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Careless People

pluralistic.net

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Re: Careless People

#271

Post by apercu »

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…

"Oh well, I'm not going to be Andres Segovia, so I guess I will never pick up a guitar."

I think that attitude comes from people who are deeply unhappy. They need therapy.

Re: Careless People

#272

Post by scruple »

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 have no idea. What I do know is that there's no degree of hard work or talent that will make me a billionaire.

Re: Careless People

#274

Post by scruple »

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.

How many are born into it? If I think about the people that I personally know who are worth 8-figures or more they were each born into wealth. I wouldn't ever say that they also don't work hard and have talent, because they truly do, but it doesn't apply to their wealth.

Re: Careless People

#275

Post by righthand »

DreaminDani wrote: post #186
yapyap wrote: post #185

It’s jarring when people refer to having read something and then it turns out they listened to the audiobook. This is not a jab on this specific blogger but a general thing. There should be a term for listening to an audiobook that’s not reading but does refer to a book on audio level, or just say you listened to the book.

Reading an audiobook is reading. As a partially blind person, it is the only way I can read comfortably. I'm not sure how a different word would help. If one was reviewing the audiobook, specifically, they might call it out in order to comment on the narration quality, etc. But if you listened to the book, you've read it.

I don’t agree. Your eyes sending signals to your brain is different than your ears. It is a different way to digest information. People tend to remember 20% of what they hear and only 10% of what they read. While the hearing is greater it doesn’t include the same process of acquiring information. “Listening is reading” is a false generalization just because you were able to gather the same information doesn’t mean you “read” the book. I don’t consider a person in a wheel chair a “walker” but I would go for a “stroll” (roaming) with them.

Re: Careless People

#276

Post by AnimalMuppet »

apercu wrote: post #263
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…

> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure. I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well. Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you m…

Hmm. So highly insecure people have to "win" (however it's defined at the moment) in order to bury their insecurities for the moment, but ultra wealthy individuals 1) have more power, so they can make it so that they win more often, and 2) are noticed more (or at least by a wider circle), so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.

Re: Careless People

#277

Post by righthand »

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…

Who hasn’t ruined a life or two for excessive monetary gain? Surely every person on earth right?

Thanks Zuck for ruining lives, selling out the public to advertising and performing psychological experiments on your users, so this guy could send text across the wire. Something not possible before Facebook apparently.

Re: Careless People

#278

Post by lithocarpus »

throw4847285 wrote: post #230

It's nice to know that despite playing fast and loose with the facts, the film The Social Network does capture something fundamentally true about Zuckerberg's psychology. The pathological need to dominate can be disguised when you're the underdog, but the more power you accrue the more it becomes the sole motivation. To paraphrase Robert Caro, "power does not corrupt, it reveals."

I think power also can and often does corrupt. Partly due to the corrupting pressure that comes at a person who has power.

Re: Careless People

#279

Post by onion2k »

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…

f you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?

Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that.

If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.

Re: Careless People

#280

Post by optymizer »

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 was the TL on a Facebook app feature driven by us, the engineers, that was 100% in the category of "good for humanity and it solves a problem for billions of people". I had to fight internal org leads to launch it, because there was almost no benefit for FB.

Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the feature is. That's when I realized how easy it is to present anything Meta works on through the lens of "stealing people's data" and "ads bad". Oculus headsets? VR ads. Smart glasses? AR ads. Spyware. Facebook app feature? Must have some privacy issue.

I'm not saying it's not deserved, with all the scandals, just that at some point it was getting a bit ridiculous with all the "Facebook bad" articles, at least one of which I knew first-hand was complete nonsense. It did seem like news outlets were grasping at straws to write yet another article to put Facebook in a bad light.

It's low-hanging fear-mongering fruit that gets the clicks and it's hard to disprove (not that PR/Legal would let us refute anything in the first place) because the trust is broken.

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