Careless People

I do.

108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently.

Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent.

So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many billions? If you're posting on HN you've probably got "success" in that extreme even if you've never applied yourself or excelled in anything of any note.

What they want to believe is that their wealth is in proportion to their hard work and talent. But even ignoring luck, in a "tournament market", rewards are a strongly nonlinear function of inputs. Being no 2 in a market which is a natural monopoly has limited rewards.

You can believe it's positive, but not buy the idea that someone is millions of times more hard working or talented than ordinary people.

The guy who has made billions needs the stronger form of this karma-like idea.

I don't personally know any people who believe that hard work and talent have zero positive correlation with success. However I know many people who believe that parents' socioeconomic status, genetics, luck, birthplace, and lack of scruples are all much more significant factors.

I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.

My take: "winning the lottery" in a Facebook sense requires a floor of talent and work at the early stages, but the odds of winning don't correlate with how much talent and work exists, nor are continued talent and work required once a critical mass of success has occurred. External factors - being in the right place at the right time, having some cushion of familial wealth, etc - dominate once you're over the floor.

Neither talent nor hard work have anything to do with helping humanity.

The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily.

The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself.

It’s just plainly evident in every sector of our economy. You don’t have to pay for the bad shit you do. Look at tobacco. Tobacco is a zero-value or negative-value industry. The sheer existence of tobacco actively makes the world a worse place.

But guess what? They don’t pay for your COPD medicine. They don’t pay for your congestive heart failure. But they will happily take your money for a carton.

All bad costs are externalizer, and all profit is kept. The end result is obvious. The more good you do, the stupider you are. The more evil you do, the more money you make.

>Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success?

On average or for a particular person? Maybe on average there’s an effect (r=.4), so there will be many people for whom that correlation is in their individual case actually negative. Some struggle with this notion, and assume success must signal talent or hard work in individual cases. How one defines success matters a lot too. If one is comparing zuck to some random CEO, say collison, can you say zuck is more hardworking or talented? He is more successful on paper, but I doubt he is significantly more hardworking or talented.

Do you actually believe that Mark Zuckerberg worked harder and is more talented than (rounded to the nearest person) every other person on the planet?

Huh. I remember being miles ahead of my peers in computer science in high school. When getting to college and finding people most definitely better than I was, I was incredibly excited to finally find such people, not scared away.

A less unflattering interpretation might be that once they saw the level of skill required to contribute to a field, they switched to a field that they could more meaningfully contribute to.

> Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.

Coincidentally, I had a very similar experience, and made a similar decision to switch to software engineering. However, the irony is that I am also just a bad, if not worse, at software engineering. Oh well, not a day goes by that I regret my decision.

I’m pretty sure Gates went to Harvard, not Princeton.

"Oh well, I'm not going to be Andres Segovia, so I guess I will never pick up a guitar."

I think that attitude comes from people who are deeply unhappy. They need therapy.

And to understand that there are people who are much better, to internalize it and change the major also requires some intelligence. I wish I had that insight instead of banging my head against the walls, barely passing while others sailed through and continued to Phd with half my effort.

There’s a very very similar story about Jeff bezos and physics.

https://youtu.be/eFnV6EM-wzY?si=Nc_EqhXEFJVuQWS6

I’m not making this up. Seems like a shared personality trait among these people.

> Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.

There are far, far fewer of these people than you think. Lance Armstrong was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Barry Bonds was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Tom Brady was the best, and he cheated to win anyway.

>Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.

Apply the phrase to the staff member he lost to, and the situation makes sense. The staff member wants to win the real game (of remaining a high-salary Facebook employee), and will throw an otherwise inconsequential game of Catan to maintain that position's security.

The do anything to win mentality often includes bending the rules where they can. Someone listed some top people in their various sports below but I'd include Lebron too. Dude is the best basketball player the world has ever seen at least when considering longevity but he still flops often to get what he wants even though he doesn't need to to win. He's just going to get every edge.

Some people view rigging the game as a part of a larger game.

In my personal experience the will to win and the willingness to cheat in general correlates.

There is no real game in the fog of business development. You invent your own and see if it works.

"If you're not cheating, you're not trying."

The game of capitalism is to win by any means necessary. Rigging the game and evading the law is part of game itself. All winners play the game this way.

Money is a potent and addictive hallucinogenic neurotoxin. We have a culture where everything is run by addicts, with predictably disastrous consequences.

The two sour losers I know just refuse to play any game at all. Cooperative games or team games they think are kinda fine though of they are "forced to". They just can't handle being targeted as individuals.

Maybe Zuckerberg has a lack of self reflection?

Arguably, to be great at modern sports, you have to be good at multiple unrelated thing (On field strategy, Physical Conditioning, Actually the sport itself, playing politics, doing all of that while listening to coach), either you have that kind of drive to be the best at all of them or you'll just be a good athlete

the principle engineer may have a lot of money but also still has a job with a boss and thus probably still hears (or know they can potentially hear) "no".

Multi-millionaires (not billionaires), but they are business owners and finance folks.

They own a mansion and a yacht (Bugs Bunny reference).

But you are correct. Different orbit from the ultra-wealthy. They still hang out with plebes like me.

However, if this happens to these folks, then you can bet that it also happens to the next valence level.

There's a frame question in this, and the history of duelling. Is your image, or self-image, in matters of honor or social status more important than your life? Is it secure or insecure to risk your life simply because of an insult? To what extent does "security" in this context boil down to the capacity for violence, rather than anything else?

It's hard to speak broadly about this I think but since we already are. Military aristocrats like knights were at the least risk among combatants in an armed conflict, being better armed, armored, and more likely to be mounted compared to the levied militias or even professional soldiers, later in the early modern era.

And social norms at the time were to take them hostage and ransom them back to their family or allied higher lord if possible, so their chances of surviving a lost battle were much higher than that of the men they were leading. So even in this context they are already figuring out "ways to address the downsides."

Vs the like, the normal people who would also be called on to die in battle, but then the rest of the time would be living under the capricious and frequently violent rule of these certainly-no-more-than-average-emotionally-secure men with more or less unchecked power over their daily lives.

What we have now developed from what they had then and a lot of the dynamics are quite similar. The violence is more abstract but that's exactly what the current crop of tech billionaires is trying to change.

Competing incentives.

Lawyers get paid to “do something”. To wealthy people, a lawyer saying “let’s actually not do anything” seems like a “what am I paying you for then” moment.

After reading the article, it seems plausible that they were advised against this and, well... didn’t care.

(Perhaps it’s more accurate to say they did not think it would manifest but that’s not a fun play on words.)

From the lawyer's point of view I guess you're making a risk judgement, presumably they thought the chance of getting a successful court order outweighed the potential increase in press of they happened to fail.

The book has great stories. You could skip the job pitch part and jump straight to once she joins Facebook, that's fine too.

Not necessarily..

During the Great Depression the Americans did pull together and demanded from President Roosevelt a social reform. That was called the New Deal Coalition.

This time though the fight will be much harder because even the democrats are so strongly indoctrinated in the "free market" idolatry that they are much closer to the republicans than any true social democratic movement (such as labor unions) that would actually be needed in order to help the American working (and soon ex-middle) class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal_coalition

These crises are occurring right now so I don’t think it will take multiple generations. The rise of neo-fascism, the climate crisis, and the escalating warmongering toward China - a nuclear power - should be seen as symptoms of a system breaking down because it prioritizes profit over people. Intensification of capitalism’s worst tendencies is the capitalist’s last stand. It’s either going to end in mass destruction or people throwing off their chains.

You might find this recent talk on neo-liberalism, by journalist and activist George Monbiot, interesting:

https://shows.acast.com/rhlstp/episodes/rhlstp-book-club-134...

Weirdly, right at the moment the US economy is tanking because of severe departures from market fundamentalism. By the people who most claim to be pro capitalism.