The layoffs I'm not sure they were really mistakes, just business as usual. The issue is they may have permanently shattered the reality distortion around the tech industry that inspired so many to pursue careers within it: the idea that tech is not traditional business.
However is this really an issue? Some VCs and C-suite members actually are cheering this on, because they think tech companies have grown too bloated and laborers unproductive, and think some fear needs to be instilled. IDK TBD, but mature companies are mature and run this way even if they aren't yet public.
With layoffs there is also question was the hiring the mistake. Which I might consider at some level for it to be. At least some part of the hired cohort.
Yeah theoretically this isn't a bad thing for "the machine". They sucked in a tremendous amount of talent with their net, and will theoretically be able to throw back many of the undesirable fish.
And yes, the powers that be have been desperate to make a statement since they lost a tiny amount of power.
"Smart" can mean different things. "Wise", "Clever", "Foolish" and many other adjectives apply.
Mark Zuckerberg has a high IQ, I won't doubt that. I also don't doubt his conviction that VR will change the world. It's possible he's right about that. I suspect he's going to experience anguish if some other company becomes the leader in VR. It might be his hill to die on, but it might not be his destiny to succeed at it. I think he's in a situation like somebody who abandons their lover to chase a doomed infatuation.
Nobody is too smart to be inflicted with blinding hubris. On the flip side, maybe Zuckerberg is playimg a really long game and sees something the rest of us don’t.
Another problem with VR is a question of scale. Zuckerberg seems to be counting on VR being a substitute for social media, Zoom, video games as know it, etc.
The problem might be you can spend all day reading, typing on a computer, scrolling on a phone, on zoom calls, watching TV. It seems you can't do that in VR. VR might be a high intensity activity that you can do a little bit every day that may never take a significant bite out of the status quo, even if VR is successful on its own terms.
I don't doubt it either; he's not dim. But "IQ" means something very specific; roughly, arithmetical ability, spatial reasoning, and lingusitic reasoning. Most importantly, IQ doesn't include judgement. Leading a nation requires judgement, more than cleverness. You can hire people to provide you with cleverness. The reason the "buck stops" with you, is because people have assessed you to have good judgement.
Take Liz Truss, the UK's last Prime Minister (I assume there's been no change while I'm typing). Apparently she's very clever; maybe too clever to take advice. At any rate, her judgement is shit.
My favorite example of this is Donald Rumsfeld. Based on his writings, he was probably one of the smartest people who ever worked in government. But as Defense Secretary before and during the Iraq war he made catastrophically bad decisions which are still impacting our national security today.
Beyond a certain minimal level, IQ is meaningless for making good decisions.
Seems like the failure was imagining that smart people don't make mistakes. Smart people make tons of mistakes and they are confident in their ability to correct and improve. They aren't fragile and afraid to be wrong in public because they know saying 'I don't know' isn't a death sentence.
Regular people generally just sit in one place improving nothing, learning nothing, changing little year over year. Terrified of being "caught out as an imposter" whatever that means.
The difference isn't smart/not smart. It's movement vs stationary.
If you're in America, you've got no such excuses. You're not going to die if your business fails. There are tons of businesses you can start with zero capital.
>> When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can make an occasional mistake and be fine, but you're likely to be much more risk-averse.
> If you're in America, you've got no such excuses. You're not going to die if your business fails. There are tons of businesses you can start with zero capital.
You talk like people don't have dependents or opportunity costs. If everyone living paycheck-to-paycheck followed your advice, I'm sure you'd have a lot of parents explaining to their kids that they're going to have to live out of the car for awhile, because some rando on the internet said they had nothing to lose.
> Most people never try. People who never try have a 100% rate of failure.
What an astoundingly ignorant and out of touch thing to say. It's completely irrational for most people to buy a long shot chance at wealth with a much, much greater chance of winding up worse off and in poverty (or deeper in it).
Also, what you said is an excellent sales pitch for a scam real estate investment system.
>> What an astoundingly ignorant and out of touch thing to say.
> False.
No.
> Both sentences are true.
So? A set of true statements can be misleading and out of touch, for instance, through omission of other important truths. In this case, the omission is that "trying" has a cost and the outcome can be negative. If you're wealthy, those negatives can often be easily shrugged off; if you're not, the expected outcome of "trying" can make the attempt irrational.
> "X people say Y so Y is false" is fallacious.
You misunderstand. It pointing out the flaw in the pitch, because it can so often be used to sell lies.
I've met plenty of small business owners who started with essentially zero money or connections. It doesn't take much to start a landscaping service, just an old pickup truck and a few tools. Those people had nothing to start with so they had nothing to lose, which makes the concept of being risk-averse kind of meaningless.
> Seems like the failure was imagining that smart people don't make mistakes. Smart people make tons of mistakes and they are confident in their ability to correct and improve. They aren't fragile and afraid to be wrong in public because they know saying 'I don't know' isn't a death sentence.
You're creating connections that don't exist between unrelated things. "Smart people" don't all have the personality traits, attitudes, and beleifs that you're attributing to them. I'd say "smart" and the things you describe are actually completely orthogonal.
they aren't the same, but they sure aren't orthogonal. truly high intelligence and problem solving grit are without a doubt correlated. And at least to me, problem solving grit by its nature requires movement rather than stationary
Repeated success in life is correlated with both those things, but they are not naturally correlated with one another.
There are a lot of very smart people who dropped out of the race. Being smart can mean you don't need to learn grit, and maybe you never do; maybe the first hard thing comes, and you do something easier instead.
There are also plenty of diligent hard workers who never amount to much more than a small business. Hard work isn't worth much on its own.
You're defining "smart" as some grab bag of traits that you deem virtuous. But if we use the common connotation of smart (ie. raw cognitive ability), and decouple it from wisdom, judgement, EQ, charisma, independence, self-awareness, then what you are saying is nonsense.
Dumb people don't feel imposter syndrome more than smart people. Ambition is not limited to the smart. And if anything I would say being high percentile IQ can work against your ability to learn from others because you're used to being the smartest person in the room.
Remember, the universe is big and chaotic, intelligence only enables a limited amount of optimization, and the difference between a "dumb" person and a "smart" person is insignificant next to our evolved social capabilities that allowed us to specialize and create huge civilizations with strong safety and wellbeing guarantees. Every "self-made" millionaire and billionaire on the planet would be nothing without those base traits of the populace.
> Smart people make tons of mistakes and they are confident in their ability to correct and improve. They aren't fragile and afraid to be wrong in public because they know saying 'I don't know' isn't a death sentence.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.
It took the Fed a full year of inflation being over the target to raise rates.
If you look at the code of the climate models responsible for the decision making of trillions of dollars, you'll find old fortran code with many obvious inaccuracies on the order of magnitude of the things it's supposed to measure, and you'll find they all copy code from each other and reach diverging results.
Climate models are very conservative in terms of the coding and approaches, but the old Fortran is used because 100's of eyes have picked over it for problems and it's as accurate as it possibly can be.
Have you actually looked at it before you replied, or are you just assuming it?
Fortran is terrible for the scale of those projects, and it shows.
I can give you concrete examples straight from GitHub. Accuracy isn't relative it's absolute. You're not comparing accuracy to other models, you compare it vs reality.
It is a known fact the results of different climate models diverge. There's ongoing research as to why this is happening, lookup CMIP6. Many models also required flux adjustment to stay stable over many years of simulation (although at least that problem is improving).
It's really hard to test these models on the scale of the effects climate change.
You still didn't answer me whether you've thoroughly reviewed their code before dismissing my comments. Did you?
You can approach it as an insider researcher "on their side" and try to correct it, but the problem is just so big you're not going to get flawless models without time, and they have already shrugged serious problems in the past with "flux adjustment". You'll get endless errata and retractions but you'll never get a narrative shift.
Or you can try to approach it from the outside like countless scientists have done and get called oil companies shill, climate denier and what not. The academic "climate" around it is very "hot".
So eventually you just go and forget it and do something productive with your life instead of literally fighting windmills. (And I did mean literally as a joke about renewable energy).
Even if your masked climate denial claims are true about climate models, the implication is that the confidence intervals are huge. That means while it could be better than expected, it could also be far worse than expected. That should give nobody comfort. The tail risk is too great to even risk finding out what will happen if we keep doing this crazy experiment with our atmosphere.
You know what's worse than climate change being real and doing nothing about it?
Climate change being real but getting the real reason wrong because of hubris, and doing measures that only harm and economy and makes us more fragile ahead of dealing with the crisis, and in the process destroying any public trust in science that will be required for dealing with the crisis.
Almost like doing lockdowns for coronavirus.
Temperature measurements and real world data and trends is not something I can deny. But there's important difference between climate change is from CO2 and greenhouse gas, to any other possible explanation.
Just like there's a difference between "inflation is transitory because of supply chain problems" to the dumpster fire we're having today.
I've had enough of this hubris. How is it that nobody is preparing for the impacts of climate change? How is everyone so confident that somehow whatever measures are done will be enough, and that everyone will actually implement them?
Adaptation is clearly the only viable solution because that's the only thing that's independent of the competence of things you don't control.
Let me push back on the notion that there are alternative explanations besides increased concentration of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases for the current rapid changes in climate. It's one thing to say that we should distrust the complicated models that try to simulate the entire Earth in sufficient detail to predict exactly what the temperature change will be and what the impacts will be in each region. That stuff is genuinely hard to predict and I won't be surprised if the models get lots of things wrong. But the basic mechanism by which higher CO2 concentrations enable to atmosphere to retain heat better is dead simple. Heat is lost from the ground and atmosphere by low frequency photons that radiate away into space. Many of the photons, especially those emitted from the ground and lower parts of the atmosphere will be scattered by gas molecules in the atmosphere, and CO2 is one of the gases that is particularly good at this. Scattering means that the photon's direction changes randomly, which means that there's a good chance that it will be redirected to be heading back down towards the ground, rather than out into space. So an increased number of scattering events improve heat retention. Adding more CO2 to the atmosphere increases the number of of scattering events and thus results in less heat being lost to space, which results in a higher average* temperature for the Earth. We can debate what the exact consequences of all this will be, but saying it isn't a result of humanity burning large quantities of fossil fuels is to me tantamount to an admission that you don't understand physics.
*(Technically, since thermal radiation goes as T^4 times emissivity and some other stuff, what I really mean is a higher value of T^4 averaged across the surface area of the Earth and weighted by emissivity. And even this is an oversimplification, since not only can heat be lost from the ground, but also the atmosphere iteself. But the basic picture of "planet gets warmer" is still correct.)
I really don't like the way the narrative is presented.
First of all, the radiation is thermal radiation. Air with CO2 at close temperature to the surface emitting thermal radiation has no bad effect whatsoever on how fast the energy radiates out.
Two things at the same temperature will always be at equilibrium, and the least thermal radiation you can emit is black body radiation like the surface. So the narrative of looking at it like it's radiation scattering might be true for high up in the atmosphere where the temperature difference from the surface is high - but very misleading and leads to bad intuition in low attitudes. CO2 also tends to stay in lower attitudes.
There are other effects from CO2 that also go the other way. CO2 has increased heat capacity, it's heavier than air, and it might have a cooling effect because it increases the effectiveness of convection.
What's the leading cause? By how much? I don't know. You need to do the calculation properly and find out. This is physics not humanistic subject. You don't judge with narratives. Narratives are misleading, calculations are what matters. If you bring your narrative to the calculation and the only effect of CO2 in your calculation is the radiation, that's even worse.
Thermodynamic systems also tend to reach equilibrium, so if you have errors in any parameters in the description of the system, your errornous system with the current state of the real system will be out of equilibrium in the errornous simulation. You should always expect simulations with imprecise data to be less stable than the real system itself.
It's settled, greenhouse gases, primarily CO2 but also water vapor, methane, and others, is causing warming. There isn't any uncertainty about this. Also, no, simulations are not always less stable than the real system.
Is it possible for you to link any of the climate models where you've observed this and point out some of the inaccuracies? (Or to link to an existing blog post or comment that does so?)
Line 87, you can see they copy physical constants from an old physics book and then later they commented out and used different constants. You can see that the difference is quite significant.
The cloud physics code there I saw in different models, with different "constants", with other comments also taken from physics books as old as the 1980s. Can look in general at the accuracy of physical constants used, some of them aren't constants at all (and depends on composition of air INCLUDING CO2, such as gas constants). There are also much more complex problems there that I can't explain over a single post.
This is extremely complex to evaluate the impact of everything going on there, and I can't make claims that it should go one way or the other, but the code quality and the testing done there are definitely not enough to reach the conclusions made and the trillions of dollars worth of decisions that followed.
Thanks for replying with details. The difference for liquid water is small, but for ice it looks like it's actually about 7%, which could be significant. Looks like what's going on is that the constants used are for different temperatures. The original constant was for ice at 0C, while the new constant is for ice at -15C. I'm guessing this is probably based on the thought that more ice on the planet is near -15C than is near 0C. Ideally for the best accuracy you'd compute the heat capacity using interpolation and a lookup table, but I can see how it would be a lot harder to enforce energy conservation that way. It would be interesting to see a sensitivity analysis on how these kinds of decisions affect the outcome of the simulation.
They have a real issue of choosing physical constants which aren't really constants, some models get it more right, others get it wrong and some are just unreadable so I couldn't get a conclusion.
There are also other issues, some code is clearly untestable, the whole thing is written in incoherent merged up pieces so you might be using different constants / calculations for the same grid location from different modules. NASA GISS code looks even worse, but I couldn't link to GitHub it's only available as tar gz download. They have even worst stuff there.
And remember the entire calculation is meant to measure the effect of changing CO2 which is only 0.0042% of the atmosphere. You need very high accuracy in everything in the first place to get the real effect rather than the model drifting into an alternative climate of imaginary world with different constants. And then remember that the real system is chaotic and the only signal that they claim to get is the average over many different simulations all drifting in average temperatures, over decades. The way the code is written there's just no way it's suitable for these kinds of predictions. And actually in most cases these models weren't built to predict climate over decades.
The world is run by people how are by and large more motivated by power and self interest and that doesn't always correlate with very high levels of intelligence.
This (and the article) have, coincidentally, been my latest fixation. I'm theoretically no dumber than any headline-making character these days, but they 1. Have connections and chance opportunities that have not fallen into my lap that have into theirs and 2. I don't have this insatiable appetite for power or money. Perhaps it's my depression or lack of confidence, but simply collecting my developer salary and spending my remaining time on my hobbies/relationships is enough for me and I have no desire (or energy, frankly) to pursue greatness.
They also have the resources to delegate substantial work to others. I often wonder how much more productive or happy I'd be if I had a "chief of staff" that ensures less interesting things get delegated to the right people.
If you’re interested in going further on this train of thought- check out virtual assistants on UpWork or Fiverr. You can find great ones for $20-40/hr. Or if you prefer a full-time person (40hr/week), you can hire a great one at $1-2k a month. This person can organize your emails, calendar, manage projects, edit videos, and so on.
My counter is why would you want to pursue such a life? And you should re-evaluate what you deem as greatness. I don't believe most of the people who fall into these power categories as great even if people occasionally herald them (or business publications do).
There are many ways to greatness and most of them do not have public accolades attached to them.
OK, if the people running the show are no better than "you" than does that imply merit doesn't rise to the top? If we aren't in a meritocracy, what does that mean for wealth distribution?
Merit doesn't guarantee anything. You also need to do things in the right order in the right time and the right place, a decent amount of luck would also come handy.
Is a minority from a ghetto just lucky if they get admitted to Harvard? When we see a stereotypical white guy get admitted to Harvard, we would assume they are privileged. Are the people who break out of overty doing it on their own, ala boot straps style, or are they the product of an unlikely serious of events which gave them the edge they needed?
Wealth distribution in particular can be accurately modeled by purely random coin flips on who gets more and who loses:
E.g. https://chancyislands.org/CIChance.html
People make mistakes. I'd rather ask a different question: what are the greatest decisions these people have made and the great things they build that I can't do, with or without luck? Then, there seems to be quite a few.
> PS: If you are starting something new, you also have the benefit of a lot of recently freed-up Coinbase/Twitter/Shopify/Stripe/Meta employees with a lot of severance nothing to lose
That's not so smart is it? Hiring folks on sky high salaries. If you are a startup, the last thing you need is uncompromising engs from BigTech imposing themselves on your org. Make sure to beat it out of them or better yet, pursue those who have the potential to grow as the startup scales, and/or those who come on board with a more grounded set of expectations. Especially, if you're aiming longer term.
The quote is not premised on, and nor does it imply, the notions you object to. As for ants, they are not a great model for human societies, even if it sometimes seems so.
This is great because it conjurs up for me an image of you as a world-weary 17 year old smoking his first cigarette after getting a high grade on his French literature test while thinking about whether he should go to Brown or Harvard or maybe just drop out altogether
> It’s hard to know what to take from that; Steve Jobs was clearly a very smart man, without a lot of empathy for lesser beings. So is he saying “Everything was made up by people no smarter than Steve Jobs”, or does he actually mean it that the average world/company/industry leader really is no smarter than you?
He's saying that the average "you" is no smarter than the average person.
> And then I take a look at the clown show that has been tech in the past few weeks...
All of these example trace their roots to extreme market distortions bought about by a massive direct injection of money into an economy that had partially shut down during the pandemic. The normal pricing signals were suppressed for the last two years.
The underlying mistake made in the biggest of the cited examples was to believe the distorted marketplace pricing signals.
The mistake made in the lesser cited examples was that getting rich from the deluge of fake money serves as proof of skill in other areas.
The process of normalization is now underway, and will continue for some time. If those examples in the article make you go "huh," just wait for what's in store as the receding tide reveals all of those bare bottoms and inflated senses of superiority.
"Do you not know, my son, with how very little wisdom the world is governed?"
Written by Axel Oxenstierna, Lord High Chancellor of Sweden, to his son, a delegate to the negotiations that would lead to the Peace of Westphalia, who worried about his ability to hold his own amidst experienced and eminent statesmen and diplomats.
This is almost exactly what I tell my younger folks who are concerned they're not authoritative enough to share an opinion or lead a project. I cured my Imposter Syndrome not by gaining confidence but realizing that everyone else was just guessing too. My guesses were at least as good as theirs.
My version was more general: I'm in a race with people convinced they cant win.
After that realization even a tiny amount of effort put me miles ahead. Again and again I found situations screaming: This is where others would give up.
You shouldn't be satisfied with guesses as good as the self proclaimed imposters. Your effort should further convince them they are!
Be that as it may, the point in our bureaucracies is precisely to make sure that the decisions we make are based on what we learned over the years and not what some “10x” SWE is throwing a hissy fit about in the daily standup.
Because it actually often works and there has been research that has found benefits. The question is whether or not the benefits are worth the drawbacks and that's highly sensitive to your actual objectives, to the local conditions, and extremely sensitive to the details of how your rent control is implemented.
For example, it is an empirical fact that rent control greatly decreases the number of people that leave a city, which especially for poorer people means that they get to keep an invaluable support network.
At the same time, there have been publications that straight up found that rent control did not reduce housing stock meaningfully and yet reduced rents.
So the assertion that it "never works" cannot be supported by the evidence because we have evidence of cases and dimensions in which it definitely worked. And that is part of the reason why some of us are subjected to rent control.
I find that this post https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control... is a good start, the video by Unlearning Economics on the subject is also pretty good, which IIRC also touches on the issue that in the rent control debate an increase in the exact same metrics (for example, mobility) is interpreted by some as good and by others as bad.
I think there is a solid case to be made that when used carefully rent control can be a good tool to use in keeping housing costs under control, though of course if used as the only tool then things are likely to end up disastrously.
> there have been publications that straight up found that rent control did not reduce housing stock meaningfully
Really? Would you build an apt building that rent control ensured would be a poor investment? How do you measure investors being reluctant to build more housing in a rent controlled area?
Rent control is good for the few people who get a below market rate. It's bad for everyone else, including those who can't find a place to rent because of it.
Rent control generally only controls increases, not absolute prices, and is relaxed for newer constructions, so developers care less. At the same time, it may reduce the cost of land zoned for high density housing if locative uses are judged to be less profitable, thereby reaching and equilibrium. It also often lowers market rent for everyone, when implemented correctly.
We can measure this reluctance by looking at construction rates and general supply in similar groups of cities or neighborhoods with or without rent control, of course controlling for other variables. This has been done in multiple studies, which are listed in the link I provided.
You don’t need the tools at all. If everyone is at (roughly) the same level of decision making ability as the post implies then it follows that disallowing certain decisions (like the price of rent) will always be suboptimal.
This is just pure and simple logic.
What ‘successes’ rent control had are hyped to an abnormal extent, since obviously those with rent controlled apartments are most keen on keeping them, and often they are not the ‘poor’. Again the poor are used here as an excuse for upper middle class bad behavior, locking people out of the city.
Turnover in a city is a good thing btw, not a bad one. But cities do seem to design themselves on keeping people out.
This is not true. Rational actors acting in their own self interest does not always approach a global optimum. An external actor limiting choices can trivially lead to better outcomes, the prisoner's dilemma being an obvious example. The tragedy of the commons is another, where the government historically either intervened to maintain good behaviour, or intervened to enclose the commons, in either case limiting the options of rational players.
Turnover in a city can be argued to be good or bad. Turnover across a city is more clearly bad, but as a said it's still arguable. In any case, I believe you're not making a great case as your basic argument that limiting choices of rational actors can never lead to better outcomes is incorrect, and I think it would be a good idea to read/watch the material I linked or referred to in order to get a better idea of what I'm arguing and so you can directly try to refute the rebuttals of points I'm going to be making. It's going to be faster than relitigating most of this conversation up until that point.
What is your definition of rent control working? There are some studies showing that rent control does work to minimise displacement of tenants [1] and that tenants seek more repairs [2], even more of lower income classes.
If you define as achieving market efficiency, maybe that's not the objective.
It's like unionising, it may make companies less market-efficient by giving more power and control to the workers. Rent control affects landlords by giving more power to tenants.
Building more houses, etc., is an orthogonal issue to rent control.
Rent control can, and sometimes does work. However, it has faltered in recent years, in large part because property management companies are using software to aid in pricing rents as high as the market can bear (to the heavy detriment of tenants), and are willing to evict and retain an unconscionable amount of empty units if overall profits rise, even at the cost of human suffering, rather than keep tenants around.
The latest "Behind the Bastards" podcast "Part One: Why is the Rent So Damn High?" explores some of this, if you have the time and inclination to listen.
I guess to put a finer point on it: this isn't exclusively a market problem, and it's incorrect to reduce/redirect all forms of market manipulation down to 'rent control'.
Certainly rent control distorts the market unnaturally, but it does so in favor of tenants and human rights, and proportionally speaking, I don't think it's the biggest distortion by a long shot. The much larger distortion causing the market problems is the optimization of rent prices at the expense of human rights.
If the market is to be distorted, I personally would pick the one that prioritizes continuity of housing over the one that maximizes rent income over total units rented.
The civil service is mostly designed to provide some level of basic stability and functioning so that no matter what flavor of the month politician gets elected you still get your trash picked up, and other services. (If politicians directly target something, though, all bets are off.)
This may have been more true during the times of nobility. With modern democracies and market economies, we at least try to have some form of meritocracy. Obviously, we fall short in a lot of ways, but the goal is to bring to best to the fore.
Well, you never get that high in politics if you don't have some traits for that, or you are pushed there by others on purpose. Either way it means she fell victim to intrigue - by getting ousted from PM position or by being installed there on the first place.
In Obama's memoirs he talks about this. How when he was a community level, then city, then state, then federal level politician how he kept expecting the quality of people/decisions to improve in the big leagues, but that instead it was the same (poor quality) at each level.
I think what's often behind the Peter Principal is the temperament and skills to gain/hold a job are often/usually not the same skills needed to do the job. And often there is conflict and tension between the two.
I think both authors can be correct, and both sets of experiences are valid. But I think it's a sign that politics selects for political-competency, which has nearly nothing to do with general intelligence or other forms of competency/expertise.
When listening to podcasts where EU politicians are interviewed it seems like this is less of a problem there. EU politics have a high impact but a low "fame" aspect. Maybe the people that care about impact and not about fame are higher quality politicians?
I'm surprised by this comment. As an outsider (from Australia) but someone who follows European politics pretty closely, the quality of European politicians is noticeably low. Not that I would say Australian politicians are better, but I'm simply surprised that any European thinks that there is a higher standard in Europe.
I don't know a lot of them, there are quite many. I believe at least Frans Timmermans, Mohammed Chahim,Diederik Samsom and Bas Eickhout are very capable and have a high opinion of EU politicians.
This sounds logical and hopeful, but even a casual survey of the current lot of political leaders on all sides is very disappointing. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, George Bush, Barak Obama, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, and even the once heralded Bernie Sanders (just to name a few) have turned out to be massive failures and disappointments.
Very few come to mind actually. I’ll mention a few and accept the resulting criticism ;)
2016 version of Bernie Sanders; Jimmy Carter; Dennis Kucinich; and almost any politician willing to stand up against needless wars, as avoiding war is a top priority for me.
Well, I don't know that it's much of a criticism, but I do note which way all those people lean politically. Mostly I just think that the modern world is ungovernable, but then again, I'm not really the optimistic type.
What way do you think they lean politically? Many of them would no longer be considered modern Democrats. For example, 2016 Bernie was for strong borders, avoiding unnecessary war, and breaking away from trade agreements that were unfavorable to American workers. Modern Bernie votes to fund a war in Ukraine and no longer cares about securing the border. The Democratic party of today is socially far more left, but their foreign policy, free speech stances, and economic agenda resembles the old (pre-Trump grenade) Republican party. Weird times.
We haven't had an honest president since Carter, and we haven't had a good president since Eisenhower. The math and process of our U.S. electoral system guarantees poor results.
I read one of Eisenhower’s biographies and he actually had some problems with the press especially thanks to Montgomery. At the same time, he was also one of the first US presidents to recognise that news can be leveraged to spread your message. Unlike earlier presidents, Eisenhower actually cooperated with the press and gave them news directly. That together with him winning a major war for America makes me suspect that his reputation would have also stood up with the media scrutiny of today. Assuming that there even is more scrutiny today? Maybe because there are more journalists nowadays so yes it could be
Yes, definitely. I was infuriated by many of W's policies regarding war and domestic spying, and Obama said he would stop those abuses, but instead continued on as was, or worse.
I think generals have an important advantage in honesty. No matter how political an officer's life is, it pales in comparison to the amount of lies needed to be a career politician.
Grant was also known for his unlacquered honesty. And for his desire to serve the nation. Whereas Lincoln changed opinions when favorable to him and was happy to suspend rule of law for the same reason.
> In Athens, they selected by random lot. A much better system.
IIRC, an important corollary to that was they designed their official positions so literally anyone could do the job. That would also have certain benefits regarding oversight, because with simple jobs anyone can check if they're being done correctly (without corruption or incompetence being hidden behind jargon).
No one holds power by accident. While some people may initially rise purely by chance, there are countless people actively trying to take their place, and thus the ability to remain in that desirable position implies sufficient competence to fend off all challengers. Obviously victory won't necessarily go to the smartest, there are many other important qualities like charisma and risk tolerance that tip the scales, but those in power still need to be smart enough to use their other skills and connections to overcome smarter competitors. If you see a grand master with a long history of success make what appears to you to be a blunder, perhaps they are indeed off their game, but it is wise to look to see how it may be a gambit.
He's a multiple bankrupt. He has a talent for destruction. It seems to me that he lacks insight; he seems to be a loudmouthed blowhard, just like many people I've met that aren't well-educated, and aren't property magnates.
I don't really get how he got people to vote for him; I suspect it's that he appealed specifically to an anti-intellectual constituency - the same constituency that rejected Al Gore for being too intellectual.
That is: being clever seems to be unhelpful, if you want to get ahead in US politics.
> I don't really get how he got people to vote for him; I suspect it's that he appealled specifically to an anti-intellectual constituency - the same constituency that rejected Al Gore for being too intellectual.
Since it was the same constituency (in the margin) that voted Obama and Trump in, maybe the question is how Obama appealed to that "anti-intellectual" group more successfully than the succeeding candidate.
Trump (or someone Trump was smart enough to listen to) realized that the same strategies that work for celebrity PR also work for political PR. Dogma in political circles had long been that you want to try to piss off as few people as possible and be palatable to as wide an audience as possible. But in hollywood gossip you want to be constantly involved in some scandal or feud - it doesn't matter what absurd position you take, people will still join your side. It's the exact same mental pathway that makes people very invested in their local sports team - sure you've never met these people and victory has no practical value to you whatsoever, but they are your team, your tribe, so you care. Trump spent years using these tactics to maintain his standing as a C-tier celebrity and eventually applied them to politics where they worked spectacularly.
He plays the part of a buffoon, but if you pay attention to his oratory there are numerous clever strategies employed - he always focusses on one opponent at a time; he always gives his opponents simple, diminutive monikers that always use the first name which make him come off as simultaneously informal and superior; technical questions are met with machismo. In general all of his efforts work towards painting himself as an extremely confident individual who is stronger and more virile than his opponents and his policy positions are irrelevant. This might seem like a dumb strategy, but if you consider how a gorilla becomes leader of its troop, it does not make a well reasoned argument that it has the best policies and will improve the economy, it makes itself appear too formidable for any other contender to challenge. Our ape brains have evolved to join the side of the strongest and most virile alpha male. Trump's strategy exploits this pathway. That is not to say that he deliberately developed a strategy based on how apes compete for dominance, but rather he happened to adopt a strategy that just happened to be effective, and he executed it well.
Trump's apparent lack of intelligence also served him well as the political establishment not only did not understand how to counter his strategy, but didn't even recognize the strategy until it was too late. They played right into his hands, frequently lampooning his positions and thus inadvertently giving him a far bigger audience. They tried to paint him as divisive and brash, not realizing that's exactly what people wanted. They debated him with traditional political rhetoric which came off as impotent and disingenuous. They pounced on every scandal which desensitized people to outrage.
While I personally believe that Corey Lewandowski was the real brains behind the operation and as stated the other contenders made serious blunders, the fact that in a few years a man with the catchphrase "You're fired!" could completely submit half the country's political spectrum to his will and retain that influence after two impeachment attempts and a lost election indicates an exceptional ability to play the game.
Yes, I think he's a clever orator. I assume he gets talking-points from advisors; but he's winging it a lot of the time, and he gets away with it.
But he's not "clever" like someone who once finished reading a book. He brags that he doesn't read books, and I believe him. He has a famously short window of attention. Perhaps all of his 'stable genius' is focused on what matters; but what's that?
[Edit] The pub around the corner from me sells a draught ale called "Stable Genius".
>thus the ability to remain in that desirable position implies sufficient competence to fend off all challengers
In the modern world there are very few individual people with a lot of power. Power today is highly distributed among institutions and elites and managers and bureaucrats and so on. Just ask any recent US president when they ran headfirst into the machinery that is the entire government how that went. No deep state necessary, just sheer inertia of systems much larger than them.
What all the examples in the article should tell people isn't that powerful people are stupid or smart, it's that nobody's in charge any more. Elon failing to tame twitter, SBF going broke on crypto isn't about intelligence, it's about people trying to speculate on or control systems that are much too complex and autonomous to be ordered around by one guy.
But the fact remains that someone is president and gets all the prestige and other perks of that position, and there are lots of other people who would like to be in that position yet aren't. Running things has never meant absolute ability to control systems, it has always been a relative measure of position within the hierarchy compared to others.
I hate articles that use Steve Jobs as some kind of guru, he was a lucky, successful asshole, but I guess that's charisma for you.
> When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world.
> Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.
> That’s a very limited life.
> Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
I wonder what bit of 60s counterculture that attitude was directly lifted from.
While the people that came before weren't any smarter than you; it's important to remember that they had, collectively, more experience in more areas than you could ever dream of having. That doesn't mean they got everything right, but it does mean if you just take the quote to heart you'll probably end up more like a bull in a China shop than some sage-like innovator.
But it is nice idea to remember, so you can mentally knock down people like Jobs, who want to portray themselves as sage-like innovators, a peg.
Jobs was highly successful 3 times (Apple I, Pixar, and his return to Apple). Once could be luck, twice is highly unlikely to be luck, and 3 times? fuggeddabootit
The sequence of events are linked. NeXT was hugely successful as it became the foundation of OS X and without it he'd never have returned. The individual product lines were a multiple amounts of luck too (Mac, iPod, iPhone, etc).
Not really. Look at Jobs' second coming to Apple. He replaced a sequence of CEOs that all failed to turn Apple around. Jobs turned a near-bankrupt company into the biggest company in the world, with the same crew and technology of the near-bankrupt company.
Pixar enormous success was Jobs' doing. Nobody else believed in Pixar.
NeXT was a failure, but Jobs found a way to salvage it.
> Jobs was highly successful 3 times (Apple I, Pixar, and his return to Apple). Once could be luck, twice is highly unlikely to be luck, and 3 times? fuggeddabootit
So someone who flips a coin an gets heads 10 times in row isn't lucky, they must be good at flipping coins? Jobs certainly had certain talents, but luck was definitely the bigger contributor to his successes. However, lots of people lose sight of that, and almost join a cargo cult centered on him.
When he talks about his father, there was a moment where he realized he was smarter and at the time I found it to be an asshole move (I can’t find the quote and story anymore).
But looking back I think he was truly honoring his adoptive parents in his own brusque way.
In anycase: Someone “less intelligent” (Paul Jobs) indirectly had a major impact on company values and world impact.
> While the people that came before weren't any smarter than you; it's important to remember that they had, collectively, more experience in more areas than you could ever dream of having.
People don't sum that way. It's more important to remember that they had, individually, a bit less, a bit more, or about the same experience in a few less, a few more, or about the same number of areas as you do, and that the collective experience you yourself have to draw on is vastly larger than theirs was.
I know contemporaries of Jobs that had every opportunity he had, and failed to notice those opportunities.
I'm one of them. It was obvious in retrospect. I missed it, and many, many people I know were blind as a bat.
There wasn't any particular magic in the hardware or software of the Apple I at the time. Yes, Woz did a great job doing it with fewer chips. But that was not key to its success.
Clearly not true in physics and engineering. How many people can honestly they're as smart as Maxwell, Einstein, Von Neumann, or even "minor" players like John Bardeen and Bill Shockley?
More believable about business and public morality of all sorts (including economics), all of which can be swamps of reality-denying utter stupidity.
The opposite of stupid isn't smart. The opposite of stupid is true, accurate, and realistic.
For every Einstein, there are hundreds or thousands of physicists who are actively exploring the big theories, and actually using them. How many physicists are working in and around CERN? A small fraction will earn any public recognition, yet all of them are furthering physics. That's just the physicists, never mind the engineers, material scientists, construction workers, managers, payroll accountants, etc, who are needed to run the place. Are they as "smart" as Einstein? Maybe. Some might be smarter. There are only so many big ideas to discover. Every other genius has to contend with exploring those ideas.
> Clearly not true in physics and engineering. How many people can honestly they're as smart as Maxwell, Einstein, Von Neumann, or even "minor" players like John Bardeen and Bill Shockley?
Clearly? Physics is littered with people playing the publish or die game.
How many interesting (and feasible, non-crackpot) ideas are being drowned out because it’s not the mainstream?
Sabine Hossenfelder weighed in this problem recently.
Well, as a good example... Shockley, as brilliant of a physicist he was, was an ardent racist and proponent of eugenics.[0] He was cruel towards his children and wife, and ended up dying alone.
If that doesn't show that people can be exceptional in one portion of their life, while horribly lacking in others... I don't know what does.
One big, directly related mistake, in my opinion is the strongly held idea that some people are geniuses, and that general intelligence is a thing.
The more I look into it, the more I see that some people are experts, even genius-level experts, sometimes in several fields, but this level of expertise is a weak predictor of their competence in different fields.
A second big problem is that some people are experts at manipulating masses and at building hype, it can be dangerous because there is a strong compounding effect with hype. (Aka snowballing)
Everyone is subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect. IMO intelligence is more about how quickly can you adapt to a new field. Everyone will have stupid moments if they are thrown in the deep waters of an unfamiliar field.
The idea that some people are genuinely extremely talented and could be successful at anything is, in my opinion, unproven and dubious.
I think that human intellectual potential is highly adaptable, but we tend to ignore/undervalue the full path that led someone to excellence in a field.
Also, we tend to rely a lot on weak heuristics to evaluate one's intellect.
The strongest one (but still weak) is language abilities.
The weakest and dangerous one is wealth/status.
Frankly, that last paragraph is the most important one. If you were on the fence about actually starting that start-up, this is your golden opportunity.
A lot of hubris in this thread. My experience has been the opposite of what honestly sounds like a lot of sour grapes thinking here: when I’ve met hugely successful leaders I was taken aback at how much more intelligent they were than me. Their ability to contextualize questions and problems, to motivate others, to find a path through challenges when it seems like there’s none to be found, and to offer advice and guidance to peers and reports was incredible to witness. Even the bullshitters were bulls hitting on top of a staggering level of intellectual ability.
>These people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster, made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others' suggestions.
> Elon adding, and then removing, a second verified checkmark to replace the one he devalued, something any B2C product expert would know is a terrible idea
Elon proposing a $20/month price for Twitter Blue, and then immediately dropping to $8 at the first celebrity pushback, something any pricing expert would know is a terrible idea
Elon (or his EA?) personally reinterviewing engineers at Twitter and telling them to print out code and then changing his mind, something any engineering manager would know is a terrible idea
I'm sure Elon knows how stupid these are, it's a publicity stunt
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadHowever is this really an issue? Some VCs and C-suite members actually are cheering this on, because they think tech companies have grown too bloated and laborers unproductive, and think some fear needs to be instilled. IDK TBD, but mature companies are mature and run this way even if they aren't yet public.
And yes, the powers that be have been desperate to make a statement since they lost a tiny amount of power.
Mark Zuckerberg has a high IQ, I won't doubt that. I also don't doubt his conviction that VR will change the world. It's possible he's right about that. I suspect he's going to experience anguish if some other company becomes the leader in VR. It might be his hill to die on, but it might not be his destiny to succeed at it. I think he's in a situation like somebody who abandons their lover to chase a doomed infatuation.
Another problem with VR is a question of scale. Zuckerberg seems to be counting on VR being a substitute for social media, Zoom, video games as know it, etc.
The problem might be you can spend all day reading, typing on a computer, scrolling on a phone, on zoom calls, watching TV. It seems you can't do that in VR. VR might be a high intensity activity that you can do a little bit every day that may never take a significant bite out of the status quo, even if VR is successful on its own terms.
I don't doubt it either; he's not dim. But "IQ" means something very specific; roughly, arithmetical ability, spatial reasoning, and lingusitic reasoning. Most importantly, IQ doesn't include judgement. Leading a nation requires judgement, more than cleverness. You can hire people to provide you with cleverness. The reason the "buck stops" with you, is because people have assessed you to have good judgement.
Take Liz Truss, the UK's last Prime Minister (I assume there's been no change while I'm typing). Apparently she's very clever; maybe too clever to take advice. At any rate, her judgement is shit.
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/clever
Beyond a certain minimal level, IQ is meaningless for making good decisions.
Regular people generally just sit in one place improving nothing, learning nothing, changing little year over year. Terrified of being "caught out as an imposter" whatever that means.
The difference isn't smart/not smart. It's movement vs stationary.
When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can make an occasional mistake and be fine, but you're likely to be much more risk-averse.
It's easy to make movements when the outcome could only benefit you.
> If you're in America, you've got no such excuses. You're not going to die if your business fails. There are tons of businesses you can start with zero capital.
You talk like people don't have dependents or opportunity costs. If everyone living paycheck-to-paycheck followed your advice, I'm sure you'd have a lot of parents explaining to their kids that they're going to have to live out of the car for awhile, because some rando on the internet said they had nothing to lose.
What an astoundingly ignorant and out of touch thing to say. It's completely irrational for most people to buy a long shot chance at wealth with a much, much greater chance of winding up worse off and in poverty (or deeper in it).
Also, what you said is an excellent sales pitch for a scam real estate investment system.
False. Both sentences are true.
> what you said is an excellent sales pitch for a scam real estate investment system.
"X people say Y so Y is false" is fallacious.
> False.
No.
> Both sentences are true.
So? A set of true statements can be misleading and out of touch, for instance, through omission of other important truths. In this case, the omission is that "trying" has a cost and the outcome can be negative. If you're wealthy, those negatives can often be easily shrugged off; if you're not, the expected outcome of "trying" can make the attempt irrational.
> "X people say Y so Y is false" is fallacious.
You misunderstand. It pointing out the flaw in the pitch, because it can so often be used to sell lies.
You're creating connections that don't exist between unrelated things. "Smart people" don't all have the personality traits, attitudes, and beleifs that you're attributing to them. I'd say "smart" and the things you describe are actually completely orthogonal.
As both a former teacher and current parent, i can say for certain that this is not true.
There are a lot of very smart people who dropped out of the race. Being smart can mean you don't need to learn grit, and maybe you never do; maybe the first hard thing comes, and you do something easier instead.
There are also plenty of diligent hard workers who never amount to much more than a small business. Hard work isn't worth much on its own.
But you are smart so you will argue "No true smart person..."
Dumb people don't feel imposter syndrome more than smart people. Ambition is not limited to the smart. And if anything I would say being high percentile IQ can work against your ability to learn from others because you're used to being the smartest person in the room.
Remember, the universe is big and chaotic, intelligence only enables a limited amount of optimization, and the difference between a "dumb" person and a "smart" person is insignificant next to our evolved social capabilities that allowed us to specialize and create huge civilizations with strong safety and wellbeing guarantees. Every "self-made" millionaire and billionaire on the planet would be nothing without those base traits of the populace.
It's not that they don't have such thoughts. They just override them.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dunning-kruger-eff...
If you look at the code of the climate models responsible for the decision making of trillions of dollars, you'll find old fortran code with many obvious inaccuracies on the order of magnitude of the things it's supposed to measure, and you'll find they all copy code from each other and reach diverging results.
Climate models are very conservative in terms of the coding and approaches, but the old Fortran is used because 100's of eyes have picked over it for problems and it's as accurate as it possibly can be.
Fortran is terrible for the scale of those projects, and it shows.
I can give you concrete examples straight from GitHub. Accuracy isn't relative it's absolute. You're not comparing accuracy to other models, you compare it vs reality.
It is a known fact the results of different climate models diverge. There's ongoing research as to why this is happening, lookup CMIP6. Many models also required flux adjustment to stay stable over many years of simulation (although at least that problem is improving).
It's really hard to test these models on the scale of the effects climate change.
This stuff is very hard, contributions before criticism.
You can approach it as an insider researcher "on their side" and try to correct it, but the problem is just so big you're not going to get flawless models without time, and they have already shrugged serious problems in the past with "flux adjustment". You'll get endless errata and retractions but you'll never get a narrative shift.
Or you can try to approach it from the outside like countless scientists have done and get called oil companies shill, climate denier and what not. The academic "climate" around it is very "hot".
So eventually you just go and forget it and do something productive with your life instead of literally fighting windmills. (And I did mean literally as a joke about renewable energy).
Climate change being real but getting the real reason wrong because of hubris, and doing measures that only harm and economy and makes us more fragile ahead of dealing with the crisis, and in the process destroying any public trust in science that will be required for dealing with the crisis.
Almost like doing lockdowns for coronavirus.
Temperature measurements and real world data and trends is not something I can deny. But there's important difference between climate change is from CO2 and greenhouse gas, to any other possible explanation.
Just like there's a difference between "inflation is transitory because of supply chain problems" to the dumpster fire we're having today.
I've had enough of this hubris. How is it that nobody is preparing for the impacts of climate change? How is everyone so confident that somehow whatever measures are done will be enough, and that everyone will actually implement them?
Adaptation is clearly the only viable solution because that's the only thing that's independent of the competence of things you don't control.
*(Technically, since thermal radiation goes as T^4 times emissivity and some other stuff, what I really mean is a higher value of T^4 averaged across the surface area of the Earth and weighted by emissivity. And even this is an oversimplification, since not only can heat be lost from the ground, but also the atmosphere iteself. But the basic picture of "planet gets warmer" is still correct.)
First of all, the radiation is thermal radiation. Air with CO2 at close temperature to the surface emitting thermal radiation has no bad effect whatsoever on how fast the energy radiates out.
Two things at the same temperature will always be at equilibrium, and the least thermal radiation you can emit is black body radiation like the surface. So the narrative of looking at it like it's radiation scattering might be true for high up in the atmosphere where the temperature difference from the surface is high - but very misleading and leads to bad intuition in low attitudes. CO2 also tends to stay in lower attitudes.
There are other effects from CO2 that also go the other way. CO2 has increased heat capacity, it's heavier than air, and it might have a cooling effect because it increases the effectiveness of convection.
What's the leading cause? By how much? I don't know. You need to do the calculation properly and find out. This is physics not humanistic subject. You don't judge with narratives. Narratives are misleading, calculations are what matters. If you bring your narrative to the calculation and the only effect of CO2 in your calculation is the radiation, that's even worse.
Thermodynamic systems also tend to reach equilibrium, so if you have errors in any parameters in the description of the system, your errornous system with the current state of the real system will be out of equilibrium in the errornous simulation. You should always expect simulations with imprecise data to be less stable than the real system itself.
https://github.com/GEOS-ESM/GEOSgcm_GridComp/blob/develop/GE...
Line 87, you can see they copy physical constants from an old physics book and then later they commented out and used different constants. You can see that the difference is quite significant.
The cloud physics code there I saw in different models, with different "constants", with other comments also taken from physics books as old as the 1980s. Can look in general at the accuracy of physical constants used, some of them aren't constants at all (and depends on composition of air INCLUDING CO2, such as gas constants). There are also much more complex problems there that I can't explain over a single post.
This is extremely complex to evaluate the impact of everything going on there, and I can't make claims that it should go one way or the other, but the code quality and the testing done there are definitely not enough to reach the conclusions made and the trillions of dollars worth of decisions that followed.
There are also other issues, some code is clearly untestable, the whole thing is written in incoherent merged up pieces so you might be using different constants / calculations for the same grid location from different modules. NASA GISS code looks even worse, but I couldn't link to GitHub it's only available as tar gz download. They have even worst stuff there.
And remember the entire calculation is meant to measure the effect of changing CO2 which is only 0.0042% of the atmosphere. You need very high accuracy in everything in the first place to get the real effect rather than the model drifting into an alternative climate of imaginary world with different constants. And then remember that the real system is chaotic and the only signal that they claim to get is the average over many different simulations all drifting in average temperatures, over decades. The way the code is written there's just no way it's suitable for these kinds of predictions. And actually in most cases these models weren't built to predict climate over decades.
The world is run by people how are by and large more motivated by power and self interest and that doesn't always correlate with very high levels of intelligence.
There are many ways to greatness and most of them do not have public accolades attached to them.
Is a minority from a ghetto just lucky if they get admitted to Harvard? When we see a stereotypical white guy get admitted to Harvard, we would assume they are privileged. Are the people who break out of overty doing it on their own, ala boot straps style, or are they the product of an unlikely serious of events which gave them the edge they needed?
Absolutely no meritocracy required.
I'm struggling to think of great decisions that didn't amount to standing on the shoulders of giants.
That's not so smart is it? Hiring folks on sky high salaries. If you are a startup, the last thing you need is uncompromising engs from BigTech imposing themselves on your org. Make sure to beat it out of them or better yet, pursue those who have the potential to grow as the startup scales, and/or those who come on board with a more grounded set of expectations. Especially, if you're aiming longer term.
- Kurt Vonnegut
This is great because it conjurs up for me an image of you as a world-weary 17 year old smoking his first cigarette after getting a high grade on his French literature test while thinking about whether he should go to Brown or Harvard or maybe just drop out altogether
He's saying that the average "you" is no smarter than the average person.
> And then I take a look at the clown show that has been tech in the past few weeks...
All of these example trace their roots to extreme market distortions bought about by a massive direct injection of money into an economy that had partially shut down during the pandemic. The normal pricing signals were suppressed for the last two years.
The underlying mistake made in the biggest of the cited examples was to believe the distorted marketplace pricing signals.
The mistake made in the lesser cited examples was that getting rich from the deluge of fake money serves as proof of skill in other areas.
The process of normalization is now underway, and will continue for some time. If those examples in the article make you go "huh," just wait for what's in store as the receding tide reveals all of those bare bottoms and inflated senses of superiority.
Written by Axel Oxenstierna, Lord High Chancellor of Sweden, to his son, a delegate to the negotiations that would lead to the Peace of Westphalia, who worried about his ability to hold his own amidst experienced and eminent statesmen and diplomats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Oxenstierna
After that realization even a tiny amount of effort put me miles ahead. Again and again I found situations screaming: This is where others would give up.
You shouldn't be satisfied with guesses as good as the self proclaimed imposters. Your effort should further convince them they are!
For example, it is an empirical fact that rent control greatly decreases the number of people that leave a city, which especially for poorer people means that they get to keep an invaluable support network.
At the same time, there have been publications that straight up found that rent control did not reduce housing stock meaningfully and yet reduced rents.
So the assertion that it "never works" cannot be supported by the evidence because we have evidence of cases and dimensions in which it definitely worked. And that is part of the reason why some of us are subjected to rent control.
I find that this post https://jwmason.org/slackwire/considerations-on-rent-control... is a good start, the video by Unlearning Economics on the subject is also pretty good, which IIRC also touches on the issue that in the rent control debate an increase in the exact same metrics (for example, mobility) is interpreted by some as good and by others as bad.
I think there is a solid case to be made that when used carefully rent control can be a good tool to use in keeping housing costs under control, though of course if used as the only tool then things are likely to end up disastrously.
Really? Would you build an apt building that rent control ensured would be a poor investment? How do you measure investors being reluctant to build more housing in a rent controlled area?
Rent control is good for the few people who get a below market rate. It's bad for everyone else, including those who can't find a place to rent because of it.
We can measure this reluctance by looking at construction rates and general supply in similar groups of cities or neighborhoods with or without rent control, of course controlling for other variables. This has been done in multiple studies, which are listed in the link I provided.
The Non-capitalist Solution to the Housing Crisis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKudSeqHSJk
The video seems to switch to "non-market" as a description.
This is just pure and simple logic.
What ‘successes’ rent control had are hyped to an abnormal extent, since obviously those with rent controlled apartments are most keen on keeping them, and often they are not the ‘poor’. Again the poor are used here as an excuse for upper middle class bad behavior, locking people out of the city.
Turnover in a city is a good thing btw, not a bad one. But cities do seem to design themselves on keeping people out.
Turnover in a city can be argued to be good or bad. Turnover across a city is more clearly bad, but as a said it's still arguable. In any case, I believe you're not making a great case as your basic argument that limiting choices of rational actors can never lead to better outcomes is incorrect, and I think it would be a good idea to read/watch the material I linked or referred to in order to get a better idea of what I'm arguing and so you can directly try to refute the rebuttals of points I'm going to be making. It's going to be faster than relitigating most of this conversation up until that point.
If you define as achieving market efficiency, maybe that's not the objective.
It's like unionising, it may make companies less market-efficient by giving more power and control to the workers. Rent control affects landlords by giving more power to tenants.
Building more houses, etc., is an orthogonal issue to rent control.
[1] http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkbrueck/course%20readings/gyourk...
[2] https://www.policylink.org/sites/default/files/RentControlMy...
Government does plenty of things that are unprofitable for the benefit of all.
This kind of policy needs to be a multipronged approach in policy to provide both new construction and long-term leases (usually 20 years).
[1] https://housingpolicytoolkit.oecd.org/www/CountryFiches/hous...
The latest "Behind the Bastards" podcast "Part One: Why is the Rent So Damn High?" explores some of this, if you have the time and inclination to listen.
Only if you ignore the secondary effects, which are legion.
> retain an unconscionable amount of empty units
A secondary effect of rent control
"Secondary effects" - please educate us on what they are, and their magnitude.
Certainly rent control distorts the market unnaturally, but it does so in favor of tenants and human rights, and proportionally speaking, I don't think it's the biggest distortion by a long shot. The much larger distortion causing the market problems is the optimization of rent prices at the expense of human rights.
If the market is to be distorted, I personally would pick the one that prioritizes continuity of housing over the one that maximizes rent income over total units rented.
The civil service is mostly designed to provide some level of basic stability and functioning so that no matter what flavor of the month politician gets elected you still get your trash picked up, and other services. (If politicians directly target something, though, all bets are off.)
Growth is exactly what the UK economy needs and she recognised that. Now all we're going to get is austerity, higher taxes and misery under Rishi
I think both authors can be correct, and both sets of experiences are valid. But I think it's a sign that politics selects for political-competency, which has nearly nothing to do with general intelligence or other forms of competency/expertise.
2016 version of Bernie Sanders; Jimmy Carter; Dennis Kucinich; and almost any politician willing to stand up against needless wars, as avoiding war is a top priority for me.
A competent system would be preferable.
Grant was also known for his unlacquered honesty. And for his desire to serve the nation. Whereas Lincoln changed opinions when favorable to him and was happy to suspend rule of law for the same reason.
Compared to whom and what?
What was the standard to which you decided they should be measured against that led to your conclusion?
lolol
In Athens, they selected by random lot. A much better system.
IIRC, an important corollary to that was they designed their official positions so literally anyone could do the job. That would also have certain benefits regarding oversight, because with simple jobs anyone can check if they're being done correctly (without corruption or incompetence being hidden behind jargon).
Donald Trump is my favorite recent example of that but there are many others
He's a multiple bankrupt. He has a talent for destruction. It seems to me that he lacks insight; he seems to be a loudmouthed blowhard, just like many people I've met that aren't well-educated, and aren't property magnates.
I don't really get how he got people to vote for him; I suspect it's that he appealed specifically to an anti-intellectual constituency - the same constituency that rejected Al Gore for being too intellectual.
That is: being clever seems to be unhelpful, if you want to get ahead in US politics.
Since it was the same constituency (in the margin) that voted Obama and Trump in, maybe the question is how Obama appealed to that "anti-intellectual" group more successfully than the succeeding candidate.
He plays the part of a buffoon, but if you pay attention to his oratory there are numerous clever strategies employed - he always focusses on one opponent at a time; he always gives his opponents simple, diminutive monikers that always use the first name which make him come off as simultaneously informal and superior; technical questions are met with machismo. In general all of his efforts work towards painting himself as an extremely confident individual who is stronger and more virile than his opponents and his policy positions are irrelevant. This might seem like a dumb strategy, but if you consider how a gorilla becomes leader of its troop, it does not make a well reasoned argument that it has the best policies and will improve the economy, it makes itself appear too formidable for any other contender to challenge. Our ape brains have evolved to join the side of the strongest and most virile alpha male. Trump's strategy exploits this pathway. That is not to say that he deliberately developed a strategy based on how apes compete for dominance, but rather he happened to adopt a strategy that just happened to be effective, and he executed it well.
Trump's apparent lack of intelligence also served him well as the political establishment not only did not understand how to counter his strategy, but didn't even recognize the strategy until it was too late. They played right into his hands, frequently lampooning his positions and thus inadvertently giving him a far bigger audience. They tried to paint him as divisive and brash, not realizing that's exactly what people wanted. They debated him with traditional political rhetoric which came off as impotent and disingenuous. They pounced on every scandal which desensitized people to outrage.
While I personally believe that Corey Lewandowski was the real brains behind the operation and as stated the other contenders made serious blunders, the fact that in a few years a man with the catchphrase "You're fired!" could completely submit half the country's political spectrum to his will and retain that influence after two impeachment attempts and a lost election indicates an exceptional ability to play the game.
> clever strategies employed
Yes, I think he's a clever orator. I assume he gets talking-points from advisors; but he's winging it a lot of the time, and he gets away with it.
But he's not "clever" like someone who once finished reading a book. He brags that he doesn't read books, and I believe him. He has a famously short window of attention. Perhaps all of his 'stable genius' is focused on what matters; but what's that?
[Edit] The pub around the corner from me sells a draught ale called "Stable Genius".
In the modern world there are very few individual people with a lot of power. Power today is highly distributed among institutions and elites and managers and bureaucrats and so on. Just ask any recent US president when they ran headfirst into the machinery that is the entire government how that went. No deep state necessary, just sheer inertia of systems much larger than them.
What all the examples in the article should tell people isn't that powerful people are stupid or smart, it's that nobody's in charge any more. Elon failing to tame twitter, SBF going broke on crypto isn't about intelligence, it's about people trying to speculate on or control systems that are much too complex and autonomous to be ordered around by one guy.
> When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world.
> Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.
> That’s a very limited life.
> Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
I wonder what bit of 60s counterculture that attitude was directly lifted from.
While the people that came before weren't any smarter than you; it's important to remember that they had, collectively, more experience in more areas than you could ever dream of having. That doesn't mean they got everything right, but it does mean if you just take the quote to heart you'll probably end up more like a bull in a China shop than some sage-like innovator.
But it is nice idea to remember, so you can mentally knock down people like Jobs, who want to portray themselves as sage-like innovators, a peg.
He was lucky an awful lot then.
(statistical liberties taken)
Not really. Look at Jobs' second coming to Apple. He replaced a sequence of CEOs that all failed to turn Apple around. Jobs turned a near-bankrupt company into the biggest company in the world, with the same crew and technology of the near-bankrupt company.
Pixar enormous success was Jobs' doing. Nobody else believed in Pixar.
NeXT was a failure, but Jobs found a way to salvage it.
He sold that failure for $429m.
Likely the $400m was really to buy Jobs.
So someone who flips a coin an gets heads 10 times in row isn't lucky, they must be good at flipping coins? Jobs certainly had certain talents, but luck was definitely the bigger contributor to his successes. However, lots of people lose sight of that, and almost join a cargo cult centered on him.
And that proves what, exactly? If lotto tickets were free, I'd buy a billion.
If he failed early, then nobody would know of it or him.
Tesla was made by two other guys, Musk contributed PR, marketing and government money.
SpaceX is a lot of public money.
If Musk is good at anything, it is taking other people's money and building a cult of personality.
That doesn't sound too hard. Why is Elon the only one good at it?!
https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/this-is-what-steve-...
When he talks about his father, there was a moment where he realized he was smarter and at the time I found it to be an asshole move (I can’t find the quote and story anymore).
But looking back I think he was truly honoring his adoptive parents in his own brusque way.
In anycase: Someone “less intelligent” (Paul Jobs) indirectly had a major impact on company values and world impact.
People don't sum that way. It's more important to remember that they had, individually, a bit less, a bit more, or about the same experience in a few less, a few more, or about the same number of areas as you do, and that the collective experience you yourself have to draw on is vastly larger than theirs was.
I know contemporaries of Jobs that had every opportunity he had, and failed to notice those opportunities.
I'm one of them. It was obvious in retrospect. I missed it, and many, many people I know were blind as a bat.
There wasn't any particular magic in the hardware or software of the Apple I at the time. Yes, Woz did a great job doing it with fewer chips. But that was not key to its success.
More believable about business and public morality of all sorts (including economics), all of which can be swamps of reality-denying utter stupidity.
The opposite of stupid isn't smart. The opposite of stupid is true, accurate, and realistic.
Clearly? Physics is littered with people playing the publish or die game.
How many interesting (and feasible, non-crackpot) ideas are being drowned out because it’s not the mainstream?
Sabine Hossenfelder weighed in this problem recently.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a big admirer of hers.
If that doesn't show that people can be exceptional in one portion of their life, while horribly lacking in others... I don't know what does.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#:~:text=Views...
The more I look into it, the more I see that some people are experts, even genius-level experts, sometimes in several fields, but this level of expertise is a weak predictor of their competence in different fields.
A second big problem is that some people are experts at manipulating masses and at building hype, it can be dangerous because there is a strong compounding effect with hype. (Aka snowballing)
The idea that some people are genuinely extremely talented and could be successful at anything is, in my opinion, unproven and dubious.
I think that human intellectual potential is highly adaptable, but we tend to ignore/undervalue the full path that led someone to excellence in a field.
Also, we tend to rely a lot on weak heuristics to evaluate one's intellect.
The strongest one (but still weak) is language abilities. The weakest and dangerous one is wealth/status.
>These people of the Power Elite were visibly much smarter than average mortals. In conversation they spoke quickly, sensibly, and by and large intelligently. When talk turned to deep and difficult topics, they understood faster, made fewer mistakes, were readier to adopt others' suggestions.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...
(Also, it was a good read!)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/215731/our-man-by-g...
I'm sure Elon knows how stupid these are, it's a publicity stunt
Ant politician cannot make everyone happy.
The brightest do not go into politics, the morally cleanest do not go there either.
So what is left? The power hungry and greedy, not sure if any party is better or worse.
I cannot think of one government that is perceived as great by the populace and foreigners on a wide scale.
Same for the powerful insurances, tech companies, banks, the leaders arent the best, the whole and lack of better competition makes them strong.
Edit: It’s very possible I’m understanding what you’re trying to say.
Now look at Boebert and similar, it is safe to say they would never be great scientists.
Of course, this is not universally true, but there is an undeniable tendency.