| ▲ | devindotcom 10 hours ago |
| >one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces I've got some bad news for you. |
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| ▲ | pcstl 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I really don't find it coherent to call someone who you keep consistently losing to stupid. |
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| ▲ | Pxtl 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's literally the meaning of the statement "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". Irrational means stupid. Stupid can win for a very long time, and in the end the "loss" is born mostly by bag-holders. | | |
| ▲ | pcstl 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | This isn't about people who just happened to make it big in a market rally, though. You're talking as if I'm speaking about people who just happened to buy some Bitcoin in 2012 rather than leaders of some of the most successful corporations on Earth. They're not infallible, but modelling them as complete idiots that just happened to get lucky is also... Not really consistent with reality, as far as I can tell. These people might not be good people, but they're good at playing a certain kind of game. |
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| ▲ | conception 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Stupidity has always been terrifyingly powerful. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not really. Things can look stupid when we don't understand them, but there has to be some intelligence somewhere at some point even if the arrival of wealth then suffocates it with sycophants. If Musk or Trump or GWB were all *merely* the idiots they're often mocked as being, chances are we'd never have even heard of them. They almost certainly weren't even "merely average". Now, stupidity that arrives after the bank balance reads a billion dollars, that's terrifyingly powerful. | | |
| ▲ | marcosdumay 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | All those people were born rich, with no chance of losing their money. Instead, the smarter rich people stay out of the press. And the only reason we hear about them is because they were always very stupid. | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 1. Trump was born wealthy. There was no "arrival of wealth" that smothered the intelligence you suppose he might have used to earn the wealth, because he didn't earn it. 2. You don't understand. Trump is successful because of his stupidity, selfishness, and vile behaviour. Not despite it. In 2016, the Republican primary field had 20 or so candidates on a wide range of reasonableness. Trump crushed them all, because he most represents the average Republican voter. If he were more intelligent, or if he cared more about anyone other than himself, they would not have voted for him. His arrogance, lack of intelligence and morals is quite literally his strength because it's what makes him so relateable to the American masses. | | |
| ▲ | edgyquant 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | There are two possibilities. One is that half the country are total idiots and the people leading them, and leading the country, are also total idiots who only got into power because half the country are, again, complete idiots below average intelligence. The other is that you are in a bubble and have been convinced that the leadership of the world’s premier superpower are below average intelligence, along with 70-80 million voters. The former is not something an intelligent person would believe, you have thrown out serious analysis for political theatre and memes and should rethink how you view the world. Now stop to consider that maybe actually half the country has a totally different worldview, and that their leadership, having reshaped global politics, is actually full of intelligent people who are cold and calculating. I know it’s harder to stomach, but just consider it for a moment. | | |
| ▲ | duk3luk3 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is simply a false dichotomy. Being propagandized into extremism does not require anyone to be a total idiot. Everyone is susceptible to propaganda and populism. | |
| ▲ | Danox 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Someone like Trump isn’t the first rise to the top of the country and be a con man or be as mad as a hatter in the end… He will not be remembered for his brain power. I think he will be remembered for the decline and the loss of influence by America across the world that will be his legacy. |
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| ▲ | colordrops 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because it's not a single data point, intelligence is a wide surface area where you can be smart in some areas and stupid in others. Furthermore whether you are being intelligent is relative to ideals and goals, and not everyone has the same ones. | | |
| ▲ | pcstl 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Capability to achieve goals" seems to be fairly independent of goals. | | |
| ▲ | colordrops 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Capability to achieve goals" is not synonymous with intelligence. | | |
| ▲ | pcstl 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I find it difficult to imagine an intelligent person who finds it hard to get what they want. The trope of the oblivious genius who is incredibly competent in a single field of inquiry but completely unable to handle day-to-day life is more a creation of media than how reality works. | | |
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| ▲ | throawayonthe 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | you're likely working under an assumption of meritocracy/overvaluing of kinds of intelligence |
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| ▲ | 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | pocksuppet 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| At first I thought you were referring to Umberto Eco's laws of fascism: "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as at the same time too strong and too weak." but it's subtly different, because incompetence is not weakness. |
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| ▲ | Calazon 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I read it as suggesting that AI models are simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces. | | | |
| ▲ | pcstl 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It is weakness in the long-term. It's pretty clear in how people talk about billionaires: They must somehow conclude that the people most successful within a system that rewards certain things are not competent because the things the system rewards are not what they think the system should reward (it is fine to believe the system rewards the wrong things, but people walk straight into denying that those people have skill even within the system, or they claim that skill within the bounds of the system does not reflect any "real" skill - totally ignoring that elites tend to stay elites even through, say, Communist uprisings). Hence how someone can say that Musk is "dumb" with a straight face. | | |
| ▲ | konmok 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I wouldn't really call cruelty or dishonesty a "skill". | | |
| ▲ | pcstl 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's a choice, but the universe has no reason to respect it. |
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| ▲ | mapontosevenths 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > the system rewards are not what they think the system should reward It's the grown-up version of nerdy kids hating "the jocks" in high school. We're all just a bunch of dumb kids. Maybe obsolete children, but still children when it counts. That said, Elon Musk celebrated cutting funding that fed starving children and supported cancer research by waving around a chainsaw on stage. The richest man on earth did this because he wanted lower taxes... for himself. When Anubis weighs his soul against the feather it's likely to completely destroy the scale. | | |
| ▲ | pcstl 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not saying any of the people in charge are good people at all. I'm just saying that they are skilled at achieving their own goals, regardless of the morality or lack thereof of those goals. | | |
| ▲ | pocksuppet 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't even think that. I think half of them accidentally stumbled into success. Elon was kicked out of PayPal with a nice golden parachute so he wouldn't sue. | | |
| ▲ | pcstl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Regression to the mean is pretty nasty. Stumbling into success can make you a car dealership owner or something like that, but being consistently successful in business requires just about as much skill as being consistently successful in, say, chess. | |
| ▲ | Danox 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And he had to sue to be put on the list of founders at Tesla, and by the way, he isn’t really the founder of Tesla. He is, however, a rich investor. |
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| ▲ | mapontosevenths 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | To be clear, I'm just saying that I don't hate him because he's more skilled than I am. Not anymore than I hate olpymic athletes for being better at ice skating. He's certainly more skilled at Making Money. I hate him because he is a cartoon villian, who when given enough wealth to feed the world chose to punch down instead of lifting up. |
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| ▲ | devindotcom 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | heh, no. Eco is referring to how the white house casts groups like academics, immigrants, socialists, and trans people. |
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