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Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#81

Post by throwawayqqq11 »

sfink wrote: post #20
tw04 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, we know the hotshot CEO of COMPANY_NAME_HERE has to put on his pants one leg at a time, but the similarity ends there. That’s probably because we know consciously or subconsciously that in order to get and maintain a position of power at a multibillion dollar firm the person either never had a moral compass or quickly had to find ways to justify ignoring or compromising it. Any one of us who has worked for on…

> That’s probably because we know consciously or subconsciously that in order to get and maintain a position of power at a multibillion dollar firm the person either never had a moral compass or quickly had to find ways to justify ignoring or compromising it. Maybe. But I suspect that we tend to view those people that way because they play the I Am A Special Human game in public, especially around those they want to…

Your entire point of humans being clumsy and stoopid and not inherently evil is generally true but for this benign incompetence is why all the discrimination layers, from scool grades to referals, etc. exist.

Whould you give a physician making life-or-death decisions and opsi-budget before you walk away? No. Then where do you draw the line until this irresponsible behavior becomes evil? Evil is defined here not by the individuals intentions but by the outcome.

Would you agree with me, that all the decision makers and elites sabotaging renewable energies and sustainability are evil? Keep in mind, they all might have their clumsy excuses.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#82

Post by wasmainiac »

eastof wrote: post #12
tw04 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, we know the hotshot CEO of COMPANY_NAME_HERE has to put on his pants one leg at a time, but the similarity ends there. That’s probably because we know consciously or subconsciously that in order to get and maintain a position of power at a multibillion dollar firm the person either never had a moral compass or quickly had to find ways to justify ignoring or compromising it. Any one of us who has worked for on…

You are still falling for the evil genius trap. The truth is all of us treat our fellow humans this way, see Singer's drowning child. We're simply not wired to care as much about even large groups of people when they are not people we regularly interact with.

> The truth is all of us treat our fellow humans this way.

Nah, I think it is more common of a cultural thing in individualistic societies. I know plenty of people who are worried about the future outlook of others they have never met. For example what phones and social media is doing to our children, or the state of the economy for young people.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#83

Post by BLKNSLVR »

dzikimarian wrote: post #52
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're not special, why do we have to pay them so much just to get out of bed?

I was part of CEO recruitment process (sadly not FAANG-like, so maybe it wasn't "so much"-level yet). Amount of people who are both seriously willing to take the job(considering pressure) and have necessary skills is not very high. Tbh same is truth for any management job - a lot of competent people prefer calmer life. Obviously for the very top compensation is bonkers and there's fair share of frauds that ended in t…

> a lot of competent people prefer calmer life

I may not be _that_ competent, but the calmer life is worth sacrificing a fair few dollars for. For each job I've changed, I've gone to a lower paying position, such that I'm currently still on $10k (around 8%) less than I was earning... 5 years ago, two jobs ago, which was probably about the same as the job I left 6 years before that. All previous jobs were worth leaving.

Parenting, maintaining a long-term relationship, playing (two, kinda) sport(s), home-labbing, keeping up with the state of the world, all take time and I enjoy all of them. It allows me to enjoy the work I do too, to not resent it for all the other things I could have been doing.

I'm in a position of privilege to say any of this, but I've also been careful and relatively well planned with my finances in order to reach this point. I'd be kinda f'd if I was out of work for longer than 6 months, but I'm sure I could re-plan and re-organise priorities and spending to minimise the damage (but we'd definitely be f'd if we both were out of work...).

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#86

Post by simianwords »

simianwords wrote: post #74

There’s a particular kind of influencer who follows the archetype I call “perpetual bull”. They are highly cynical and show an immense confidence in their own predictions despite not being in the thick of it. And usually it follows the same format: the ideology is that the elites are stupid and completely irrational, evil as well as extremely powerful (they can’t see the contradiction in this). So they attempt to “ba…

Here's a Paul Krugman quote on the Internet

"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s"

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#87

Post by ljsprague »

schnebbau wrote: post #79
NoPicklez wrote: post #49

Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit, because they're still a human being like all of us. It's easy to look at Musk and say, he's done some dumb shit when his dumb shit makes news. But very few of us have the same type of scrutiny that powerful people have. He's done dumb shit, but he's done a lot of pretty good shit across his lifetime. Nobody is infallible.

Has Elon done dumb shit though? He's still winning, it couldn't have been that dumb.

Indeed I would bet he knew he would lose money on Twitter but did it anyway.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#88

Post by lukan »

Arainach wrote: post #51
Tinned_Tuna wrote: post #39

I don't think the author read even the Wikipedia page on Napoleon's invasion of Russia? Napoleon _did_ have reasons for attacking Russia, he _did_ prepare logistics. His motives, rationale, and actions are well-documented and widely studied. > watching an unchecked megalomaniac march 685,000 soldiers into a Russian winter without a fur coat in sight Napoleon famously crossed the Neman River in *June*.

If you believe a war with a country the size of Russia will be over within 4 months you might not be a genius.

The main parts that mattered were the european ones. And usually, capturing the enemies capital equals victory and Napoleon did capture Moscow. The russians just decided to keep the fight going, despite the chance that their capital burns down, which it did (allegedly on purpose to drive Napoleon out).

In general, Napoleon did not think the russians would use scorched earth tactics, meaning burning their own land, villages, food to deny the french army any supplies (and the russian peasants did not agree to this, but they were not asked).

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#89

Post by fluoridation »

WatchDog wrote: post #56
zarzavat wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the index funds be forced to purchase SpaceX SpaceX is a fantastic company full of the smartest engineers that has brought fast internet to the most remote regions on Earth. Even if it wasn't for index funds, investors would buy the shit out of it. xAI has built an almost-frontier model. It's not Anthropic or OpenAI but it's also not valued like Anthropic or OpenAI either. Twitter is doing OK, despite predictions.…

Elon has made multiple comments in the past about how much keeping SpaceX private, makes it easier to run, and achieve it's goals of colonising Mars. He has given up on that, he has abandoned the Mars goal, and he is sacrificing the company to the whims of the public markets, just so he can have a payday. xAi raised $45 billion and Grok loses benchmarks to Chinese(GPU sanctioned) open weight models. I'm overall posit…

>yes, it does feel like the idpol witch hunts have died down a bit since.

You don't seriously believe that was because of the Twitter purchase and not due to a coinciding social shift, do you?

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