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rich_sasha 13 hours ago

I suppose the kind of character traits that enable becoming super-rich probably also lend themselves to giving such talks.

Most sane people would stop working by the time they become rich, not super rich. To become a billionaire, your brain must be wired differently, and perhaps with unwavering conviction that you are right, righter than anyone else and the world owes you its attention.

busyant 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This quote is partially apt to your idea:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -GB Shaw

I don't fully agree with the quotation from Shaw, but there's some truth to it. And I suspect a common quality of the billionaire class is ruthless unreasonableness -- and considerable luck.

joquarky 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

Progress isn't always a goal.

In fact, I could speculate that humanity might benefit from slowing down progress on most non-medical industries right now.

kelseyfrog 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My pet theory is that billionaire weirdness and AI psychosis have the same root cause: talk too much to sychophants and the human mind starts to go off the rails.

Without a reality check, the natural feedback loop that tells us we're wrong sometimes, the human mind starts to diverge into madness.

kelseyfrog 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Upon reflection, I'd add some amount of spoiled child syndrome or affluenza[1]. Both of those are environments where children and adolescents are removed from consequences due to someone not telling them they're wrong or removing natural painful feedback mechanisms of reality.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza