[chrisco255]

Or the way that modern progressives tend to skew everything towards race and class when a conversation is not even remotely about that, it seems like a natural thing for them.

It might be natural for the NY Yankees to win a world series. Some people complain about it when it happens. Some people don't like the Yankees. But they are pretty good at baseball. When Microsoft lost the mobile market, it was an unfortunate thing for them.

Bill Gates doing his postmortem relent on losing that market is not a big deal. It's just what you do when you take a loss.

You ever lost at anything you've strived for? It's hard not to think about "what if"? That's very human.

[wpietri]

I picked those examples because they're very prominent uses of the naturalistic fallacy. The reason that obvious examples in America are about things like race and class is that America was founded by a bunch of rich white dudes who wrote their systemic advantages into law, enforced them violently, and then tried to pretend it was just the natural order. If you don't like that, take it up with them. Were we in England, I could have used similar examples from the aristocracy and royalty, who thought their dominance was just as natural, but everybody else (we colonists included) thought were inbred, chinless goofs.

I agree it's "natural" (by which I mean common) for people with systemic advantages to pretend that it is "natural" (by which they mean expected and correct) that they continue to receive those advantages whatever their actual merit. It's natural, but also revealing of the individual in question. Because not everybody does that. Just sticking with tech titans, we have Steve Jobs" and "stay hungry, stay foolish". And Andy Grove's, "only the paranoid survive".

I also think "not a big deal" is thoroughly wrong. Had Microsoft not gotten fat and arrogant on monopoly rents, they might have done a good enough job making OSes that they wouldn't now be struggling to stay relevant.

[tsunamifury]

I think those who are defending Gates here naively believe they are of the same natural position, instead of realizing they are so far down they are more realistically his prey.