It’s also a convenient, easily identifiable excuse to a decent portion of the populace.

Decent portion of juries.

Just a case of Affluenza, right?!

The market is telling them they need to make number go up.

Once all the growth and new ideas were consumed, the only ways to make number go up, is to extract more profits.

This means doing everything within the law, and as safely as they can within the grey area, to ensure they hit those numbers.

They had an existential risk when TikTok showed up, and the design idea behind TikTok was even more addictive and less community oriented than Meta.

Do note: I am not giving Meta a pass. Just ensuring the system of incentives that got us here is interrogated and a better way forward is thought of.

Maybe. I had the ... I'm not going to say "pleasure" or "displeasure", because it wasn't a particularly voluntary experience but it was an enlightening one ... of talking with a couple of newly extremely wealthy people, on a pretty deep/vulnerable level, about their worldview. Anecdotal and not that many data points, so grain of salt. These were two pretty different people in different situations.

The impression I came away with is that their rationalizations for continuing to accumulate/keep wealth were created perfunctorily, downstream of being wealthy. Some of their rationalizations were defensible ("I'll start a charitable foundation" or "I'm economically transforming the communities where my businesses operate"), some not. But I got the strong feeling that the rationalizations (even the ones that these people used on themselves, not for others) were developed in response to the baseline prior that they needed to keep/increase their wealth. The rationalizations weren't reflective of values that were present before the wealth, they were just a necessary buffer against cognitive dissonance given that the real core value in play was that they needed to keep their wealth. If they hadn't rationalized it with "I'm a job creator", it would have been something else, and it wouldn't have mattered. The narrative wasn't the point, they just needed something serving that purpose.

I was also surprised at how little deservedness came up. Very few of their rationalizations had to do with pride/entitlement a la "I am smarter/better than others therefore this wealth should go to me". They were more ... utilitarian reasons that they shouldn't stop accumulating money.

Overall, I didn't find either of these people unusually good or bad--they were ordinary for white-collar educated knowledge workers, with ordinary amounts of grit, greed, values, hypocrisy, and adaptive/maladaptive behaviors, to my eyes. They rationalized their having wealth with the same combination of true/false/self-serving/values-based logic that other people use to rationalize ... I dunno, not voting, or not giving money to beggars: the reasons presented are usually foils for the underlying reasons, you know?

They were connecting people.

They had to make positive results.

They had to bow down to the culture wars and the people in government.

They had to X, or the concequences to them would be bad.

I know that many people in trust and safety, civil society, etc. cut their teeth doing safety at Meta. They had many genuinely upstanding people who tried to do the right things for their users. People who pushed the issues to their leadership.

However, you do not get paid by reducing time on site. You are not valuable, when you are from a cost center that is reducing revenue.

I know that T&S conferences have to discuss how to describe the work as revenue accretive, just so that leadership listens before doing something horrifically bad.

Within firms, the incentives mean engineers grow by figuring out how to remove /automate T&S, rather than fulfil requests from T&S teams.

You get what you build incentives for. Even on HN you see this. There are more converastions on the threat of censorship than on actual research or papers and safety.

He may simply believe if you’re not able to identify and keep your kids off of addictive / harmful substances, then you’re getting what you deserve.

It makes the most sense. Especially given the “dumb fucks” quote.

Some popular ones:

* The whole Atlas Shrugged self-deification bit

* Relatedly, the "Effective" "Altruism" bit, where you first have to gain power at all costs to then properly wield it for good. But even by that standard, you'd think he'd have enough power by now.

Lastly, not really his own mental steelman, but more of an external diagnosis:

* Increased wealth has been shown repeatedly [0] to be correlated with narcissistic symptoms. Maybe it's simply pathology.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23963971/

One of the things I'm most thankful for is growing up before social media and such became ubiquitous, and permanent. Imagine if you had things you said in your teen years, in private, following you for the rest of your life. He was 19 but, especially in modern times, that's still a lifetime away from being a mature adult.

It's one reason I'm happy to see social media disappear and, if not that, then at least age restricted. My kids will say stupid things in those years - we all do. And I don't want that to follow them as they look back on their earlier selves and invariably cringe.

> Isn't that what most people in democracies think though?

They do think that, yes. But they're not shaping anything as they see fit, at best they're shaping as millions of other together see fit. They're giving someone a millionth of a mandate to do something, and then hope that happens.

> The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual

That's quite the difference. It's exactly the only one that matters from what we can see around us every day.

It's the entropy of power. Spread that power over too many people and it becomes noise.

creep

I think the word you're looking for is "sociopath."