561–570 of 575 posts
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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?
That's assuming that free will actually exists, which is an open question at this point.
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Mastery comes with age, no way around that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pi7WcHqBNU - Here are some bits of wisdom from Japanese master chefs, both young and old.
In light of this, it's weird how the software industry, especially startup culture, is so rife with age discrimination.
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Neither talent nor hard work have anything to do with helping humanity. The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily. The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself. It’…
Tobacco actually has some value: It produces a craving, which can be satisfied temporarily. Being able to fulfill some kind of desire, even a contrived one, is the value. Or rather, the addiction of smoking created a desire that can definitely be satisfied.
You don't need to make things better to make money.
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From the book, it appears that Sheryl used Meta as a platform for promoting her own image and book rather than do the things that prevented a lot of bad. It’s beyond sad
Sounds like she got sued over it. But not over propositioning direct reports for sex in front of her entire team.
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> Wait, is the angle of the book that she’s a good person? That can’t possibly be right… Well, she paints herself as an idealist who believes Facebook can be an agent of [presumably positive] change, so at least she thinks of herself as good in some sense of the word. That’s what I found intriguing about that shark attack prologue. If it had been written by a third person or if this were a novelization, it would feel…
Well can you please spoil the shark attack thing? With a bit SPOILERS tag at the top if you like?
I find the narrator to be trying really hard to make the Facebook/Meta people look bad and in a lot of those cases she herself just comes across as bad at her own job.
Nobody in this book comes across well.
This review is as naive as Wynn-Williams portrays herself in her memoir (which I enjoyed!) In the book, Wynn-Williams described herself as a wide-eyed, almost helpless person, which doesn't align with her pre-Facebook career as a lawyer in the a diplomatic corps. And when at FB, she was in the rooms where it happened, and had a job enabling some of it. She could've quit, but did not. She was one of the titular carele…
How does her attempt to change things from the inside, by confronting their higher ups, who constantly put her down for it and collectivizing with other insiders, still lead you to such a harsh judgment of her character?
I read the book. It’s a very interesting read. A few things stood out ( no spoilers ) - Casual indifference at exec level to atrocities happening because of FB/ Meta. - Money/power does make you insensitive - Tech bro view of the world permeates most decisions that Meta takes. - Casual sexual harassment for women ( follows from the tech bro worldview I guess ) - US centric world view influencing how execs treat world…
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Well can you please spoil the shark attack thing? With a bit SPOILERS tag at the top if you like?
As a kid she was attacked by a shark. Parents took her to a local doctor who sewed up the wound. Turned out her bowel was punctured and she was going septic. Started complaining to her parents that she was feeling worse and worse. Parents brush her off and say to get some rest. Next morning she’s nearly dead, parents freak out, and rush her back to the doctor and eventually get her helicoptered to a real hospital. Su…
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> 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.
What they want to believe is that their wealth is in proportion to their hard work and talent. But even ignoring luck, in a "tournament market", rewards are a strongly nonlinear function of inputs. Being no 2 in a market which is a natural monopoly has limited rewards.
I used to lake to say that both hard work and luck were necessary, but neither sufficient, for outsized success. But as our economy has gone down the path of more and more inequality and winner-take-all markets, the luck becomes ever more important because at the very, very top it is more like a lottery.
That is, I think Zuckerberg and others like him have a lot of unique skills, but I can guarantee at least a thousand other people have skills similar or better, but who didn't experience just the perfect set of circumstances to be a mega billionaire. Those 1000 other people are not evenly distributed with, say, a bunch of them being mega-hundred billionaires.
The fact is that the circumstances that even allow billionaires to exist in the first place are actually so exceedingly rare that you have to take luck as the primary determinant.
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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.
“The top earners among the current taxpayers were found to have already been at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago,” Barone and Mocetti note on VoxEU. The study was able to exploit a unique data set—taxpayers data in 1427 was digitized and made available online—to show long-term trends of economic mobility.
https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...>
The question is how much ones starting position (that is, birth conditions) predict adult-period wealth and status. Yes, there's clearly movement within ranks, and more at the very top of the rankings than most. But familial wealth trends are empirically quite strongly rooted in status-at birth, from this and numerous other studies.