[visarga]

> In their minds, financial success is the ultimate yardstick.

In a loopy recursive way, it is. Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway is the working principle behind biology, economy and technology. I am not saying rich people are always right, just that cost is not so irrelevant to everything else. I personally think cost satisfaction explains multiple levels, from biology up.

Related to introspection - it certainly has a cost for doing it, and a cost for not doing it. Going happy go lucky is not necessarily optimal, experience was expensive to gain, not using it at all is a big loss. Being paralyzed by rumination is also not optimal, we have to act in time, we can't delay and if we do, it comes out differently.

[mayneack]

That may or may not be true in aggregate, but for extreme outliers it's impossible to separate from survivorship bias. Are Musk and Andreeson really the most skilled entrepreneurs in the world or are they just good enough for luck to propel them to stratospheric success?

[brandensilva]

They found luck and success and continue to compound that. However it's easy to make so much money when you have that much already. Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset. The risk they take now is very low.

I feel like they will never suffer the consequences of their actions in any negative way should they get it wrong.

Rarely do we see billionaires not become billionaires because they know how the game is played because they shaped the game so they only ever fail upwards.

[hackyhacky]

> Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset.

Yes, which is why the ranks of the very wealthy are filled with lucky grifters. They got rich by luck, then expanded that wealth with some combination of fanciful statements, lies, and outright fraud.

[AndrewKemendo]

They’re just the most ruthless

If you look at the entire entirety of understood history of biology:

The most ruthless always wins

That is to say if I go into a village and kill all the adults and teenagers and steal all the kids who are scared to be killed by me, then I will win in the probably two successive generations that I’ve been able to successfully brainwashing into thinking I’m some kind of God.

That is until somebody kills me and then takes over the structure. For example there are no dictatorships that last past the third generation

That is literally and unambiguously how all life operates

There are intermediary cooperation periods. But if you look at the aggregate time periods including how galaxies form it’s all straight up brute force consumption

[Zigurd]

That's not how humans came to populate areas that previously were dominated by predators who would be obviously deadly to individual humans. Cooperation and planning are what made physically weak humans dominant. That cooperation and planning developed and flourished without authoritarian structures.

[svachalek]

Tribal chiefs are not authoritarians? Because basically every Stone Age village has one.

[tolciho]

A brief look at certain native American tribes might show quite a lot of talking and consensus building, like if some war chief wants a war he needs to drum up support for that. Hours of talking ensue! Not to say that ancient tribes didn't have the worst of what modern corporations have to offer as far as leadership goes, but a claim "basically every village" is basically wrong, or "bascially" is carrying a heck of a lot of weight.

[AndrewKemendo]

All Native tribes have been thoroughly dominated and decimated into being constrained to reservations by waves of brutal colonists, that were, as I said, the most ruthless.

So again, the most ruthless win

[Zigurd]

Read some Charles Mann. Tribal leaders if they can really be described as leaders had to work with consensus and cooperation. Modern society is much more coercive.

[skdhfkdjfhsjk]

Among the Cherokee councils--which included both men and women--unanimous agreement was required for any group decision.

In their society, and in so many others who have been crushed by the forces of empire over the eons, the leaders of the people did not get there by murdering their way to the top. They were respected persons who were elevated to that position by the people.

Tradition tells us the Cherokee did once have a heriditary priestly class, who were called the Ani-kutani, or Nicotani. The people long suffered under their arrogance until one of them went too far, raping a woman while her husband was away. Her husband then amassed an uprising of the people and they killed out the Nicotani to the last man.

(An existence proof that it can be done, if nothing else.)

[mayneack]

I promise there are thousands to millions of people just as ruthless. Most of them just end up as petty criminals.

[AndrewKemendo]

No doubt

Placement almost perfectly dictates whether high level psychopaths wind up in jail or the boardroom

[skdhfkdjfhsjk]

"A petty thief is put in jail. A great brigand becomes a ruler of a nation."

- Chuang Zhu (late 4th century B.C.)

[rybosworld]

> In a loopy recursive way, it is.

The primary issue with this is that there is a significant amount of luck involved in acquiring large sums of wealth.

It's hard to get firm numbers around this, but it's estimated around 30-40% of the wealthiest people in the world, derive their wealth almost entirely from inheritance. It's actually very difficult to measure this accurately because a lot of studies will report people as "self-made" even if they started with a small $10 million loan from their parents.

Wealth also follows power laws such that it's significantly easier to acquire more of it once you pass certain thresholds.

Take Mark Cuban - made billions selling some crappy radio service to Yahoo!. Has done effectively nothing since then except for re-investing the proceeds from the buyout. He's technically self-made but it's hard to argue he was anything other than lucky.

[horsawlarway]

Sure, but this argument doesn't actually invalidate the parent at all.

To go back to your biology point:

Figures like Andreessen or Musk (or, at least in my opinion most billoniares) can be directly compared to cancer. They are EXCELLENT at extracting value from the environment they're in. If you limit your moral judgement to just that... then you clearly think cancer is wonderful, since it does the same thing!

Cancer is a group of cells that chemically signal the body to provide resources and spread themselves without restraint, avoiding internal systems that would regulate it via things like apoptosis or other signaling. If you judge a cell by how many resources it can accumulate... Cancer is wildly successful.

But the problem is that extraction without introspection, success with insight, moving without care... eventually actors like this destroy the system they operate within.

Ex - Andreessen should perhaps spend some introspection on the fact that ultimately "dollar bills" are literal cloth (or more likely... digital numbers) that he can't eat, won't shelter him, and can't emotionally satisfy him.

They strictly have value because of the system he operates within that allows exchange, and if he acts without care of that system... he might destroy it. Or it might destroy him.

---

So directly to your point: There is clearly a need for more introspection than "zero". And suggesting otherwise is unbelievably conceited. It is cancerous, and should be treated as such.

[Teever]

No. it certainly isn't.

I'm damn near broke right now but it would be obvious to you if you spent ten minutes with me that I'm healthier both mentally and physically than either of those two and I can walk down any street with relative impunity and talk with any stranger I meet without concern that they'd recognize me and have beef with me over some stupid shit I did online. I know that when I interact with people it's because they want to interact with me and not my money.

It's true that the cage they live in is gilded but it's still a cage.

Sometimes I stumble across wikipedia biography pages a person like a mumblerapper who had a meteoric rise in fame and wealth only to die in a puddle of puke from a Xanax overdose at like 25. It's sad and everything but when I read it I just think "Man, what a fucking idiot..." Like sure this dude probably had a great few years conspicuously consuming a bunch of shit and showing off a bunch of money with some floozies hanging off his arm but where is he now? Dead and cold in a hole in the ground. And he died a pretty pathetic death to boot.

I don't know about Andressen but I'm pretty sure I'll outlive Musk. As risk adverse as he is for his physical safety he'll end up doing something downright stupid that ends in his untimely death. With Andressen there's a growing possiblity that enough people wise up to his destructive impact on society and a movement where people who are still physically capable but with inoperable brain cancer or something start taking out people like Andressen.

Slow and steady wins the race.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5jI9I03q8E

[Zigurd]

I have yet to check the prediction markets for this proposition but I would bet on Peter Thiel being the first one to mistake a fancy cup for the Holy Grail.

[asdff]

The curse of fame is really underappreciated. Rich and famous people obviously never talk about it in public as it is going against the narrative that builds their brands, but they feel it. They are so jealous of the quietly rich who no one will recognize. Who can still live the same life as you and I. They really are trapped. They basically have to fall of the face of the earth and age out of their appearance to have a chance of obscurity. And their line of work makes that impossible.

They can't go to grocery stores. They can't go to parks. They can't go to casual events. They can't be spontaneous and they can't be serendipitous. Any relationship they have with people is in the shadow of their image. Most people they interact with are trying to grift them in some was as they are a publicly known high value mark. People value what they can get from them vs their personality. Over time they subconsciously under stand this, start to trust no one, and rely heavily on a circle of people who happen to be in reach who may still be grifting them. It is like they live in some artificial habitat on earth, supported by staff, not actually on earth.

[asdff]

>Cost gates what we can do and become. Paying back your costs to extend your runway

You don't even need an amazing job to do that though

[a123b456c]

Oh come on. So you're rooting for the evil genius in the comic book movie? You would harm millions of people to move up the financial success yardstick?

I don't think many people would agree with such positions.

I do think that people who have succeeded financially might adopt that ethos as an ex post rationalization.

[etchalon]

OK, but ... imagine Andreessen said, "I don't eat food."

No one would think that was a reasonable position.

No one would argue, "Well, food DOES have draw backs. What if you eat too much of it!"

We all inherently understand that you have to eat food, and while being careful not to eat too much.

We would understand that if anyone said, "Look at all these successful people who also didn't eat food!" that they were talking absolute shite.

No one would treat the statement "I don't eat food" as anything other than deeply fucking weird.

[hackyhacky]

I feel like your comment is evidence that you are insufficiently acquainted with various flavors of cult-like behavior and wingnuttery. There are in fact people who sincerely believe that you don't have to eat [1], who believe it so fervently that they risk and sometimes lose their lives for that belief.

Humans are social creatures. We are biologically inclined to follow charismatic leaders, even off a cliff. In most people, the susceptibility to suggestion is much stronger than the strength of their rational beliefs. Just look at American politics, for example.

All of this is to say that if Andreessen said, "I don't eat food," there would be a small but vocal group who would see that as validation of their beliefs; there would be a think-piece in the Atlantic about the history of breatharianism; Hacker News comments about what does "food" mean, really, etc. Yes, people would take it seriously. Just because he's rich and has therefore bought a loud megaphone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inedia

[asdff]

Are you kidding? People would eat that up if he said that. Soylent would sell like crazy. You'd see protein smoothie shops pop up all over the bay area. For better or worse there is a subset of people who just lap up at whatever comes out of these people's mouth.

[push-pull-fork]

If you were to make a list of the most important people in history how different would it be from the list of the richest people in history?

How many different occupations do you think you would find on the important list. Would it have scientists, mathematicians, doctors, engineers, world leaders, activists, religious figures, teachers?

How many occupations do you think would be on the richest list?

Do you think it is fair to judge the success of Martin Luther King Jr or Albert Einstein based on the amount of money they made?