rule, one heuristic, that we can simply apply to many similar situations. This is why ideology exists and is so powerful. You can always find people chanting the same phrase or slogan, over and over, regardl…
I though the 4D chess explanation was that he bought it (was forced to buy it by courts) because he was entering politics and wanted to be able to ensure the deaths of half a million children in Africa:
https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=inte...
It looks like he succeeded wildly at that.
Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
#46I disagree with the parts about Trump: he does know what he is doing. Not because it's a well crafted plan of 4D chess, but because he's deeply anxious/insecure and "lie with grandiosity" is a learned survival mechanism to protect his feelings from reality. It's like expecting a fish to stop swimming - it feels like it's suffocating, it's going to panic and do everything it can to get back into the water, get moving…
I think you have to qualify what you think trump is doing knowingly or not. Lie in every press conference? Sure. Posting an image of himself as Jesus? The guy has dementia.
> The guy has dementia.
I think you're right, but it isn't as advanced as Joe Biden's was, by the end of his term.
Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
#47I kind of feel like people know how to human, and how the humans around them human, but someone they've never met but only heard about or seen on TV or in meme posts? No clue at all. Sure, we know the hotshot CEO of COMPANY_NAME_HERE has to put on his pants one leg at a time, but the similarity ends there. They're different, they won't fall for the stupid tricks we fall for. They don't have trouble getting out of bed…
> They have CEO spouses that don't ask them to take out the trash or think about which yogurt to buy.
From 'Curb your enthusiasm', I've learnt that that's actually the only thing they ever do.
Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
#48[deleted]
Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
#49Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit, because they're still a human being like all of us.
It's easy to look at Musk and say, he's done some dumb shit when his dumb shit makes news. But very few of us have the same type of scrutiny that powerful people have. He's done dumb shit, but he's done a lot of pretty good shit across his lifetime.
Nobody is infallible.
Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
#50Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit, because they're still a human being like all of us. It's easy to look at Musk and say, he's done some dumb shit when his dumb shit makes news. But very few of us have the same type of scrutiny that powerful people have. He's done dumb shit, but he's done a lot of pretty good shit across his lifetime. Nobody is infallible.
It’s easy to look at musk because he’s a piece of shit