I kind of feel like people know how to human, and how the humans around them human, but someone they've never met but only heard about or seen on TV or in meme posts? No clue at all.
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. They're different, they won't fall for the stupid tricks we fall for. They don't have trouble getting out of bed or ever worry about what their kids are up to. They have CEO spouses that don't ask them to take out the trash or think about which yogurt to buy.
On the flip side, if they do something bad, that's because they're evil. A deep dark evil totally unlike the banal lameness of the people around us. They don't do stupid shit when someone jerks their chain and they get all worked up. Why would they, they're surrounded by money and other powerful people and have servants feeding them brilliant insights all day long. Everything they do is planned and calculated and they think through the damage they're doing to people in excruciating detail.
There's only one species of humans on Earth, and we're all dumb as shit.
> 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 one of those companies is pretty confident the person running it views other humans not in the way you describe, but as numbers in a spreadsheet who can either justify their continued employment by other numbers in a spreadsheet or not.
Most of us can’t imagine viewing and treating our fellow humans that way.
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.
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 other. As my power increases, the fallout of my human actions has larger and more “evil” sounding consequences.
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.
>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.
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.
"Mental Retardation" used to be a common term signed into law and documents but was removed in ~2010. Since then, it has become more of a slur than a description.
> 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.
I don't think it has much to do with individualism/collectivism. A lot of people are worried about a lot of things beyond themselves; most eventually realize it's bad for mental health and grow out of it, some pick a cause or three and act to make things better, and then there's also the lot that signal worry because it makes them look good.
Of course this is a process, so especially with younger populations, you are going to meet a lot of people worrying about random issues big and small, because it takes time to process it and learn the coping strategies.
Sure people worry regardless. If it’s not A it’s B. Im talking about societies for example that ignore homeless and poverty, vs societies that have social welfare systems at the expense of high tax rates.
I really don't think the collectivist societies are that far ahead. People just invent out groups. India's castes, China's Uyghur's, Japan's castes and treatment of Korea and China, etc. Religious out groups, ethnic out groups, cultural out groups, linguistic out groups, etc. The list is just as long.
Uh, no. That you believe that is more indicative of your proclivities than anyone else's, and also indicates the people around you are such that haven't challenged you to disabuse you of the notion. It isn't normal. It isn't okay to treat people as just numbers or means to an end, and Dunbar's number is not a license to be a psychopath to people beyond the handful we actively maintain relationships with.
You should treat people empathetically. You should treat the failure to do so by people as something noteworthy and concerning. The fact we as a society seek to optimize for elevating psychopaths for personal gain is part of the problem we've created for ourselves, and to be quite frank, was probably hijacked as early as the founding of the United States into a really problematic, if value creating cornerstone of society that could probably use a good deal of sunlight being shone on it for disinfection and rot clearing purposes.
I think you'd need to present some stats that compare how much the ultra-wealthy and normal people donate to altruistic causes (adjusted for income) to make that argument
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.
> 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 impress / are afraid of, and they really aren't very different from the rest of us at any time. We do the same shit when we're around people we want to impress / are afraid of.
I do agree that the situations such people are in will influence them. They'll have to get used to making decisions that make a big impact on a lot of people's lives, and they'll start thinking that such things are more normal than you and I ever will. I just don't think it changes them all that much.
> Any one of us who has worked for one of those companies is pretty confident the person running it views other humans not in the way you describe, but as numbers in a spreadsheet who can either justify their continued employment by other numbers in a spreadsheet or not.
Okay. But I would do the same, and I'm farther from being a CEO than anyone I know. I can afford to care. If I were thrust into such a position, I would have to squash that caring in order to not cause a great deal of harm to those people I care about. Don't let a doctor operate on his/her own children.
But get me and the CEO sitting in comfy chairs and shooting the shit after work, and I don't think there'll be much of a difference between us. My jokes will be a little funnier, and he'll be more confident and less awkward. But that's just me, not blue CEO blood.
Tell you what. Give me a billion or two dollars and I'll go to a billionaire's hangout. I bet they'll make the same stupid wisecracks, talk about basically the same crap the rest of us do, and get indigestion from eating the too-rich food.
I don't exactly disagree with you. Power changes people. It is tempting and easier to become amoral and accustomed to some pretty messed up stuff. It just doesn't change everything about them. In particular, they have the same dysfunctional thought patterns, they make the same sort of cognitive errors, they struggle with the same shit.
> Most of us can’t imagine viewing and treating our fellow humans that way.
I can.
Perhaps it's not that I have a higher opinion of the CEO/billionaire class, it's that I have a lower opinion of all of us. Nazis were not uniquely evil. I think that's become even more obviously true of late. (Did I just invoke Godwin's Law? So be it.)
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.
All your analysis does is ignore what folks' actual concerns are.
Of course everybody eventually has to take a shit and has dumb jokes.
You're just ignoring some very real differences in how folks relate because of their circumstances and declaring that those of us who understand those differences are dumb.
You're not a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. Having hung out with them, their concerns really are very different than say, the line cooks and journyman HVAC electricians.
While it's tautologically correct that the billionaires also have to have lunch at some point in the day, the specifics of it are vastly different. But more importantly, the ways in which they make their basic livings are fundamentally different in ways that lead them act differently.
That's the difference that folks are point out, and ignoring it just makes you look ignorant of some basic facts about the world.
The US does not set out to capture civilians, while the hamas does. It matters. All the rest of the comment makes no sense in light of that.
Also you omitted the part where I said I disagreed with what Israel did. But as a human I believe we are evil like that, and I am really sorry about it.
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 the position for various reasons, but if you want someone reasonable pool shrinks quite fast.
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...).
Have you considered being paid $20 million for one year, and then staying home with family for the next ten years? Even after taxes, you'd still have much more of both time and money than a career in, say, air traffic control.
Following Boeing example you given below - it's not like the guy was given offer to become a CEO out of the blue & had to endure year to be set for life.
He was slowly climbing through the ranks of huge organization over the span of almost 30 years. Given later revelations I certainly wouldn't call it easy or calm - likely even morally challenging sometimes (not admiring anything here - simply any position of power comes with this kind of issues - no matter you're playing for good or bad guys).
Taste of Boeing shareholders for execs is whole other discussion, but I really don't think there's huge crowd of people both willing and capable of filling those shoes.
Maybe, if that was even offered as an option. I doubt I'm that competent, however, and just the fact I have that doubt probably excludes me from the possibility.
Hell, I would gladly take any job where "failing upward" was the rule. Do it for a few years, fail, and then move on to the next higher level opportunity.
Most job levels fail downwards, but once you get to a certain level, for whatever reason, nearly everyone fails upwards. I think "director at a FAANG" and "VP at a medium sized company" are about the level where roles start defaulting to failing upward.
>Amount of people who are both seriously willing to take the job(considering pressure) and have necessary skills is not very high.
I don't believe that. The average CEO is going to have perhaps ten direct reports. I'm willing to bet nearly every one of those is capable and up for the job.
In my past I got high enough to barely touch the ceiling of a multi-billion dollar public company. I routinely had 1:1s with directs to the CEO. Not one of them would be willing or able to take that CEO job.
Just the amount of public facing interviews on CNBC would disqualify half and the other half wouldn't want to do it. They were already being paid very well.
If everyone actually came together and decided that they are not worth paying what they are paid now the compensation would likely normalize to a few multiples of other roles.
But lot of compensation is just magic money out of air that is stock valuations so the stock holder just gives slice of what they think they made. So as long as they financialised system exist so will extreme compensations.
Yaay! I get a chance to bring up IOED - the illusion of explanatory depth [1]
We kinda know how something works, but if we had to draw it out, we’re stumped. The classic example is drawing a bicycle or explaining how a flush works. (You might be able to draw it, or explain it, but that doesn’t obviate the point)
They are just humans, but if they wield more power, more responsibility should be expected of them. Not just for the business they represent, but also for the society they have an outsized influence upon.
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*.
For some weird reason people like to simplify that war to "Napoleon vs. Russian winter", completely overlooking Kutuzov. Kutuzov was dealt a bad hand but he played his cards very well
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).
Through a modern lenses and with hindsight and memes that follow from napoleons failed attempt we can say flippant things like this and say napoleon wasn’t a genius. But students of history and future generals will obviously investigate the facts and see things through the lenses and circumstances of the time rather than from the seat or the internet commentator.
but they have already, rhetorically, dealt with anyone that might come with some sort of context that does not agree with their conclusion:
>There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value, and you’ve met them. I am absolutely sure of it. They show up in every comment section and reply thread where someone powerful does something that looks, on its face, like a mistake - and their argument always runs the same way: you don’t understand, this is actually part of a larger plan, there’s a strategy here that you and I can’t see because we’re not operating at that annointed and elevated level…
Which is, of course, one of the things you have to do when dealing with shooting some bullshit in order to get to your next level of argument, you have to deploy arguments as to why the people who might show up to say hey that's bullshit are actually the stupid people who talk the bullshit, and not you.
As an example of the genre it's pretty tepid, they manage the "I'm telling you the truth part" and the talking down part of the message, but I personally find the best of this genre always includes a pithy little witticism that is just so bitchy and deliciously mean that nobody wants to make the bullshit accusation. At least that's my recommend!
I give it a C+/B- for effort.
on edit: I of course mean what the original article did, in making its flippant comments, not what Arainach did.
the larger plan people are not the historians, IMHO that's clearly a description of people who spent a bit too much time reading about conspiracy theories (and generally are too partisanal)
Napoleon thought the Russians would come out and fight him, instead of burning their country down in retreat and letting L'Empereur's army steal their stuff and rape their people
they chose scorched earth retreat, and history proved them right.
I intentionally didn't say "the population of Russia". Occupying an enormous land mass takes an enormous amount of time (arguably infinite) and resources.
OK, Napoleon is right and he's "conquered" Russia in a month. Are all of those troops being sent home before winter?
Napoleon was never going to go to Vladivostok. You do know that most of Russia is empty apart from the western part? So in effect if you capture Moscow and a few other major cities you are done.
Something I've learned is that in a certain social strata when people do audaciously stupid, its rarely because they lack the common sense to have covered their tracks. Its because they've learned they don't have to. No one is working hard to try and catch them, and even if by some miracle someone does (and people believe them), no government or regulatory body is really interested in punishing them anyway.
This broadly goes for non-criminal acts too. Sometimes powerful people do seemingly dumb things because they are only dumb in the context of the incentive structures if one of us tried to do it. In their context, it would be stupid not to egregiously take advantage.
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, regardless of the circumstance. Because it's easier for them to do that than it is for them to treat every situation as unique and to reason through it from first principles. Hell, sometimes that's just not feasible.
In this situation, yeah, sometimes powerful people do dumb shit. And ideologues come by and say, "You just don't understand the 4d chess!"
But also, sometimes it's the opposite! And the powerful person does something smart, but that's unclear or unfamiliar to the average person without massive wealth/access/power. And ideologues from the peanut gallery come by and say, "Another powerful person doing stupid stuff!"
And of course, the right (but alas more effortful) approach is to evaluate each situation individually, and reason through the factors, and also to wait to see how it turns out, before evaluating.
For example, the author evaluations Elon's purchase of Twitter as an irredeemably stupid decision. And I agree, many things about how that went down seem very stupid. But at the same time, dude has launched an AI lab that's gotten tons of press and exposure thanks in large part to X, combined it with his other companies, and is about to IPO for $1.5T+. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe I don't like it. Maybe there's lots to complain about here, but it's difficult to describe this as a "stupid" move.
Does that mean he was playing 4D chess? Also, maybe not! Maybe he just lucked into this situation. Maybe he didn't foresee it initially, but figured it out later. Or maybe, much more reasonably, he figured that he has tons of optionality and tons of leeway, so even if he doesn't have a good plan to begin with, he'll likely figure it out. Who knows.
It's tough to be a speculator judging from the sidelines with incomplete knowledge. And it's even tougher to avoid allowing our biases and ideologies to compel us to simply shout our beliefs rather than being objective and analytical.
The main goal of Napoleon's invasion of Russia was to beat their military in a decisive battle long before reaching Moscow, forcing Alexander to comply with the continental system - a European trade embargo created by Napoleon to weaken the British Empire who have been hostile toward France since long before the French revolution. Alexander signed this trade embargo during the treaty of Tilsit of 1807, and had been breaking the treaty for years by allowing trade with the British.
The Russians did intend to fight, and set up redoubts several times close to the invading army, but would always retreat when the Grande Armée approached. The military leadership in Russia was very indecisive, caught up in internal rivalries and disagreements. It didn't help that a large part of their military leadership was German. Aside from small skirmishes, they only gave battle once they were practically standing at the doorstep of Moscow, in the battle of Borodino.
The 400,000 dead soldiers died mostly to disease. Recent studies have found evidence of Borrelia Recurrentis which causes a form of relapsing fever. The western soldiers wouldn't have had any exposure to this bacteria before, so they were particularly weak to it. It was also exceptionally hot during the summer while they were invading (when the majority of soldiers died), which contributed to spread of disease and exhausting the horses. Disease and dying horses did way more damage to the Grande Armée than the Russian military did.
The campaign was a military disaster (though the people at home might not be aware, due to slow information flow and propaganda), but it was not without aim, and it was not obvious to anyone that 70% of the army would die to disease before a single major battle.
I appreciate that you at least didn't propagate the myth that Napoleon invaded in the winter, or that he lost because Kutuzov "outsmarted" him by giving him free passage to Moscow and burning it down.
> There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value
I would hope that the majority of readers here are taking the story with a huge pinch of salt. Napoleon's invasion of Russia is one of the most misunderstood events in modern history. Maybe that's why it's so popular to use it as an anecdote - because it can be molded to mean whatever you like, and people probably won't question you.
I think the age of social media has made the problem much worse. People are much more focused on how to gain fame and glory, but they can easily distance themselves from taking responsibility for the consequences.
> “The funny thing about ‘Veep’ is, we as people who worked in the White House always get asked, okay, what’s the most real? Is it ‘House of Cards? Is it ‘West Wing’? And the answer is, it’s ‘Veep.’ Because you guys nail the fragility of the egos, and the, like, day-to-day idiocy of the decision-making,” Vietor said.
Same vibe as "conspiracy theorists are optimists because they believe there is a great plan."
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.
"Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales."
One thing I'd highlight is that the mechanism the OP notices in all the actors is a low-cost way of reducing uncertainty.
At each step, what does it cost to admit uncertainty or error vs what is gained from doing so? For a powerful person, appearing decisive often has a lower immediate cost than being indecisive. For a committed supporter, doubting the figure they've invested in has social, psychological and identity costs that outweigh any benefit of changing their beliefs.
When the local cost of uncertainty is higher than the perceived benefit of being right, people resolve toward certainty.
So the phenomenon could be seen as a cost-minimizing collapse where beliefs and actions settle on whatever preserves stability, even if it means denying something real.
So: Benefit(belief update) < Cost(belief update) => certainty collapse -> people believe weird shit
Some people are just really good at leveraging others. Leverage enough other people, and you can get rich and or powerful.
And the more you leverage, the more you get.
A lot of current powerful people got lucky at one key moment (often involving imaginary money and hype applied to the stock market). And once they got their big level up, they suddenly became visionaries. That includes some of the more outspoken people that many HN readers idolize.
Many of those people believe their own bullshit, partly because they naturally are insulated within a group of sycophants (who are either groupies or usually looking for a lift up to a level of stature they don’t deserve).
I suspect sycophancy has a lot to do with things . People with power attract those who want their favour and/or money who will align themselves to please the powerful rather than steer them to their best selves. Furthermore as the sycophants accumulate the genuine voices likely begin to sound out of place, like their _against_ the individual. Ironically paranoia gets deployed in the wrong direction to push out the true voices.
I worry this fate will become more common. Everyone can hit up an artificial sycophant at will who they've been told is super intelligent and yet claims their ideas are full of deep insight.
And sometimes people put out hit pieces about companies they don't like, while objectively much worse companies in the same industry are beloved. Who knows why people do things!
I agree with the thesis but i dont agree about elon buying twitter. That was really messy, but it was clear later on that he did it to manipulate the election for trump, and that bet paid off amazongly well for him in hindsight. Not only did twitter turn out to be ceitical in spreading misinformation (how many morons didnt vote for harris because they thought shed start a war in the middle east) but that then also gave him crazy access to the government. It fell out later, but it was probably the most effective 40bil anyone today could hope to spend
"The Wire" TV show portrays these things well. In it, the powerful people often have the least clue about anything. They are just playing the game and often winning by sheer luck. They also often do fuck up, but because they are powerful, are able to get other people to take the hit for them or build a narrative that hides the fuck up.
The older I get, the more I think that this TV show is actually the most realistic portrayal of how the real world works there is.
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 “balance the narrative” by showing the other side.
In the past year or so I heard multiple things about A.I.:
I was kept being told that the AI bubble will crash any time soon. Still didn’t happen.
I was told ChatGPT is not here to stay. It’s one of the most downloaded apps in the world.
I was told that Elon firing 80% of staff will cause twitter to crash. It didn’t. It’s running perfectly fine.
The modus operandi seems to be that you may just be cynical about everything because civilisationally important discoveries happen only once a while
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.
I would actualy give the not so benefit of the doubt even to powerful people. Everyone does stupid shit all the time.
There is however a significant difference in how the fallout of this dumb shit affects people. Powerful people may do dumb shit and then due to the power sweep the consequences away from themselves. While everyone else would have had to face these consequences.
And thats the fundamental issue. Too much power allows dumb decisions to stand unchallenged, and removes the possibility for self correction (due to consequences). Which is fundamentally why the power of singular people needs to be limited.
While the premise is good and explains a lot of failures, I the Musk example is misplaced.
Musk bought Twitter. And then he succeeded - Trump became elected and he became his right hand. Is it, for Musk, a failure?
Sure, it is not 4D chess. It is just "some people lie as a tool to get their goals".
The same way when politicians introduce surveillance to "protect children" and it makes children less, it is not a failure. It is a win - more control, and more fuel for further campaigns.
I disagree with the parts about Trump: he does know what he is doing. Not because it's a well crafted plan of 4D chess, but because he's deeply anxious/insecure and "lie with grandiosity" is a learned survival mechanism to protect his feelings from reality.
It's like expecting a fish to stop swimming - it feels like it's suffocating, it's going to panic and do everything it can to get back into the water, get moving again.
The fish isn't playing 4d chess, it's just flipping all over the place until it feels safe again, and then probably forget all of the chaos minutes later.
How much this is applicable to the other examples - Musk, Napoleon - unclear.
But saying they do "stupid" things without looking at why they might do stupid things is reductionist/overly simple/can PROBABLY be answered with psychology in most cases.
I related to this. I think the 4D chess crowd are, like the "I did my own research" crowd projecting a dominance view in the moment, not actually providing a rebuttal.
It's the deux ex machina of our times. How can Elon be wrong about invading Moscow. You don't understand but I do
'Clever Hans was a horse that appeared to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks during exhibitions in Germany in the early 20th century.' - wikipedia
We should be able to hold 2 things in mind at the same time.: a leader (i.e. Elon Musk) can be extremally charismaric (in his specific nerdy way), can have a great talent in filtering ideas that people pitch to him - optimizing for coolness factor. He can even be able to speak about these ideas for hours in captivating maner. A skill in deal-making, getting financed, inspiring people is also real.
At the same time such person can be extremally narcissistic and impulsive + clearly addicted to public drama focused on him or her.
And these character tratis seem to control him, so this person will always choose the 'more power, more news, more controversy' path even when it clearly doesn't make sense.
Add to it a society with a strong cult of personality (a feature of US culture) and some of the lucky reckless charismatic people will get very powerful eventually and also get rewarded for doubling down on their worse decisions.
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 to fall before attacking Iran. The last one was Syria that fell in 2024.
- As is evident now, Trump is not MAGA. Vance was an anti-Trumper in 2016 and is the deepest of deep state via his Thiel sponsor. They are just executing the plans.
- The "pro-Russia" sentiment of Vance and Trump appears to be a ruse. They want to make the EU pay more but continue the Ukraine war.
- Vance's "support" for Orban was fake and achieved the intended goal: people voted for the opposite and $90 billion for Ukraine of EU money is unblocked.
- Vance deliberately torpedoed the Pakistan peace talks.
- Democrat protests are weak. Hillary Clinton only criticizes the (ostensible) lack of a plan.
The plan is to weaken Russia, China and the EU. The latter two are targeted by high energy prices and increased US dependencies in the case of the EU.
The problem is not lone commentators pointing all this out. The problem is that there is a concerted effort to blame all of this on Trump and Israel. Blaming Israel was forbidden prior to the Iran war, now it is a mainstream excuse promoted by mainstream media, left and right wing podcasts and almost all Internet commenters.
That is a deliberate strategy to distract from long term goals.
Elons robot obsession is probably more 4d chess / hidden plan theory. At a time when Tesla sales are flagging in Europe despite an enormous surge in overall EV sales due to yet another energy crisis, he's turning Tesla factories into humanoid robot factories to make a robot that doesn't yet work that nobody asked for. I'm sure lots of Tesla fan boys will pay 20k for a robot butler, but an EV fills a need for the average family and an incompetent bipedal Roomba really does not. They should be focused on PR, it's such a short step from where they are now back to being on top of the EV market.
And how does the price Musk paid for Twitter look now? Sure, maybe it was really a dumb move and he just got lucky. But he's been lucky a hell of a lot.
155 comments
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. They're different, they won't fall for the stupid tricks we fall for. They don't have trouble getting out of bed or ever worry about what their kids are up to. They have CEO spouses that don't ask them to take out the trash or think about which yogurt to buy.
On the flip side, if they do something bad, that's because they're evil. A deep dark evil totally unlike the banal lameness of the people around us. They don't do stupid shit when someone jerks their chain and they get all worked up. Why would they, they're surrounded by money and other powerful people and have servants feeding them brilliant insights all day long. Everything they do is planned and calculated and they think through the damage they're doing to people in excruciating detail.
There's only one species of humans on Earth, and we're all dumb as shit.
> 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 one of those companies is pretty confident the person running it views other humans not in the way you describe, but as numbers in a spreadsheet who can either justify their continued employment by other numbers in a spreadsheet or not.
Most of us can’t imagine viewing and treating our fellow humans that way.
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 other. As my power increases, the fallout of my human actions has larger and more “evil” sounding consequences.
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.
>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/
> 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.
"Mental Retardation" used to be a common term signed into law and documents but was removed in ~2010. Since then, it has become more of a slur than a description.
> 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.
Of course this is a process, so especially with younger populations, you are going to meet a lot of people worrying about random issues big and small, because it takes time to process it and learn the coping strategies.
> Religious out groups, ethnic out groups, cultural out groups.
Yeah, unfortunately seen this on all corners of the political spectrum, hidden or not.
You should treat people empathetically. You should treat the failure to do so by people as something noteworthy and concerning. The fact we as a society seek to optimize for elevating psychopaths for personal gain is part of the problem we've created for ourselves, and to be quite frank, was probably hijacked as early as the founding of the United States into a really problematic, if value creating cornerstone of society that could probably use a good deal of sunlight being shone on it for disinfection and rot clearing purposes.
That person is either some level of naive, some level of evil, but certainly not an evil genius.
> 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 impress / are afraid of, and they really aren't very different from the rest of us at any time. We do the same shit when we're around people we want to impress / are afraid of.
I do agree that the situations such people are in will influence them. They'll have to get used to making decisions that make a big impact on a lot of people's lives, and they'll start thinking that such things are more normal than you and I ever will. I just don't think it changes them all that much.
> Any one of us who has worked for one of those companies is pretty confident the person running it views other humans not in the way you describe, but as numbers in a spreadsheet who can either justify their continued employment by other numbers in a spreadsheet or not.
Okay. But I would do the same, and I'm farther from being a CEO than anyone I know. I can afford to care. If I were thrust into such a position, I would have to squash that caring in order to not cause a great deal of harm to those people I care about. Don't let a doctor operate on his/her own children.
But get me and the CEO sitting in comfy chairs and shooting the shit after work, and I don't think there'll be much of a difference between us. My jokes will be a little funnier, and he'll be more confident and less awkward. But that's just me, not blue CEO blood.
Tell you what. Give me a billion or two dollars and I'll go to a billionaire's hangout. I bet they'll make the same stupid wisecracks, talk about basically the same crap the rest of us do, and get indigestion from eating the too-rich food.
I don't exactly disagree with you. Power changes people. It is tempting and easier to become amoral and accustomed to some pretty messed up stuff. It just doesn't change everything about them. In particular, they have the same dysfunctional thought patterns, they make the same sort of cognitive errors, they struggle with the same shit.
> Most of us can’t imagine viewing and treating our fellow humans that way.
I can.
Perhaps it's not that I have a higher opinion of the CEO/billionaire class, it's that I have a lower opinion of all of us. Nazis were not uniquely evil. I think that's become even more obviously true of late. (Did I just invoke Godwin's Law? So be it.)
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.
Of course everybody eventually has to take a shit and has dumb jokes.
You're just ignoring some very real differences in how folks relate because of their circumstances and declaring that those of us who understand those differences are dumb.
You're not a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. Having hung out with them, their concerns really are very different than say, the line cooks and journyman HVAC electricians.
While it's tautologically correct that the billionaires also have to have lunch at some point in the day, the specifics of it are vastly different. But more importantly, the ways in which they make their basic livings are fundamentally different in ways that lead them act differently.
That's the difference that folks are point out, and ignoring it just makes you look ignorant of some basic facts about the world.
So this is how you expect the rest of the world to treat the US? Just torture and murder their civilians and erase their homes and culture?
The US killed, maimed and displaced many millions of iraqis, should we help the iraqis exterminate the US population?
Also you omitted the part where I said I disagreed with what Israel did. But as a human I believe we are evil like that, and I am really sorry about it.
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 the position for various reasons, but if you want someone reasonable pool shrinks quite fast.
> 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...).
He was slowly climbing through the ranks of huge organization over the span of almost 30 years. Given later revelations I certainly wouldn't call it easy or calm - likely even morally challenging sometimes (not admiring anything here - simply any position of power comes with this kind of issues - no matter you're playing for good or bad guys).
Taste of Boeing shareholders for execs is whole other discussion, but I really don't think there's huge crowd of people both willing and capable of filling those shoes.
https://www.manufacturing.net/aerospace/news/21109798/boeing...
Most job levels fail downwards, but once you get to a certain level, for whatever reason, nearly everyone fails upwards. I think "director at a FAANG" and "VP at a medium sized company" are about the level where roles start defaulting to failing upward.
It's fucking gross. If a person can live with it, they don't deserve to.
>Amount of people who are both seriously willing to take the job(considering pressure) and have necessary skills is not very high.
I don't believe that. The average CEO is going to have perhaps ten direct reports. I'm willing to bet nearly every one of those is capable and up for the job.
In my past I got high enough to barely touch the ceiling of a multi-billion dollar public company. I routinely had 1:1s with directs to the CEO. Not one of them would be willing or able to take that CEO job.
Just the amount of public facing interviews on CNBC would disqualify half and the other half wouldn't want to do it. They were already being paid very well.
But lot of compensation is just magic money out of air that is stock valuations so the stock holder just gives slice of what they think they made. So as long as they financialised system exist so will extreme compensations.
We kinda know how something works, but if we had to draw it out, we’re stumped. The classic example is drawing a bicycle or explaining how a flush works. (You might be able to draw it, or explain it, but that doesn’t obviate the point)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_explanatory_depth
> They have CEO spouses that don't ask them to take out the trash or think about which yogurt to buy.
From 'Curb your enthusiasm', I've learnt that that's actually the only thing they ever do.
But that's just, like, such a 19th century communistic view on things.
We may all be in the same storm but we're not all in the same boats.
> 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*.
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).
> usually, capturing the enemies capital equals victory and Napoleon did capture Moscow.
Too bad the capital was Saint Petersburg at that time.
>There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value, and you’ve met them. I am absolutely sure of it. They show up in every comment section and reply thread where someone powerful does something that looks, on its face, like a mistake - and their argument always runs the same way: you don’t understand, this is actually part of a larger plan, there’s a strategy here that you and I can’t see because we’re not operating at that annointed and elevated level…
Which is, of course, one of the things you have to do when dealing with shooting some bullshit in order to get to your next level of argument, you have to deploy arguments as to why the people who might show up to say hey that's bullshit are actually the stupid people who talk the bullshit, and not you.
As an example of the genre it's pretty tepid, they manage the "I'm telling you the truth part" and the talking down part of the message, but I personally find the best of this genre always includes a pithy little witticism that is just so bitchy and deliciously mean that nobody wants to make the bullshit accusation. At least that's my recommend!
I give it a C+/B- for effort.
on edit: I of course mean what the original article did, in making its flippant comments, not what Arainach did.
but yes, including this snark seems unnecessary
they chose scorched earth retreat, and history proved them right.
> country the size of Russia
density of population is not equal to land mass, you know
OK, Napoleon is right and he's "conquered" Russia in a month. Are all of those troops being sent home before winter?
This broadly goes for non-criminal acts too. Sometimes powerful people do seemingly dumb things because they are only dumb in the context of the incentive structures if one of us tried to do it. In their context, it would be stupid not to egregiously take advantage.
In this situation, yeah, sometimes powerful people do dumb shit. And ideologues come by and say, "You just don't understand the 4d chess!"
But also, sometimes it's the opposite! And the powerful person does something smart, but that's unclear or unfamiliar to the average person without massive wealth/access/power. And ideologues from the peanut gallery come by and say, "Another powerful person doing stupid stuff!"
And of course, the right (but alas more effortful) approach is to evaluate each situation individually, and reason through the factors, and also to wait to see how it turns out, before evaluating.
For example, the author evaluations Elon's purchase of Twitter as an irredeemably stupid decision. And I agree, many things about how that went down seem very stupid. But at the same time, dude has launched an AI lab that's gotten tons of press and exposure thanks in large part to X, combined it with his other companies, and is about to IPO for $1.5T+. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe I don't like it. Maybe there's lots to complain about here, but it's difficult to describe this as a "stupid" move.
Does that mean he was playing 4D chess? Also, maybe not! Maybe he just lucked into this situation. Maybe he didn't foresee it initially, but figured it out later. Or maybe, much more reasonably, he figured that he has tons of optionality and tons of leeway, so even if he doesn't have a good plan to begin with, he'll likely figure it out. Who knows.
It's tough to be a speculator judging from the sidelines with incomplete knowledge. And it's even tougher to avoid allowing our biases and ideologies to compel us to simply shout our beliefs rather than being objective and analytical.
The Russians did intend to fight, and set up redoubts several times close to the invading army, but would always retreat when the Grande Armée approached. The military leadership in Russia was very indecisive, caught up in internal rivalries and disagreements. It didn't help that a large part of their military leadership was German. Aside from small skirmishes, they only gave battle once they were practically standing at the doorstep of Moscow, in the battle of Borodino.
The 400,000 dead soldiers died mostly to disease. Recent studies have found evidence of Borrelia Recurrentis which causes a form of relapsing fever. The western soldiers wouldn't have had any exposure to this bacteria before, so they were particularly weak to it. It was also exceptionally hot during the summer while they were invading (when the majority of soldiers died), which contributed to spread of disease and exhausting the horses. Disease and dying horses did way more damage to the Grande Armée than the Russian military did.
The campaign was a military disaster (though the people at home might not be aware, due to slow information flow and propaganda), but it was not without aim, and it was not obvious to anyone that 70% of the army would die to disease before a single major battle.
I appreciate that you at least didn't propagate the myth that Napoleon invaded in the winter, or that he lost because Kutuzov "outsmarted" him by giving him free passage to Moscow and burning it down.
> There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value
I would hope that the majority of readers here are taking the story with a huge pinch of salt. Napoleon's invasion of Russia is one of the most misunderstood events in modern history. Maybe that's why it's so popular to use it as an anecdote - because it can be molded to mean whatever you like, and people probably won't question you.
> “The funny thing about ‘Veep’ is, we as people who worked in the White House always get asked, okay, what’s the most real? Is it ‘House of Cards? Is it ‘West Wing’? And the answer is, it’s ‘Veep.’ Because you guys nail the fragility of the egos, and the, like, day-to-day idiocy of the decision-making,” Vietor said.
Same vibe as "conspiracy theorists are optimists because they believe there is a great plan."
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.
Via Edward Tufte
"Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales."
At each step, what does it cost to admit uncertainty or error vs what is gained from doing so? For a powerful person, appearing decisive often has a lower immediate cost than being indecisive. For a committed supporter, doubting the figure they've invested in has social, psychological and identity costs that outweigh any benefit of changing their beliefs.
When the local cost of uncertainty is higher than the perceived benefit of being right, people resolve toward certainty.
So the phenomenon could be seen as a cost-minimizing collapse where beliefs and actions settle on whatever preserves stability, even if it means denying something real.
So: Benefit(belief update) < Cost(belief update) => certainty collapse -> people believe weird shit
And the more you leverage, the more you get.
A lot of current powerful people got lucky at one key moment (often involving imaginary money and hype applied to the stock market). And once they got their big level up, they suddenly became visionaries. That includes some of the more outspoken people that many HN readers idolize.
Many of those people believe their own bullshit, partly because they naturally are insulated within a group of sycophants (who are either groupies or usually looking for a lift up to a level of stature they don’t deserve).
I worry this fate will become more common. Everyone can hit up an artificial sycophant at will who they've been told is super intelligent and yet claims their ideas are full of deep insight.
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.
Powerful people operate on unchecked egos and surround themselves with sycophants.
The "trick" is that cunning powerful people fail forward, so they keep on doing dumb shit with even more impact.
The older I get, the more I think that this TV show is actually the most realistic portrayal of how the real world works there is.
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 “balance the narrative” by showing the other side.
In the past year or so I heard multiple things about A.I.:
I was kept being told that the AI bubble will crash any time soon. Still didn’t happen.
I was told ChatGPT is not here to stay. It’s one of the most downloaded apps in the world.
I was told that Elon firing 80% of staff will cause twitter to crash. It didn’t. It’s running perfectly fine.
The modus operandi seems to be that you may just be cynical about everything because civilisationally important discoveries happen only once a while
There is however a significant difference in how the fallout of this dumb shit affects people. Powerful people may do dumb shit and then due to the power sweep the consequences away from themselves. While everyone else would have had to face these consequences.
And thats the fundamental issue. Too much power allows dumb decisions to stand unchallenged, and removes the possibility for self correction (due to consequences). Which is fundamentally why the power of singular people needs to be limited.
Musk bought Twitter. And then he succeeded - Trump became elected and he became his right hand. Is it, for Musk, a failure?
Sure, it is not 4D chess. It is just "some people lie as a tool to get their goals".
The same way when politicians introduce surveillance to "protect children" and it makes children less, it is not a failure. It is a win - more control, and more fuel for further campaigns.
It's like expecting a fish to stop swimming - it feels like it's suffocating, it's going to panic and do everything it can to get back into the water, get moving again. The fish isn't playing 4d chess, it's just flipping all over the place until it feels safe again, and then probably forget all of the chaos minutes later.
How much this is applicable to the other examples - Musk, Napoleon - unclear. But saying they do "stupid" things without looking at why they might do stupid things is reductionist/overly simple/can PROBABLY be answered with psychology in most cases.
It's the deux ex machina of our times. How can Elon be wrong about invading Moscow. You don't understand but I do
We should be able to hold 2 things in mind at the same time.: a leader (i.e. Elon Musk) can be extremally charismaric (in his specific nerdy way), can have a great talent in filtering ideas that people pitch to him - optimizing for coolness factor. He can even be able to speak about these ideas for hours in captivating maner. A skill in deal-making, getting financed, inspiring people is also real.
At the same time such person can be extremally narcissistic and impulsive + clearly addicted to public drama focused on him or her.
And these character tratis seem to control him, so this person will always choose the 'more power, more news, more controversy' path even when it clearly doesn't make sense.
Add to it a society with a strong cult of personality (a feature of US culture) and some of the lucky reckless charismatic people will get very powerful eventually and also get rewarded for doubling down on their worse decisions.
- 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 to fall before attacking Iran. The last one was Syria that fell in 2024.
- As is evident now, Trump is not MAGA. Vance was an anti-Trumper in 2016 and is the deepest of deep state via his Thiel sponsor. They are just executing the plans.
- The "pro-Russia" sentiment of Vance and Trump appears to be a ruse. They want to make the EU pay more but continue the Ukraine war.
- Vance's "support" for Orban was fake and achieved the intended goal: people voted for the opposite and $90 billion for Ukraine of EU money is unblocked.
- Vance deliberately torpedoed the Pakistan peace talks.
- Democrat protests are weak. Hillary Clinton only criticizes the (ostensible) lack of a plan.
The plan is to weaken Russia, China and the EU. The latter two are targeted by high energy prices and increased US dependencies in the case of the EU.
The problem is not lone commentators pointing all this out. The problem is that there is a concerted effort to blame all of this on Trump and Israel. Blaming Israel was forbidden prior to the Iran war, now it is a mainstream excuse promoted by mainstream media, left and right wing podcasts and almost all Internet commenters.
That is a deliberate strategy to distract from long term goals.