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Careless People

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Re: Careless People

#331

Post by Jensson »

siavosh wrote: post #327
sokoloff wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick any of those 8 billion. Have them work half as hard. Have them have half as much talent. Do their outcomes remain the same , get better, or get worse? You’re arguing that there are other factors that also influence outcomes (and that those other factors are stronger forces). I agree with that point, but that’s not a refutation to the notion that the coefficients on talent and hard work are positive, nor a convin…

Can anyone benefit from working 10% harder or smarter? Undoubtedly. But success isn’t linear. It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages. The first million might be 95% hard work and talent. The next million, probably a bit less so.

> It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages.

Millions of people had an equal or better starting condition than Mark Zuckerberg so we aren't really lacking privileged people, but vanishingly few of those do become ultra wealthy.

Re: Careless People

#332

Post by swatcoder »

keerthiko wrote: post #178
technothrasher wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

in my experience, people who grow up as the biggest fish in a small pond (whether concerning just fields they care about, or in general) are always 99% of the time, one of these two when they end up a middling fish in the big pond: like you, happy to find peers and inspiring exemplars to collaborate with and learn from, or those who hate that they are not the best anymore. the former group probably leads the healthie…

I think the more common outcome you're not seeing, for the "other" group, is that they just go back to smaller ponds where they excelled in the first place, and often make strong contributions there.

Once it's been observed that there are bigger fish, you can't really go back to the naive sense of boundless potentiality, but you can go back to feeling like a strong and competent leader among people who benefit from and respect what you have.

Your comment focuses on the irrepressibly ambitious few who linger in the upper echelons of jet-setting academia and commerce and politics, trying to find a niche while constantly nagged by threats to their ego (sometimes succeeding, sometimes not), but there's many more Harvard/etc alum who just went back to Omaha or Baltimore or Denver or Burlington and made more or less big things happen there. That road is not so unhealthy or unhappy for them.

Re: Careless People

#333

Post by siavosh »

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 raises the question: where is the crack in this structural system, and how can we pry it open? Perhaps the vulnerability lies in the desire of the ultra-rich and powerful for societal respect—whether born of love or fear hardly matters. How should society respond? Mercilessly mock them.

Re: Careless People

#334

Post by varelse »

sokoloff wrote: post #318
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. 108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently. Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent. So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many bil…

Pick any of those 8 billion. Have them work half as hard. Have them have half as much talent. Do their outcomes remain the same , get better, or get worse? You’re arguing that there are other factors that also influence outcomes (and that those other factors are stronger forces). I agree with that point, but that’s not a refutation to the notion that the coefficients on talent and hard work are positive, nor a convin…

[dead]

Re: Careless People

#335

Post by ryandrake »

vintermann wrote: post #290
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here on HN, we're not telling Zuck and Musk anything. We're telling each other things about Zuck and Musk. Zuck and Musk aren't dropping by to find out what we think of them, ever.

Figuratively speaking, we're telling them, since we're saying it loudly in public. You bet they know people are saying it. They might even peek in - we know some of their friends (arguably friends) who do, and Musk is among other things famous for being a bit of a social media addict.

Rich people's bubbles are thick, and their "outside-the-bubble" communication tends to be write-only. I highly doubt Zucc or Musk spends any time at all on places like HN or Reddit, and their comms on their respective social media platforms tend to be broadcast sending/writing and not reading comments or feedback. They rely on the sycophants in their orbit to give them the summarized, sanitized, positive feedback, and downplay/hide the negative.

Re: Careless People

#336

Post by acyou »

Zuckerberg and co. always seem so basic. Settlers of Catan and Ticket To Ride? I can't imagine more flavorless, generic games.

Wait, those are the games that I play...

I remember listening to Zuckerberg speak at length about the various epochs of Facebook including the fast pivot to global, it's overall a fascinating and compelling story that the book surely capitalizes on well.

Re: Careless People

#337

Post by datadrivenangel »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #298
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 do. 108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently. Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent. So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many bil…

Circumstances and luck are hugely important, but you have agency even if you don't have full control.

Any of us could get hit by a meteor or drop dead at any minute, but working harder towards goals in aggregate moves us towards those goals, so I don't understand how this logic works?

Re: Careless People

#338

Post by siavosh »

Jensson wrote: post #331
siavosh wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone benefit from working 10% harder or smarter? Undoubtedly. But success isn’t linear. It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages. The first million might be 95% hard work and talent. The next million, probably a bit less so.

> It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages. Millions of people had an equal or better starting condition than Mark Zuckerberg so we aren't really lacking privileged people, but vanishingly few of those do become ultra wealthy.

I'm not going to get into the role of luck, but more curious -- how many ultra-rich individuals do you think can exist on the planet earth?

Re: Careless People

#339

Post by stevenwoo »

grafmax wrote: post #58
K0nserv wrote: post #14

The book is a good read and she also testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee[0], repeating many of the claims from the book under oath. One of the striking things is that it's clear that Mark and several others from Facebook perjured themselves in prior hearings. I expect there will be no consequence for this. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3DAnORfgB8

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.

Citizens United has enshrined this in law by allowing wholesale purchase of politicians via the current campaign finance system.

Re: Careless People

#340

Post by gen220 »

samiv wrote: post #240
piva00 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you and the person you're replying to agree.

We won't get a New Deal Coalition Part 2 without our own Dust Bowl (climate-change/industrial-agronomy-induced disasters, and the massive disruption to peoples way of lives that accompanied it) and Great Depression to conclusively demonstrate that industrialized, financialized oligarchy "doesn't work".

The two-party system was just as much captured by "free market" idolatry pre-FDR as they are today. There was nearly three decades of socialistic organizing in response to crisis in the 1890s-1920s before we finally had those principles manifest in one of the two major political parties in the executive branch, with FDR in 1932.

We're barely into the nascency of our own century's progressive era. If history's any guide, it'll probably take decades and it will get much, much worse before it gets better. :/

I re-read Grapes of Wrath recently, and it was an uncanny feeling: like I was reading something that was both near-future Sci-Fi and a memory-holed but relatively-recent history.

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