Careless People
pluralistic.net1019 points by Aldipower 3 days ago
1019 points by Aldipower 3 days ago
> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success.
So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success
Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
I do.
108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently.
Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent.
So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many billions? If you're posting on HN you've probably got "success" in that extreme even if you've never applied yourself or excelled in anything of any note.
Pick any of those 8 billion. Have them work half as hard. Have them have half as much talent. Do their outcomes remain the same , get better, or get worse?
You’re arguing that there are other factors that also influence outcomes (and that those other factors are stronger forces).
I agree with that point, but that’s not a refutation to the notion that the coefficients on talent and hard work are positive, nor a convincing argument that success is unrelated to those two factors.
Can anyone benefit from working 10% harder or smarter? Undoubtedly. But success isn’t linear. It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages. The first million might be 95% hard work and talent. The next million, probably a bit less so.
> It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages.
Millions of people had an equal or better starting condition than Mark Zuckerberg so we aren't really lacking privileged people, but vanishingly few of those do become ultra wealthy.
I'm not going to get into the role of luck, but more curious -- how many ultra-rich individuals do you think can exist on the planet earth?
Point is that wealth is a pretty minor part here compared to luck and skill, as otherwise people born wealthy would dominate the startup world. Instead its people born to upper-middle class families that dominates it.