Part of it is a sort of pascals wager being done, where it becomes rational and logical to play this game as it is for yourself however unsavory, because the incentives for playing it as such are high enough where people will always do it. Altruism towards the collective species fundamentally takes a backseat for individual and kin survival. There are plenty of species where the mother will even eat any offspring who don’t flee them after birth soon enough because the incentives for the mother even out way that small affordance of altruism to kin. Biology is about entropy not emotions at the end of the day.

There's two things going on here:

- things like the FT and the Bloomberg terminal continue to be reliable, because people are paying them to be reliable and are making decisions based on the news; but those are for the "financial middle class" who are still doing something that could be called a "job"

- people like Musk pick news sources which confirm their biases, and are at risk of spiralling off into a Fox News hole of untruths, because they're too rich to be adversely affected by poor decisions or things that turn out not to be true.

>Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them:

Lets assume all people when given the opportunity will do what is in their own best interests first.

The less power you have, the more working with others is in your own best interest.

The more wealth you have, the more power you have and the less you _need_ to work with others to achieve what you want or need, so you have an increased ability to weigh what is best for you vs what is best for everyone.

At some point the wealth/power split is so much that you can effectively stop caring about what everyone else wants and pursue what you want and what benefits you.

So while they may have better information, they aren't incentivized to decisions that are less harmful to everyone.

> Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons. Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures. Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion.

All of those can be leveraged for profit if one is cynical and self-serving enough. Most of 'them' that fall into these categories know to some degree the actions they take are harmful to others, and frankly they don't care. Either in their own self-interest, or deluded interests of whatever group they identify with.

Maybe what's most important to them isn't what's most important to you.

Have you contemplated such possibility?

profit. they have the best information money can buy and they use it to make profit.

Hanlon's razor doesn't take into account the fact that they have a perfect motive.

If drugs flood my community, you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh". If you put the burden on the population when everything in society works against them, it's not productive in any way.

"Elite" has so many meanings, it is near worthless without some tight context.

Most people who are really good at something, and became successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of those people read and developed complex thought, and likely and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not so much.

On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and widely.

I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And how unaware they are that there are people around them that know so much more.

They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are unaware other people have them and expand them.

I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the picture, the concept.

People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But people not having anything to mentally connect it to when they encounter it is scary.

But they are better informed about and better placed to exploit the things that are profitable. The rest is just background noise.