The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me

It's not just the ones at the top, it's a strong subculture within the industry, built perhaps on valuing certain personality traits that to some extent may correlate with certain kinds of effectiveness.

I immediately think of HN comments from the recent news about this week being off-the-charts hot, the way a disturbing number of people people seized on technical errors in the popular reporting (the Earth was obviously hotter at points in the distant past; the estimates were "just a computer model"), and jumped straight to, as Krugman puts it, reflexive contrarianism, the notion that the climate scientists must be wrong or corrupt and my gut-instinct priors are correct because I see myself as very smart.

Thankfully I think we did a fairly good job succinctly taking the sabotures to task this time around on these climate issues. The fine technicalities any contrarianism rested on looked ridiculous.

On so many topics all it takes is two or three seeds of chaos & the core points are all missed, amid endless debate on absurd distantly related topics. Injecting false debates can quite effectively smokescreen the topic at hand.

Online especially there's also a lot of people with agendas, either hidden or proudly worn. Give how transactional exchanges are, how little reputation really follow one around, the ability for either crazy or just-incredibly-slanted-agenda-keeping to inject itself in & distort the conversation is very high.

There's also the silent majority factor online. Most people don't comment in to say, "that was great, thanks, seemed spot on". The people most likely to comment are squeaky wheels, are people who make noise & they are more likely to have Very Serious Opinions.

Trying to just show up and spread some positivity &highlight good points is enormously appreciated. But alas also makes you a target for those whose behavior pattern is reflexive contrarianism. What a term!

It's because none of these claims are valid or reputable. Anti-vaxxers are making up these claims out of whole cloth, and if people spend any reasonable amount of time debunking it, then the anti-vaxxers will fall back on the same playbook as always:

1. The debunking is a lie/hoax, you can't trust these people they're working for big pharma.

2. Okay well that might not be true but what about this other completely manufactured claim?

3. This doesn't prove anything because

Take a read here:

https://observers.france24.com/en/science/20210811-covid-19-...

Excerpt:

> This first video shows small balls in a Petri dish moving in a strange way and connecting in a chain. It was widely circulated on social media early last week. The caption claims that it shows “graphene oxide" in the vaccine.

> Our team carried out a reverse image search and found the original version of the video on the YouTube channel of the "Stanford Complexity Group", linked to the American university of the same name.

> The video, called "Self Assembling Wires", shows steel ball bearings floating in castor oil in a Petri dish with a metal rim. An electrical current moves the balls when voltage is applied to them, and they connect to one another. There is absolutely no graphene or graphene oxide in the dish.

The reason people don't spend their time debunking these claims is that the people originating them are not making them in good faith. Doing real science to debunk blatant lies loses because it takes a lot longer to reproduce an alleged 'experiment' than it does to download a video and record new audio over top to claim it's something that it's not.

If these claims were real, then reputable sources would be reproducing them and there would be a discussion. Instead, the claims are completely fabricated and posted by random people with no credentials (or fake credentials), with baseless claims being made to support what they assert is happening.

There must be a different brain chemistry at work. Maybe increased levels of comfort and elevated pack status from the freedom of social transactions does this. I never understood why a lot of these fuckers don't just go away and leave everyone else alone when they made enough money for themselves to not worry about money. But I have come to realize that it doesn't work like this at all and there comes a profound change, most likely biochemical that promotes these drives.