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by Schmerika 126 days ago
People can be profoundly stupid in areas like basic/fundamental morality, while also being in the top 0.001% in areas like manipulating media and making money.

Examples: Every billionaire. Every single one - except Chuck Feeney who proved the rule.
1 comments
ifwinterco 126 days ago
I'd argue that's not really stupidity, it's more of a moral and spiritual failing.

IMO those are really two separate axes, you can be very smart and also completely evil or quite dumb but a genuinely good person

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Schmerika 126 days ago
It's not very smart to fail morally and spiritually, over and over, without ever looking into why or trying to correct the issues.

It does take intelligence of a particular kind to examine yourself and what makes you happy, fulfilled. And it takes a certain kind of stupidity to become greedy for more and more and more, neverending.

I don't believe that intelligence is a single axis. You can even have different levels of intelligence on different days for the exact same topic; even on the same day from one hour to the next.

Some people might be great at set theory but terrible at calculus; some people might be great with their hands at sewing but clumsy with glasswork. People are weird and complex.

But what's clear is when people don't even try to be good people. And that requires a particularly dense form of stupidity.

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ifwinterco 126 days ago
True yes, I do get what you're saying
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YetAnotherNick 125 days ago
Umm, I am not sure. If you can type on HN you are probably much richer than most in 3rd world countries and you for sure can give majority of your wealth to them. Almost everyone of any richness thinks they are not rich enough although almost everyone in tech probably is.
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Schmerika 124 days ago
Which part of what I said are you unsure about? I'm pretty confident about it.

> If you can type on HN you are probably much richer than most in 3rd world countries

Centuries of exploitation, ongoing, that we all benefit from. Yes.

> and you for sure can give majority of your wealth to them.

Well, no, not really. Not if I want to own a house, and be able to retire some day. For those living in America it's even tougher; where a medical emergency can bankrupt a lot of people.

But what you're missing is that the difference between being a millionaire (which I'm not even) and a billionaire is ... About a billion dollars.

And rather than help 3rd world countries, or even the hungry people in their own, billionaires generally do shit like what's in the Epstein Files (which Thiel explicitly is) and the Panama Papers to keep things getting even better for themselves at everyone else's expense.

So, you're conflating two very, very different scenarios.

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