I think there's a lack of appropriate adjectives for people like Balaji and also Musk or even Marc Andreesen. It's plainly obvious that none of them are actually dumb. These are clearly people with high IQs and active imaginations. Where they fall down is in being prone to being wildly irrational. They're also just self-absorbed and seemingly lacking in empathy and compassion.
> These are clearly people with high IQs and active imaginations. Where they fall down is in being prone to being wildly irrational. They're also just self-absorbed and seemingly lacking in empathy and compassion.
What you are missing is that extreme wealth insulates them from any significant personal consequences of their logical imaginativeness, so such feedback never gets incorporated into their logic.
If the rest of us espoused fascism and then lost our jobs and standing in our communities, we would be in real trouble.
For the tech uber-wealthy (pun intended), money is community. Your community (peers or acolytes) will keep boosting you as long as you have it, because it completes the circular logic that explains your success.
Think of it this way, the yes man will enable the leader to drive the fully loaded truck at 100MPH even when the brakes are bad. The yes man also won't tell the leader they are rapidly approaching a cliff either.
I call it "Engineer Brain" after watching a talented relative descend into madness trying learn virology during the pandemic. It was further crystalized after the Titan submersible incident and reading about the terminal hubris of Stockton Rush.
We spend our lives specializing into ever smaller subdomains of already small domains. A lifetime of bending your brain in one direction, being well compensated, being told you are smart... it leads to tremendous gaffs once you step out of your little specialized world.
It's important to maintain a deep humbleness and acknowledge the gaps in your knowledge. Don't disregard experts in other fields because they are saying things that conflict with your biases. Learn to identify your biases and think about how they may limit you from gaining understanding. It's much more fun to go through life with the attitude of not knowing everything and listening to people who know what they know.
It would be far worse to silo everything off to "experts" in their field. Usually such deference is just a cop out for not learning what they learned.
Often the best work is done when combining the knowledge of people from different fields. Humility is important but more collaboration is needed, not less.
I don't disagree. My two examples were people who not only did not collaborate, but actively resented the knowledge offered from experts different fields.
I do think that past successful collaboration can lead to a bias though. As a programmer I've solved problems for a variety of disparate industries and fields. I know just enough to know I'm vastly ignorant of those fields save for a little part that I helped solve problems for. But I've seen colleagues go the opposite route.
No, I don't think this is engineer brain. That's something more neutral, more similar to a hacker mentality, IMO.
This is wealth brain.
> A lifetime of bending your brain in one direction, being well compensated, being told you are smart... it leads to tremendous gaffs once you step out of your little specialized world.
That's not explained by simple engineer brain, plenty of us engineers are not in this position. But those who are wildly, exceptionally successful under capitalism, get their ideas (good and bad) reinforced more and more. They look at their success - money, power, fame, influence, and believe it is due to the correctness of their ideas, not due to the exact stupidity of humans they look down upon.
I agree completely that wealth plays a critical role, if not the most critical role, in all of this. Especially at the higher end with Balaji and all the other would be tech John Galts.
I have just observed that the threshold is low enough that many middle-class engineers achieve it (I've always lived in low cost of living areas where engineers get to live pretty comfortable lives relative to their surroundings. But that's just my one data point). Their folly tends to be more banal, like ordering Ivermectin from Mexican pharmacies or endlessly talking about nuclear power in a near utopian fashion. Admittedly, pretty harmless stuff compared to the article.
I think it could easily be both. A lot of people who fall into this trap aren't all that wealthy. Certainly not to the degree of being isolated from society unless they choose to be.
It's a different form of rationality, one that is self-referential. They understand the Internet as a medium for discourse, where the audience is extremely large but the number of other memes competing for attention is also very large. They also understand that the more outrageous and anger-provoking a statement is, the more likely it is to go viral. Therefore, the way to ensure that your statements actually have an impact is to hype them up to the most provocative, outrageous form that you can, see who bites, piss people off, and get them talking.
We're discussing this article, after all, right? We know who Balaji is. While look at how many very rational "Show HN" posts here fail to get traction or reach the front page.
Oftentimes, there's a kernel of a true idea behind the hype, but it's been taken to the most extreme form possible simply because the most extreme form is the only one that goes viral.
From the wikipeida: Smith has appeared on the Neoliberal Project's podcast multiple times[21] and was labeled the "Chief Neoliberal Shill" by the group in 201
And to be completely clear, noeliberalism and leftism are NOT one and the same. Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism. "Smith has expressed disagreements with socialism and communism". Calling Noah (Or Biden, Or most mainstream democrat politicians) leftist is totally incorrect and one of my pet peeves that online commenters tend to do.
"Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism"—but that is just communism. No other ideology seeks communism as a goal, and socialism is just a stepping stone to communism, or at least that is what they taught me in my Soviet high school.
> "Leftism is defined by a goal of communism or socialism"—but that is just communism. No other ideology seeks communism as a goal, and socialism is just a stepping stone to communism, or at least that is what they taught me in my Soviet high school.
Outside of communist thought (wherein socialism is a stage on the route to communism—and the only concrete stage to which there is a roadmap in most communist thought, though different schools of communism have different maps), socialism is a thing sought in its own right by socialists who are not communists.
Obviously, its unsurprising that a Soviet high school would only teach the dogma of the particular brand of communism then currently held to be orthodox in the USSR, but that's a rather limited view.
Yeah, imo communism is a subset of leftism, which includes other ideas all of which are defined by a general opposition to global free market capitalism.
I'm sure there's better definitions too, but neoliberals are not a leftist in any of them.
