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Careless People

pluralistic.net

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Re: Careless People

#511

Post by techpineapple »

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 think they’re like linearly correlated to a point and then other things take over.

I do think that the primary factor that can lead to billionaire status aside from luck is sort of moral flexibility / shamelessness / irrational risk tolerance above and beyond hard work and talent.

Re: Careless People

#512

Post by stonemetal12 »

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.

For most of human history yes, the amount of hard work you did was negatively correlated with success. Kings, Queens, and Pharos sat on thrones while peasants built the pyramids, farmed the land, etc.

Even today high effort jobs tend to be low paying, paper shuffling, or keyboard tapping tends to pay better.

Re: Careless People

#513

Post by mtzaldo »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #4

I’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…

Sounds like the book is similar to the almost famous movie main idea.

Re: Careless People

#514

Post by malwrar »

> Wynn-Williams's firsthand account of the next decade is not a story of these people becoming more reckless, rather, it's a story in which the possibility of consequences for that recklessness recedes, and with it, so does their care over those consequences.

I often feel similar when I witness rich people operate, and I’m sure others on different wealth scales observe the same in me. It’s wild to observe someone take risky/dangerous positions, fail, and then shrug it off when you would have been ruined. One of those observable moments of privilege. I feel like it would be something interesting to study.

Re: Careless People

#515

Post by mihaaly »

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…

Probably he is insecure? Put too much into how much people think about him. And believes that being a big person he needs to be the best at everything, while - and this is a positive trait actually - he knows that he is not that big, needs to overcompensate and project much more than he possesses - which is a common trait on Facebook. Overreacts to the ubiquitous life experience of loss.

Re: Careless People

#516

Post by hombre_fatal »

mapt wrote: post #510
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…

Being an Olympic gymnast or marathon runner or boxer is not, broadly speaking, healthy. These pursuits require you to make sacrifices that push your body to extremes, to its physical limits, and not only you are selected for a very particular set of traits, there are also lots of health and psycho-social compromises that are entailed by those traits and by your training process. That is the cost of competition. Likew…

Good point, and it made me think about a more general point about people:

It's often the same underlying trait that gives someone qualities that we like/admire but also the qualities we don't like.

When we evaluate each other, we sometimes have thoughts like "she has , but if only she'd work on ".

Over the years I finally realized that's not how we work. Our traits aren't always connected to isolated levers that we can pull independently.

The really good sales guy might exaggerate fibs in personal convo. The girl that moved from Germany to Mexico to start a successful hostel also has a hard impulsiveness that's hard to get along with. The really attentive mother is risk-averse to a point of absurdity. All examples of friends off the top of my head. Or me: I can find happiness anywhere that I am (good), but it also means I don't have the drive to rock the boat when I should (bad).

There doesn't necessarily exist the possibility of preserving the good part if you were to fix the bad part since the fix might require changing the underlying trait.

Re: Careless People

#517

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

siavosh wrote: post #353
Jensson wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point is that wealth is a pretty minor part here compared to luck and skill, as otherwise people born wealthy would dominate the startup world. Instead its people born to upper-middle class families that dominates it.

I broadly agree with your point, but you’re overlooking a critical dimension: once someone successfully identifies and exploits a niche (through a combination of skill and luck), the subsequent growth >can Humorous analogy: Imagine you’re playing a video game where, through a mix of skill and luck, you stumble upon an incredibly overpowered weapon. With even minimal competence, this weapon lets you easily acquire eve…

This is a basic feature of capitalism and every other acquisitive social system.

Without forced redistribution of wealth/power that set hard limits you're going to get a runaway, and the whole thing melts down.

This won't happen if the people with wealth/power care about consequences and have the wisdom to model outcomes accurately. But the kinds of people who care about consequences in capitalism are unlikely to be chasing huge wealth in the first place.

The system cannot work. It's fundamentally manic depressive, alternating between irrationally exuberant booms and catastrophic crashes, and consuming talent and raw materials for self-defeating ends.

Re: Careless People

#518

Post by prophesi »

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.

Some of the books that have stuck with me for the longest are the ones I listened to during the years I had a grueling 45+ minute commute. The only downside I've found is that it's a lot harder to find and reference passages you've found of interest. Otherwise I think it's a perfectly valid method of ingesting information. If you listen while doing something that really should require your undivided attention, then I'd agree that it falls short to reading the text.

They also state up front that they listened to the audiobook, so I'm not sure how much value there'd be in defining a term to differentiate reading versus listening to a book.

Re: Careless People

#519

Post by eru »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #452
eru wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does any of this have to do with capitalism? Have you ever seen a succession struggle in eg any old monarchy?

Capitalism is a system that allows people to make wealth based on trade. The winners in this game are the people at the top of the hierarchy. All these type A billionaires are the ultimate winners of the game. Zuck is a winner. In communism the system says there are no winners. Everything needs to be fair.

> In communism the system says there are no winners. Everything needs to be fair.

I'm glad you take them at their word. May I interest you in some beach front property?

In any case, there's plenty more systems than just these two.

Re: Careless People

#520

Post by eru »

mionhe wrote: post #495
ninetyninenine wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is a system that allows people to make wealth based on trade. The winners in this game are the people at the top of the hierarchy. All these type A billionaires are the ultimate winners of the game. Zuck is a winner. In communism the system says there are no winners. Everything needs to be fair.

The "system" in this case being the guy at the top who has taken all the power. Please feel free to point to the real world exception, because I can't find it.

There's plenty of exceptions. PR China just after Deng was a good exception, and so was the Soviet Union after Stalin.

But they were only exception in the lame technical sense that you didn't have a single 'guy at the top' in charge, but a sharing of power by eg something like the Politburo.

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