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Careless People

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Re: Careless People

#231

Post by achenet »

KeithBrink wrote: post #156
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

> 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…

I was interested in this anecdote about the board games, but it seems like there's at least some dispute about how true or inflated this story is: https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-board-game-c... I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly…

from the article you linked, it seems that Zuck told everyone else to gang up on the next hardest player so he could win.

That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said. Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?

Re: Careless People

#232

Post by hermitcrab »

kashunstva wrote: post #182
hermitcrab wrote: post #134

>Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down. I do wonder what the point of amassing all that money and power is, if it means you end up grovelling to a despot like Xi (or a would-be despot like Trump).

Just riding that hedonic treadmill, probably. Once you have bought all the properties you want, airplanes, helicopters and yachts, I imagine your hedonic set-point adjusts to that level and you begin to cast about for what's missing. (What's missing of course, is what all these people can't seem to find, which is an unwavering set of human-centred values.)

Once you have several mansions, a helicopter and a super yacht, the only possible reason to want more is for status. And you have to be some sort of sociopath to use that much of the world's resources just have a yacht 5m longer than the other guy.

Re: Careless People

#233

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

diggan wrote: post #42
conartist6 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So get a group of other sympathetic people and fork them. This is virtually the only place where you have a chance to take power from them by your actions. "The best way to complain is to create things," and yes that's a poster I got for free back when I worked at Facebook.

> fork them This requires all of the "source" to be available. For PyTorch and a bunch of other projects, this is trivial as all the source is straight up on GitHub. But for proprietary things like Llama, it's really hard to fork something when you don't even have access to what they used to build it (software-wise, not even thinking about the hardware yet). How could you fork something like Llama when Meta don't eve…

> you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it

I don’t have experience with this so I’m taking it at face value; if this is true, it’s so strange that I have an idea of this being an “open” model. As in, not that they PR’ed to make people believe it but that people who were required to accept those terms seem to believe it (as users seem to repeat it). Seems a little bit of critical thinking should dispel that notion. Are there any, more reasonably open models? Is LLaMa just called open because it’s the most accessible?

Re: Careless People

#234

Post by ninetyninenine »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

> 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…

It’s a personality trait that leads him to success.

Yes Zuckerberg won the lottery. But at the same time his business acumen and ruthless personality put him in a position to win the lottery.

Re: Careless People

#235

Post by hylaride »

generic92034 wrote: post #70
aredox wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.

So, why is he not selling all his Tesla stocks, then?

IIRC, he borrowed against them for a lot of stuff, including the Twitter acquisition. It's probably why he's freaking out a bit and returning to it. It's also not the first time he's had liquidity problems. Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse. The infamous "refundable deposit" for the car back then that ended up being almost twice as much as promised was essentially an unsecured loan. People were almost out all their money.

Bethany McLean (a journalist that was among the first to start questioning Enron's numbers and wrote the book "the smartest men in the room" on it that also became a documentary) has been following Elon Musk for well over a decade.

She once said "Whenever Elon is lashing out is when he's under enormous stress". Also, he has a large cult of true believers who believe a man who's taken credit for others work as his own all his life. Watch this documentary called "the cult of the dead stock" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Bd6YxifCo ; it's like that x100.

Re: Careless People

#236

Post by aprilthird2021 »

moolcool wrote: post #139
xdkyx wrote: post #73

This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness? If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and ti…

I think Facebook's core product is inherently evil in a way that other FAANG's core products may not be.

It doesn't have anything to do with this though. It has to do with having so much power and money in a "meritocracy" and the mental gymnastics needed to maintain those two opposing propositions.

Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals

Re: Careless People

#237

Post by zfiber »

remus wrote: post #212
sokoloff wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's not just luck. It's about how far would you go against the human principles. Remember, zuck is a prime ideological person who never had any ethics on respecting other people's privacy. His well known textual conversation with a friend on calling people "dumb fucks" for giving out their data for using "facebook" is one of the many examples.

Re: Careless People

#238

Post by asoneth »

sokoloff wrote: post #190
lordnacho wrote: post #96

Earlier 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 don't personally know any people who believe that hard work and talent have zero positive correlation with success. However I know many people who believe that parents' socioeconomic status, genetics, luck, birthplace, and lack of scruples are all much more significant factors.

I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.

Re: Careless People

#239

Post by ajb »

TrackerFF wrote: post #50
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #9

> 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…

I think it is part nature, part nurture. To get where they are, they need to be quite smart, competitive, and ruthless. As soon as they succeed, they become magnets to yes-men and people trying to ride their coat-tails. So you end up in a position where the majority will ask "how high?" when you tell them to jump, and who will never question you. Do that for a couple of decades, and something has to change - psycholo…

There is also a feedback effect. Most people are part of groups which aren't strongly selected for moral character, but the rich and powerful become surrounded by people who are after money and power, unless they deliberately manage to avoid that. So some of their bad behaviour is because the availability heuristic tells them that that's how most people behave, and fills them with cynicism and contempt

Re: Careless People

#240

Post by samiv »

piva00 wrote: post #69
grafmax wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as we have this concentration of wealth in this country we are going to have this selective enforcement of laws based on class lines.

I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything. Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about…

Not necessarily..

During the Great Depression the Americans did pull together and demanded from President Roosevelt a social reform. That was called the New Deal Coalition.

This time though the fight will be much harder because even the democrats are so strongly indoctrinated in the "free market" idolatry that they are much closer to the republicans than any true social democratic movement (such as labor unions) that would actually be needed in order to help the American working (and soon ex-middle) class.

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

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