"Careless" is doing some seriously heavy duty lifting here.
Careless People
211–220 of 575 posts
Re: Careless People
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success. So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
I suspect talent and hard work are pretty well correlated with becoming wealthy (say >$10m), but I think you then need a big injection of luck to take you from wealthy to ultra wealthy.
Re: Careless People
#213> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have th…
Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful would have a lot of negative psychological pressures that would likely effect all of us in that situation. Personal growth is difficult. Acknowledging negative parts of ourselves is difficult. Many times, we are forced to confront something negative about ourselves because of how it effects our lives and our relationships.
I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.
But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.
It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
Re: Careless People
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
You might find this recent talk on neo-liberalism, by journalist and activist George Monbiot, interesting: https://shows.acast.com/rhlstp/episodes/rhlstp-book-club-134...
I haven't listened to the talk but read Mobiot's book when it came out last year :) On the same vein, I'd recommend "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", and even the original "A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto" by Charles Peters to understand how the term is slippery and diverged a lot from the original manifesto. And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person. The feeling I have is t…
>And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person
Also, it is interesting that you feel the need to say you aren't a communist before criticising the current system. I guess that is a sign of just how entrenched it is.
Re: Careless People
#215I’m only part of the way through the book, so have nothing to spoil here. But it’s entertaining. And shocking. The author will relate a scene that’s so absurd that you think “ah, this can’t be true, this is made up for dramatic effect, nobody would act like that” and then you Google it and you realize the absurd thing is totally true and was fully documented at the time. All the author is adding is a perspective from…
For a company that supposedly runs on data and strategy, they're shockingly bad at anticipating how people will react when they try to bury criticism
Re: Careless People
#216> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have th…
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon? I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very…
That phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to men. All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person.
Re: Careless People
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity. Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretion…
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on. That sounds more like a cult than a company. I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
With the number of people that have been swept up in cults over history the entire idea that "people can just easily leave" doesn't seem to pan out well.
Re: Careless People
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.
> In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
The do anything to win mentality often includes bending the rules where they can. Someone listed some top people in their various sports below but I'd include Lebron too. Dude is the best basketball player the world has ever seen at least when considering longevity but he still flops often to get what he wants even though he doesn't need to to win. He's just going to get every edge.
Re: Careless People
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on. That sounds more like a cult than a company. I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
> I don't understand why anyone would put up with that To paraphrase McBain's answer to "how do you sleep at night?" "On top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO0JaecRWy0
People with the skills to earn lots of money can generally also get well paid jobs at companies not run by sociopaths.
Re: Careless People
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's called the Streisand Effect. :)
It's kind of amazing that people still hit this, really. Like, if you're Facebook's lawyers, how are you not telling them "don't talk about this; anything you say or do will only promote it further"? The lawyers must _know_.
From the lawyer's point of view I guess you're making a risk judgement, presumably they thought the chance of getting a successful court order outweighed the potential increase in press of they happened to fail.