[ModernMech]

> Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming.

At some level being "smart" means having the foresight to predict these things. How smart can you really be if you didn't see this coming? Certainly not amongst the "smartest".

Because it's not like no one predicted it. Yes Trump say contradictory things but it's not at all hard to read the man. People like George Conway have been correctly predicting his moves since 2017, because although Trump is inconsistent in his words, he's actually very consistent in his actions.

[crazygringo]

> How smart can you really be if you didn't see this coming?

Pretty smart. We judge intelligence as the ability to predict thousands of different things in lots of different scenarios, and nobody ever gets everything right 100%.

The idea that you would define intelligence solely by your prediction on tariffs isn't a definition most people will share.

[ModernMech]

You're right intelligence is multifaceted.

But when you say things like "Even the smartest businessmen who donated money to him didn't think this was coming", I cannot agree because as I said, plenty of people saw this coming. The smartest businessmen did think it was coming, they were right. They got the signal from the noise. They put the puzzle together.

The ones who didn't think it was coming were not among the smartest. They were fooled by the noise and didn't connect the dots.

[crazygringo]

> plenty of people saw this coming

But as a percentage of smart people, it's miniscule. And people can get things right for the wrong reasons. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, as they say.

> The smartest businessmen did think it was coming

Prove it. Show us the list of smartest businessmen according to some independent metric in 2024, and then show me how many of them shorted the market because the saw tariffs coming at these levels, because that would be the obvious action to make tons of money.

Unless you can do that, you're retroactively defining "smartest" by this one issue, and hindsight is 20/20 as we all know...

Because the market reaction already proves that the smart money hadn't priced this in. You're the one who needs to demonstrate the contrary here.

[disgruntledphd2]

Warren Buffett sold a bunch of his US stocks recently so I guess he counts.

[ModernMech]

> But as a percentage of smart people, it's miniscule.

Yeah, which makes them the smartest. The top is usually small compared to the whole.

> And people can get things right for the wrong reasons. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, as they say.

Except people have a now decade-long track record of calling Trump correctly. I already gave you a name George Conway. You want a list of people who called this before it happened, look into the people he follows and retweets.

> Show us the list of smartest businessmen according to some independent metric in 2024, and then show me how many of them shorted the market because the saw tariffs coming at these levels, because that would be the obvious action to make tons of money.

That evidence would not prove what I said because as you stated, even a broken clock is right twice a day. WSB is making bank on this event as you must know, but I wouldn't put them in the "smartest" category because someone is always on the winning side of these kinds of events and being there doesn't make them smart necessarily.

> Because the market reaction already proves that the smart money hadn't priced this in. You're the one who needs to demonstrate the contrary here.

All it proves is the market is irrational and doesn't understand the nature of Trump.

Because here's what it comes down to: yes, Trump did say a lot of things during the election, and perhaps people heard what they wanted to. But they key realization that anyone has to understand about Trump is that he's not a sane individual. The smartest people understand this and they can accurately predict his moves. Not as smart people refuse to acknowledge this, and they try to ascribe rationality to his motives, which he continually confounds, because.... he's not a rational individual. The smart move would to stop trying to fit a rational peg into an insane hole.

And so you can be the richest business man, with decades of experience, and huge portfolios, but you cannot be the smartest if you continually for a decade, allow this massive blind spot to infect your reasoning w.r.t. Trump.

The exact mistake these investor made was thinking "gee, I made a lot of money his first term, it wasn't that bad. It should be the same this term. He's crazy like a fox, not crazy crazy."

The error is that this line of thinking ignores the giant gaping insurrection that Trump caused, and the massive distorted reality he created to justify it. Trump does not live in a rational world anymore, he lives in a world he made up to soothe his own ego that he lost in 2020. And because these big brain investors with more money than sense had $$$ in their eyes, they forget to recalibrate their expectations from a president checked by rational institutionalists, to a guy who is clearly on a power trip and supported by a compliant Congress and no one to say "no" in the White House.

So at the end of the day, the people who need to prove they're amongst the smartest business people are those who are blindsided, confused, and disoriented while others are clear-eyed, can explain this whole situation from first principles, and are using the current events to validate their model of Donald Trump to better predict him in the future.

[crazygringo]

> That evidence would not prove what I said because as you stated, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

That's my point. The tiny number of people you can identify just got lucky.

> The smartest people understand this and they can accurately predict his moves.

No they can't. You can't predict the behavior of someone who isn't sane, as you put it. Their behavior is random and impulsive, not predictable.

People who predicted tariffs at these levels aren't smarter. Just "lucky". Or maybe not even, since during our exchange, Trump has suddenly and unpredictably rolled back most of the tariffs...

[ModernMech]

> That's my point. The tiny number of people you can identify just got lucky.

Conway is rare because he's been right for the longest. If you're right for a decade it's not luck; you've built a better model of reality.

The people who clued him in where psychologists who recognized Trump was a malignant narcissist in 2015. People like Elizabeth Mika predicted the insurrection 5 years before it happened, but she faced derision in her field for calling Trump's malignancy out. But it turned out her model of his psyche was the most accurate, and continues to be.

Today, many more people have been clued into him, to the point where you can just find randos who can read him accurately. This isn't luck: https://www.threads.net/@discodonkey68/post/DFnRsCaOAHa

> You can't predict the behavior of someone who isn't sane, as you put it.

Yes actually you can, you have a bad model for how insane people behave. And that's why you're bewildered and others are not. Insane behavior is not always random, Trump actually telegraphs and announces his moves. He often says exactly what he's going to do, and then follows through.

He's insane because he lives in an irrational world of his own creation, but the world still has rules. The rules do not follow logic but are more along the lines of "I'm always right". That's not rational, it's not sane, but it's predictable. You just have to learn how to think like him.

> People who predicted tariffs at these levels aren't smarter. Just "lucky". Or maybe not even, since during our exchange, Trump has suddenly and unpredictably rolled back most of the tariffs...

Not unpredictably, he had already done it before with Mexico and Canada.

This shit is so predictable it's been memeified: https://x.com/JoshEakle/status/1909715626232291612

Even the "mission accomplished" response from Magaworld is predicted, as the markets continue to sink today.