opened the link, and then closed it. I forgot how much I can't stand the guy But yeah, a billionaire talking about groceries and homegrown plants, I can imagine his opinion on that would have the...
opened the link, and then closed it. I forgot how much I can't stand the guy
But yeah, a billionaire talking about groceries and homegrown plants, I can imagine his opinion on that would have the same weight as a small kid's opinion on astrophysics
I guess I find any normalization of this guy offensive. He spent billions to get a rapist elected President and proceeded to work toward dismantling the US government. Oh, and he's either a Nazi...
I guess I find any normalization of this guy offensive. He spent billions to get a rapist elected President and proceeded to work toward dismantling the US government. Oh, and he's either a Nazi or thinks Nazi salutes are funny. I don't think we should care what he thinks other than in so far as we have to defend ourselves from him.
No offense to OP; not everyone has to think like I do. It's a pretty harmless topic overall. But I figure someone should say it.
I have followed Elon for a reasonably long time. I do not know how much of his original appearance was performative. He said he wanted to help the world and viewed himself as a superhero. When...
I have followed Elon for a reasonably long time. I do not know how much of his original appearance was performative. He said he wanted to help the world and viewed himself as a superhero. When people rightly said they didn't want his help, and that if he was genuinely interested in bettering humanity he should start in his own backyard and work to improve the lives of people who worked for him. Something inside him seemed to break. He became unstable. His anger and angst began to flail about. As you say, continuing to give him a voice is unhelpful. He has show that he will use his voice to lash out.
I think his politics were always performative. He just wants to be adored, probably has some form of narcisism. He tried with the left, got rejected. He tried the right, they loved him, so he...
I think his politics were always performative. He just wants to be adored, probably has some form of narcisism. He tried with the left, got rejected. He tried the right, they loved him, so he doubled down on that.
I don’t get why people call him “Elon” like he’s their uncle. We don’t call trump “Donald”, jobs “Steve”, hitler “Adolf”… so why is it different for Musk?
I don’t get why people call him “Elon” like he’s their uncle. We don’t call trump “Donald”, jobs “Steve”, hitler “Adolf”… so why is it different for Musk?
His first name is unique, and (particularly for folks who like him I suppose) his last name sounds more distasteful. But I suspect there was some intentional PR work there too. Trump had the...
His first name is unique, and (particularly for folks who like him I suppose) his last name sounds more distasteful. But I suspect there was some intentional PR work there too. Trump had the benefits of the office granting him "respect" and a title and still he went by "The Donald" for a while. But neither Steve nor Adolf are/were that distinctive at the time.
I am torn on replying. I have avoided replying on this chain any more because I would be happy to see it disappear. I wanted to clear my reason for this, but will likely not respond again. I can't...
I am torn on replying. I have avoided replying on this chain any more because I would be happy to see it disappear. I wanted to clear my reason for this, but will likely not respond again. I can't speak for all people, only myself. I call Elon by his first name because to me a last name is a sign of respect. Elon is just a man. A man who is doing terrible things, but a man. He might as well be someone's uncle. One who doesn't get invited to Christmas anymore because he can't stop rambling about all his crazy theories. I tend to refer to everyone by their first name; your list and more.
Said dismantling has also directly lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths by the destruction of USAID, and it will also contribute to the spread of infectious diseases. People would vilify actual...
Said dismantling has also directly lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths by the destruction of USAID, and it will also contribute to the spread of infectious diseases. People would vilify actual world leaders who took actions like that for far less, and I think there are even fewer excuses for a complete non-official who was bizarrely allowed to act in that capacity.
He's also transparently a eugenicist, so he can fuck off for that alone. (Side note: Mickey 17 was worth a watch for the transparent mockery of him alone.)
I mean the smell and taste of homegrown tomatoes is on its own level, but people in countries like Spain and Italy can enjoy similar quality from groceries. I think the point was mostly that...
I mean the smell and taste of homegrown tomatoes is on its own level, but people in countries like Spain and Italy can enjoy similar quality from groceries. I think the point was mostly that homegrown tomatoes are about 20 times more expensive in total.
I’m fascinated by the fact that such a complete and utter moron, continually proving himself to be such, managed to become so rich. Immediately after the idiotic statement about tomatoes, proving...
I’m fascinated by the fact that such a complete and utter moron, continually proving himself to be such, managed to become so rich.
Immediately after the idiotic statement about tomatoes, proving that he’s never eaten a homegrown tomato, he then says that the solution to AI induced unemployment is going to be universal high income, as if that greedy MF would ever share a penny that he didn’t have to.
I've decided that being a sociopath is a cheat code for life, at least in capitalism. You don't need to be very smart to get ahead if you have a little luck and absolutely no morals. Being born...
I've decided that being a sociopath is a cheat code for life, at least in capitalism.
You don't need to be very smart to get ahead if you have a little luck and absolutely no morals.
Which can also be reframed as: our current system explicitly incentivises and rewards sociopaths and people emulating their behaviours. We all know the “reward for hard work” rhetoric is largely...
Which can also be reframed as: our current system explicitly incentivises and rewards sociopaths and people emulating their behaviours.
We all know the “reward for hard work” rhetoric is largely bullshit, but I don’t think enough people take that next step through to “reward for actively harming people” being the observable reality. It’s not a natural law that allows sociopaths to win, it’s the choices we as a collective have made and now refuse to back out of.
Is it not? Incentives are a nasty beast. In any power structure that exists today (politics, business, academia), there’s a tradeoff between ‘playing the game’ and sticking to values....
It’s not a natural law that allows sociopaths to win
Is it not? Incentives are a nasty beast.
In any power structure that exists today (politics, business, academia), there’s a tradeoff between ‘playing the game’ and sticking to values. Intentionally or not, people place themselves along the spectrum of “How much am I willing to sacrifice my morals/values/intrinsic motivators to get extrinsic rewards like money?”. This happens on a tiny scale, like lying on a resume or cheating in school to land a well-paying job, to committing widespread fraud or exploitation as a leader.
Sociopaths, generally, are some of the most willing to do anything for extrinsic rewards. We’d expect those with fewer obstacles to maximizing success to do so.
In a system that has any misalignment between the reward system and the intended behaviors that get rewarded, one can expect that those most willing to ‘play the game’ will get furthest ahead. Some systems are more aligned than others, and some (finance) often have little to no intrinsic motivators. It’s genuinely quite difficult to build systems with good alignment (though they exist! I think of libraries and mutual aid groups). Power corrupts.
Are you certain of that? Any misalignment? There are no dampening effects? Regulation and judication can't be well enough applied to make the unintended advantage of game exploitation neglible?
In a system that has any misalignment between the reward system and the intended behaviors that get rewarded, one can expect that those most willing to ‘play the game’ will get furthest ahead.
Are you certain of that? Any misalignment? There are no dampening effects? Regulation and judication can't be well enough applied to make the unintended advantage of game exploitation neglible?
I want to say that “misalignment means there exists an optimal strategy that isn’t aligned with the underlying goals of the system”. I think what you’re describing (exploitation of mechanics...
I want to say that “misalignment means there exists an optimal strategy that isn’t aligned with the underlying goals of the system”. I think what you’re describing (exploitation of mechanics providing negligible advantage) I would consider an aligned system. I think we’re debating semantics? Please correct me if I’m misunderstanding.
It isbnot my intention to debate semantics. It is my intention to clarify them. I read Gregs "natural law" statement as one saying "no fundamental principle explicitly says that sociopaths will...
It isbnot my intention to debate semantics. It is my intention to clarify them. I read Gregs "natural law" statement as one saying "no fundamental principle explicitly says that sociopaths will always come out on top in a society" and your version of "natural law" being "we can derive that sociopaths will always come out on top in society from our worlds fundamental principles". I think it is valid to say that your version of "natural law" is more or less as strong as if "sociopaths always win society" was explicitly written in the firmament, assuming that we actually can derive that phenomenon from first principles.
To this, your third paragraf becomes important. Your wording makes it sound like systems are prone to exploitation because any amount of misalignment leads to non-neglible sociopath explotation. As perfect alignment is impractical - if not outright impossible (even libraries lose books to theft - this makes socipathic supremacy an inevitability, and thus a de facto "natural law" by derivation. But this understanding I would (and did) question.
You clarification though softens what misalignment is and means. Any misalignment still gives an advantage to the sociopath, but it is not inevitable that a system is misaligned. I can agree to that definition. What follows though is also that it is no longer "a natural law that allows sociopaths to win", not even an implocit one derived from fundamental peinciples. It is "just" a misaligned system. It can be rectified. The socipath can be fought with systemic change.
It is just choices made by the society, and thus we can make new ones. It's probably going to be hard, yeah, but we, humans, do things that are hard all the time. Especially - and only - once we've realised it isn't naturally impossible.
Incentives are hard, and honestly if we got enough people debating the nuances of their alignment the pragmatist in me would probably consider that roughly as good as finding a beautifully elegant...
Incentives are hard, and honestly if we got enough people debating the nuances of their alignment the pragmatist in me would probably consider that roughly as good as finding a beautifully elegant and perfectly aligned system of governance!
Like you say, we do have a few examples of genuinely well aligned systems, but at this point I’d be happy if people would just stop going all Patrick Star when discussing the system we currently have.
I'd say luck is still a bigger factor. I'm sure there's a lot of sociopaths with no morals who would do anything to become a billionarie, and yet they're stuck being low income. You need insane...
if you have a little luck and absolutely no morals.
I'd say luck is still a bigger factor. I'm sure there's a lot of sociopaths with no morals who would do anything to become a billionarie, and yet they're stuck being low income.
You need insane luck to come upon/be born into an opportunity to unethically make billions, and then abandon your morals to take that opportunity
Just like how popularity is not a proxy for quality, money is not a proxy for intelligence. Upward social mobility is far less a thing than people imagine it is, and at a certain point of...
Just like how popularity is not a proxy for quality, money is not a proxy for intelligence. Upward social mobility is far less a thing than people imagine it is, and at a certain point of pre-existing wealth it becomes difficult to not gain more without being profoundly stupid.
People who are more intelligent tend to self-select out from opportunities to become wealthy. e.g. people who want to do scientific research end up doing just that, often being paid far less to work at a university than their skills might get them in industry. Or they understand statistics and don't take to gambling, so they don't want to risk future well being on wild gambles on the stock market. Or their passion really doesn't pay well (writing, music, etc) and they'd rather pursue that than monetary games.
Also, being self-centered enough to grift and harm other people to make personal score go up is a more useful tool to becoming wealthy and not one which interesting and intelligent people tend to value. If anything, they're more likely to trend toward an obsession with things not being fair.
Oh, I know much of that from personal experience. I grew up lower middle class on a farm and was later homeless in order to afford going to university while working full time to pay my own way. My...
Oh, I know much of that from personal experience.
I grew up lower middle class on a farm and was later homeless in order to afford going to university while working full time to pay my own way. My parents were completely against it for religious reason (university will turn you liberal and gay!), making it so that I couldn't get financial aid since they had sufficient 'wealth' due to owning an inherited family farm (non-liquid wealth), and also wouldn't help me by providing the documentation that I needed. I may have been able to work within the system to get help, but I had nobody to mentor me and was barely staying afloat, so I didn't invest the time to look into it. It also didn't help that I was so sheltered that I knew nothing about how the academic system worked.
I know that I'm the rare exception that broke the cycle, I've seen my cousins and others not escape it. I'm now a software developer that has been the lead developer on some major projects for some very major companies (in the top 50 of the Fortune 500 list) and have enough of a network to be turning down more work than I take, having been recruited to every job I've ever had.
My wife and I argue this a lot. She's more of the mindset that I'm proof that hard work can lead to success, whereas I see it as luck -- luck that I made the decision to run away from home and be homeless rather than stay in that environment, luck that I had good enough health to work, luck that my Tourette syndrome is not more severe leading to extreme stigma (it was bad enough that I was severely bullied by students and teachers alike in elementary school), luck that I was naturally an avid reader (even as my parents actively discouraged the habit, saying I should live in the real world), luck that I had a natural aptitude and interest in something that happens to pay well, luck that I had a few good mentors like my fifth grade teacher who recognized my interest in programming and would let me into the classroom an hour early every morning so that I could work on the computer (back when few had home computers, and my parents wouldn't have allowed one anyway) and give me what I now realize were made-up problems with requirements to solve (like a program to administer and grade quizzes and provide him with the reports) to keep me engaged and learning, luck that I was accepted into the university, luck that I wasn't kicked out for my poor performance due to working full time while taking a full course-load (but I was on academic probation more than once), luck that the son of the owners at my high-school McDonald's job needed help with his computer science homework and later recruited me to my first job that set the path for the rest of my career, luck that I decided to take a full time position at one of my consulting clients before they were bought-out and had a substantial equity payout. And, finally, lucky to have a base salary that I feel guilty about at times when I think about how bad income inequality is. I could go on, but I've gone on way too much already. :)
Meanwhile, my wife's son grew up with a professor as his father and is now a professor himself, married to a professor, and they're barely scraping by and I'm helping them out financially since the cost of living is so high in the city where they live and I want them to be able to provide the best for my grandson. He could easily leave the academic world and make an obscene amount of money because professors in his field are heavily recruited by AI and finance companies, offering $1M+ salaries, but he doesn't want to do it and I don't blame him.
So, I, who barely made it through school at a state university make a very comfortable salary doing very fulfilling and meaningful work, and he barely scrapes by after starting graduate level classes at one of the best universities in the USA (~5% acceptance rate) right out of high school since he'd already finished all of the undergraduate classes at the state university during his high school years, graduated with the highest grades in his graduating class, then other top schools for his PhD (~3% acceptance rate) and post-doc work.
I’ve long learned that large swathes of the general public actually doesn’t appreciate when people are smarter than them. Especially if they are right-leaning. I mean, look at the president. Look...
I’ve long learned that large swathes of the general public actually doesn’t appreciate when people are smarter than them. Especially if they are right-leaning. I mean, look at the president. Look at George Bush.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/24/george-w-bush-wasnt-dumb-but-he-was-still-a-bad-president/ https://www.keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/ This is a mild pet peeve of...
This is a mild pet peeve of mine : ) Neither Bush nor Musk are dumb (that’s what I took your implication to be. I might have it backwards) — far from it.
Bush might have been very well educated but educated does not equate to being “smart”. Bush did not have “intelligent” as part of his persona. I’m not sure he ever wanted to come across that way;...
Bush might have been very well educated but educated does not equate to being “smart”. Bush did not have “intelligent” as part of his persona. I’m not sure he ever wanted to come across that way; his likability was built on the image of “a guy you’d like to have a beer with”, and that isn’t something you’d necessarily want to do with a rocket surgeon.
He was well educacted, yes, and that doesn't equate to being smart, yes, but he was also smart. And yes, he intentionally downplayed his intelligence to build a folksy persona, but that doesn't...
He was well educacted, yes, and that doesn't equate to being smart, yes, but he was also smart. And yes, he intentionally downplayed his intelligence to build a folksy persona, but that doesn't mean he didn't have it.
Thank you, and apologies to anyone that has attempted to watch the whole video! This is my first post on Tildes and I thought I pasted a YouTube link to this same point (31:30) in the video....
Thank you, and apologies to anyone that has attempted to watch the whole video!
This is my first post on Tildes and I thought I pasted a YouTube link to this same point (31:30) in the video. Either I mucked it up or the URL was truncated at that time, not sure which happened. In any event, mea culpa. I definitely did not intend for anyone to have to suffer through the entire video!
You posted correctly. I edited the link when it appeared in the comments that the timstamp link wasn't accurate. I have re-edited the link with the timestamp. My bad!
You posted correctly. I edited the link when it appeared in the comments that the timstamp link wasn't accurate. I have re-edited the link with the timestamp. My bad!
I dislike Mr Musk deeply, but I sort of agree with him on tomatoes I guess? Growing tomatoes yourself has abismal cost effectiveness unless you're very good at it : I can buy quality tomatoes for...
I dislike Mr Musk deeply, but I sort of agree with him on tomatoes I guess?
Growing tomatoes yourself has abismal cost effectiveness unless you're very good at it :
I can buy quality tomatoes for about 6-7 euro per kilogramme, if I considered gardenning a chore, the time i need to produce that myself is much higher.
And my homegrown tomatoes are usually worse than good varieties from the market (even I can do better than the regular supermarket tomatoes which only share the color red with actual tomatoes).
Now my grandpa could grow excellent tomatoes like I've never tasted anywhere else, but gardenning was his hobby for many decades.
So cost-effectiveness isn't the point, either gardeners derive joy from the process of gardenning their own tomatoes, or we intend to get good enough over time to make higher quality than what is available at cost effective scale...
Which is what Mr Musk is getting at I'd guess if I wanted to interpret this charitably and steelman his position.
I wonder if it depends on your climate? I feel like I can forget about a tomato plant with a wire basket in my backyard and I’ll get something wildly more flavorful than any I have bought at a...
I wonder if it depends on your climate? I feel like I can forget about a tomato plant with a wire basket in my backyard and I’ll get something wildly more flavorful than any I have bought at a store and a ton of them. Especially cherry tomatoes.
I still eat grocery store tomatoes but the process of them being picked before they’re ripe makes them taste like something completely different. Even if I buy the organic fancy tomatoes it still doesn’t hit the same.
Just a side rant:
When I was younger we would go to farms and pick them ourselves for cheap because they didn’t have to factor in the price of labor. Now you have to do the “u-pick” experience where it’s prohibitively expensive because it’s novel to get something ripe off the vine AND you’re doing the work yourself! And farmers markets used to be cheap too :(
There is some amount of genetic ability to taste, also. My mom gardenened through much of my childhood (and still does) and I would consider her good at it, but I never got the enjoyment others...
There is some amount of genetic ability to taste, also. My mom gardenened through much of my childhood (and still does) and I would consider her good at it, but I never got the enjoyment others seem to out of home grown tomatoes. I once went to the Seed Saver's farm annual Tomato Tasting Festival - presumably they are good at growing tomatoes since they farm for a living - and the tomatoes were fine, I guess.
I believe others when they describe the awesomeness they experience eating homegrown tomatoes. But I am somehow not wired to experience that. I enjoy growing edible plants, but tomatoes aren't worth my time to grow.
Perhaps besides the point a bit, but anyone know on what logic do Youtube comments work? If you went to this interview based on just those comments, you'd think that The Economist is shutting down...
Perhaps besides the point a bit, but anyone know on what logic do Youtube comments work? If you went to this interview based on just those comments, you'd think that The Economist is shutting down in shame because of how thoroughly Musk won this debate. I watched through the whole thing and obviously nothing like that happened, to either direction, and it wasn't even a debate.
How does one practically commentbomb Youtube with bots? That's gotta be what's happening there, right? Google just allows that?
opened the link, and then closed it. I forgot how much I can't stand the guy
But yeah, a billionaire talking about groceries and homegrown plants, I can imagine his opinion on that would have the same weight as a small kid's opinion on astrophysics
I guess I find any normalization of this guy offensive. He spent billions to get a rapist elected President and proceeded to work toward dismantling the US government. Oh, and he's either a Nazi or thinks Nazi salutes are funny. I don't think we should care what he thinks other than in so far as we have to defend ourselves from him.
No offense to OP; not everyone has to think like I do. It's a pretty harmless topic overall. But I figure someone should say it.
I have followed Elon for a reasonably long time. I do not know how much of his original appearance was performative. He said he wanted to help the world and viewed himself as a superhero. When people rightly said they didn't want his help, and that if he was genuinely interested in bettering humanity he should start in his own backyard and work to improve the lives of people who worked for him. Something inside him seemed to break. He became unstable. His anger and angst began to flail about. As you say, continuing to give him a voice is unhelpful. He has show that he will use his voice to lash out.
I think his politics were always performative. He just wants to be adored, probably has some form of narcisism. He tried with the left, got rejected. He tried the right, they loved him, so he doubled down on that.
I don’t get why people call him “Elon” like he’s their uncle. We don’t call trump “Donald”, jobs “Steve”, hitler “Adolf”… so why is it different for Musk?
His first name is unique, and (particularly for folks who like him I suppose) his last name sounds more distasteful. But I suspect there was some intentional PR work there too. Trump had the benefits of the office granting him "respect" and a title and still he went by "The Donald" for a while. But neither Steve nor Adolf are/were that distinctive at the time.
I am torn on replying. I have avoided replying on this chain any more because I would be happy to see it disappear. I wanted to clear my reason for this, but will likely not respond again. I can't speak for all people, only myself. I call Elon by his first name because to me a last name is a sign of respect. Elon is just a man. A man who is doing terrible things, but a man. He might as well be someone's uncle. One who doesn't get invited to Christmas anymore because he can't stop rambling about all his crazy theories. I tend to refer to everyone by their first name; your list and more.
I'm convinced it started as a PR campaign to make him more relatable.
Said dismantling has also directly lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths by the destruction of USAID, and it will also contribute to the spread of infectious diseases. People would vilify actual world leaders who took actions like that for far less, and I think there are even fewer excuses for a complete non-official who was bizarrely allowed to act in that capacity.
He's also transparently a eugenicist, so he can fuck off for that alone. (Side note: Mickey 17 was worth a watch for the transparent mockery of him alone.)
A small kid might actually come up with something interesting to say on the subject. They tend not to be driven as much by ego.
This guy thinks grocery store tomatoes are better than homegrown tomatoes 😂
"What could it cost, $10?" energy
I mean we've known for a while that he has no taste so this just confirms it. :D
😂
I mean the smell and taste of homegrown tomatoes is on its own level, but people in countries like Spain and Italy can enjoy similar quality from groceries. I think the point was mostly that homegrown tomatoes are about 20 times more expensive in total.
I’m fascinated by the fact that such a complete and utter moron, continually proving himself to be such, managed to become so rich.
Immediately after the idiotic statement about tomatoes, proving that he’s never eaten a homegrown tomato, he then says that the solution to AI induced unemployment is going to be universal high income, as if that greedy MF would ever share a penny that he didn’t have to.
I've decided that being a sociopath is a cheat code for life, at least in capitalism.
You don't need to be very smart to get ahead if you have a little luck and absolutely no morals.
Being born into wealth is a multiplier.
Which can also be reframed as: our current system explicitly incentivises and rewards sociopaths and people emulating their behaviours.
We all know the “reward for hard work” rhetoric is largely bullshit, but I don’t think enough people take that next step through to “reward for actively harming people” being the observable reality. It’s not a natural law that allows sociopaths to win, it’s the choices we as a collective have made and now refuse to back out of.
Is it not? Incentives are a nasty beast.
In any power structure that exists today (politics, business, academia), there’s a tradeoff between ‘playing the game’ and sticking to values. Intentionally or not, people place themselves along the spectrum of “How much am I willing to sacrifice my morals/values/intrinsic motivators to get extrinsic rewards like money?”. This happens on a tiny scale, like lying on a resume or cheating in school to land a well-paying job, to committing widespread fraud or exploitation as a leader.
Sociopaths, generally, are some of the most willing to do anything for extrinsic rewards. We’d expect those with fewer obstacles to maximizing success to do so.
In a system that has any misalignment between the reward system and the intended behaviors that get rewarded, one can expect that those most willing to ‘play the game’ will get furthest ahead. Some systems are more aligned than others, and some (finance) often have little to no intrinsic motivators. It’s genuinely quite difficult to build systems with good alignment (though they exist! I think of libraries and mutual aid groups). Power corrupts.
Are you certain of that? Any misalignment? There are no dampening effects? Regulation and judication can't be well enough applied to make the unintended advantage of game exploitation neglible?
I want to say that “misalignment means there exists an optimal strategy that isn’t aligned with the underlying goals of the system”. I think what you’re describing (exploitation of mechanics providing negligible advantage) I would consider an aligned system. I think we’re debating semantics? Please correct me if I’m misunderstanding.
It isbnot my intention to debate semantics. It is my intention to clarify them. I read Gregs "natural law" statement as one saying "no fundamental principle explicitly says that sociopaths will always come out on top in a society" and your version of "natural law" being "we can derive that sociopaths will always come out on top in society from our worlds fundamental principles". I think it is valid to say that your version of "natural law" is more or less as strong as if "sociopaths always win society" was explicitly written in the firmament, assuming that we actually can derive that phenomenon from first principles.
To this, your third paragraf becomes important. Your wording makes it sound like systems are prone to exploitation because any amount of misalignment leads to non-neglible sociopath explotation. As perfect alignment is impractical - if not outright impossible (even libraries lose books to theft - this makes socipathic supremacy an inevitability, and thus a de facto "natural law" by derivation. But this understanding I would (and did) question.
You clarification though softens what misalignment is and means. Any misalignment still gives an advantage to the sociopath, but it is not inevitable that a system is misaligned. I can agree to that definition. What follows though is also that it is no longer "a natural law that allows sociopaths to win", not even an implocit one derived from fundamental peinciples. It is "just" a misaligned system. It can be rectified. The socipath can be fought with systemic change.
It is just choices made by the society, and thus we can make new ones. It's probably going to be hard, yeah, but we, humans, do things that are hard all the time. Especially - and only - once we've realised it isn't naturally impossible.
Incentives are hard, and honestly if we got enough people debating the nuances of their alignment the pragmatist in me would probably consider that roughly as good as finding a beautifully elegant and perfectly aligned system of governance!
Like you say, we do have a few examples of genuinely well aligned systems, but at this point I’d be happy if people would just stop going all Patrick Star when discussing the system we currently have.
Sociopaths have an advantage in all rulesets. Its just the prisoner's dilemma.
There's a reason Stalin lead the Soviet Union.
I'd say luck is still a bigger factor. I'm sure there's a lot of sociopaths with no morals who would do anything to become a billionarie, and yet they're stuck being low income.
You need insane luck to come upon/be born into an opportunity to unethically make billions, and then abandon your morals to take that opportunity
Just like how popularity is not a proxy for quality, money is not a proxy for intelligence. Upward social mobility is far less a thing than people imagine it is, and at a certain point of pre-existing wealth it becomes difficult to not gain more without being profoundly stupid.
People who are more intelligent tend to self-select out from opportunities to become wealthy. e.g. people who want to do scientific research end up doing just that, often being paid far less to work at a university than their skills might get them in industry. Or they understand statistics and don't take to gambling, so they don't want to risk future well being on wild gambles on the stock market. Or their passion really doesn't pay well (writing, music, etc) and they'd rather pursue that than monetary games.
Also, being self-centered enough to grift and harm other people to make personal score go up is a more useful tool to becoming wealthy and not one which interesting and intelligent people tend to value. If anything, they're more likely to trend toward an obsession with things not being fair.
Oh, I know much of that from personal experience.
I grew up lower middle class on a farm and was later homeless in order to afford going to university while working full time to pay my own way. My parents were completely against it for religious reason (university will turn you liberal and gay!), making it so that I couldn't get financial aid since they had sufficient 'wealth' due to owning an inherited family farm (non-liquid wealth), and also wouldn't help me by providing the documentation that I needed. I may have been able to work within the system to get help, but I had nobody to mentor me and was barely staying afloat, so I didn't invest the time to look into it. It also didn't help that I was so sheltered that I knew nothing about how the academic system worked.
I know that I'm the rare exception that broke the cycle, I've seen my cousins and others not escape it. I'm now a software developer that has been the lead developer on some major projects for some very major companies (in the top 50 of the Fortune 500 list) and have enough of a network to be turning down more work than I take, having been recruited to every job I've ever had.
My wife and I argue this a lot. She's more of the mindset that I'm proof that hard work can lead to success, whereas I see it as luck -- luck that I made the decision to run away from home and be homeless rather than stay in that environment, luck that I had good enough health to work, luck that my Tourette syndrome is not more severe leading to extreme stigma (it was bad enough that I was severely bullied by students and teachers alike in elementary school), luck that I was naturally an avid reader (even as my parents actively discouraged the habit, saying I should live in the real world), luck that I had a natural aptitude and interest in something that happens to pay well, luck that I had a few good mentors like my fifth grade teacher who recognized my interest in programming and would let me into the classroom an hour early every morning so that I could work on the computer (back when few had home computers, and my parents wouldn't have allowed one anyway) and give me what I now realize were made-up problems with requirements to solve (like a program to administer and grade quizzes and provide him with the reports) to keep me engaged and learning, luck that I was accepted into the university, luck that I wasn't kicked out for my poor performance due to working full time while taking a full course-load (but I was on academic probation more than once), luck that the son of the owners at my high-school McDonald's job needed help with his computer science homework and later recruited me to my first job that set the path for the rest of my career, luck that I decided to take a full time position at one of my consulting clients before they were bought-out and had a substantial equity payout. And, finally, lucky to have a base salary that I feel guilty about at times when I think about how bad income inequality is. I could go on, but I've gone on way too much already. :)
Meanwhile, my wife's son grew up with a professor as his father and is now a professor himself, married to a professor, and they're barely scraping by and I'm helping them out financially since the cost of living is so high in the city where they live and I want them to be able to provide the best for my grandson. He could easily leave the academic world and make an obscene amount of money because professors in his field are heavily recruited by AI and finance companies, offering $1M+ salaries, but he doesn't want to do it and I don't blame him.
So, I, who barely made it through school at a state university make a very comfortable salary doing very fulfilling and meaningful work, and he barely scrapes by after starting graduate level classes at one of the best universities in the USA (~5% acceptance rate) right out of high school since he'd already finished all of the undergraduate classes at the state university during his high school years, graduated with the highest grades in his graduating class, then other top schools for his PhD (~3% acceptance rate) and post-doc work.
"Become" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here because he became rich when he entered the world, courtesy of his papa's emerald mines of course.
Well, true, but he wasn't born with his current level of wealth.
Easiest way to make money is to already have a lot of it.
With a small loan of a million dollars you can do it too!
I’ve long learned that large swathes of the general public actually doesn’t appreciate when people are smarter than them. Especially if they are right-leaning. I mean, look at the president. Look at George Bush.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/24/george-w-bush-wasnt-dumb-but-he-was-still-a-bad-president/
https://www.keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/
This is a mild pet peeve of mine : ) Neither Bush nor Musk are dumb (that’s what I took your implication to be. I might have it backwards) — far from it.
Bush might have been very well educated but educated does not equate to being “smart”. Bush did not have “intelligent” as part of his persona. I’m not sure he ever wanted to come across that way; his likability was built on the image of “a guy you’d like to have a beer with”, and that isn’t something you’d necessarily want to do with a rocket surgeon.
He was well educacted, yes, and that doesn't equate to being smart, yes, but he was also smart. And yes, he intentionally downplayed his intelligence to build a folksy persona, but that doesn't mean he didn't have it.
Apparently youtube doesn't support clips now but if it did I would have clipped 30s from 31:30 - 32:00
You can copy a link to the video starting at a certain time, but you cannot specify the end time:
https://youtu.be/XuoqKYxDHVc?t=31m30s
Thank you, and apologies to anyone that has attempted to watch the whole video!
This is my first post on Tildes and I thought I pasted a YouTube link to this same point (31:30) in the video. Either I mucked it up or the URL was truncated at that time, not sure which happened. In any event, mea culpa. I definitely did not intend for anyone to have to suffer through the entire video!
Thanks again!
You posted correctly. I edited the link when it appeared in the comments that the timstamp link wasn't accurate. I have re-edited the link with the timestamp. My bad!
😂 no worries! Thank you 🙏🏼
Thanks! I definitely could not listen to a long form anything with him.
Elon Musk sucks at gardening. That's my takeaway from this.
I dislike Mr Musk deeply, but I sort of agree with him on tomatoes I guess?
Growing tomatoes yourself has abismal cost effectiveness unless you're very good at it :
I can buy quality tomatoes for about 6-7 euro per kilogramme, if I considered gardenning a chore, the time i need to produce that myself is much higher.
And my homegrown tomatoes are usually worse than good varieties from the market (even I can do better than the regular supermarket tomatoes which only share the color red with actual tomatoes).
Now my grandpa could grow excellent tomatoes like I've never tasted anywhere else, but gardenning was his hobby for many decades.
So cost-effectiveness isn't the point, either gardeners derive joy from the process of gardenning their own tomatoes, or we intend to get good enough over time to make higher quality than what is available at cost effective scale...
Which is what Mr Musk is getting at I'd guess if I wanted to interpret this charitably and steelman his position.
I wonder if it depends on your climate? I feel like I can forget about a tomato plant with a wire basket in my backyard and I’ll get something wildly more flavorful than any I have bought at a store and a ton of them. Especially cherry tomatoes.
I still eat grocery store tomatoes but the process of them being picked before they’re ripe makes them taste like something completely different. Even if I buy the organic fancy tomatoes it still doesn’t hit the same.
Just a side rant:
When I was younger we would go to farms and pick them ourselves for cheap because they didn’t have to factor in the price of labor. Now you have to do the “u-pick” experience where it’s prohibitively expensive because it’s novel to get something ripe off the vine AND you’re doing the work yourself! And farmers markets used to be cheap too :(
There is some amount of genetic ability to taste, also. My mom gardenened through much of my childhood (and still does) and I would consider her good at it, but I never got the enjoyment others seem to out of home grown tomatoes. I once went to the Seed Saver's farm annual Tomato Tasting Festival - presumably they are good at growing tomatoes since they farm for a living - and the tomatoes were fine, I guess.
I believe others when they describe the awesomeness they experience eating homegrown tomatoes. But I am somehow not wired to experience that. I enjoy growing edible plants, but tomatoes aren't worth my time to grow.
Is there a clip just about tomatoes?
ETA this link should take folks to the comment
Perhaps besides the point a bit, but anyone know on what logic do Youtube comments work? If you went to this interview based on just those comments, you'd think that The Economist is shutting down in shame because of how thoroughly Musk won this debate. I watched through the whole thing and obviously nothing like that happened, to either direction, and it wasn't even a debate.
How does one practically commentbomb Youtube with bots? That's gotta be what's happening there, right? Google just allows that?