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Careless People

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Re: Careless People

#251

Post by achierius »

baritone wrote: post #54

I look forward to reading the book, but I’m not anti-Zuck. Individuals can change the world. Groups with ideology can change the world. This is why many of us are here at HN- for the discussion of ideas and for idealism. Few want to be supreme jerks that ruin things on a massive scale. Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they…

> We all fuck shit up and ruin lives

Part A sure, but I can say with some certainty that most people do not ruin lives. It's just hard to have that much influence over other people. If you want to be particularly pessimistic, you might be able to argue that many people ruin their children's lives -- But even that's a stretch.

Re: Careless People

#252

Post by ninetyninenine »

rottc0dd wrote: post #87
Jevon23 wrote: post #28

Earlier 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.

I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Re…

There’s a very very similar story about Jeff bezos and physics.

https://youtu.be/eFnV6EM-wzY?si=Nc_EqhXEFJVuQWS6

I’m not making this up. Seems like a shared personality trait among these people.

Re: Careless People

#253

Post by llm_nerd »

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.

Enormous numbers of humans work hard and are talented at the things they do. Hard work and talent gets you a middle-class existence, at least if you were born in the right country and with the right resources to go to university, etc.

In the case of Zuck, he basically did play a lottery ticket, and a perfect confluence of being in the right place at precisely the right time yielded some success. A million other programmers, working just as hard and just as talented, were trying to make their web app hit at that time and failed.

That's how life is. It is a lottery ticket that Zuck is super rich. And it's a strawman to act as if pointing this out means that hard work and talent don't matter.

And FWIW, the overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy. I am kind of a broken record on this, but I think Meta's entire business is basically the oxycontin of the online world, and that everyone involved should feel absolute shame about the negative value they bring to the world. Non-sociopaths would have felt shame and changed course when they realized they were getting rich on the mentally ill, conspiracies, misinformation, etc.

Re: Careless People

#254

Post by overgard »

marcianx wrote: post #106
rottc0dd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Re…

A less unflattering interpretation might be that once they saw the level of skill required to contribute to a field, they switched to a field that they could more meaningfully contribute to.

I think the reality though is you don't need to be in the top 99.999% to contribute to a field, you just need a unique take/voice. Trying to be the best at anything is a bad strategy in a connected world

Re: Careless People

#255

Post by sgarland »

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…

> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies.

Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing.

EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.

Re: Careless People

#256

Post by Arainach »

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…

Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them.

Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.

My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.

Re: Careless People

#257

Post by ninetyninenine »

technothrasher wrote: post #98
rottc0dd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Re…

Huh. I remember being miles ahead of my peers in computer science in high school. When getting to college and finding people most definitely better than I was, I was incredibly excited to finally find such people, not scared away.

That’s not a common reaction with humans. When people are the best, there’s a huge serotonin rush. Like literally this is measurable in humans.

Serotonin regulates dominance hierarchies and is associated with happiness. It’s so biological in nature that the same effect can be witnessed in lobsters. People or lobsters high in dominance have more serotonin and are generally happier.

Your story is not only anomalous. But it’s anomalous to the point where it’s unrealistic too. I can’t comment on this but if you did not feel the associated come down of serotonin I’m more inclined to say you’re not being honest with yourself more then you’re a biological anomaly. There’s likely enough variation in genetics to produce people like you so I’m not ruling it out.

Re: Careless People

#258

Post by lordnacho »

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.

You can believe it's positive, but not buy the idea that someone is millions of times more hard working or talented than ordinary people.

The guy who has made billions needs the stronger form of this karma-like idea.

Re: Careless People

#259

Post by doubled112 »

astura wrote: post #66
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…

Many many many years ago I used to like playing Scrabble (knockoff) on Yahoo Games. I quit playing completely when my opponent accused me of cheating because I made a high point move and was winning.

First person shooters were like this back before I stopped playing them online.

Get decent and dominate a few rounds? Here's a kick ban, must be cheating. Couldn't be because they keep bunching up.

Re: Careless People

#260

Post by hylaride »

hermitcrab wrote: post #219
hylaride wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Finding those companies is hard, especially when there's an obvious winner. Hell, I'd have joined facebook (not in hindsight, though) in the early 2000s because the specific challenges they were facing would have been novel. That being said, I'd likely feel terrible for what FB became had I did.

I visited the FB campus ~2015 on the invitation of some former colleagues that worked there. It felt very culty at the time and I left with the vague feeling that I always got when I left the house of my spoiled and over-privileged friend that I had in grade school. How they were working with the scale of data that they had to deal with was very cool, though.

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