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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

#91

Post by colinb »

justonceokay wrote: post #77
eastof wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where did the above commenter say “genius?” Evil is boring because it is so usual. With the small power I’m given I choose not to recycle, I jaywalk, I say the “R” word in private conversation. If I were a line manager I would play favorites and skip mentorship opportunities if I were tired or busy. As a middle manager I might forget the names of some of my indirect reports and unwittingly pit teams against each othe…

>Remember that 99.9% of people do not consider themselves to be the bad guy, yet more than 0.01% of people are bad guys. Almost no one identifies with evil, yet evil is a string that runs through every beating heart.

"estimate the prevalence rate of psychopathy in the general adult population at 4.5%." [0]

You do most of humanity a disservice by lumping them in with that cohort that may or may not identify themselves as evil (I have no idea) but are certainly capable of deliberately and with calculation behaving in ways that most of us would label with the "E" word.

Sometimes being judgmental is ok.

[0]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8374040/

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#92

Post by WatchDog »

fluoridation wrote: post #89
WatchDog wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the causation is multivariate, but at least partially because of it, yes.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#93

Post by ting0 »

The Twitter example is a bad one. Elon Musk, at the time, was making hundreds-of-millions through crypto-market manipulation on Twitter. At that time he realized that having control over the entire Twitter platform would unlock many billions of dollars worth of profit opportunity. Attention is the most valuable and powerful currency in this world. Not only for manipulating markets, but also for political propaganda. The information we consume literally shapes the world. So yes, it was a 4D chess move.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#94

Post by 63stack »

quantummagic wrote: post #46
riffraff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have to qualify what you think trump is doing knowingly or not. Lie in every press conference? Sure. Posting an image of himself as Jesus? The guy has dementia.

> The guy has dementia. I think you're right, but it isn't as advanced as Joe Biden's was, by the end of his term.

Could you post a link to a video where Trump talks for 15 minutes coherently?

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#95

Post by da_chicken »

justonceokay wrote: post #77
eastof wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where did the above commenter say “genius?” Evil is boring because it is so usual. With the small power I’m given I choose not to recycle, I jaywalk, I say the “R” word in private conversation. If I were a line manager I would play favorites and skip mentorship opportunities if I were tired or busy. As a middle manager I might forget the names of some of my indirect reports and unwittingly pit teams against each othe…

> Where did the above commenter say “genius?”

It's the transparent subtext. Like, blindingly transparent.

GGP's comment is talking about how CEOs are special or different than we are. That is, that they're not just evil, but that they're evil geniuses. It's just Great Man Theory with a Snidely Whiplash costume.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#96

Post by ljsprague »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #45
csallen wrote: post #19

The challenge with the world is that it requires nuance, ad hoc thinking, and effortful thinking. The human brain doesn't like putting effort into thinking. It's uncomfortable. It's easier for us to just have one rule, one heuristic, that we can simply apply to many similar situations. This is why ideology exists and is so powerful. You can always find people chanting the same phrase or slogan, over and over, regardl…

I though the 4D chess explanation was that he bought it (was forced to buy it by courts) because he was entering politics and wanted to be able to ensure the deaths of half a million children in Africa: https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=inte... It looks like he succeeded wildly at that.

[flagged]

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#97

Post by army_unit_77 »

Sankozi wrote: post #66
khnad10 wrote: post #38

The post cleverly and preemptively disparages people who "show up in a thread and claim that everything is part of a larger plan". Posting a picture of Napoleon is cute, but does not prove anything. Those were different times. - The Iran attack plans go back a long way. Netanyahu tried the same during the Obama administration and was rejected. There are Brookings Institute papers that outline all countries that need…

Your post is great example of 4D chess arguments. They seem believable at first glance but if you look deeper they either don't make sense (like vice president taking role of a clown to lower support of an ally) or are distraction (the Iran attack plans argument - lots of people predicted Hormuz problem, previous plans doesn't matter much here).

> like vice president taking role of a clown to lower support of an ally)

Your premise is that Orban is an "ally". He was an ally in the culture war distractions (anti-woke).

Hegseth told the EU to take over and pay for the Ukraine war in 2025. $90 billion supersede culture war issues. Vance already made a clown of himself by pivoting from Trump is a "moral disaster" and an "idiot" in 2016 to running with him in 2024.

Your post is a great example of sinking a post without any coherent arguments. It is impossible to discern what you even mean by the second "Iran" arguments. There are no premises and there is no logic.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#98

Post by Swenrekcah »

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.

Two people see an opportunity to make money. One of them recognizes the venture would harm the people involved and decides not to. The other either does not see the harm (so not a genius) or simply doesn't care (sociopath?). That person does the thing and makes the money.

That person is either some level of naive, some level of evil, but certainly not an evil genius.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#99

Post by roncesvalles »

1. Outcome bias. Just because a decision didn't pan out doesn't mean it was a bad decision at the time it was made.

2. Rich/successful people have a bias for big bets because big bets are how they got this far.

3. People get less sharp as they get older but are more confident because of the successes of their youth.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#100

Post by spiderfarmer »

NoPicklez wrote: post #68
spiderfarmer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular people do dumb shit and embarrass themselves at a barbecue. Powerful people do dumb shit and move markets, wreck products, distort public discourse, and still get a choir singing about their ‘pretty good shit across his lifetime.’ At some point it stops being nuance and starts being unpaid PR.

All due respect I don't really care much about Musk, but my point is that a powerful person can have a done a good thing and a dumb thing over the course of their career. The dumb thing doesn't nullify the fact they did a good thing. As the article presents, Napoleon is considered one of the great military commanders in history. But he also did some pretty dumb shit leading the many deaths.

Nullification doesn't work when you're mixing up competence with character. Good versus evil is one axis. Smart versus dumb is another.

Someone can be smart and still be rotten. Someone can make money and still be a fraud morally.

But here, the myth of him as some singular genius falls apart the moment you look at how much of his reputation is built on other people’s work, lucky timing, and high-stakes gambling dressed up as vision.

The dumb stuff he does, but mostly the dumb stuff he says, does a good job of nullifying the 'smart' stuff.

So you’re romanticising a rich exploitative gambler who wouldn’t hesitate to sneer at 'ordinary' people, like us, as sheep.

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