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Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#71

Post by wood_spirit »

Arainach wrote: post #51
Tinned_Tuna wrote: post #39

I don't think the author read even the Wikipedia page on Napoleon's invasion of Russia? Napoleon _did_ have reasons for attacking Russia, he _did_ prepare logistics. His motives, rationale, and actions are well-documented and widely studied. > watching an unchecked megalomaniac march 685,000 soldiers into a Russian winter without a fur coat in sight Napoleon famously crossed the Neman River in *June*.

If you believe a war with a country the size of Russia will be over within 4 months you might not be a genius.

Through a modern lenses and with hindsight and memes that follow from napoleons failed attempt we can say flippant things like this and say napoleon wasn’t a genius. But students of history and future generals will obviously investigate the facts and see things through the lenses and circumstances of the time rather than from the seat or the internet commentator.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#72

Post by nearbuy »

csallen wrote: post #19

The 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…

Yeah, the Twitter acquisition wasn't obviously irredeemably stupid. I think it was a bad decision, but paying a 38% premium above market price for an acquisition of a public company is within the normal range. You can argue the markets were irrational and Twitter was overvalued, but you shouldn't argue it's obvious because it clearly isn't obvious to a huge number of investors. You could argue Twitter is a poor fit for Musk's goals, but that wasn't obvious either. Twitter didn't have to change radically to be worth its price. It just had to grow profits a bit and maybe help some of Musk's other projects (like Grok).

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#73

Post by usrnm »

Tinned_Tuna wrote: post #39

I don't think the author read even the Wikipedia page on Napoleon's invasion of Russia? Napoleon _did_ have reasons for attacking Russia, he _did_ prepare logistics. His motives, rationale, and actions are well-documented and widely studied. > watching an unchecked megalomaniac march 685,000 soldiers into a Russian winter without a fur coat in sight Napoleon famously crossed the Neman River in *June*.

For some weird reason people like to simplify that war to "Napoleon vs. Russian winter", completely overlooking Kutuzov. Kutuzov was dealt a bad hand but he played his cards very well

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#74

Post by simianwords »

There’s a particular kind of influencer who follows the archetype I call “perpetual bull”.

They are highly cynical and show an immense confidence in their own predictions despite not being in the thick of it. And usually it follows the same format: the ideology is that the elites are stupid and completely irrational, evil as well as extremely powerful (they can’t see the contradiction in this). So they attempt to “balance the narrative” by showing the other side.

In the past year or so I heard multiple things about A.I.:

I was kept being told that the AI bubble will crash any time soon. Still didn’t happen.

I was told ChatGPT is not here to stay. It’s one of the most downloaded apps in the world.

I was told that Elon firing 80% of staff will cause twitter to crash. It didn’t. It’s running perfectly fine.

The modus operandi seems to be that you may just be cynical about everything because civilisationally important discoveries happen only once a while

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#75

Post by bryanrasmussen »

wood_spirit wrote: post #71
Arainach wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe a war with a country the size of Russia will be over within 4 months you might not be a genius.

Through a modern lenses and with hindsight and memes that follow from napoleons failed attempt we can say flippant things like this and say napoleon wasn’t a genius. But students of history and future generals will obviously investigate the facts and see things through the lenses and circumstances of the time rather than from the seat or the internet commentator.

but they have already, rhetorically, dealt with anyone that might come with some sort of context that does not agree with their conclusion:

>There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value, and you’ve met them. I am absolutely sure of it. They show up in every comment section and reply thread where someone powerful does something that looks, on its face, like a mistake - and their argument always runs the same way: you don’t understand, this is actually part of a larger plan, there’s a strategy here that you and I can’t see because we’re not operating at that annointed and elevated level…

Which is, of course, one of the things you have to do when dealing with shooting some bullshit in order to get to your next level of argument, you have to deploy arguments as to why the people who might show up to say hey that's bullshit are actually the stupid people who talk the bullshit, and not you.

As an example of the genre it's pretty tepid, they manage the "I'm telling you the truth part" and the talking down part of the message, but I personally find the best of this genre always includes a pithy little witticism that is just so bitchy and deliciously mean that nobody wants to make the bullshit accusation. At least that's my recommend!

I give it a C+/B- for effort.

on edit: I of course mean what the original article did, in making its flippant comments, not what Arainach did.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#76

Post by ptsneves »

sfink wrote: post #20
tw04 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That’s probably because we know consciously or subconsciously that in order to get and maintain a position of power at a multibillion dollar firm the person either never had a moral compass or quickly had to find ways to justify ignoring or compromising it. Any one of us who has worked for on…

> That’s probably because we know consciously or subconsciously that in order to get and maintain a position of power at a multibillion dollar firm the person either never had a moral compass or quickly had to find ways to justify ignoring or compromising it. Maybe. But I suspect that we tend to view those people that way because they play the I Am A Special Human game in public, especially around those they want to…

[flagged]

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#77

Post by justonceokay »

eastof wrote: post #12
tw04 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That’s probably because we know consciously or subconsciously that in order to get and maintain a position of power at a multibillion dollar firm the person either never had a moral compass or quickly had to find ways to justify ignoring or compromising it. Any one of us who has worked for on…

You are still falling for the evil genius trap. The truth is all of us treat our fellow humans this way, see Singer's drowning child. We're simply not wired to care as much about even large groups of people when they are not people we regularly interact with.

Where did the above commenter say “genius?”

Evil is boring because it is so usual. With the small power I’m given I choose not to recycle, I jaywalk, I say the “R” word in private conversation. If I were a line manager I would play favorites and skip mentorship opportunities if I were tired or busy. As a middle manager I might forget the names of some of my indirect reports and unwittingly pit teams against each other. As my power increases, the fallout of my human actions has larger and more “evil” sounding consequences.

Remember that 99.9% of people do not consider themselves to be the bad guy, yet more than 0.01% of people are bad guys. Almost no one identifies with evil, yet evil is a string that runs through every beating heart.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#79

Post by schnebbau »

NoPicklez wrote: post #49

Sometimes 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.

Has Elon done dumb shit though? He's still winning, it couldn't have been that dumb.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#80

Post by fluoridation »

NoPicklez wrote: post #68
spiderfarmer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular people do dumb shit and embarrass themselves at a barbecue. Powerful people do dumb shit and move markets, wreck products, distort public discourse, and still get a choir singing about their ‘pretty good shit across his lifetime.’ At some point it stops being nuance and starts being unpaid PR.

All due respect I don't really care much about Musk, but my point is that a powerful person can have a done a good thing and a dumb thing over the course of their career. The dumb thing doesn't nullify the fact they did a good thing. As the article presents, Napoleon is considered one of the great military commanders in history. But he also did some pretty dumb shit leading the many deaths.

>The dumb thing doesn't nullify the fact they did a good thing.

I mean, surely it depends on the exact nature of the two things. Also, contrasting good with dumb strikes me as odd. Something can be good and dumb, or bad and smart.

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