A similar story that I love regarding the infamous Van Halen brown M&M contract rider:
“Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.”
But this isn't like that at all. The Brown M&M is a clever hack that seems weird (and that gets posted here over and over and over...).
What's going on here is simultaneously much more mundane and much more interesting.
A given strategy at a corporate level is something like a 10 dimensional cube, with half of those dimensions within the company and half of those side outside. It begins as a concept floated by those in charge, it gets floated to people who float it to people who finally put out another version, say, a 5 dimensional cube. And final thing has requested qualities, with some things added simply as CYA, things that aren't good but the low level operative can't be criticized for.
Sometimes this process result in a dimension that a moderately intelligent person can look at and say "that's moronic, that would never work" and it doesn't.
The thing is, indeed, the critic doesn't see even the 5 released dimensions of the whatever-the-fuck that's being sold so they don't know the difficulties involved. Because the thingy is trying to barely satisfy each of these dimensions, not be great in any of them. Because these are all constraints,
Why push out a crappy version of Windows (say Vista), why produce yet another fail sequel in series X, etc. Sure, when such satisficing projects fail, the dumb stuff seems obvious but people forgot that so many projects succeed by just barely missing the bar of inadequate and so some are going to have to hit the bar too, in one of those dimensions.
Yeah. I'm imagining the guy who says "fuck that" to picking the brown m&ms out as the same kind of person who goes "10A circuits should be fine. They build safety margins into those" or "those rafters should be fine to hold 2 tons of equipment. They're really stout 2x6's." You know, the kind of person who just assumes they know better and that what is planned doesn't matter. And if you let them do that they will totally kill you with their negligence.
As I said in another reply: The post even said they'd go ahead and check stuff. Does anyone think they WOULDN'T have checked that show equipment for one of the biggest rock bands of the day if they found no brown M&M's? Really?
But it's trivially easy to do, and the venue knows that not doing it is a violation of contract. A violation of contract could cost them the whole show, so there's no reason not to do it.
There is nothing to indicate any effectiveness whatsoever; how many shows were cancelled as a result? The post even said they'd go ahead and check stuff. Does anyone think they WOULDN'T have checked that show equipment for one of the biggest rock bands of the day if they found no brown M&M's? Really?
It's a canary in the coal mine. Presumably they still checked other critical things but based on the canary could determine how closely they needed to check everything.
This article puts it better than I ever could. I had a similar reaction when I read extremely critical press coverage of some VCs in Europe investing in YPlan, which eventually sold for a nominal amount to Time Out London.
The synopsis of all the coverage was: "How could they have spent all that money? And how could the investors have been so STUPID?"
My friend Fred Destin wrote a great essay on this[1], and I'll do the horrid thing of quoting my own note to him in reply:
> It’s analogous to a soccer fan questioning the manager’s decision to put player X on the field instead of Y. The manager sees both players on the training ground for hours every day, knows their mood, talks to them, understands how they respond to different situations, and consults his coaches. Then the matchgoing fan sees 90 minutes of output on Saturday and makes a judgement with <1% of the data a manager has.
> Past a certain point in fundraising and traction, it’s impossible to believe that a startup failing is anything more interesting than a combination of poorer-than-expected execution, and bets not paying off.
Scale this up to anything and you will want to be governed by a benevolent dictator. Not even senators themselves read the full bills they vote on, and I don't blame them with it being hundreds of pages of reading that could easily be parted out to aides, but the electorate certainly doesn't have this advantage. Maybe 1% of voters are truly informed.
My IT director doesn't know every facet of what is in our environment, and generally is not up to date as to what changes are happening on the day to day. And he doesn't need to be.
The point of high-level workers is so they can focus on high-level priorities. They have staff -- legal aids, system admins, business analysts, whatever -- whose job it is to digest that stuff and put it into simple briefings for leadership to evaluate in the context of other issues.
> I don't blame them with it being hundreds of pages of reading that could easily be parted out to aides, but the electorate certainly doesn't have this advantage
The electorate isn't expected to have this advantage, and is not expected to read the bills. The whole reason for representative democracy is so that the common voter does not have to parse this stuff -- that's explicitly the point. I find someone who reflects my views and I put them in office, and trust that they'll be able to digest what's happening and vote accordingly. The common man isn't expected to understand tariffs, international banking, military theory, computer engineering, social justice issues, and food scarcity.
> The common man isn't expected to understand tariffs, international banking, military theory, computer engineering, social justice issues, and food scarcity.
What better use is there of the common man's time than understanding societal issues like justice and scarcity? Are you describing how the world is or claiming how it should be? If you do not understand justice, scarcity, etc. how can you claim to elect someone who reflects your views--ignoring that a lot of politics is lesser evil voting?
An uneducated populace voting is a worst-case scenario for a representative democracy.
> An uneducated populace voting is a worst-case scenario for a representative democracy.
I'd probably say that the worst-case scenario is a populace that doesn't care whether their representative is educated on the issues.
There are many things that I consider myself uneducated in, but as long as my representative has similar values, is not corrupt, is competent and finds and listens to experts in the relevant fields, then I don't necessarily consider that to be a problem.
We should be electing people we trust to care about the detail of stuff that doesn't interest normal humans, not people we'd like to have a beer with.
> > The common man isn't expected to understand tariffs, international banking, military theory, computer engineering, social justice issues, and food scarcity.
> What better use is there of the common man's time than understanding societal issues like justice and scarcity?
It's perfectly fine not to be informed (or interested!) in most topics. It only becomes dangerous when you're uninformed but trust your own opinion more than the experts. Popular examples are climate change, or the COVID-19 response.
Show me the model produced by he experts that has been right? Show me the science behind the idea of quarantining the entire population in order to slow the spread of Covid-19. There is science behind quarantining sick people - but not healthy people. Show me the science behind the social distancing - 6 foot rule? I mean really - where IS the science to those things? These experts are self-proclaimed. I am more than willing to listen to a bridge builder tell me why I need to use a certain kind of steel as apposed to another - but many of these experts that we have been listening to lately are anything but experts.
No, he is making the valid point that in many areas that are highly relevant to public policy, there are no experts. Those who call themselves "experts" actually aren't. Nobody has enough understanding of the problem domain to make accurate predictions.
In such a case, the only viable solution is for nobody to "rule".
Decisions have to be made—including doing nothing. Someone is always "ruling". Diffusing responsibility does not change that fact (though it can have other significant benefits).
I'm sympathetic to your POV, by the way, because uncritically listening to experts has literally killed millions of people in the past century. But the key word is "uncritically". Pushback is healthy, discussion is super-healthy; my position, though, is that in any argument, experts should get more weight unless the people arguing back have strong, on-the-ground evidence.
In general, I disagree. Most of the time decisions do not have to be made--more precisely, decisions by "leaders" who get to dictate what everyone must or must not do so not have to be made, and should not be made. Our political structure makes it seem like they do, but that's a bug in our political structure, not an actual necessity.
> in any argument, experts should get more weight
If "experts" is defined as "people who have a demonstrated track record of making accurate predictions in the past", then yes, I agree.
However, by that criterion, as I said, in most domains that are of importance for public policy, there are no experts. Your statement, while correct in itself with that definition of "expert", does not help at all in those domains.
Any other definition of "expert" does not justify your statement.
> Our political structure makes it seem like they do, but that's a bug in our political structure, not an actual necessity.
Again, "no decision" is a decision, especially in the presence of alternatives.
> If "experts" is defined as "people who have a demonstrated track record of making accurate predictions in the past", then yes, I agree.
How good must their track record be before they warrant more weight? 100%? 75%? 5% better than an average person's? I think each level warrants different levels of deference. If a perfect oracle speaks, you do what they say. If someone who spent a long time studying a very complex problem has an opinion, you listen carefully, and ask follow-up questions, but you don't pretend that the Google University™ twenty minute crash course on the topic is as informative.
I recognize it's not simple (and it's fraught). But saying "there are no experts" when people dedicate their lives to studying a lot of these phenomena is only true if you demand 100% accuracy.
"No decision" by leaders in a situation where there is not sufficient justification for ordering everyone to do or not do something, is not the same as "no decision" period. Individuals are still making decisions.
> How good must their track record be before they warrant more weight?
Good enough that their predicted benefits from a policy are reliable enough to justify the costs and risks of that policy.
> If someone who spent a long time studying a very complex problem has an opinion, you listen carefully
Not if they have no track record of accurate predictions. "Studying for a long time" is not a good proxy for that. Lots of people study complex topics for a long time without ever making any accurate predictions.
> saying "there are no experts" when people dedicate their lives to studying a lot of these phenomena is only true if you demand 100% accuracy
You're missing the point. It's not that the accuracy has to be 100%. It's that you're looking at the wrong thing. It doesn't matter how long someone has spent studying a topic. All that matters is their predictive track record. Looking at anything else just distracts you from what matters.
> "No decision" by leaders in a situation where there is not sufficient justification for ordering everyone to do or not do something, is not the same as "no decision" period. Individuals are still making decisions.
Except that it did not play out well because individuals were deceived by so called (wrong) experts who claimed that it is nothing worse than flu.
Based on this individuals took decisions that were opposite to the optimal result and traveled to the areas most inflicted by the virus and carried it to their countries en masse.
Countries that understood the character of the virus and implemented early restrictions (that was questions on days) did fare better that countries that waited to implement restrictions.
>> Decisions have to be made
> In general, I disagree.
You can check the data. Lets take for example 3 similar Mediterranean countries - Spain, Italy and Greece.
First 2 waited with restrictions till >1000 confirmed infected.
3rd executed restrictions when there was only 65 confirmed cases.
Result. First 2 tens of thousands dead, 3rd <200.
There is clear patterns - earlier countries did implement testing facilities and applied restrictions - faster they got the spread under control with lower causalities.
"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists." - Joan Robinson, 1955
She's not wrong. If my adulthood has taught me anything it's that supposed "experts" are oftentimes anything but. And they're certainly not trustworthy just because of their title or credentialing.
Hi! I am not sure about your background--which matters for explanation. I cannot speak to 6 feet in particular, but the basic idea starts with the assumption that the primary vector is large respiratory droplets. If that's the case, imagine you are a droplet. You are acted upon by gravity and by air/temperature. As you move along, you will fall. At some distance, most droplets above a certain size will have settled. That's the basic reasoning. You can argue about the particular cutoff, but the bigger question is how relevant aerosols are. But, the problem is that in the early spread of a virus, the growth in infections is very fast. Someone has to guess. If you wait for perfect knowledge, a lot of people will die because you are taking a linear approach to an exponentiatial problem.
The Imperial College paper that kicked off the whole thing has plenty of details on various quarantining scenarios, including full population quarantine and at risk population quarantine, or any combination thereof. Did you read it? Do you not agree with the simulations or what are your objections?
> she seems to be a professional science contrarian
She's a scientist. To the extent she's a "contrarian", it's due to her personal experience in seeing how science actually works as compared to how it's supposed to work.
> However, using Ferguson20’s stated assumptions, I calculate a 30% higher death toll of approximately 660,000 people (Column A7), implying an IFR of 1.23%.
There's a reason people in power have advisors, and it isn't just to rubber-stamp things.
Back in the old days, FDR had a board of experts to advise him on things. He listened to them. Governments also have a professional civil service, full of people who don't rule but who are in contact with those who do, and who know enough to give good advice.
So the question isn't whether we have a technocracy or a democratic system totally unconnected to reality. It's how well-advised our democratically elected leaders are.
I get the opposite message: You're saying (and I agree) that even a small group of people chosen to be dedicated to making informed decisions is not able to keep up with the demands it puts on them, specifically they need to make decisions based on very partial information. How is a benevolent dictator supposed to do better? That doesn't make sense.
At least in theory the wisdom of crowds can do better. In practice, it's often hard to argue.
Regarding sports. Unfortunately, let's not discount the politics and human nature involved in fielding a team. Some players get to play because of their salary, some players get to play because of their relationship with the coach, some players get to play because they're trade bait, some coaches really are wrong, etc.
Coaches are human too. They are just as fallible as the rest of us. They may work with better information than the fan, but this doesn't mean that they should never be questioned. And good coaches allow themselves to change opinions if criticism makes sense.
For business... for every Netflix, there's a WeWork that everyone can see is insane and they're not wrong.
The other thing is that player evaluation is an extremely imprecise science. For example, even with all the information modern professional sports scouts get about their prospects, many new players still wash out and are busts. The science just isn't precise enough to give definitive answers (and it's possible that science can't give answers in some of these cases). So there are a large number of judgement calls to be made, even with all the information available.
A fan might be correct when they say, "Coach should have played X instead of Y.", but the trick is knowing that in advance. And knowing hundreds of other things in advance too. Maybe coach got that one decision wrong, but hundreds of others right. The fan is unlikely to get that many correct on a percentage basis.
I suppose that's part of the fun of fantasy sports, proving that if you had the chance you could do a better job deciding which players will perform the best each week
Regarding sports, most people fail to understand that most professional sport association (like football "clubs") are actually entertainment companies.
The sport is just the bait for the spectators.
A coach might choose a certain player over another just because the people acclaim him/her.
Also, don't forget that scandals about rigged games are quite regular nowadays.
The american model is certainly entertainment focused, but the european football model at least has youth leagues and a lot more local outreach than a given american pro team in their host city.
> some players get to play because they’re trade bait
I mean, insofar as we’re measuring teams by winning games, rather than measuring teams by how profitable they are, we’re probably not measuring their inclusive fitness. Winning doesn’t help you if nobody pays attention; and, vice versa, making money helps you (in the long term) even if you don’t win.
I disagree with the soccer fan analogy. Often in soccer the team manager publicly reveals key perspectives and strategies that always guide their decisions. They also reveal patterns of player selection that link to their perspectives and strategies, often over many years across multiple teams.
If Jose Mourinho comes to coach your team, you know right away the player recruitment and selection will be rooted in a very calculated defensive approach, conservative possession-oriented play style.
He has done this at several clubs where it was universally understood to be a bad strategic idea given the talents of the specific players he would be inheriting, even from his first day on the job.
Even casual fans could see that, despite the coach spending hours and hours observing player training, talking to players and studying game film, he was biased to impose his preferred strategy onto the team no matter what, even if all the evidence said it was unjustified.
Considering the Premier League further, this effect just gets worse the less skilled the manager is. Many mid or bottom table teams have blunderously bad managers that combine both being low skilled with being hyper committed to a fixed strategy regardless of the characteristics of their players. Once they have dug their heels in on the strategy, they can’t go back on it or appear to buckle under fan pressure, or else they seem like a pushover / non-expert with no special knowledge worth millions of dollars, and it becomes entirely political (making the strategic weakness even more apparent).
I would say it’s a case where “the wisdom of crowds” really is wisdom and the consensus criticisms about player selection are usually very valid and well-supported and the connection to the coach’s strategic weaknesses is obvious.
> If Jose Mourinho comes to coach your team, you know right away
1. You're about to spend a whole heaping wad of cash on overpriced players that other people are trying to offload.
2. He'll be gone in under 3 seasons with a hefty golden parachute.
3. The toxic after-effects will contaminate your club for years.
I'd say both of those things are frequently true, and it's hard to know which is right when. "Fans" in aggregate also have the benefit of hindsight and confirmation bias. For every smart fan who was right, there were many who were wrong but don't keep bringing it up years later. Coaches OTOH have to live with the decisions made in the moment, right or wrong.
People call people idiots instead of trying to understand how they made a mistake because of fundamental attribution error. We all do it.
People are predominantly successful because of luck. Opportunity, connections, upbringing, all luck. Yes, you still need to make the right decision at the right time.
There is a pernicious tendency to make a fallacious argument for intelligence because of success; that is, people become convinced of intelligence because of success. The most obvious example today is the president of the USA. He is convinced of his own intelligence because clearly he is one of the most successful people in the country. I don't think many reasonable people would argue for his genius. On the other end of the spectrum, it seems obvious to me that in the billions of poor people on this planet there is an unknown genius unable to escape his or her circumstances.
We make mistakes. We don't try to understand the mistakes of others as we call them idiots. We are not necessarily capable of succeeding even if we are smarter than those that have.
Thank you! Even if your comment is slightly off-topic I always get upset when people just immediately assume genius because of success. Some people almost literally didn't have to do anything but to open their wallet to receive dollars in, at the right time, while being at the right place.
This very often gets overlooked. The world's economy is an MMORPG game and networking / contacts matter much more than many of us who swear in meritocracy would like to believe.
Another form of this that seems to have taken over online discussions in the last few years is “<person> did <thing> because they are evil” (or rich).
As an example, I’ve noticed that privacy-related discussion on HN is often thought-terminated by comments that reduce down to “<company> is doing <perceived privacy-destroying thing> because they want to destroy your privacy”. On reddit, a common form of this is “<politician> is doing <something implausibly comic book villain-y> because they are evil”.
When the motive isn’t clear, I often enter these discussions trying to learn more about why - but more often than not, I just leave feeling the same way as the author here.
They picked an example that really aged well. Look at netflix today - it's clear that a little bit of humility would have been warranted in 2011 when talking about the company.
Communication is a key to a high-level position in a hierarchy, and therefore, to the wealth.
But very high IQ people have difficulty connecting with the majority of other people, so they lag behind.
I feel like what isn't really properly understood in these situations is the statistical chances that are involved here. 10 people put $50 on the roulette table, and then we celebrate the guy who hit their number. That genius who hit their number still had a negative expected value when placing that bet. Colette Martin would've been right to criticize Reed Hastings if he were making that bet with Netflix's money. But we don't read articles about the CEOs who make bad bets and lose them, and we don't really know if the CEOs who won made good bets or bad bets.
It's possible the richest CEOs are actually the worst at picking bets, because they're the ones who picked bets that were the least likely to pay off, and therefore got the biggest pay out when they won. If 50 people were making the same bet as Reed Hastings, then Netflix would've found it far harder to succeed, since they would've been competing for talent, content and customers with 50 other companies. The reason Netflix exploded in growth is partly because they were the only ones serving that market. Maybe that was a genius stroke of insight, or maybe he was one of a thousand people making bad bets, and he's the one that it paid off for.
> we don't read articles about the CEOs who make bad bets and lose them
Yes we do, all the time: Theranos, WeWork, WebVan, Myspace, Friendster, BlackBerry, Enron, Worldcom, etc, etc, etc.
Sure, we don't hear about companies that never get anywhere because they never did anything interesting to start with, because that's unremarkable.
But we hear a lot about the companies that attracted a lot of success or hype early but then "bet" wrong. (In fact, these stories arguably get a disproportionate amount of coverage, due to schadenfreude from journalists and their audience.)
The roulette spin analogy is not apt, because building a successful company is not a single bet; it's many many bets, every year/month/day over many years, which moves it well out of the realm of random chance and mostly into the realm of skill.
And before someone says it: nobody argues good luck is not a factor in a company's success. But that is mostly at the very beginning (e.g., Steve Jobs meeting Woz; Bill Gates' mother knowing the chairman of IBM) and luck alone is not nearly enough.
Skilled leadership over the long term makes all the difference between success and wasted opportunity.
It's interesting that plenty of people were flinging poo at Reed Hastings when he was making the transition between mailing DVDs and streaming, and pretty much nobody in the media dared fling poo at the obvious "violating laws of physics" shennanegins happening at Theranos before Tyler Shultz took them to the ground.
None of the other examples are really comparable to Netflix either; they were all companies which eventually failed, but which business reporters didn't particularly dislike until after they failed. Netflix was nearly universally reviled for making "dumb" decisions which turned out to be correct, and Mcardle deserves credit for noticing that Hastings was probably a better CEO than most business reporters.
What makes a betting person good or bad? It's hard to score and compare process and intention. The most natural way of determinig the quality of the betting person is by their results.
It's not a very informative way of looking at the world, but it's the most straightforward.
Maybe he was just standing in the right place at the right time, but he was also prepared with the right tools to do what he did. Doing good business is more than a spin on a roulette wheel.
Investors diversify, so we need CEOs of individual firms to take more risk than we want for our portfolios as a whole. To be worth their wages, a CEO of a publicly-traded company should be making risky slightly-positive expectation value bets; were the firm too risk-averse, it'd be just as inefficient as if it were to keep too much cash on hand.
It is possible that a rich CEO has a negative EV bet picking strategy. Unlike casino games we cannot exactly determine this expected value, and have to estimate it from past observations. CEOs who generated positive past rewards, will most likely have a positive EV betting strategy.
Sounds like the VC model, or the found-a-startup model. I came here to say basically this. Well put! Survivorship bias is a huge problem in the way of explaining success.
While I agree with the main thrust of the article (Chesterton's fence, etc.), the author seems to take as a given the fact that Netflix is sliding back into becoming as expensive as cable, because the content providers are setting the prices.
But Netflix's value is not from competing against cable on price, it's competing against piracy on convenience.
Content providers will never again see the same profits, because the de-facto price of content is zero. It's too easy to pirate, and morally grey enough that people are willing to do it.
Netflix got so big because it captured the market of people who were willing to pay for the convenience. If this gets too high they will just go back to pirating.
I’m not sure if that’s a given. People going back to piracy sort of assumes people will happily walk back to watching sketchy streams on laptop screens. I think the bar will pretty high for people who wish to watch on Apple Devices, Rokus or Smart TVs.
There has been enough time for people to get locked into walled gardens.
Not going to link anything here, but certain PLEX/freeNAS plugins can basically let you make your own Netflix, complete with slick UI, but all the content.
However most people don't have the requisite knowledge to set all of this up, so I would agree with the other commenter that the majority are probably still going to just go to sketchy streaming sites.
I think content acquisition still has several hurdles as well as the pipelines of your favorite metadata scraper isn't exactly trivial to setup.
The actual software, once installed is really nice (I have a Plex Server + Infuse on an Apple TV), but in my case I still pay for content (via usenet).
We already saw measurable piracy spike in response to the sudden influx of streaming services splitting desirable content among several platforms. If anything, it's more of a danger as the generations paying for media are more comfortable than ever with the concept and willing to return to it if there are too many obstacles to conveniently finding what you want to watch.
What's ironic to me is (IMO) Netflix is probably the shrewdest big company in existence now. Hastings has dominated not one but two markets, the second obviously larger and more insurmountable than the first. Almost Every single decision they make (including and especially ones that make customers unhappy, like their shitty browsing experience) seems so calculated and thoughtful it's just amazing.
Even I thought Disney plus might be the beginning of the end for Netflix, that it finally met a Goliath it couldn't best, but now even that isnt obvious anymore.
Meh, Netflix is one of many for me. Would be happy if it didn't exist, to watch other stuff on other streaming and I don't think they necessarily have the best content.
Netflix try's to get you hooked on their originals, but the problem with that is once you binged a series you want something else - they cant keep feeding you the crack that is that current series because they take months to produce, so you switch to something else - and at that point it could be something else on Netflix, or just as easily something else somewhere else. I don't think Netflix is really that sticky.
But maybe I am proving the point of the article and I'm missing the strategy.
Exactly. We all keep talking about leaving Netflix but it looks like we aren't. How long has Netflix now been without major movies? Clearly whatever they're doing works - from my ground-level experience, everyone has at least a couple of shows that they like watching in Netflix, and everyone shares accounts as well so in the end it's a few dollars a month for always having a backup service with a lot of "meh" titles at the least.
Perhaps that's what the company is gunning for? Perhaps they noticed that the crowd that sees Adam Sandler movies is the main market and they don't necessarily need to pander to "sophisticated" audience to be a successful company? Who knows. It just looks mindful, minimally, where they're trying to chart out a path that they CAN do, given all their constraints (mainly every major IP now being protected by their parent for their own streaming service).
> Even I thought Disney plus might be the beginning of the end for Netflix, that it finally met a Goliath it couldn't best, but now even that isnt obvious anymore.
I think Disney painted themselves in a corner buying every studio and putting it under the Disney banner.
Disney have long stood for family values programming which is never edgy or pushes the envelope.
That was the reason behind Touchstone and the purchase of Miramax (and prob a few other Disney owned subsidiaries I've forgotten) to push out adult centric content and keep it separate from the Disney = family-friendly marquee.
The Disney brand today is this monolithic umbrella brand and with all their streaming content going under the Disney+ channel it's going to be hard for people to cognitiviely disassociate the brand from the content.
For example who's going to think I fancy watching Pulp Fiction tonight, let me see if it's on Disney+....
They know this and have a way around it. Disney holds a controlling majority of Hulu. That's why they push the Disney+/Hulu+/ESPN+ combo so hard and put all the edgier stuff on Hulu. You can watch Pulp Fiction on Hulu with the Starz add-on. Hulu is their big aggregation play.
It fills a gap in Netflix. Netflix is great at annoying kids' stuff and great at heavy 16+ stuff, but not so good at stuff that's fun for the whole family[0]. Pixar has tons of that.
[0] Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events is a rare exception that I strongly recommend to anyone who is or has ever been a kid.
It's an intelligence to realize that in order to make a lot of money, you have to be ruthless at business. In order to be ruthless like that, you need to neglect being a good and reasonable person, even to those closest to you. Such is the cost of money. Money doesn't buy real friends or happiness, and so the smartest among us are deliberate in not accumulating wealth needlessly. Whilst everyone else assumes their stupidity for not accumulating wealth, in truth, it’s a Dunning-Kruger situation.
I've encountered a few individuals fairly well off and where they think of everyone as idiots. These individuals came from an upbringing of lower class and they eventually had the right opportunities happen for getting ahold of some money. Example from something comparable to bitcoin happening. Nothing in anyway of were these persons were contributing to society in how they gathered a good portion of wealth.
I've also encountered people from wealthy families and these individuals typically don't comment on what they think of others less fortunate in society. They also stay out of politics or anything where people get disgruntled about. I'm unsure if it was how they were raised and or they know the game of life is rigged. In any case, I respect this group the most which is sort of odd because everything was handed to them.
Anyway, the first group of individuals probably would have been better persons if they were just born into money as well. They have a fallacy in their head of they earned their success and wouldn't have had it any other way in life. In reality they just had a worse path to eventually becoming financially independent and sadly these individuals place their ego around wealth because of it.
I don't necessarily believe in the traditional idea of luck. I think everything is predetermined at birth. But wow does it help to be born into a wealthy family with somewhat decent genetics. Quality of life will be so much better. It's so noticeable that I sometimes wonder how others don't see it as well.
I've been learning this slowly over the last few years. I was a typical science guy. Then a close friend dragged me to the gym (which was just foreat heads right?). And it really helped with my depression and now it's a major activity for me. Same for Networking and Sales skills and Watching Sports and Foreign languages...
Embarrassed me would like to publically apologies for assuming everyone else is an idiot and should do what I do. Sorry guys!
>> I mean, Reed Hastings did manage to build this rather large and successful business that killed off one of the most successful retail operations of its day. It's possible that he just sort of did this by accident. But is this really the most likely explanation?
It's possible, yes. And if we consider that there were possibly a few thousand people at that time trying to make that business work, then "by accident" does start to look like the best explanation.
Was/is he smarter than everyone else trying to do the same thing? Probably not.
Was/is he better connected, better funded, more able to run a business, than the others? Possibly, but probably not.
Was/is he luckier than everyone else? Almost by definition, if we define "luck" as "something that helps people succeed".
It's a very nebulous definition. But there's definitely a Venn diagram overlap of "by accident" and "by being very lucky". Even without getting to FedEx levels of "lucky", there is definite "luck" involved in making decisions based on incomplete information that will turn out to have outsize effects on the business later. This is a normal activity for startup founders, and I'll bet serious money that more than a few of them were made in Netflix' early years.
We always underestimate survivor bias when considering successful startup stories. And without studying the other people who were trying to build the same business at the same time, we have no idea why some of them succeeded and others failed. Without this information, it's impossible to say whether Netflix succeeded "by accident" or by design.
A non-native speaker here - what does "debacletacular" mean? The word only has a few hits on Google. I understand it's a neologism of sorts, a conflation, but what's the meaning?
I'm guessing "a spectacular debacle" - AKA "epic fail"?
It's an adjective, based on 'spectacular'.
It is to 'debacle' as 'spectacular' is to 'spectacle'.
'Spectacular' meaing "relating to, or having the character of, a spectacle" (Wiktionary).
So it would mean something like 'relating to, or having the character of, a debacle' - with hints of 'spectacular debacle'.
The usual response to such a question is - "you're just an anti-intellectual! Being rich doesn't mean you're smart - any fool can do it! Real non-fools write their opinions down and other fools follow them."
/s
I've known some utterly immoral people become very, very wealthy - I might've even helped them along the way. The reason I'm not rich and they are, is that they decided they didn't want to help me along my way.
Being rich isn't an indicator of intelligence, nor is it an indicator of hard work or decent ethics. It does, usually, mean that someone wanted to give you money for some reason - and even a fool or an intellectual can do such a thing for love. Or, not.
> It does, usually, mean that someone wanted to give you money for some reason
Isn't that the definition of participation in the economy? You created goods, or provided services, or arranged for goods to be created or services provided, and in exchange people give you money?
Cases where people are given money without in some way earning it are far in the minority.
Because you're an idiot too. Also me. We're all just muppets, with blind spots, distorted perspectives and emotions that override reason. Some idiots are just lucky in the right ways at the right times.
I kept thinking this when the 'cybertruck' was unveiled. Suddenly everyone around me was explaining in detail why this truck was going to be a complete fiasco and a danger to everyone else on the road. I'll happily acknowledge that Musk is off his rocker, but can people really think that he doesn't know how to make a car?
( I'll admit a soft spot for the thing after someone pointed out it looks like what happens when you let back end engineers design the front end )
HN's predictions are solidly in "less space than a nomad" territory. I think the predictive value is nil. I think it might be slightly negative, i.e. if you trade on the naive opposite of the aggregate HN opinion, you might make money simply out of HN's anti-incumbency predilection combined with the Lindy effect.
The classic Dropbox comments and the glee at FB hitting some low stock price, $19?
I will fully admit that Musk knows how to make a car. He’s a car person and had a history of owning and enjoying sporty luxury cars before Tesla. But he’s not a truck person.
I don't know if the cybertruck is a good or bad idea. I don't know if it's going to succeed or fail. I don't know how anyone can possibly declare with confidence that they do know how the truck will do when released.
The whole problem with eg the BMW i-Series or most other electric cars is that they are designed in a silly way that says, “look at me, I’m a weird electric car, I’m not a normal car at all, I’m willing to look like a total dork in order to virtue-signal about being eco-friendly”. Teslas just look like sports cars—except the Cybertruck’s styling is 100% “dorky virtue signal about having a weird special truck”, and truck people are even less likely than car people to put up with that.
I looked to see what truck users on /r/Trucks had to say about it.[1][2] Here are some highlights, both positive and negative:
> It’s really damn cool aside from the roof coming to a point. I’m not sure I understand that design decision. However, onboard air compressor, 110v/220v accessory power, fast as shit, good ground clearance, integral bed cover and ramps, air ride suspension, and tough shell to boot... there is a lot to like here. I might just have to buy one in a couple years.
> Yeah because everyone wants a ‘bed’ you can’t load from the sides.
> I think [being able to load the truck bed from the sides] really only matters for people who use their trucks for actual work. This is obviously for people who want a truck for play and not work.
> ... he could have taken this seriously and actually made an impact. Now he’s proven the older anti EV crowd 100% correct that an electric truck isn’t a viable alternative.
> Clearly designed by someone who has literally never even used a truck once in their entire life.
> It's stupid tall bedsides ruin it for slide in campers too. If it wasn't for that the 3500lb payload and huge battery would make it great for a slide in.
> I'm surprised you all are not pouncing on the unibody. The other "truck" (Honda) that uses a unibody construction does not get much love.
> [People who like the Cybertruck design are] those who've never actually used a truck to haul items and/or trailers. Those who are in the ranching, mining, and other similar industries are laughing at this.
> Is the bed cover transparent? Seems like the rear window is only usable when the cover is retracted. I'm sorry. This is a truck for the Ridgeline crowd. No 8ft bed option. Only crew cab configuration. AWD, not 4WD. Can't tow a Gooseneck or 5th wheel, which you're gonna want when towing a 14K trailer. People will buy it. I won't.
> It’s a weird case of form over function. He was so focused on the blade runner vibe he forgot to make sure it was usable as a truck. Can’t even get to the front of the bed without opening the tailgate and getting inside.
> Trucks have a utilitarian purpose. There is a reason for their shapes. And if you look worldwide there are some differences, but also some commonalities. Like being able to access the frigging bed. That’s a massive failure here.
> There’s some things about truck design that are important to the function of being a truck. Like not having angled bed sides so you can fucking reach the first 1/2 of the bed without getting in it or being able to tow a 5th wheel.
> After looking at more pictures today I realized it doesn't even have a true 6.5' bed. It's much shorter than that, but angles in underneath the rear seats. Probably ok for hauling a few sheets of plywood, but putting in, say, furniture, would be harder.
> I set things in the bed over the bedside a lot. And climb in the sides. I’d have to awkwardly yeet shit over the side of that angled monstrosity
> This truck looks like an absolute nightmare to load and unload tbh. I actually even ditched my bed for a Bradford flatbed to make my truck easier to use. Rear/side visibility looks awful. Boasts a 14,000 towing capacity yet it looks like a nightmare to hook up to a trailer. I’d love to know how far this thing can tow 14,000lbs. Payload of “3,900lbs”. What does the truck itself weigh? Does Tesla understand GVWR or how to calculate payload or is it assuming it’s potential buyers do not? I guess I just don’t understand the whole concept and what exactly they’re going for. Seems like they’re trying to do too much. This has been the plague of these types of “crossovers” which is exactly what this is. El Camino, Ford Ranchero, Subaru Brat, Subaru Baja, Chevy Avalanche, Honda Ridgeline, the list goes on and on.
> Having a large locking cover would give me so much peace of mind when I'm parked with my tools in there. Having the thing build of stainless steel made me ask why hasn't trucks been main of stainless steel for years.
> The bed has some L-Tracks and T-Slots in it too for easy tie downs, which was something I learned from a video I saw that someone did a test drive in
> Literally the only good truck feature is the integrated full width ramp in the tailgate.
> And you can lower the suspension in the back to make it easier! I would have killed for that the last few times i was loading heavy equipment into the back of my truck by myself. I had to make due with backing up to a hill and using a shitty steel ramp that would fall if i so much as looked at it wrong.
> Let's be honest, most people in suburbia/cities with trucks are just drugstore cowboys anyway. This truck will meet the needs of most consumers
> Good luck towing a 5th wheel with that thing
> If you need a truck, Cybertruck's already disqualified itself. Little clearance, no room for mods, unibody, no side access to the truck bed, likely range issues (once you add a load), and that's just the stuff we know about now. I can only imagine buying this if you buy a truck just so you can feel like you're driving a truck but never plan on using the truck features beyond occasional off-roading.
I think that the market for the Cybertruck is the Burning Man/offroad desert campout guy. I'm sure Elon is/knows a lot of these guys, since the Mojave is just over the hills from LA. It's perfect for this application.
It has huge ground clearance, the paint doesn't get screwed up when you scrape it on some brush, the bed is big enough to hold dirtbikes, and they are easy to load/unload with the included ramp.
You can sleep in the bed and it's covered, but not like a normal bed cover that creates a coffin like compartment, or a camper top that doesn't let you load tall items.
Not having access from the sides is a lot less of an issue than it used to be. With a new full sized 4x4, only very tall people can reach much in the bed from the sides anyhow. If you're going to give that up, you might as well go big and provide huge enclosed cargo volume. The ramp makes it much easier to just walk into the bed while carrying heavy items rather than loading from the sides.
It seems people are commenting on the title of the article and not on what the article says : it's easy to think someone is stupid when you read about them making a bad decision in the news.
Classic examples are:
"Hitler was stupid to invade Russia". In fact he needed to conquer oil fields to keep the ability to wage war andhe Russian army was particularly weak at that point.
"Kodak was stupid not to sell digital camera". In fact Kodak did develop digital camera technology. They were behind one of the first commercial digital camera (The Apple QuickTake), they licensed their patent and were number one sellers of digital camera in the US at some point.
It's easy to fall into this trap when you only high level information. I think that when you get more detailed information this effect dissipates. You then realize that there are many factors and stakeholders.
It's really easy to think you have the better answer when you don't even understand the problem. You're working in a weightless fantasy land while the actual people involved have to work with the messy, dirty, heavy reality.
Great ideas can still have poor execution. It seems to me that major the flaws in the Netflix execution of the Qwikster spinoff was the source of much of the criticism. Most people lump the idea and execution together.
This is why when investors replace founders the companies stop innovating. Obvious ideas don’t have any value. You need deep domain knowledge to see how things really are, and not how things seem to be.
Dismissing a successful person but seeming "dumb" person is a benefit to them. Now, they can continue succeeding with less scrutiny.
For a long time I thought many politicians were "dumb" based on their public comments, propelled only by their connections. Now, when I look up some politicians who's spouting objectively false / misleading statements and find they've graduated a top-tier university and have a JD I realize these are not intellectually stupid people. They're skilled in their field, have drive, and less empathy/morals than others.
US politicians often act "dumb" because Americans mistrust intellectualism and "book smarts," but they trust plain-spoken cowboys who shoot from the hip and speak like common people.
Hillary Clinton attended Wellesley and Yale, and speaks like someone who did, and many Americans hate her. GWB attended Harvard and Yale, but he played up the stereotypical Texas country-boy stereotype and fumbled over his words, and got two terms. Donald Trump went to Wharton business school, but speaks (and shitposts) at the level of a common Reddit troll, and he was elected in large part because of that.
You'd think Americans would stop falling for it at some point.
> Hillary Clinton attended Wellesley and Yale, and speaks like someone who did,
Hillary Clinton put on a terrible fake Arkansas accent for the beginning of her political career, talked about baking pies, and quoted country-western songs in interviews. The reason she uses her natural accent in her later career is because she has positioned herself as a "wonk," and often against Republicans who were doing folksy.
i.e. she's looking for a different set of Americans to "fall for it." Trying to appeal to an audience who thinks that everybody else is a sucker and they're the shrewd one.
When she goes to black churches, she puts it on again. Instantly starts dropping her g's and praising the lord like she would never do in a white church.
Do you think graduating from a top university makes them smart? Do you think working at a top hospital makes you a great doctor? Etc. There is a distribution everywhere. At top universities it just might be not as wide as some other places.
You should watch closely the people you admire. Donald Trump is as successful politician as one can be. He is as rich as one can be. He has a degree from a top university. But he's a useless person and dumb as a rock. If you try to follow his way you will get nowhere. Good luck.
I still have and use their disc rental service. I go to dvd.com and it forwards to dvd.netflix.com where I only rent blu-rays. Maybe they would have had better luck with a different name.
In my experience, the ability to explain is a side effect of being gifted. A gifted person can simplify complex subjects and concentrate on the important points, they can find different metaphors that work, or fit their explanation to your knowledge, and are often self aware enough to understand their own thought process. The less gifted often struggle to teach.
However “that’s obvious” is also often said intuitively by very smart people, where they are correct but they can’t actually explain how they know they are correct.
Reconcile that with how power concentrates on charisma and relationships (Politics, Startups, Businessmen). Power is about getting other people to do things, which is about communication!
Most of us chose the profession/vocation we practice because that is the opportunity that presented itself at the time. Very few people set out to be "rich". What they really want is to be comfortable, and able to pursue contentment.
An anecdote from when I was a young person. A friend was working very hard to become a plumber. At the time I thought who would want to be a plumber, it is a gross and dirty job with a limited future. One day I asked him out of curiosity what he thought a plumber's place was. His reply surprised me. He said "a plumber's job is to protect the health of the community." Now that I'm older and reflect back, I can see that being a plumber is a solid vocation, that is needed by most communities, where a person can live anywhere they choose. But they don't get "rich". They make a comfortable living and feel they are contributing to the well being of the community. Isn't that what most of us really want from life?
What do you call people like me who is an anti-materialist and believes the religious impulse that a vow of poverty will make it easier to achieve enlightenment -- but keeps falling ass backwards into money.
2011 is the context: a height of the start-up wave, ascendance of FB--presumably due to "genius". The implication being that if you are really smarter than others you must have the rewards to show it. Hopefully this would be received today as a tone-deaf denial of privilege. The great myth of meritocracy has been blown apart.
Do you really believe Zuckerberg is an idiot? He has successfully navigated industry shift to mobile. He decisively and swiftly purchased Instagram and WhatsApp, buying his way into two major upcoming trends. You may think he is jerk or evil but no way an idiot.
"idiotic" was stated by the original post, not my reply. My objection is to the formulation that massive financial success in tech is proof of genius-level intellect. Being relatively smart may be necessary, but it is certainly not sufficient. Connections, opportunity, timing, and greed are other prerequisites. On the other hand, moral concerns about the negative downstream effects of your goals--something that a supposed genius would have insight into--would be inhibitors. As to the purchases you mentioned, I would argue that the game is a lot easier when you already have hotels on Boardwalk. And I certainly don't attribute strong imperial instincts as a mark of genius.
Facebook's dominance was earned. Remember Myspace? They were huge when Facebook started. Now they're tiny by comparison. Google tried and failed several times at social networks. Zuckerberg figured out how to manipulate humans in quantity through subtle programmed social cues. That's an achievement on a par with that of Hiram Maxim.
Oh come on, MySpace was an absolute disaster from a speed and usability point of view. It was obvious anyone could have done better than MySpace.
At the time I was using mixi.jp which was "MySpace done right" and was hugely engaging. (It's quite possible that Mixi might have become Facebook had they not committed commercial suicide later with some very stupid decisions. The only social network I know that deliberately tried to limit their userbase.)
While I agree with the article, it is important to distinguish the macro from the micro point of view.
From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one.
On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater than that of finding there very talented ones, because moderately gifted people are much more numerous and, with the help of luck, have - globally - a statistical advantage to reach a great success, in spite of their lower individual a priori probability.
I think it's mostly just that intelligence is not terribly important for success. Tenacity, street smart, charisma, connections, passion are all more important than IQ.
Taleb wrote extensively on this. IQ only statistically relevant at the bottom end of the scale (barrier of entry) but meaningless for "success" otherwise.
Exactly. People on here seem to forget that almost every single rich person that can be named had hereditary money.
Jeff Bezos now has more money than can be made if an American family earned 63k for 2 million years. He also had parents that gave him a so-called "three hundred thousand dollar investment" (more money than most people see in a lifetime even while working hard for their family, dedicating most of their life to work and barely managing to enjoy life), while ignoring or dodging every single tax he can get away with.
It's weird how most people are fine with that, because they seem to see themselves as temporarily embarrassed billionaires, or because they aren't able to understand the sheer amount of money.
> He also had parents that gave him a so-called "three hundred thousand dollar investment" (more money than most people see in a lifetime even while working hard for their family, dedicating most of their life to work and barely managing to enjoy life)
Jeff Bezos also had a teen mother, a biological father that abandoned him, and a Cuban immigrant father that came to the US alone at 16 with nothing and no ability to speak English.
After passing through a refugee camp, just six years later Mike Bezos was raising Jeff as his own and had successfully gone to college.
If - having survived all of that well enough to build a decent life for himself - Mike could afford to invest into his son's business, then it's a remarkable accomplishment that should be cheered, rather than attacked.
I don't know much about Jeff Bezos so I try to reserve my judgement about him. But I am confused - how does one come from a poor family and then receive a $300k loan from said family?
Sure, I didn't mean to sound like I am stomping on the Dream. What I meant was, how specifically did this family that came from poverty accumulate $300k?
Quick research says that Mike Bezos worked as an engineer for Exxon after graduating college, and saving that money wisely can add up to $300k.
That does not change the calculus in my mind, because the situation goes beyond just money. How did the Sr. Bezos land such a well paying job with Exxon? An engineer position puts him in a privileged class. We have to look back further generations to see how his family was in such a position to raise a successful engineer?
Let alone that Sr. should have the knowledge and support he required to manage his money so well. I look at the Jr. Bezos having a privilege to have a father who he could turn to for advise, or who may have guided his development. Not saying he did, cuz I don't know the family, but it sounds like it was a real possibility. Who saves all that money, only to entrust it to his estranged son who he don't know or trust--as if he haven't had a hand in imparting the necessary temperament, sensibility, and wisdom for his son to be successful in some way in the economy? LOL.
How many people today are fortunate to have grown up in this time, in this is a period of unprecedented economic growth and social change, who have squandered their earnings, because they didn't have the support of knowledgeable and trustworthy parents or family?
Sounds to me like a chain of great decisions, luck or both.
I can give a counter example. I moved to an affluent town on the North Shore of Long Island, NY. I met a woman in my neighborhood who described to me her career at the local hospital, as a nurse, for over 20 years. She's African American, and landed this job in the late 70s early 80s by my calculation. She benefited by the social changes at the time that accepted African Americans as nurses in a largely white community. I also met her son, and he struggles with under-employment in his career. I had the impression she didn't understand why he was in that situation. She was proud of her success. I imagine it was difficult for her to reconcile her career in nursing, and her son's struggles. She had success, why not him? Unlucky, more like it.
Right now--that hospital is part of one of those large health care corporate systems. If she had this job today, its very possible she would not have seen her salary increase year after year, nor enjoyed a pension, nor stayed with the same organization for so long just being a nurse. There will always be new nurse graduates with more energy with just enough knowledge who are more manageable by corporate. That's the reality of hospitals and healthcare today, despite growth in this field.
Fortune goes to the right person who is in the right place at the right time. And if you frack up and fall out, someone else is ready to take your place, hey. Who in a great position can say they did it entirely alone? Meag Lottery winners. haha.
Fine with what, that his parents helped him start a business or that he's so enormously wealthy?
I hope people don't mind the former, but the latter is a bit problematic. When individuals can control that much wealth, democracy breaks down, they can control politics. It wouldn't hurt capitalist incentives at all if the richest of the rich were limited to earning say $100 m.
> I hope people don't mind [that his parents helped him start a business]
parents != parents
maybe i'm stating the obvious, but "if you want to get rich, come up with a good idea and work hard" is way easier when your parents can invest 300K in your startup and you have that safety net to fall back on. as in, that's a substantial factor into somebody's "self-madeness" that's often overlooked
(i know that's not what you said, but imo it's a common sentiment re: creating a successful business)
These two things are more important than most people are prepared to admit. Very few people ever do the "rags to riches" thing. The few that do are probably good looking. Some people are just born with the ability to be far more successful than others.
And I'm sure that's a great comfort to the vast number of people who are born with every bit as much potential for greatness as <insert personal favourite genius, celebrity, or billionaire here>, but never have the opportunity to realize it due to crushing poverty.
They may never be able to achieve even modest financial security and live in constant dread that they'll lose one of their 2-3 jobs and be on the street, but hey, they can define success as meaning a family that loves them, so that makes absolutely everything OK! /s
No idea why this would be downvoted, this is absolutely true - there is not just one version of what a successful life looks like. Deciding how you define success is a principle part of forming yourself as a person.
While this sounds great, it's a bit like when people say you can "choose what to believe". You cannot, in fact, choose what to believe. You either believe something or you don't. Similarly, with feeling successful, you either do feel that or you don't. It's not really under your control.
But what you can do is realise that things aren't always under your control so not to worry about them. Instead just concentrate on things you do have and things you can do. You have the power to be useful to society so do that. You have the power to do good things so do it. How you feel doesn't really matter.
In a sense, it's like skill in any domain. Being good at something isn't strongly correlated that strongly with being successful at it, at least if success is taken to mean fame and fortune.
In that sense, the most successful CEO isn't necessarily the smartest individual/CEO in the same way the most successful artist isn't necessarily the best one on a technical level.
Perhaps also there are more definitions of success? Some people find success in moderate income but good family happiness. Others find success in taking care of their community.
Intelligence is hugely important for any kind of outlier success. It's no coincidence that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Jim Simons are undeniably brilliant.
The claim that charisma, street smarts, or connections are more important than intelligence is absurd. There are so many fields in which those things just don't matter. If you're not charismatic don't pursue a career in a field that requires charisma. Simple.
It's easy to think that intelligence isn't a strong predictor for success because there are many intelligent people who don't accomplish much. But there are many more charismatic and well-connected people who don't accomplish much! But we don't culturally expect charismatic people to automatically become successful, like we do for smart kids. That's where the real difference is.
> If you're not charismatic don't pursue a career in a field that requires charisma. Simple.
I'm sorry, what field would that be?
I have yet to see a field where extraversion, persuasiveness, and regularly going out and having beers with the boss is less likely to get you promotion than being utterly brilliant, doing an amazing job at what you do, and maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
At least in America, charisma has a massively outsized influence on your success in anything but the very most menial of fields.
Sure they are smart, but you'll find smarter people at any theoretical physics department, if we're talking IQ. Also, I don't think we are talking about rich as in global top 100, what I at least meant more mundane financial success, like earning $1 m a year.
At that level, you definitely don't need to be a genius, I'd say if anything a genius is much less likely to make a million a year.
People who don't try to become rich probably won't. That much is clear. When people pursue theoretical physics they knowingly choose a career that cuts off almost all paths to wealth. The question "so, why aren't you rich?" doesn't apply to people who aren't even trying.
For success within theoretical physics you see, again, exactly how important raw intelligence is. Charisma and people skills are nice, but top researchers are disproportionately brilliant. This isn't nearly as true in those scientific fields where research results are unverifiable. We've seen this in the recent months with the embarrassing quality of epidemiological modeling.
Earning $1m a year doesn't require exceptionalism of any kind, but there is a huge gap between $1m a year and the global top 100. And intelligence becomes more dominant and other traits start to matter less as the stakes increase.
"For success within theoretical physics you see, again, exactly how important raw intelligence is. Charisma and people skills are nice, but top researchers are disproportionately brilliant. This isn't nearly as true in those scientific fields where research results are unverifiable. We've seen this in the recent months with the embarrassing quality of epidemiological modeling."
I actually believed physics has repeated run into the problem where large swaths of research is in fact unverifiable and exists purely on a theoretical basis until technology has caught up with the theory. Wasn't there a large discussion within the past 12 months or so about the many flaws of the field of physics, including the repeating of the same mistakes due to not wanting to stray too far from the existing literature? Doesn't this field also have large swaths of theories with plenty of mathematics behind both that are also mutually exclusive?
If I would think about a field with a long history of verified research, physics would most certainly not be up there. I'd say chemistry has physics beat there for example.
Additionally, epidemiological modeling has to deal with real data from sources whose trustworthiness are largely only somewhat known and somehow project this into the future. This is a garbage in, garbage out situation and I don't know if this should reflect on the field overall. It'd be like judging ML as a field based off of a problem case in which all training data has untrustworthy labels.
Wee need to teach thiss type of logical reasoning about statistical information at the high school level. It needs to be instinctive, and our default instincts are completely wrong for the task.
Statistical information has become extremely salient. Covid-19 is the current example. Most information is statistical. The same is true in many work contexts, where companies generate statistical knowledge that people need to interpret.
Meanwhile, this logic toolset is typically much weaker than our other ones. Average numerical ability is actually quite good, comparatively. The average person would perform ok on classic logical reasoning (Socrates is a man...). Throw in some statistical information... bogus conclusions (or no conclusion) are more common.
It's doable. Nothing too hard here. It's on par with simple algebra. We just haven't adjusted education to the needs of the times.
You are over simplifying the world. You are doing a mental exercise and reducing everything to a single variable: Talent.
So if someone success without talent, you explain it with another monovariable: luck.
By the way, for me being talented in something is just another version of luck. So we can say that you believe in just one variable: Luck is everything.
The world is way more sophisticated and complicated than a single variable.
Because of my work I have met people that are today highly successful. For example I have met motorcycle's world champions when they were children, that now earn tens of millions of dollars.
The most interesting thing is that for every world champion I know, I have met way way more incredible talented children that never became world champions and don't earn much or work in other areas.
They are human beings that took and take different decisions in their lives.
Some of them were very hard workers(and did not success after all the work), some of them were lazy(and succeeded anyway).
Some of them loved going to parties, others prefered to play guitar or read. Some were very social, others had few friends. Some were impulsive, some were analytical. Some were perfectionistic, others only care about doing things as fast as possible. Some had impulsive sex, other preferred stable relationships. Some accepted others helping them and listened, others refuse to learn or advice from others.
At the end of the day, there are hundreds of variables out there. There are usually some patterns that emerge on successful people on each specific discipline.
For example, in motosport you find that most successful people are highly competitive. They are obsessed with winning. I played ping pong with one of the kids and won. He could not stand it and trained and trained until he could win me(a year or so later). This kid is rich and famous now.
By the way, Success is different for different people. For me success could be not having a boss, working in front of the beach everyday without stress,and able to support my family.
For other people, being successful means earning millions of dollars, even when this means living for work inside a concrete hive watching numbers all day on a computer screen, and not having children until you can pay for a house that you never have time to visit.
Not necessarily in sports, but in other domains success may also often be the outcome of a stochastic process, because there are so many factors involved. This is often overlooked and successful people don't like to hear it, but the fact that they are among the successful whereas others with similar prerequisites aren't can often be attributed to pure chance.
There is a lot of survivor bias in the assessment of success.
I believe that successful people tend to have a high base level of intelligence, often high social intelligence, are often very persistent, and rich parents and good looks also help a lot. But it's equally important to happen to be at right place at the right time and meeting the right people.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are good examples in my opinion, had they been born ten years later they might have ended up in only moderately successful software business, or selling printers and go out of business by the early 90s, or creating a failed video game console. They started their businesses at exactly the right time, met the right people, and made good decisions in some early, very dynamic and emerging markets.
The op is not reducing everything to talent, or even implying that talent is especially important. If you are thinking about this statistically (the OP is), than these examples don't matter.
The implication is a distribution of outcomes, not definite outcomes.
The argument works regardless of the definition of success used.
> the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater than that of finding there very talented ones, because moderately gifted people are much more numerous
That is exactly what Bayes' theorem predicts.
Many other conclusions , erroneously, seem more intuitively right, thou. Statistics is hard to master as our brains biases are strong forces.
And that many smart people have better things to do with their time than making more money. I have everything I need and really want. I much rather play with my three year old son in the garden than being able to afford a new Tesla.
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
> This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
A lot of money simply isn't useful for anything interesting or valuable. Surviving is great, some comfort is nice, but after a certain order of magnitude, it's not so much people having money, it's money having people. While large scale projects are also important and those need money and other resources to be pooled in some form, but they don't require any involved person to be filthy rich.
And maybe that if you are smart (or think you are, based on previous success) you might be more relaxed about not optimizing for maximum monetary gain at every step of the way since you think you will always have plenty of good options down the road since your smarts is not a random one-off occurrence but something you can tap into repeatedly.
Personal anecdote: I used to be very anxious about making the absolutely "best" choice at every fork in my life and would agonize and analyze every decision meticulously. A few years into my career, I have had enough positive experiences and successes under my belt that I feel much more relaxed about the choices I make because I think I'll always have the ability to correct or pivot if I make one wrong move right now.
Because have lots of money gives you the economic power to survive adversity, pursue interests that are more fulfilling, do more good in the world, etc...
I think what TheOtherHobbes means is you can survive adversity and pursue fulfilling interests without rising to the level of 'rich' - unless your interest is something like having colleges name buildings after you!
Indeed, it would be a poor reflection on our society if you had to be in the top percentile for income to merely be economically secure.
Yeah the underlying causality between intelligence and wealth/success is always strange for me. Researchers, artists, philosophers... There are a lot of smart people actively choosing to pursue interests that are not valued by the market/don't bring shareholder value. Is this a cultural thing? It's a bit caricatural but where I live I find it's the opposite, "real" smart people should not pursue such lowly material and gross goals as money, being rich is kind of suspicious. But maybe there are nuances in the different kind of smartness that are talked that I miss.
TIL: Didn’t know I was stupid for having different goals than starting a family.
In non mockery voice: I think there is nothing wrong in being smart and perusing academic titles, wealth or recognition. Can’t I be happy travelling the world because I have so much passive income that I don’t care how much I spend? Can’t I be happy running megacorporation without a child?
If you calmly re-read the post you were replying to, you will see that they didn't question different goals than theirs, at all. They said "many smart people", not all, and they didn't say that those outside that subset are stupid.
If that makes you happy then fine, but it's wrong to assume that it's the ultimate goal for everyone to be mega rich. Honestly it's a very common mistake for people to be totally sure that everyone in the world desires to be rich and famous
>>that everyone in the world desires to be rich and famous
Keep the fame, I just want the freedom that money buys. I was never famous; but I have been asked for autographs and been stared at by total strangers with hero worship in their eyes--it is bizarre, and it made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I can't imagine anyone wanting that.
I think it was Naval Ravikant who said recently that the ideal is to be rich or financially independent enough to not worry too much, + anonymous. Rich AND famous is a never-ending nightmare and poor + famous is pretty much the worst outcome because you have such reduced freedom and privacy and don't know who your real friends are.
I don't care about being kicked out of the 9-zero club or whatever, I just want to lay about all day or if I want to take a week trip to Kenya or Moscow... and NO BOSS
That was one of the more butt hurt of all possible interpretations of what I said. And without knowing anything at all about you, and only judging from your comment, my guess is that hit a bit of a nerve. Why is that?
And I didn’t mean to say that playing with three year old kids in the garden is the only thing that is worth pursuing. It was just an example close to my hearth right now in my life in my circumstances and in my part of the world. Of course there are many other worthy pursuits. My point was only that trying to get a bigger pile of money than other people I don’t consider one of them.
Of course you can. True happiness is something that can't be controlled. So anyone who tells you you can't be happy doing a particular thing isn't right.
Granted there are some things we shouldn't be happy doing but I think that we all know what they are and it goes without saying.
Generally, happiness is a reward from doing what your genes want you to do. The greatest happiness therefore, should be found in the process of breeding and caring for offspring.
Social status (consumption, skills and achievements) helps you secure higher quality mates and offers greater security to your offspring. That's why gaining social status, feels worthwhile, but without kids it feels a bit empty.
Before kids, I knew the breeding was pretty good fun, but my genes gave me no indication that having kids would be fun too.
Perhaps thats just to ensure those genes are spread far and wide and to concentrate on social status before the all consuming process of caring for offspring begins.
> Generally, happiness is a reward from doing what your genes want you to do.
I disagree. Generally happiness comes from being happy/content/thankful for what you have (as opposed to "having a lot"). You can be happy having no children, no fortune, no fame, etc. Conversely all of these do not guarantee happiness - Robin Williams committed suicide despite having them all, I think it's fair to assume he was not happy.
Is this actually true, except from a normative perspective?
Onne would definitely expect the highly gifted to think/act differently socially as well as in several other areas, but is it actually correct to say they have less "developed skills", except possibly in the sense that they probably has had less reason to, and fever opportunities to develop these skills with their peers?
Every time I am wrong, I rejoice, because it means I learned something new, I just objectively became less dumb. Ego is the bane of learning. Smart people with ego usually aren’t as smart as you think, it’s usually more luck, performance, and privilege.
Besides, “Mo money, mo problems”. I have a couple thousand square feet of house, few thousand square feet of yard and garden. It’s way too much for just me, I have a dedicated VR room. Billionaire or bust mentality is a sickness.
Didn't bother to read the article. Just the comments. My take? The smartest people I know are the ones who married well and have a great family and social life. Wealth / education are great but worthless if your personal life is a mess.
Take Benjamin Netanhau as an example. The guy is very wealthy and successful. I think he graduated from both Harvard and MIT. (Although one degree might be an MBA that anyone with money can do). However, he is married to a psycopat who controls his life and is hated by everyone around them. I don't even want to talk about his son. Do I want his life? Hell no!
I agree with the premise of this article. That armchair quarterbacking is rarely helpful and usually oversimplified.
But I dislike the common implication in the headline, which is that intelligence somehow always equates to wealth.
First of all, it's not always easy to judge how wealthy another person is, no matter their profession or outward appearance.
Secondly, I think we all need to disuade ourselves of the notion that everyone in the world wants to become wealthy. Plenty of extremely intelligent people are perfectly happy where they are and are perhaps smarter for not chasing wealth like all those genius entrepreneurs. Just look at the lives of those we idolize so much for their success. Do you really want that life? A lot don't. And there is a good chance people more intelligent than those "successful" people don't want that life either.
Additionally, I know quite a few wealthy people that are rather dim. But they were hard workers and an opportunity presented itself because they were at the right place at the right time and they took advantage of that opportunity and worked it dry.
I concur. It really depends on the reward function you chaise.
Let's say you are a genius OCD person being elated by seeing the numbers on your bank accounts go up and nothing much else. You live 60-90 years and at the end you have some big number there. In this case you were successful.
Let's say you are a more typical person, you'll probably have a larger set of reward functions and they may even change over time. Having money on the account to be able to cover costs and do some vanity spending is definitely rewarding to a point - until it becomes hollow. But then there are all those other reward functions, like maintaining a family, seeing your kids grow up, see the world, play games, learn new things and maybe build or invent a thing or two. Maybe just shine as a social focal point or any number of other things. Maybe just watching turtles in various environments.
The only thing that we can't extend as a reward function is acquiring more time, like money on the bank account. So balancing the reward functions for a reasonable contentedness with life is generally what we strive to do, even if we don't spell it out that way.
We start young and see all the possibilities and the scarceness of time is not a pressing matter - reward functions are more about enjoying life. Then with a family you see time passing, become more aware of it. You learn from the things you messed up and know that some things can't be fixed and your reward function will become more about stability and preservation.
As a general trend, yes. But since your life is lived with N=1 and you can't generally change your innate intelligence, that is not usually relevant to guide decision making.
I don’t really understand the point of the article. It seems to be challenging an assumption that being “smart” has something to do with being financially successful. But why would we start with that assumption? Why would we conflate being “intelligent” with being good at making money?
To me, this seems as preposterous as asking “if you’re so smart, why are you so bad at playing the violin, or why aren’t you a Hollywood movie star, or why can’t you run a 4 minute mile, or why don’t you have a million Twitter followers?”
Even if we make the questionable assumption that the very concept of general intelligence (something like what an IQ test purports to show) is sensible, why would we assume that it correlates positively with success in any conceivable discipline?
Nah it just means too many people think they are "smart" while not applying their supposed edge to get any practical thing done better.
Money is just one example. The baseline is "if you are so smart why how come you don't have a better life", this can be more money, a better job, more time for your children, a hotter wife for some.
If you don't like the materialistic versions, My personal version of it is "if you are so smart why are you complaining so much instead of fixing your problems"..
The article doesn't really use a strict equality between being "intelligent" and being good at making money. It's more an implication, that being good at making money implies being probably something like "intelligent".
Now having this established, your examples of playing the violin and Hollywood stars doesn't make any sense. They are reading the relation backwards. The implication holds the other way round.
The implication you are pointing at still an assumption.
If we can't assume that Hollywood stars or concert violinists are intelligent (even if not all intelligent people can be those things), then why would it naturally be so with financially successful people?
The examples still make sense under the premise that the assumption is off.
Speaking only for myself, I strongly held the idea that being "smart" was the most important thing. It's only in the last 5 years that I've really come to regret that view. (For context I'm in my late 30's) Ideas are cheap, getting things done is valuable.
There is no correlation between being an idiot and being rich. Being rich is (in most cases) the ability to... Sell yourself, for the lack of a better expression. And smart people commonly can't sell themselves or their products because they often solve problems which are far more complex than the ones ordinary people have. They will spend brutal amounts of resources and efforts to solve a problem which ordinary people just don't have. Ask any developer how often have they been in a non-tech circle having a casual conversation and saying "Wait, you paid how much for someone to do X?"
X usually being the work of two (below) average Joe developers which can be done in a few weeks. And there you are, sitting and wondering how to build something big.
Which is another common mistake: people rarely become rich overnight and it's a gradual process. You are looking at people who are light years ahead of you, while the route to success is a tight and windy mountain road, full of crests and dips. Looking at the people standing on the mountain peak isn't productive and doesn't give you any valuable information. It's those who are one or two corners ahead of you that you need to be looking at.
> There is no correlation between being an idiot and being rich
Correction: there is actually a rather strong correlation [0].
Of course it is not a perfect correlation and a lot depends on other factors like luck or hard work. So out of a billion people you can always point to millions who are outliers.
There is a correlation between intelligent and income but we have been conditioned to misunderstand what intelligence is. we are taught that schooling is as sign of intelligence but that is just a sign of Memory and a sign of formatting. Many people fail because their ideas as are not formatted correctly or their ability to remember remember during an exam. There are many people who have failed education and still succeed in their dreams. Elon Musk is an example where he said "I didn't go to Harvard but all my lawyers did".Is Musk more intelligent that his lawyers even though he does not have the same education. So what is intelligence? The issues is also how do you measure success. May people choose Money as that quantifies things and then we can compare. The main issue is Quality is not comparable. Neither is Happiness. Success can only be measured with yourself. because you have to do the things that need doing to get into the positions to be seen as dumb. The Politician who says some really dumb thing or the businessman that does not seem to know what he is doing, have done some really smart things to be in a position to be dumb.
> While awaiting Canadian documentation, Musk attended the University of Pretoria for five months.[51] Once in Canada, Musk entered Queen's University in 1989, avoiding mandatory service in the South African military.[52] He left in 1992 to study economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania; he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and a Bachelor of Science degree in physics.[53][54][failed verification]
Since this is about money, isn't that a bias? I mean what are the chances of "son of (insert a billionaire name here)" to be rich vs me. TBH I can be stupid too with that amount of money, since I can afford it.
Even if that's true, it still implies that everyone else mostly aren't idiots, because otherwise it wouldn't take luck to get rich, all it would take is outsmarting all these idiots everywhere.
Nope. Luck does not imply causality. Everyone can be an idiot (including you) and you can still be lucky. Or there can be a mixture of idiots and geniuses and you can still be lucky.
"Luck does not exist" is not required, because that's just a separate path to getting rich. You can win the lottery and it's pure luck. But if you're really smarter than everyone else then you should still be able to figure out how to get their money even if you only have the ordinary amount of luck.
I think that’s needlessly reductionist. Read the biographies of people like Mark Cuban and Richard Branson: both of these men were born entrepreneurs and salesmen, with Cuban starting his first business at age 12 and Branson at age 16.
A good parallel to this is the music industry, actually: yes, there is a significant amount of luck in “making it.” But you cannot deny that talent is one of the strongest predictors: at the very least, talent is the bar to entry.
I think people like Cuban and Branson are good examples of those who "make their own luck", where they're running the business version of Monte Carlo simulation until something sticks. They definitely have the right mindset and skillset to do things like run a business successfully, but obviously the probability of success increases with the number of attempts.
Yeah, but the music industry also has an issue that a surprising number of non-musical things are considered talent. "Production value" as was said in Tape Heads.
Looking at examples of successful people is classic survivorship bias. Smart people who lucked out on their businesses do not get to write biographies.
Are you born in the west, male and white? If you are you're lucky. And those traits will allow you, even against your best efforts to fall upwards over your lifetime.
Also, you have a couch, and get to sit on it, that's a lucky thing to do.
To be lazy is an indulgence that not all unlucky people have.
Edit: I don't know who downvoted me, but this is the definition of luck according to Google: "success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions"
Luck just determines specific momentary opportunities that that have the potential to set you in the right direction. The thing is, you need to be prepared to take advantage of those opportunities, as well as work on increasing the occurrence rate of those opportunities.
It’s like playing blackjack. Ultimately, it all comes down to luck, but you are significantly increasing your chances of winning by employing certain (legitimate) strategies rather than playing your hand randomly and hoping for luck to hit you.
Well, the title is easy to answer, even many exceptionally talented people are never rich, and there's a significant amount of luck involved in being rich. It's pretty easy to be smarter than many people while never having financial success, or respect, or an audience or whatever.
It's worth picking up the actual thesis from the article though. If for example Hastings is rich, does that mean he's not an idiot (or does not often make idiotic decisions)?
It lowers the chance obviously but on the other hand fame and money is often fleeting. The average S&P 500 company now lives fewer than 20 years. So that means a lot of people who could be considered to have made good decisions in the recent past will fuck up in the near future.
The fat tailed nature of tech investing means that someone can make 30 bad decisions and one good one and be insanely rich. At the end of the day they often just survived the bad ones, but you'd still have been right in calling them out on the 29 bad ones.
So I think on a case-by-case basis net-worth is a shoddy indicator.
> average S&P 500 company now lives fewer than 20 years
No, the average age of an S&P 500 company is now less than 20 years. Which is heavily influenced by the rise of technology and the many S&P 500 companies that were created in the last ~20 years. It does not mean that companies are dying faster, just that S&P 500 is filled with young companies.
"A recent study by McKinsey found that the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared. They will be bought- out, merged, or will go bankrupt like Enron and Lehman Brothers."
I didn't see any evidence backing up their estimates nor any number that represent how many former S&P 500 companies go out of business. The studies I could find listed some of the companies that fell out of the S&P500 and AFAICT most of them still exist.
I would be careful about taking McKinsey's carefully crafted quotes and projections at face value. 'Disappeared' is intentionally vague. They also intentionally use age of a company when talking about the past and tenure on the S&P500 when talking about the future to make the numbers seem more dramatic[1]. It's part of their sales pitch - "it's harder than ever to run a company so you should really hire a consulting company to save you".
Money an intelligence rarely correlate.
I know many very smart people that are just not interested in creating the business, though they are working on super complex things just for the sake of science.
Also there are lots of idiots why can become rich. There are so many opportunities.
So you can be absolutely right saying that some guy is an idiot even if he has billions.
Just do a quick google search with income and IQ correlation.
Random first article: https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-intelligence-predict-income , don't even know if it's a good source, but google was showing results for IQ having a correlation to income, and also for show results saying IQ having no correlation to wealth.
You own words:
> Though they are working on super complex things just for the sake of science
Those kind of things tend to pay higher that you usual trade job, and are only available to higher than average IQ.
Wealth and Income are very distinct things.
>When internet commentators see odd behavior that they don't understand, why do they assume that the most parsimonious explanation is that management must be a bunch of drooling morons?
I don't think most internet commentators have the patience or even the interest of painting an accurate picture. Most of them are shitposting.
Whenever you see someone who you believe to be an idiot succeeding, it usually means they're really good at the game and you don't even understand what the game is.
Today information is so easy to get that a lot of people think they know everything about every subject. But, like you said, reading the rules of the game does not mean you know how to play.
When a company like Netflix launches a new product it is possible they thought about this with different teams for a long time. Then it's very naive to comment on the internet to say they are wrong and made a stupid mistake.
No, it isn't. Anyone who has been involved in corporate decision making knows that different teams thinking for a long time is absolutely no guarantee of a successful outcome - or even of a barely functional one.
Companies make stupid mistakes all the time. When you're in the trenches there's a certain amount of group think, and issues that may be obvious to outsiders may be invisible and/or suppressed by internal politics.
Of course Internet comments may be naive and wrong for other reasons. But that's a different question.
> different teams thinking for a long time is absolutely no guarantee of a successful outcome
Of course it is no guarantee for success. But an outsider has absolutely no clue about what was discussed and what the politics were. So I think it is naive to make comments like "this is never going to work", or "removing the headphone jack will bring Apple down".
To take a recent example: when a company like TripleByte launches a new product - namely that key parts of all profiles will suddenly be public - they might have thought about this with different teams for a long time too, but commenters on the internet said they were wrong and eventually they admitted that they made a stupid mistake.
Netflix's plan paid off. TripleByte's didn't.
Apples and Oranges, I know, but how do you tell the two apart without hindsight?
It's easy to tell them apart because ethical and instrumental reasoning have distinct value systems.
It is irrelevant that Triplebyte's public profiles may have been instrumentally valuable for the company in the long run. No one arguing against them cared about that. But they did care about the ethical implications of that decision -- it was wrong even if it turned out to be good for Triplebyte, which it didn't because their plan was so brazenly unethical that they got a spanking.
Plenty of idiots succeed because success was granted to them the day they were born.
____________
Also, a lot of times when you see an idiot succeeding, the idiot is a face for people to criticize while the master minds go about doing their magic, unseen.
There are also plenty of people who weren't born rich, played the game well, and "made it". Probably not as much as those who were born rich and got a head start.
In this context, most commenters are implying society's perception of success which is intimately tied to money.
If the definition of success is completely left to a person's own devices, the whole argument of the "game" falls apart too. Since there is no game to play.
I think this is sadly very true - trying to actually be a kind person really limits how well you can play "the game".
There's no good solution to this either - if there was more kindness in the world, then that would just create even more opportunities for the people playing the game to get ahead, because they would have more victims to exploit.
One key thing about the game is the definition of "being ahead", and in a way, the meaning you want your life to have.
If the definition of being ahead is to work in upper management, or at trendy FAANG making a large amount of money then you are kind-of forced to play the game in order to "get ahead".
However, if your version of getting ahead is to have a loving family, or to spend time on the hobbies you like or traveling or <insert other non-monetary thing here> then you can (and sometimes even have to) spend less effort on the game.
I'm still working on finding my balance, but I've learned that I enjoy life much more when I'm doing something where I can spend less time playing the game, even if that comes with a large decrease in income and "prestige".
What if I told you that desire to "travel" can be equally phony, a result of careful marketing tactics, a carrot on a stick. If only I had more money I'd travel the world and volunteer and become an Instagramer or Youtuber and just blog about the best places to get coconut water on the beach, that would be perfect. Now back to the office.
As Zizek often says, ideology shows itself exactly in the ways that you try to one-up the ideology. When you long to escape the rat race, you have to immediately associate to something that is only attainable via doing the rat race itself and making money (e. g. Travel the world, beaches etc). It has to be firmly in dreamland.
What the system doesn't want you to do: be frugal and marketing-resistant, demand payment relative to the value you provide, be satisfied with living in a normal house with a normal family, not craving products, being mentally self reliant, etc. There is no juice to squeeze out from such a person, but it might exactly be the kind of person your family and community would need.
Not saying this would be your best option necessarily, you can definitely put up with getting squeezed a bit, but be conscious of it.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, but of all the dreams to pin your critique on, I’d recommend not using travel or public service. While there is definitely consumerist travel of the Instagram variety and plenty of misguided philanthropy, there’s a beautiful baby in that bathwater.
There is, for sure. But we certainly have a tendency to dream of taking that great leap and saving all the children in Africa etc. I do see people from richer countries and families actually doing it, and posing with the African kids in Kenya on Facebook pretending it's something other than a vacation. (There are some articles on how this help is often useless or even positively counterproductive, only offset by the participation fee.)
My point is not to shit on philanthropy though it's a bit more nuanced.
So there are some who do go to save the kids a continent away, and who gave up their jobs and then go to travel the world, the interesting thing is not them, but why they are fascinating to the audience. It's all about "if only I could do that, then..." A dream, an outlet. And it has to be far away.
How about this (nothing personal). When did you last talk with your family members' and friends' deep thoughts, fears, desires, worries and things of pride, cherished achievements, aspired goals etc. Not in an interrogation way, but naturally, while doing activities, cooking, fishing, sitting at the campfire. How many of them can you rely on to know yours?
How often have you talked with your neighbors? How is your local community (street, apartment block) doing, what are the problems, is someone in need of help because their kid is sick?
I found this articulated really well in Jordan Peterson's writing (I know, divisive guy). The point isn't to denounce faraway volunteering and a philanthropic traveler lifestyle. Rather that people are setting up dreams at a safe distance that they can then safely regard as unattainable.
It's much more scary to think of helping people in your apartment block, because eww, those people are nasty they are loud, they cook smelly cabbage on Sundays, they are too dumb for your liking. If only you had some angelic far away people who are simply waiting for you as their savior, it would be so much easier.
This kind of "set your house in order first" idea is upsetting, but humans and societies are complex enough that you have to get a feel for how things go wrong and how they go right, if you learn by setting yourself straight first, then attend to your family and close friends, then the community etc. Yes, your neighbor may betray you and always beg you for loans if you appear to philanthropic. True. You'll have the same issue when trying to hand out stuff to Ukrainians or the Syrians. Which group is the "good guys"? Are you being manipulated, etc.?
It's complicated, but we can push it all away to dreamland by saying, one day, I will travel and have a beachfront house in Africa and help all the kids (or one of these). Till then, I hammer away to get that promotion.
Again, travelling can be extremely beneficial if you have the right mindset and prepare. You can see different ways of living, different ways of thinking, mentalities, types of interactions. Or simply different sceneries than the one at home. But as someone who has traveled to some places and swam at beautiful beaches, it isn't all that euphoric in itself. Perhaps this is a "no shit, Sherlock" type of claim, but actually sunbathing on the Copacabana isn't that much better than sunbathing by the lakeside in Hungary (but one is more useful than the other in spiting your colleagues). It's more about the people you're bonding with while doing it. Plus if you actually interact with locals, but many just stay in their hotel resort. And you could indeed already do many facets of it at home, bringing your communities closer, but of course everything incentivizes us away from this. (People constantly move around etc.)
(PS. I'm crap at all of the above and just ranting)
> I'm still working on finding my balance, but I've learned that I enjoy life much more when I'm doing something where I can spend less time playing the game, even if that comes with a large decrease in income and "prestige".
Unfortunately in the US, if you don’t play the game, you have greatly reduced access to healthcare, which is a huge incentive to play the game especially if you have kids.
1) This isn't even true in general. Aside from optional things like cosmetic surgery which you need to pay for out of pocket, the people on the taxpayer-subsidized obamacare bronze-level packages have access to the same doctors, facilities and treatments as people with high incomes and high quality employer-sponsored insurance plans. The only difference is deductibles and copays, which might vary by a few thousand dollars in the event of major surgery.
2) Even if it was true, is a society where freeloaders are rewarded equally to those who contribute a good thing or a just society? Healthcare, like all goods and services, comes from the labor of the working classes. It's perfectly fair and reasonable that the people working to pay for this (whether through insurance premiums, taxes, etc) receive the fruits of their labor, rather than having it siphoned away by non-contributing people.
Regarding #1, I meant that people can't afford it. Bronze plans are designed to only pay 60% of expected healthcare costs, and still cost $1k to $2k per month per family, and have an out of pocket cost of ~$13k+ per year.
Generally, if your employer doesn't offer subsidized health insurance, then it means you're not paid much as it is, so adding premiums that cost $10k to $20k per year plus needing $13k per year saved for OOP costs (double that if you have a problem at the end of the calendar year) is a tall order.
And yes, you get premium subsidies if you make less than a certain amount, but it's no where near a comfortable life. The government makes sure you are right on the edge of being able to afford the basics.
This is not simply "unfortunate", it's done on purpose.
People who are not able or willing to earn money under the existing economic system are denied food, housing, clothing, healthcare, legal representation...
> However, if your version of getting ahead is to have a loving family, or to spend time on the hobbies you like or traveling or <insert other non-monetary thing here> then you can (and sometimes even have to) spend less effort on the game.
Money – and thus at least understanding the game enough – is often a precursor to getting enjoyment out of those things though, to various degrees. Probably less so with family, if the dynmaics are healthy, but definitely more needed for certain hobbies and travel.
In some ways one goes alongside another, it's getting more difficult financially to have a loving family, do hobbies, travelling unless you earn enough money. You have to play the game a lot to be able to have things
There is no "not playing the game". You can opt for different mini-games, but the game is eternal, beyond humans, beyond life even. Reading zen stories definitely helps you see this. Even denouncing the game is part of the game. Don't be afraid of playing it. If you don't enjoy in, you need to play it better on a higher level, by stepping back a bit.
And in lots of cases you don't need to be smart to build a successful business - time and place often matter the most.
Speaking here of my own experience.
So yeah, often idiots can be super rich and its absolutely ok.
Also you can be a genius going something without resources and connections, so there are millions of reasons why you can be way smarter than the rich guy on top while you are not rich at all.
That assumes independent events. But "failing" early (weak social network, poverty, lost a lot on the first big gamble) have a large effect on the size and risk of the next gamble.
And sometimes that game is rack up lots of debt. I’m only in my mid-30s but I’ve already seen multiple occasions of people being swindled by someone they thought was a multimillionaire in lending them $10,000. If you can’t understand where someone’s wealth cane from, there’s a chance it doesn’t exist.
This seems a clear example of the parent comment though. You don't see the value in it and that's fine. Other people enjoy an endless parade of almost free entertainment that they find more interesting than the usual drudgery of life.
Even the Romans knew you only needed to supply bread and games to keep the people pacified. Celebrity culture is just a modernized and less directly violent form of "games". The game modern celebrities are playing is apparently completely invisible to you?
It's the same mindset that goes into dismissing pop music as low effort drivel. It actually takes an incredible amount of skill from a bunch of people at the top of their games to make a pop hit.
People with high incomes from sources with no ethical dilemmas may also think that there are successful idiots. And not only because they do not understand the game the idiot is playing.
Now you are moving the goalposts from singular they are good at the game, to their family as a collective is good at the game. A statement perfectly compatible with that particular family member being an idiot.
Idiot usually means someone who doesn't know basic facts or has trouble anticipating consequences for their actions. But I think part of GPs comment was to note that the concept of idiot needs to be readdressed. For example, if your hypothetical person has a family network (just another tool; but a v. good one!) that helps them, then they choose to either stick with their family or try to strike out on their own. We're already discussing the situation where they have chosen to leverage their family network.
And maybe one could respect people who go their own way to get out of their family's shadow so they can be seen as making it on their own. But if that's not the game then both people are 'idiots' (in this thought experiment).
Success is not guaranteed just because someone was sent to an Ivy League school by his rich parents.
This is the blank slate fallacy where people believe (for political correctness reasons) that any kid had same chance of success if he was given the same opportunity as the success of kids.
In the end it's not about the money. As you said, there are lottery winners who lose everything in a few years, and there are people who build a new fortune after losing everything.
That doesn't mean that being born into a privileged life doesn't have advantages, but it's about way more than just the money. It's also the connections you have. The best example right now is Trump, who is a complete and utter failure as a businessman yet people keep throwing money at him.
The child is probably playing a different game than the ancestor who acquired the wealth in the first place.
The game the (alleged) idiot is playing is "don't lose the family fortune". If you weren't born wealthy but want to be, you are playing the "make more than you spend" game in one of its variations. There is for example an obvious slow way that might give your children a better shot at the "don't lose the family fortune" game and there are also many also many higher variability games like the "lottery" and "startup" games.
Not every game requires the same skills and personality type.
It means that not only do they have a business idea (or stole one), but they have the network and (financial) risk buffer to develop it into a business.
One thing to keep in mind is that the majority of businesses and products fail. Remember survivorship bias. For every successful Netflix there are a dozen failed movie streaming services. Anyone who has had a few weeks worth of software engineering can produce a Twitter clone, but none have been successful.
Mastodon does okay. It's not as big as Twitter, but people who stick with it are happy with what they have. All it did was flip the model: interconnected, community-funded instances instead of one big, expensive to run silo.
That's true, but a lot of people think the school you attend matters. For example, in the context of hiring, if you have 2 otherwise candidates but you can only choose one, most people would choose the person who went to Stanford over the guy who taught himself to code or attended a lesser respected school (in most cases). Some companies are stupid enough to only hire people from fancy schools. I think Google did something like this for a while, but thankfully they stopped.
Thus, attending a fancy school is a big advantage if you've got the money or have another way to get in.
Yep, I've seen more than a few job postings over the years stating some version of "Must hold a degree from a Top 10 school." Who would want to work with a bunch of elitist jerks, anyway?
Well, there is a lot of graduates from those universities to begin with, so it's only logical that there is a certain amount of useless graduates that end up unemployed. The same logic applies to the rest of humanity.
The real question is whether those graduates are more likely to be useless and unemployed than people who did not graduate from the same universities.
He said success, not wealth. Yes, obviously someone inheriting their parents' billion dollar business is wealthy, but I wouldn't consider them successful unless they've done something on their own.
It's often not all that hard to disguise one as the other. I worked for a guy once who was drowning in family wealth and all he had to show for it was a failing business.
After years of losses that almost nobody else would have been able (or willing) to sustain he made it into a moderate success.
Outwardly, at face value, he's doing pretty well, until you count the decade of losses which nobody talks about.
Another friend is a moderately renowned documentary maker. Again, facilitated by family wealth. Outwardly, the appearance is of being successful, which cost a fair chunk of family wealth.
I think in both cases, family wealth drove something akin to an obsession to appear successful, which they largely achieved and nobody mentions the uncomfortable facts about how they got there in polite company.
Microsoft's division that made X-Box {,360,One} was in the red for years as well and lost billions before it made its first profit (I think it's now profitable overall, but I wouldn't be surprised if it actually didn't yet return all the money put in to it through the years).
Almost nobody else would have been able (or willing) to sustain the costs that made it into a success.
With more money can of course learn to fail in greater scale, but IMHO this also has benefits in it's own. Learning to think big is a skill of it's own. Small business plays by different rules than big business, even if they have overlaps.
And I also think how succesfull you really were can only be said after staying on your peak for some time, because some games go really really long.
I like to think of this example [0] when I have the feeling that I got to where I am all by myself, and forget how many and how much others have worked to "build my boat", and how much luck was involved at every step.
I like to give Trump as an example: everyone loves to blast him for being an idiot. Is he a good president? No. Is he good at the game, but most people totally miss what his game is? I claim, yes. It's unfortunate that he managed to play the US election system for his own purposes, but that doesn't mean he's just incompetent at everything. E.g. he's a rather good populist - that may not be a quality you like, but at that particular game he's not at all bad.
Which leads to the following:
How do you measure if someone is a good president? What measurements do you use to claim Trump is not a good president?
Surely it can't be approval ratings since you can't expect public to understand nuances behind the decisions and what the president actually has to be doing? It can't be just GDP because GDP might have been going up anyway? It can't be what the president is saying in public and how many of those facts are wrong since this doesn't mean what actual decisions the president is making.
Aren't there universal measurements for leaders/counties?
For example the Bible has a lot of wisdom like: 'If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.' This was already written some 2000 years ago and has been proven true over time.
So I would argue you could measure the amount of unity a leader tries to create.
> So I would argue you could measure the amount of unity a leader tries to create.
That’s a nice one. Yet do you think then Hitler might be a good leader? (not a joke). He united the white German population in a time of great economic disarray - in both Germany and Europe. Maybe we should measure unity and cooperation with other countries? Global solidarity
Some combination of GINI, average life expectancy, number of bankruptcies, business closures, unemployment, changes in all-cause mortality, median household debt, disposable income, educational attainment, and so on.
If you look at a basket of well-being measures as opposed to raw GDP it's hard to argue that Trump has done a good job.
Of course Covid has had a big effect. But there were many policy options for handling that, and Trump - and his far-right equivalents in other countries - reliably picked some of the least effective ones.
Never met a person on the right who considered GINI index as a good measure.
Regarding bankruptcies, unemployment, household debt Etc, Obama's first term would show really low score on these things, presuming that's all he had, almost none of it was caused by the actions taken by him during his presidency.
It seems to me (as an outside observer), that this normally happens for the two years after a new President is elected.
Normally they don't get 60 in the Senate though, which means that the system is working at intended (you need to stay consistently popular for 6+ years to start swinging the Senate).
He sure as hell isn't, but has some understanding of marketing, and access to people and resources (Bannon, Russian propaganda, Republican playmakers via Pence) that could push him over the edge.
How much of his agenda is really his, anyway? He's a punching bag to distract everyone while the real power players get their way.
I think Trump is a good example of how luck and skill interact. He absolutely has a talent for selling his ideas to a big chunk of people. I don't think he would have actually become president though, if it weren't for a number of things out of his control: if Putin hadn't been trying to stir up discord, if there'd been a compelling Republican alternative, if James Comey hadn't made that last-minute announcement reminding everyone of the emails again.
I would say yes, if you define success in the political game as being elected to a high office. Most of us consider him an idiot, and in many way he certainly is. But he do knows who to get people to vote for him, which is what matters. He didn't fall into the precidency by accident or by being rich or well connected. He did what mattered to become elected (with a bit of help from Putin).
Many smarter people with more money and better connections failed, see e.g. Bloomberg.
You could think of it as, "Trump is good enough at the game to get elected president."
You could also think of it as, "Those with enough money and power to influence who gets elected president are good enough at the game to get Trump elected president."
Scott Adams claimed that Trump uses methods from hypnosis. I have no idea if that's true, but it's the best explanation I've seen for the irrational support he still gets.
No one is making the argument that he's the best president ever, or even a good one. The point is that he became the President of the USA - he played the game very very well.
It becomes more apparent when you see his videos on the subject from the 1980s - he was planning this move for decades.
perhaps the point I missed, is that because he is so visibly un-sellable, yet successfully sold himself, he wins, because Blair and Obama had underlying competencies. Trump is the best salesman, because he is selling.. nothing. And its being bought.
Getting them to pay was never a concern -- he's trying to rile up the base.
Plus he's a construction magnate -- get enough traction to get a preliminary budget and start allocating funds to his buddies. Even if it's just a concrete wall for 1/3 of Texas that's big $$$ for his construction cronies.
Indeed. He's not getting paid (in both actual dollars and in attention) for having walls built. Whether the wall gets built or not is entirely irrelevant as long as he gets votes.
He's like a vacuum salesman who promises to give his customers dishwashers and toasters for free if they buy a vacuum cleaner.
When they buy the vacuum cleaner, it turns out he lied about the other goods but they still ended up with the vacuum cleaner. But what a lot of people really wanted was the dishwasher.
A much more thoughtful treatment of this problem is "The Dictator's Handbook." There are three possible explanations:
1) The CEO knows something I don't.
2) The CEO is dumb.
Those are rarely it. The third one is:
3) The CEO is optimizing for personal wealth / fame / success, and there are political considerations.
Most CEOs can recognize that a business decision can be absolutely the right thing to do for the business and not make that decision if it either would cost them (1) their standing with shareholders (2) their annual bonus (3) their standing with the board (4) their standing with internal constituents.
The key skill CEOs need to be CEOs can be summarized as: "How to become a CEO." That involves a lot more management of politics than it does business success (but still a fair measure of both). Furthermore, if a strategy leads to business success but costs a CEO their job, they cannot take that strategy.
The Dictator's Handbook would say the CEO is optimizing for survival as CEO. The book was subtitled, "the logic of political survival," and is based on a game theory based model called the predictioneers game. It was written precisely as a more useful quantitative tool to describe these things instead of just moralizing about them.
It means this CEO makes decisions that first secure her ability to maintain benefits to the essential people who keep her in that position, second, to prevent influential people from coordinating for leverage themselves to become new essentials she'd be accountable to, and third, maintaining the pipeline funnel of interchangeables to keep those influentials in line. The goal is to reduce the size of the coalition you need to please to maintain the ability to keep making decisions in that role.
The moralistic version of this is the Gervais Principle from Ribbonfarm that gets posted here periodically. In that model, instead of Smith and DeMesquita's leader managing coalitions of essentials, influentials, and interchangeables, you have the Gervais psychopath using idiots to manage losers. It's just a different description of the same mechanisms.
There is a third related model, which describes how, where to do any good in the world at all, you need the power to do it, and obtaining and sustaining that ability long enough to do the good you intend to becomes %95 of the work, with vary little left over for benevolence and altruism. The path to that is straightforward and achievable, as evidenced by how many objectively unremarkable people seem to achieve it. It's just a matter of desiring that over all the substitutes and distractions that keep you comfortably in your place.
I would postulate that 3) is indistinguishable from doing a great job as CEO the vast majority of the time. Only very occasionally are the personal interests of the CEO in conflict with those of the company and its owners.
Most CEOs can recognize that a business decision can be absolutely the right thing to do for the business and not make that decision if it either would cost them (1) their standing with shareholders (2) their annual bonus (3) their standing with the board (4) their standing with internal constituents.
Again, you'll have to provide some compelling evidence or some very good arguments to convince me that the cases where the wishes of the board and/or the shareholders are in conflict with what is best for the business, are anything other than a rarity.
The key skill CEOs need to be CEOs can be summarized as: "How to become a CEO."
That's a very cynical and reductionist view. I prefer to think in terms of peacetime and wartime generals. In peacetime (ie. when the market forces make it difficult to fail for example because you have a monopoly), I think it's probably true that a very important requirement for rising to the top, is political skill. In a wartime, ie. in a highly competitive market, good business people rise to the top.
You fail to mention the 4th possibility (alluded to in the article): Market conditions sometimes change and the CEO is left with no good options. If you had a wildly successful business selling abacuses and someone suddenly introduces a low cost electronic calculator, there's probably not much you can do a CEO to prevent you market from shrinking. Of course you could try to change your business from making abacuses to making calculators in an attempt to hang on to your customers, but there's is also nothing about manufacturing abacuses that translates into creating electronic calculators, so the chances of that succeeding are slim to none.
Your postulate is generally correct on a quarterly time span. It's generally incorrect on a 5-year time-span. Good examples are Carly Fiorina gutting HP in ways which weren't immediately externally visible, or Bezos / Jobs pursuing tactics which took years to show value.
Key differences between the Board / shareholders and the CEO include:
(1) Amount of time available. Boards meet a few times, and it's exceptionally hard to get buy-in for something which doesn't have a concise executive summary. Shareholders have even less time.
(2) Insider information. Shareholders (and, to some extent, Boards) have far less inside information than the CEO.
If you'd like good evidence, the book "The Dictator's Handbook" builds a pretty good case that mirrors my experience operating at both executive and board levels. It's not a complete explanation, but I think it accounts for 50% of the types of dynamics described.
>> The key skill CEOs need to be CEOs can be summarized as: "How to become a CEO."
> That's a very cynical and reductionist view
It may be cynical, but it mirrors my experience. It's definitely not reductionist. "How to become a CEO." is an incredible complex, intertwined set of skills. Some of those skills include effectively leading companies, but others do not.
It blows my mind how people can come here and attempt to write a serious answer claiming the CEO "rarely" knows something his armchair critic doesn't (as a basis for their "bad" decision). Then proceed to peddle cliches and conspiracies.
Also, shareholders aren't stupid, they usually reward CEOs for good business decisions and so does the board. Sometimes it's unclear what is better long-term and short-term results are preferred, but nobody knowingly punishes or fires a CEO for a good decision. That just exists in the imagination of people whose involvement with business decisions consists of reading Dilbert cartoons.
... to the extent you consider one of the most influential and best-researched management books a "cliche and conspiracy."
I'll mention I didn't claim that a CEO rarely knows something a critic doesn't; just that things like the CEO's greater understanding of something like market dynamics are rarely the basis of what is externally perceived to be a "bad" decision by an armchair critic. The basis is usually political dynamics (which most armchair critics have far less insight into than the CEO -- the information gap is greater).
And as a shareholder, I can say I don't think my intelligence matters very much in this story. The amount of time and thought I can put into each company in my portfolio is what matters. That's both especially true because I have index funds, and why I have index funds.
As a footnote, if you'd like a more extreme take on this, Pfeffer's Power is a good read (but quite controversial -- the book basically makes the claim that CEOs are fundamentally psychopaths). Pfeffer is at Stanford.
Dictator's Handbook is considered hardly controversial at all. It's a game-theoretic argument, backed by pretty good data. The author is at New York University.
I'll also mention that simply insulting the poster of an argument ("just exists in the imagination of people whose involvement with business decisions consists of reading Dilbert cartoons") doesn't strengthen your point. You know nothing about my background. It just makes you look like you're either a jerk, or ran out of sound arguments.
> You know nothing about my background. It just makes you look like you're either a jerk, or ran out of sound arguments.
You made 2 appeals to authority - of dubious authenticity - and I have no reason to assume you wouldn't make a 3rd if you thought it'd give you extra points. My background is: ex-CEO.
If you're don't read books, I don't think this is a bridge you'll cross. And I'm sorry you find two respected professors, one at NYU and one at Stanford, to be of dubious authenticity. I'm not quite sure where to go from there in the conversation. There are many individuals who find Pfeffer dubious, but de Mesquita is extremely highly regarded.
I'm not going to share my background on the internet, but ex-CEO doesn't make you qualified to talk about much of anything. It depends on the organization. I've virtually never seen these sorts of dynamics at organizations below 100 people, and they don't become universal until around 1000-10,000 people. You need to reach a certain scale of competition before people start acting in ways which are game-theoretically optimal. If you have 10 people, it's easy to keep alignment on mission, vision, community, and business. If you have e.g. 10,000 people, and 1% are gunning for CEO, the only way to get to the top is to out-gun the other 99. That competition is what leads to these dynamics.
> And I'm sorry you find two respected professors, one at NYU and one at Stanford, to be of dubious authenticity.
Obvious straw man. I have no qualms with those professors, just with your claims about their books, which at least one summary contains no trace of. Should I read those books merely to verify your claims? I'm not so sure.
> I've virtually never seen these sorts of dynamics at organizations below 100 people, and they don't become universal until around 1000-10,000 people
So your initial claims don't apply to CEOs of corporations with less than 1000 people? Moving the goalpost much?
Your username suggests you shouldn't read these books. You should skim notes about these books and write obnoxious posts based on those, claiming the person you're talking to is lying based on no evidence at all.
Indeed, Dictator's Handbook has a nice summary someone posted in this thread. Your link wasn't even a summary, but someone's take-home notes for their own career.
> So your initial claims don't apply to CEOs of corporations with less than 1000 people? Moving the goalpost much?
That's where the goalposts started. They haven't moved an inch. The article was talking about Reed Hastings and Netflix. We were talking about publicly-traded companies with shareholders. "Power" talks about ... power. CEO of a 5-man shop isn't power. It talks about how people climb to the top of corporate ladders at big organizations, and the selection mechanism for who makes CEO. Dictator's Handbook is about big organizations too. It's a game-theoretic treatment.
Obviously some context went over your head. Maybe that goes with digital communications, or maybe that goes with not being interested in longer texts, so much as in skimming summaries.
I've many times tried to people make money but they get pretty defensive with their ideas and dreams and their plans, so I've decided different way, I drop them hints if I care for them enough and move on.
A lot of people just look at cause Vs effect in a wrong w
> I think we should eliminate the corporate income tax . . . and tax income once, when it hits a person.
LOL what? Can't have it both ways, pal.
I've seen this line of thought expressed a few times before, and it strikes me as disingenuous to hold that a corporation is a person... right up until the moment that idea puts slightly less money in your pocket.
I'm surprised at the number of downvotes. I feel like my position is self-evident. In my view, either a corporation is a person under the law, in which case this is indeed taxing income when it hits a person; or a corporation is not a person and should not be able to assume sacrificial liability for those controlling it.
However, I recognize that what may be self-evident to me may not jive with others' perspectives. Would any of the downvoters care to elaborate as to why, in their view, a corporation should be a person for some purposes but not a person for taxation purposes?
I love the way people who consider themselves smart rationalize their lack of success/wealth, including here.
- I don't want to be wealthy anyway
- To be wealthy you have to be ruthless and I prefer to be nice
- smart people are so busy with issues much more important than money
- wealthy people are just lucky idiots
- wealthy people are just idiots who are better at exploiting other idiots
- people who are wealthy spend their lives chasing wealth instead of enjoying it
It's sad that people refuse to acknowledge that assuming responsibility for one's own or even their family's lives means to take care of every aspect of it, including financial issues. If you are "too busy" to take care of your finances to the best of your abilities, you are incompetent and not in control of your life.
If I wanted to be rich I think I'd have to put much more effort into work life. I really don't want to do that.
If it comes down to working and possibly getting rich, or spending time in the pub with mates. I'll choose spending time with mates 100% of the time. I'm also very lazy, I don't think you can get rich being as lazy as I am. Hell, if it comes down to getting up before 9am to make money or sleeping in, I'll choose sleeping in.
I try to work the absolute minimum I have to that allows me my lifestyle which I'm comfortable with. If that means I never get rich, I'm fine with that.
> I try to work the absolute minimum I have to that allows me my lifestyle which I'm comfortable with. If that means I never get rich, I'm fine with that.
But what makes you think this kind of behavior is smart? For example, how do you plan on being able to keep it up when your cognitive abilities are no longer at their peak, or when your current job loses its present value?
Some people work hard early on precisely because they prefer to be able to do what they want without any work for most of their lives.
I am wealthy, but I admit I'm an idiot who just got lucky.
And I believe that the majority of wealth comes from pure luck.
Come one, you get born in USA and you salary for the same job is automatically 10 times higher than if you were born in India.
It's getting downvoted because it's not a good argument. Accusing the people you disagree with of coming to their conclusions through motivated reasonsing neither actually addresses the logical arguments people are making, or gives the people you're disagreeing with any intellectual credit. It also throws up some horrendous strawmen - you have to be rich to take care of your family?
Want to have an open conversation with someone you disagree with? I have a good tip, don't open the conversation by accusing them of being incompetent and not in control of their own lives.
Ok here's the conversation, but the thing is that it's not reeeealy a debate: "Money is good to have".
But everytime you say exactly this, there are swarms of people trying to explain to you why it's not so important. It's just pure rationalisation.
That doesn't mean "you should or shouldn't dedicate your life to money because it will not make you happy", but this specic argument IS the strawman people give usually everytime you talk about money, and THIS is actually how most people actually kill the conversation.
It's not even only money that gets this reaction. Every time somebody shows off or is lauded for having something that would actually take critics some effort to achieve, such reactions are common. Whether it's muscles (body building is ugly, unhealthy, only possible with horrible drugs...), good looks or many children. People will find some disadvantages and let you know.
> you have to be rich to take care of your family?
No, but your family will certainly benefit from you increasing your wealth instead of claiming you're too busy with more important things or doing what you like.
> Want to have an open conversation with someone you disagree with?
Don't worry, I don't merely disagree with these people. I find them foolish and obnoxiously self-aggrandising, hence an open discussion would lead nowhere.
High IQ is correlated with higher income but not higher wealth
Wealth and income is not the same thing, a smart person might for example not invest as much in order to dedicate to his hobby more time, etc. Not everybody pursuits wealth, but everybody needs a good solid monetary base. That's why if you are smart you should have that base covered, and that shows in the studies that present correlation between income and IQ.
Just remember the difference between income and wealth.
“Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.”
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/