The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me
nytimes.comFrom the article: "Unfortunately, however, these people have enough money to do serious damage."
Having money does not make anyone fit to change anything outside their business. Maybe there need to be limits set on what can be done with money, government approval of business plans for example, or limits on how much cash can be spent in some area the wealthy person has no understanding of. If someone makes a fortune selling cat food they should not be able to use that money to lobby for rule changes in medicine or to buy their way into running hospitals. Even the business experience side of things is NOT generalizable. There needs to be a requirement of knowledge and experience as a barrier to entry to spending huge amounts of money. Otherwise wealthy people will just fuck things up because then can. An airplane pilot needs training to fly a plane, training for the wealthy should be required to alter an economy.
People would definitely resist the idea of not being able to spend their money the way they want. That's the whole point of capitalism, and these people made their fortunes thank to capitalism so obviously capitalism is correct.
The core fundamental issue I see a lot of is that your net worth defines your value. People with more money have more inherent value across the board, and people with less have less. Rich people have an outsized effect on society because people look at their bank balance and see how much money they've made and immediately think that their success came from being an exceptional specimen of humanity.
If we could ditch the cult of personality and the "rich makes right" attitude and actually looked at the behavior of billionaires, we'd see that these people are almost universally unhinged from reality, making baseless claims and assertions, changing social or political affiliations as soon as the group they support doesn't support them unconditionally, avoiding paying taxes as much as possible and then turning around and performing "philanthropy" by paying for a new library or wing of a museum to be named after them. They complain that the government is subsidizing health care when taking billions in government subsidies just so they can turn a bigger profit, which people then attribute to their skill and worth as a person and not their leveraging of their fortune for political gain.
>we'd see that these people are almost universally unhinged from reality, making baseless claims and assertions, changing social or political affiliations as soon as the group they support doesn't support them unconditionally, avoiding paying taxes as much as possible
This sounds like a normal person. So the problem is that they're plagued by the same biases and shortcomings as the un-monied, but via their wealth are able to inflict their flaws upon us on a vast scale?
It's not just the ones at the top, it's a strong subculture within the industry, built perhaps on valuing certain personality traits that to some extent may correlate with certain kinds of effectiveness.
I immediately think of HN comments from the recent news about this week being off-the-charts hot, the way a disturbing number of people people seized on technical errors in the popular reporting (the Earth was obviously hotter at points in the distant past; the estimates were "just a computer model"), and jumped straight to, as Krugman puts it, reflexive contrarianism, the notion that the climate scientists must be wrong or corrupt and my gut-instinct priors are correct because I see myself as very smart.
Thankfully I think we did a fairly good job succinctly taking the sabotures to task this time around on these climate issues. The fine technicalities any contrarianism rested on looked ridiculous.
On so many topics all it takes is two or three seeds of chaos & the core points are all missed, amid endless debate on absurd distantly related topics. Injecting false debates can quite effectively smokescreen the topic at hand.
Online especially there's also a lot of people with agendas, either hidden or proudly worn. Give how transactional exchanges are, how little reputation really follow one around, the ability for either crazy or just-incredibly-slanted-agenda-keeping to inject itself in & distort the conversation is very high.
There's also the silent majority factor online. Most people don't comment in to say, "that was great, thanks, seemed spot on". The people most likely to comment are squeaky wheels, are people who make noise & they are more likely to have Very Serious Opinions.
Trying to just show up and spread some positivity &highlight good points is enormously appreciated. But alas also makes you a target for those whose behavior pattern is reflexive contrarianism. What a term!
Yes, that's a good point, that in well-moderated environments you can call them out effectively.
And silent majority, indeed. Too bad the term "silent majority" has been co-opted by the loudest and most misguided minority.
100% on point irony & sadness vis-a-vie silent majority. I think the idea is such a useful, true & important idea.
I've struggled to find a good succinct way to capture the idea, that doesn't also have the bogus historical baggage.
There must be a different brain chemistry at work. Maybe increased levels of comfort and elevated pack status from the freedom of social transactions does this. I never understood why a lot of these fuckers don't just go away and leave everyone else alone when they made enough money for themselves to not worry about money. But I have come to realize that it doesn't work like this at all and there comes a profound change, most likely biochemical that promotes these drives.
I don't think there is any different brain chemistry at work. It is just human nature to want to do something with their wealth, for good or ill or whatever.
It is more likely that the people are naturally acquisitive and the ones that succeed then feel the need to continue to do things when the best thing for them and us is for them to stop and just enjoy their wealth.
Listening to Lex Fridman's podcast with tech bros and billionaires, kind of easy to see what Paul Krugman is talking about.
What I don't get about this whole COVID conspiracy thing: If there's no Graphene Oxide in there, why don't some anti-conspiracy people just grab a camera while testing the blood of various volunteer vaxxed/non-vaxxed people, compare it under a microscope and show the results? Because that's what the conspiracy people are doing and they're all finding traces of what looks like graphene oxide based on existing papers about GO.
If the vaccines are fine, they won't find anything. If there was just one conspiracy person showing what looks like graphene oxide that even reacts to electromagnetic currents under the microscope I'd say they're obviously just looking to cause confusion but I've seen so many videos from different people and doctors showing similar effects in the blood of vaxxed people that I find it irritating that no one is even attempting to debunk them.
It's because none of these claims are valid or reputable. Anti-vaxxers are making up these claims out of whole cloth, and if people spend any reasonable amount of time debunking it, then the anti-vaxxers will fall back on the same playbook as always:
1. The debunking is a lie/hoax, you can't trust these people they're working for big pharma.
2. Okay well that might not be true but what about this other completely manufactured claim?
3. This doesn't prove anything because <pseudo-science explanation>
Take a read here:
https://observers.france24.com/en/science/20210811-covid-19-...
Excerpt:
> This first video shows small balls in a Petri dish moving in a strange way and connecting in a chain. It was widely circulated on social media early last week. The caption claims that it shows “graphene oxide" in the vaccine.
> Our team carried out a reverse image search and found the original version of the video on the YouTube channel of the "Stanford Complexity Group", linked to the American university of the same name.
> The video, called "Self Assembling Wires", shows steel ball bearings floating in castor oil in a Petri dish with a metal rim. An electrical current moves the balls when voltage is applied to them, and they connect to one another. There is absolutely no graphene or graphene oxide in the dish.
The reason people don't spend their time debunking these claims is that the people originating them are not making them in good faith. Doing real science to debunk blatant lies loses because it takes a lot longer to reproduce an alleged 'experiment' than it does to download a video and record new audio over top to claim it's something that it's not.
If these claims were real, then reputable sources would be reproducing them and there would be a discussion. Instead, the claims are completely fabricated and posted by random people with no credentials (or fake credentials), with baseless claims being made to support what they assert is happening.
Thank you, that's exactly what I was looking for!