> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success.
So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success
Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently.
Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent.
So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many billions? If you're posting on HN you've probably got "success" in that extreme even if you've never applied yourself or excelled in anything of any note.
At school I used to play marbles. I had no skill whatsoever so I did "set ups" where I put a marble down and other kids threw theirs from a standard distance to hit it.
I got "marble rich" because I knew who the good players were and when one came a long I put my foot over my marble. Once you knew the trick it was impossible not to win on average and be a few marbles better off every day.
At a certain point I stopped finding this desirable and felt a bit guilty about it - the marbles were of no use to me really and it was enough to know that I had the trick of succeeding.
I wonder if this is roughly how people get wealthy in real life other than that they don't think "enough".
What they want to believe is that their wealth is in proportion to their hard work and talent. But even ignoring luck, in a "tournament market", rewards are a strongly nonlinear function of inputs. Being no 2 in a market which is a natural monopoly has limited rewards.
A lot of people seem to think of success as the sum of a bunch of independent variables: positioning + insight + hard work + talent + luck - scruples ... Then, they argue about the relative magnitude of each term.
It's obviously more complex than this, but I think it's more useful to think of it as a product. You don't need a high value in any of them to succeed, but a tiny value in even one means you need an astronomical value somewhere else.
I don't personally know any people who believe that hard work and talent have zero positive correlation with success. However I know many people who believe that parents' socioeconomic status, genetics, luck, birthplace, and lack of scruples are all much more significant factors.
I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.
>Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success?
On average or for a particular person? Maybe on average there’s an effect (r=.4), so there will be many people for whom that correlation is in their individual case actually negative. Some struggle with this notion, and assume success must signal talent or hard work in individual cases. How one defines success matters a lot too. If one is comparing zuck to some random CEO, say collison, can you say zuck is more hardworking or talented? He is more successful on paper, but I doubt he is significantly more hardworking or talented.
My take: "winning the lottery" in a Facebook sense requires a floor of talent and work at the early stages, but the odds of winning don't correlate with how much talent and work exists, nor are continued talent and work required once a critical mass of success has occurred. External factors - being in the right place at the right time, having some cushion of familial wealth, etc - dominate once you're over the floor.
But negative, but success is correlated to success so much that at some point work and talent are irrelevant. Let's say Zuck has an idea to make something. He has enough people around him discussing ideas that he can basically pick one he likes and it's already pre-filtered. Then he can give it to basically anytime he chooses, with arbitrary skills threshold and resource allocation. Then he's got a whole support network to make it work. And if it falls? A loss of a few millions means nothing to him and he can try again.
Every step of that is inaccessible to someone hardworking and talented. So let's say you got lucky once or was born with wealth available to you - you can skip the whole talent and work thing.
I think you can certainly make some of your own luck via hard work, but there is a difference between actually making on your own, and starting on 3rd base.
I suspect talent and hard work are pretty well correlated with becoming wealthy (say >$10m), but I think you then need a big injection of luck to take you from wealthy to ultra wealthy.
How many are born into it? If I think about the people that I personally know who are worth 8-figures or more they were each born into wealth. I wouldn't ever say that they also don't work hard and have talent, because they truly do, but it doesn't apply to their wealth.
I think it was a Steve Jobs quote, paraphrase "it's 5% the idea, 95% implementation".
Lots of very intelligent and talented people out there. But when you have the good fortune of coming up with a great idea (Facebook in the mid 00's) you have to use your talent to relentlessly implement it.
This is what separates the plebs from the ultra wealthy. Intelligence + talent + idea + implementation = success
"if hard work was all you needed to get rich, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire".
The clothes I'm wearing right now were probably made by a sweatshop laborer working 12 hours a day under awful conditions, getting paid something like 1% of what I make in my tranquil 7 hour workday sitting comfortably at a computer.
I therefore think that just hard work has an almost zero correlation to success by itself.
If you add in "addressing a valuable market", then yes, hard work helps, in that more effort spent addressing that market will likely yield higher rewards. But working hard on something people don't want will not yield success, in my view.
"The horse was the best worker in the kolkhoz, but never became its chairman". Heck, there is an entirely too depressing to read (but probably mostly correct) theory about how the office politics work [0] and I imagine it roughly translates to the other fields as well. Putting lots of efforts into some random thing most likely won't make you rich and/or powerful. It's putting the effort into becoming rich and powerful that gets you there — but that takes a rather particular personality and skill set.
I'd argue that every billionaire has a talent for persuading capable people to join them on a journey.
Having that skill alone isn't enough because you also need to pick the right journey at the right time, but not having that skill definitely means you won't be a billionaire.
Enormous numbers of humans work hard and are talented at the things they do. Hard work and talent gets you a middle-class existence, at least if you were born in the right country and with the right resources to go to university, etc.
In the case of Zuck, he basically did play a lottery ticket, and a perfect confluence of being in the right place at precisely the right time yielded some success. A million other programmers, working just as hard and just as talented, were trying to make their web app hit at that time and failed.
That's how life is. It is a lottery ticket that Zuck is super rich. And it's a strawman to act as if pointing this out means that hard work and talent don't matter.
And FWIW, the overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy. I am kind of a broken record on this, but I think Meta's entire business is basically the oxycontin of the online world, and that everyone involved should feel absolute shame about the negative value they bring to the world. Non-sociopaths would have felt shame and changed course when they realized they were getting rich on the mentally ill, conspiracies, misinformation, etc.
> The overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy
Bingo. Now good luck getting such message into heads of star-stuck young folks who dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025, when its all about money.
I work in banking, much better job than startup/faangs could offer here in Europe, at least people aren't so naive when joining. Had a discussion with my boss recently and we figured we have around 40% of management visibly falling under various sociopathic definitions. Not requirement per se but certainly helps thrive up there.
Yes, it's totally sensible that someone would setup an experiment to prove a conjecture in a comment thread that will be forgotten in a couple hours. Totally reasonable ask.
I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated.
Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.
from the article you linked, it seems that Zuck told everyone else to gang up on the next hardest player so he could win.
That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said.
Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?
In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.
I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Remarks are Paul's)
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
A less unflattering interpretation might be that once they saw the level of skill required to contribute to a field, they switched to a field that they could more meaningfully contribute to.
I think the reality though is you don't need to be in the top 99.999% to contribute to a field, you just need a unique take/voice. Trying to be the best at anything is a bad strategy in a connected world
Yeah, but these are also about people who are not even starting off at a field. These are teenagers. It really stood out that they can think where they can make most impact in the world at such an young age.
What are you talking about? Our society harasses every teenager to think again and again and give definite answers to exactly that kind of question. It's completely normal and exactly like every other young person.
Huh. I remember being miles ahead of my peers in computer science in high school. When getting to college and finding people most definitely better than I was, I was incredibly excited to finally find such people, not scared away.
in my experience, people who grow up as the biggest fish in a small pond (whether concerning just fields they care about, or in general) are always 99% of the time, one of these two when they end up a middling fish in the big pond: like you, happy to find peers and inspiring exemplars to collaborate with and learn from, or those who hate that they are not the best anymore.
the former group probably leads the healthiest & happiest life fulfillment while pursuing their interests — i'm heavily biased though because i too fall into this category and am proud of this trait.
the latter group consists of people who either spin their wheels real hard and more often than not burn out in their pursuit of being the best, or pivot hard into something else they think they can be the best at (often repeatedly every time they encounter stronger competition) like gates & co, or in rare cases succeed in being the best even in the more competitive environment.
this last .001% are probably people whose egos get so boosted from the positive reinforcement that they become "overcompetitive" and domineering like zuck or elon, and let their egos control their power and resources to suppress competition rather than compete "fairly" ever again.
i think there's a subset of people from both main groups that may move from one into the other based on life experiences, luck, influence of people close to them, maturity, therapy, or simply wanting something different from life after a certain point. i don't have a good model for whether this is most people, or a tiny percentage.
Excuse me for generalizing the point. That's not fair to do just based on these anecdotes. But, I can also understand their perspective.
Paul continued to be a guitar player all his life and hosted jamming sessions in his home. I started with piano very late in my life and not very regular, but I am just happy to join the fun party.
That’s not a common reaction with humans. When people are the best, there’s a huge serotonin rush. Like literally this is measurable in humans.
Serotonin regulates dominance hierarchies and is associated with happiness. It’s so biological in nature that the same effect can be witnessed in lobsters. People or lobsters high in dominance have more serotonin and are generally happier.
Your story is not only anomalous. But it’s anomalous to the point where it’s unrealistic too. I can’t comment on this but if you did not feel the associated come down of serotonin I’m more inclined to say you’re not being honest with yourself more then you’re a biological anomaly. There’s likely enough variation in genetics to produce people like you so I’m not ruling it out.
When I was 18 years old and a new classical guitar student, I was very fortunate to hear the Maestro in concert. I even got to meet him briefly afterward because my music professor had some connection to him.
I was blown away at the time by what was possible and that, even though he was very old at the time and had to be led out onstage by the arm, needed help getting seated, and had the guitar placed in his lap, what he could still play was so far advanced of anyone in my class who were all in attendance.
The temptation (and I have felt this many times since then after hearing various guitarists) could have been "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good." But I'm glad I didn't succumb to that and decided that "I'd rather not sound like anyone else" and still feeling pleasure and accomplishment from playing on my own terms.
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
And to understand that there are people who are much better, to internalize it and change the major also requires some intelligence. I wish I had that insight instead of banging my head against the walls, barely passing while others sailed through and continued to Phd with half my effort.
> In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time.
Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
> Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
There are far, far fewer of these people than you think. Lance Armstrong was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Barry Bonds was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Tom Brady was the best, and he cheated to win anyway.
The thing Tom Brady is accused of (deflating footballs) is scientifically proven to be a result of the ideal gas law. The NFL admitted they had no idea that was a thing when they levied the accusations at him.
Even if you believe the NFL and it was "more probable than not" that he was "generally aware" of a scheme to deflate the balls, let's not pretend that accusation is even in the same universe as what Bonds and Armstrong did
>Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
Apply the phrase to the staff member he lost to, and the situation makes sense. The staff member wants to win the real game (of remaining a high-salary Facebook employee), and will throw an otherwise inconsequential game of Catan to maintain that position's security.
The do anything to win mentality often includes bending the rules where they can. Someone listed some top people in their various sports below but I'd include Lebron too. Dude is the best basketball player the world has ever seen at least when considering longevity but he still flops often to get what he wants even though he doesn't need to to win. He's just going to get every edge.
The game of capitalism is to win by any means necessary. Rigging the game and evading the law is part of game itself. All winners play the game this way.
It's not competition that they like. It's winning.
Competitive athletes expect to lose. They don't want to lose, but there's only one winner (or three podium spots) in any given contest. They turn "not wanting to lose" into their motivation for getting better, still knowing that they are fairly likely to lose. The competition is the point, and when they lose, they are still a little happy if they did better than they did last time.
The people who want to win regardless of the competition, regardless of the rules: we call those people bullies.
>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer
I can recall being this way as a small child. So had I not been disciplined as a child so that I would not be a sore loser, did this blunt something that would have led to my being more "successful"?
I think that while the trait itself is fairly common the ability to bully and pressure everyone around you to give in to this level of petty and demeaning deference is quite rare. You only see it in powerful people because they're the only ones who can actually make people do this.
I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
Money is a potent and addictive hallucinogenic neurotoxin. We have a culture where everything is run by addicts, with predictably disastrous consequences.
The two sour losers I know just refuse to play any game at all. Cooperative games or team games they think are kinda fine though of they are "forced to". They just can't handle being targeted as individuals.
I'm like that and really I have lots of free time because of not playing any competitive games
Downside is I obviously don't use that free time to do anything I'm not already skilled at, like art or music or writing or exercise (except for rock climbing which I manage to not be competitive at)
A few years back (2015ish?) I read a big magazine profile of Michael Jordan in his post-basketball life and I was really surprised by how unhappy he seemed - extraordinarily competitive at everything, even casual games of golf, running up huge gambling debts, etc.
This is a guy who was the most dominant athlete of his generation, arguably the greatest the ever play the game, and yet he can't turn it off, he can't relax and rest on his laurels. The same personality quirks that drove him to win at basketball mean he can't tolerate losing in any arena.
Arguably, to be great at modern sports, you have to be good at multiple unrelated thing (On field strategy, Physical Conditioning, Actually the sport itself, playing politics, doing all of that while listening to coach), either you have that kind of drive to be the best at all of them or you'll just be a good athlete
What a ridiculous video that's reading way too much into a silly 5 second clip.
Bill Gates may be competitive, but this specific event, and the whole idea that it somehow represents a shift, is completely unrelated to the current topic. People have different private and public personas, and even present different personas to different people. This is completely normal, and often the only way to cope with being a celebrity, especially for introverted personality types.
It's only 5 seconds edited down to match your attention span. Exceed it, I suppose, because the fact that personas exist is not the pertinent part, it's the glimpse past BillG's persona to see the compulsive competitive behavior: inventing a chair game, "cheating" at it, and instead of brushing it off as silly fun (which everyone would have accepted) getting increasingly flustered until he walked out of an interview.
Speaking of which, if you watch the (nearly) full interview[1] instead of that 5 second clip, you'll realize that the chair jumping bit had nothing to do with the reason he walked out of that interview. I couldn't find the full version, but you can see that towards the end he gets annoyed at the constant prodding to get him to admit some wrongdoing. The entire segment is made to portray him as some out-of-touch rich guy and tyrant that abuses his employees and competitors. Just poor television all around, more interested in promoting sensationalism for engagement purposes, than showing an honest image of the person. The chair jumping bit is proof of this, given that it's the only thing the public remembers.
Extrapolating that bit to make some grand assumption about his personality is beyond ridiculous.
I'm pretty sure this is the correct and intuitive reason.
In a competition to be 'ever above everything else',
tragically it selects for the most pathologically ruthless behaviour pattern,
be it Musk or Putin.
If there were a contestant even more unscrupulous than you,
he'd take your place.
So, as long as we allow/tolerate obscene wealth, we invariably get this.
And if we try to avoid it the wrong way, we get Stalin.
I know a number of wealthy folks, many of them, actually really decent people. They deserve their wealth, and I have no issues with it. They tend to have somewhat different value systems than I do, but we get along, anyway.
I have learned that one word they pretty much never hear, is "No."
Even the very best of them, gets used to having every whacked-out fever dream their Id squeezes out, treated like God's Word.
People who aren't very good at self-analysis and self-control, can have real problems with it.
We are watching a bunch of very public examples of exactly this, right now.
How wealthy are the wealthy folks you know ? a quant or faang principal engineer making 1.5-2 million/year is wealthy and worked hard to get there (although, luck is still a big part of it) yet they're much closer in wealth than a fast food employee than they are to the super rich. Someone who has accumulated 50 millions of assets is wealthy, yet they'll never afford a super yacht or the lifestyle that billionaires can afford.
the principle engineer may have a lot of money but also still has a job with a boss and thus probably still hears (or know they can potentially hear) "no".
Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful would have a lot of negative psychological pressures that would likely effect all of us in that situation. Personal growth is difficult. Acknowledging negative parts of ourselves is difficult. Many times, we are forced to confront something negative about ourselves because of how it effects our lives and our relationships.
I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.
But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.
It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
In the 1800s in Spain, king Ferdinand VII, was famously keen on playing billiards while being a really bad player. His opponents were known to, not only play badly, but play so that he would get easy positions to shoot.
"Así se las ponían a Fernando VII" is even nowadays a popular -though not that widely used today- expression to tell someone the task in front of them is an easy one nobody can fail.
I think you'll see this kind of thing in many professions. Some doctors, who are highly specialized and highly trained in their field, act like they should automatically be great at skills they barely have experience with, and then get frustrated when they don't immediately excel or when people with less impressive credentials end up being better at something.
My family member who taught flying to hobbyist pilots always said physicians were the most dangerous students because of their "know-it-all" attitude.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.
I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.
There's a frame question in this, and the history of duelling. Is your image, or self-image, in matters of honor or social status more important than your life? Is it secure or insecure to risk your life simply because of an insult? To what extent does "security" in this context boil down to the capacity for violence, rather than anything else?
But duels were instituted primarily to curb vendettas, deadly street brawls, and retaliatory assassinations that aristocrats regularly engaged in. At least with a duel, the violence was limited to one death and a settlement to the honor of all involved. It was in improvement to the situation they were facing at the time.
But the idea of honor itself was a necessity for most of history, when there was no central government to enforce contracts, punish violence, etc. Your reputation was one of the only protections you had. Whether your family was known to exact revenge to those that wronged you or as weak pushovers would affect someone’s decision to kill one of you, steal your things, or make a deal with you and keep everything for themselves.
You had to show that anything someone could gain at your expense would be outweighed by your commitment to take more back in revenge.
It's hard to speak broadly about this I think but since we already are. Military aristocrats like knights were at the least risk among combatants in an armed conflict, being better armed, armored, and more likely to be mounted compared to the levied militias or even professional soldiers, later in the early modern era.
And social norms at the time were to take them hostage and ransom them back to their family or allied higher lord if possible, so their chances of surviving a lost battle were much higher than that of the men they were leading. So even in this context they are already figuring out "ways to address the downsides."
Vs the like, the normal people who would also be called on to die in battle, but then the rest of the time would be living under the capricious and frequently violent rule of these certainly-no-more-than-average-emotionally-secure men with more or less unchecked power over their daily lives.
What we have now developed from what they had then and a lot of the dynamics are quite similar. The violence is more abstract but that's exactly what the current crop of tech billionaires is trying to change.
I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.)
So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.
When someone builds their whole identity around being "the smartest person in the room," any situation that challenges that (even something as trivial as losing a game) can feel like a threat to their entire self-image. It's not just ego, it's almost existential.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
This is very Roman Emperor behavior. Or Chinese Emperor, for that matter. It has pretty much always been the case that power and privilege lets you get away with bad behavior while simultaneously holding your subordinates to onerous standards and/or inflicting punishment on a whim.
Building a court who will steer you away from bad ideas rather than surrounding yourself with yes-men requires active effort, and enough humility to be aware of that risk.
The other constant historical trope is of course the abuse of power for sexual purposes.
Success has a part of skill, and a part of luck. It hurts to be reminded about skill issues.
Board games aren't as simple as time invested. I could spend my whole life studying chess, and some 13yo prodigy will handily beat me blindfolded, while juggling three other boards.
Board games cannot be conquered with wealth or a successful business. Or, rather, they can, but only by pressuring your underlings into letting you win; giving you the feeling you crave.
Naw, the rare super talented 13yo child that excells at such games will have also spend an incredible amount of time learning everything there is about it - leaving very little time to pursuit outside of that discipline to improve themselves.
There is a grain of truth to what you're saying, obviously - as Magnus has proven when he started to enter chess tournaments... Outplaying people with decades more experience. But you're also ignoring that he spend pretty much every waking moment of his thinking life playing chess.
This is the more interesting answer to me because it's a reminder that everyone is playing a different game.
I used to play games to win, but now I play games to maximize the collective enjoyment of playing the game. This shift began with my spouse (who is a very sore loser) but continued with my children. I still let them lose sometimes because I want them to know how to enjoy a losing game, but I (selfishly) want them to enjoy games as much as I do, so that's my focus, and I will play to lose (as non-obviously as possible) frequently.
When I play games against good players now, I notice that I've lost a lot of skill in the kind of strategic ruthlessness required to win. I found this surprising, because playing in a way where you're trying to "fix" the outcomes for other players and modulate the mood of the game based on outcomes still requires a great deal of strategic insight and clever play. I guess the additional attention to the social and emotional dynamics must naturally reduce focus. It's kind of a shame, because you can't maximize enjoyment with a skilled player without being skilled, but I suppose the trade off is that there will always be more unskilled players who can benefit from enjoyment maximizing play than skilled players who will suffer from subpar opponents. Naturally, skilled players are already getting a lot out of the game, or else they wouldn't be playing enough to become skilled.
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies.
Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing.
EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.
>> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
There is a long history of wealthy elites wanting to always win, even at games, and who want to be the center of attention.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had many of the same characteristics seen in today's ultrawealthy elites. When he commanded forces in German military exercises his side was always the side that won because it was his side.
"Wilhelm II's reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire's governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
f you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that.
If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.
It’s more so related to power. Once you’ve acquired enough power, it consumes most people. They don’t like having their power challenged or put in a weakened state. Many of these people are acquiring power via some form or their “genius”. Technical wunderkind, military strategy genius, etc. So that drives their ego. But, they probably know they’re not actually a genius and plenty of people could have done what they did but they got lucky. So they end up getting defensive and insecure when anything challenges their power, risks to expose their genius as a fraud, etc. They’re operating on a mental house of cards and are volatile due to it. For regular people, they seem to be triggered by small things like losing a card game but it’s probably just that, a trigger that unleashed a wave of pent up insecurity.
> If you're wildly successful at something … why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people…
Really rich people aren't any different from the rest of us. You quickly realize that what sets them apart is privilege. You see behaviors in the wealthy that if they were poor they'd be locked up for. "They just let you do it if you're rich" comes to mind.
There is also a feedback effect. Most people are part of groups which aren't strongly selected for moral character, but the rich and powerful become surrounded by people who are after money and power, unless they deliberately manage to avoid that. So some of their bad behaviour is because the availability heuristic tells them that that's how most people behave, and fills them with cynicism and contempt
No one deserves that much more than others. No one believes they don't deserve what they have. People work backwards to justify why they need so much more power, control, and wealth than others. Worse for Zuck b/c his special shares.
The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1 anything pretty early in our journey and stop fixating on comparison and focus on maximizing ourselves.
Most people have to make peace with not being №1, and in doing so, they actually get a shot at real contentment. But when you're at the top, the game never ends. There's always another metric to dominate, another threat to neutralize, another narrative to control.
> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy?
Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure.
I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well.
Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you might get some insight.
Hmm. So highly insecure people have to "win" (however it's defined at the moment) in order to bury their insecurities for the moment, but ultra wealthy individuals 1) have more power, so they can make it so that they win more often, and 2) are noticed more (or at least by a wider circle), so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
>so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
It makes sense, media glamorizes these people and amplifies their actions, and some of the insecure folks crave attention. Look at that one guy who somehow works harder than all of us but is able to tweet all day every day...
It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.
What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways.
Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them.
They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.
I know these types of people, a lot of them, but I am not one of them. I was a student at Harvard, I've dated the daughter of a film studio owner, the daughter of the then-owner of Gucci, I've worked at an Academy Award winning VFX studio, I know celebrities and CEOs, and I married an Academy Award winner. I know these people.
There is a mechanism in high wealth investment circles that seeks very ambitious and simultaneously low self knowledge individuals to invest heavily. They tend to be driven and charismatic in that drive, while being very ignorant of their negative impact on others. Many high net worth individuals see themselves in such youth, and invest in them, their ideas and their drive. They create psychopaths, and celebrate their mistakes as fuel for control of them later. This mechanism I am describing is very powerful, dominating.
Right? I had a sort of respect for the Zuck, same partner for a long time, seems nice to his children, does charity… And then he gets one of those mega yachts and he can’t stand loosing at board games. So disappointing.
Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people.
Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time.
Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.
There is definitely a point where we need to stop assuming that people who are good at building tech companies are, by default, good at _anything_ else.
Imagine being so spineless, so utterly desperate for power, that you’re willing to contort your public persona just to appease a man who made lying a brand. Zuckerberg didn’t just sell out—he gift-wrapped his integrity and hand-delivered it to Cheetolini.
> Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.
It's weird how moments can go from "we were playing a game when.." to "The New York Times is covering a game we played 15 years ago". What I've heard from people who were in the game was that he wanted to go to bed so he was trying to negotiate a quick end to the game. There was a time at a con where I did something similar (i.e. we had to finish, we couldn't just leave the game setup and play later.)
Everything is viewed through a mirror darkly.
"HE FORCED OTHERS TO KNEEL BEFORE HIM, EVEN IN BOARD GAMES!1!" vs. "He wanted to go to bed so made a dickhead comment that would let him both win and sleep." Think back to your 20s, which feels more likely.
Probably have been told their whole lives that they are so smart, clever, and special, that they will (and rightly should) always win. So any loss immediately looks to them like foul play by their opponent(s). Even if it's just a casual game. Anyone telling them otherwise doesn't last long in their orbit. As they gain power, they naturally grow a bubble of sycophants who reinforce their "I always win" beliefs.
There's also no shortage of people willing to tell Zuck and Musk (from a relatively safe distance, like in public here at HN) that they're insecure manbabies born into wealth who don't deserve a fraction of the power they've managed to claw themselves. I suspect that we, and the desire to show us wrong (or at the least spite us) are also part of the equation for why the current crop of billionaires are as they are.
From an Eastern philosophy point of view, low ego with high confidence, is a skill that can be trained. It is also a skill someone can get worst at. That being said, I don't think that Zuck and Musk would have become low ego people without internet criticism, since they are on the completely wrong path.
Here on HN, we're not telling Zuck and Musk anything. We're telling each other things about Zuck and Musk. Zuck and Musk aren't dropping by to find out what we think of them, ever.
Figuratively speaking, we're telling them, since we're saying it loudly in public. You bet they know people are saying it. They might even peek in - we know some of their friends (arguably friends) who do, and Musk is among other things famous for being a bit of a social media addict.
You mean "us jealous poor people who are mad that he is bright and successful".
I've known a few people in the hundreds and millions of dollars in wealth category and that seemed to be their go to response when anyone had to say anything negative about their behaviors.
In the US at least, never underestimate the amount of calvinism and prosperity gospel that has creeped into every facet of our lives.
These guys are sort of like a type of inherited wealth. They created companies at a time where you could go public and have no accountability to a board with power.
When you take a genius and drown them in good fortune… you sometimes get a sense of personal infallibility.
We all have personal quirks which would appear silly if publicly known. But most of us are not billionares, so these quirks do not come to light, or do not seem that strange in ordinary people. "Not wanting to lose at board games" is actually quite a mild personal quirk compared to some of the things I know about myself or about my close friends. I know a guy who spends 20 minutes picking out tomatoes.
I think it's easy to unknowingly surround yourself with yes-men and become insulated from failure. Losing then seems like an exception to the rule, a bug.
That's interesting becasue at least with Zuckerberg, he entered a local bjj tournament under a fake name.
And tbh if you eventually do find yourself against him your going to want the opportunity to say you submitted him. No one's letting him win at a tournament
At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity.
Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.
It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
Louis XIV had a notably insecure childhood, with portions of the nobility were in open rebellion. When he came of age, he set about to make damn sure that they were under his thumb.
But the parallel seems lacking to me: Musk and Zuckerman can't jail recalcitrant managers.
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
That sounds more like a cult than a company.
I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
With the number of people that have been swept up in cults over history the entire idea that "people can just easily leave" doesn't seem to pan out well.
Finding those companies is hard, especially when there's an obvious winner. Hell, I'd have joined facebook (not in hindsight, though) in the early 2000s because the specific challenges they were facing would have been novel. That being said, I'd likely feel terrible for what FB became had I did.
I visited the FB campus ~2015 on the invitation of some former colleagues that worked there. It felt very culty at the time and I left with the vague feeling that I always got when I left the house of my spoiled and over-privileged friend that I had in grade school. How they were working with the scale of data that they had to deal with was very cool, though.
There's lots of talk in the entertainment world, from the long-term famous, about how money and fame tend to be fundamentally warping. Bill Murray said to Pete Davidson that, once it happens, nearly everyone is an asshole for about two years. People fawn all over you; they do things for you. They give you things for free. You can get things normal people can't get. If you're making a few million a year, you have economic power beyond nearly everyone you've ever known. At a certain level, travel is a whim, not a slog through TSA and airport lines. And you lose the ability to deal with pushback of any kind.
The smart ones -- the ones with some capacity for self-awareness -- course-correct. The others don't.
But in Hollywood, one assumes, the bubble is far less perfect than the one around someone like Zuck, whose power over Facebook is absolute and inviolate, and who has money and power beyond almost every other person on the planet. So there's only a very small chance of any course-correction, and thus he stays an asshole, and that assholery extends to insisting that he win at trivial board games.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
All the other comments are about Zuckerberg being an out-of-touch egomaniac, but I think this is a reflection of people.
We want our leaders to be infaliable and we use the stupidest metrics to judge people. Remember how Ed miliband eating a sandwich became a scandal? For every one person that would see losing as not a big deal, there's like ten people that will think "this guy can't win a game of settlers of Catan, and he's running the company???".
I am reminded of that joe rogan clip where he's just in awe of Elon Musk because of his Diablo rankings or something. People feed into the mythology.
It's all stupid and insane, but I don't see how anyone can look at the current state of politics or the stock market and not say that the world is full of crazy things that just run on vibes.
i see it in local politics a lot too, people don't dare to contradict the leaders, who in turn end up believing they are right on everything, it's a sad thing really
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
The modern phenomenon, relative to history in general, is that upsetting an elite doesn't get you immediately killed or sold into slavery. But yes, they have always been like this. Behind every great fortune is a crime, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It’s part of the pathology. So much so it’s violating otherwise core tenets of their culture and customs:
Look, today meritocracy and brutal honesty are absolutes, they’re considered critical, exactly to overcome biases that stand in your way. The Zuck types are 100% believers in this (heck they accelerated it), yet they still need positive affirmations like winning board games.
Most people (especially smart and opportunistic ones) fold because they know winning a private board game means nothing.
It's an old problem. Medieval kings had this problem. One way around it was the fool/jester, who could (within limits) say the things that nobody else was free to say.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very rich allowed them to _get away_ with this behaviour; poor weirdos have more incentive to suppress it because people will only accept it from rich weirdos.
Though the phenomenon of "adult manbaby gets upset when not allowed to win game (especially by his partner)" is _absolutely_ out there, even for non-absurdly-rich people; see any subreddit about relationships for examples.
That phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to men. All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person.
Nah, definitely not exclusive to men, but you do see it more from men. I think possibly at least partially because it _is_ seen as somewhat more socially acceptable from men than from women; the boy who never grew up is viewed more favourably than the girl who ditto.
> All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person
You also need them to think that they'll get away with this behaviour, whether it be just being very rich, or because there is some societal tolerance of Homer Simpson-esque emotionally immature men, or for some other reason.
He should have eaten his own dog food and played the games inside the Metaverse where he could have had the environment ensure his desired outcome. But maybe the Metaverse itself is now a painful reminder of failure.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
I think that successful people tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to "winning" in as many situations as possible. If you accept losing as a part of life and move on, you're not going to be successful, because you don't spend time thinking how you could've won. Of course this looks funny in situations where one cannot win, but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
> but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.
you're getting the order of events backwards. it's not "Become a billionaire, then become a baby who insists they be allowed to win board games". The order is, first you're an entitled, manipulative jackass with absolutely no bottom for unethical behavior and zero tolerance for "losing", then become a billionaire by being so brazenly shitty in all areas of life and getting people to go along with you. Caveat, you have to be a white guy for this to work and it works much better if you already inherited millions from your dad.
As an exercise, apply this rule to all the other billionaires you know.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Deep running narcissism, bordering on sociopathy or psychopathy.
Anyone with a conscience would worry about having the work of your lifetime being used in genocide. Zuck isn't like that. He doesn't care. What he cares is winning at board games.
Given this, I don't want to imagine how much Elon Musk is suffering right now for the bullying he gets and for Tesla, which have higher stakes than a tabletop game.
He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.
IIRC, he borrowed against them for a lot of stuff, including the Twitter acquisition. It's probably why he's freaking out a bit and returning to it. It's also not the first time he's had liquidity problems. Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse. The infamous "refundable deposit" for the car back then that ended up being almost twice as much as promised was essentially an unsecured loan. People were almost out all their money.
Bethany McLean (a journalist that was among the first to start questioning Enron's numbers and wrote the book "the smartest men in the room" on it that also became a documentary) has been following Elon Musk for well over a decade.
She once said "Whenever Elon is lashing out is when he's under enormous stress". Also, he has a large cult of true believers who believe a man who's taken credit for others work as his own all his life. Watch this documentary called "the cult of the dead stock" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Bd6YxifCo ; it's like that x100.
That's not how it works. You can't sell without someone buying from you, and if you're selling everything then buyers will know your stock is worthless and will not exactly be rushing to take you up on the offer, except at whatever severely depressed prices will generate a profit margin from liquidating your assets.
He's much better off propping up the stock with a bit more grifting for as long as that will last and living off loans taken with stocks as the collateral.
One cannot simply sell all of their stock if they own that much.
I don’t think Elon cares about Tesla as a vision anymore, but does he care about being “the richest man in the world” or at least one of them. Absolutely, and TSLA is the reason that’s true.
I’m only part of the way through the book, so have nothing to spoil here. But it’s entertaining. And shocking. The author will relate a scene that’s so absurd that you think “ah, this can’t be true, this is made up for dramatic effect, nobody would act like that” and then you Google it and you realize the absurd thing is totally true and was fully documented at the time. All the author is adding is a perspective from the inside.
I understand why Facebook people might have wanted the book to go away. That their attempt to do so comically backfired and resulted in entirely the opposite effect, well, that’s also pretty much what you’d expect from this crew after reading the book.
It's kind of amazing that people still hit this, really. Like, if you're Facebook's lawyers, how are you not telling them "don't talk about this; anything you say or do will only promote it further"? The lawyers must _know_.
From the lawyer's point of view I guess you're making a risk judgement, presumably they thought the chance of getting a successful court order outweighed the potential increase in press of they happened to fail.
> completely uninterested in the author’s “job pitch”
It's central to the arc of the narrative though. She begins with the idealistic possibilities for Facebook; and now, in a real-life epilogue, is concluding by pulling back the curtain on how horrible these people are. And by extension this company.
She didn't respond, which is fair enough, it's probably not big enough to be interesting to her. But then I got auto-added to her PR mailing list. I didn't ask or consent to be on the PR mailing list (all the page says as of now is "To contact Sarah, please complete the form below"). Seems I was just added because I used the "contact" form.
Auto-adding someone who contacts you to a PR mailing list is a dark pattern. Seems she learned something at Facebook. I found it ironic.
The book is a good read and she also testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee[0], repeating many of the claims from the book under oath. One of the striking things is that it's clear that Mark and several others from Facebook perjured themselves in prior hearings. I expect there will be no consequence for this.
I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything.
Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about "innovation", "growth", and all the buzzwords implemented to make it seem to be the only alternative we have. Any discussion about regulation, breaking down behemoths wielding massive power, betterment of wealth distribution, workers' rights, etc. will attract that mass who are true believers of the dogma.
To undo this will require a whole political ideology from the ground up in the USA where the two parties are just two sides of the same coin, I really cannot see how this can realistically change without a series of major crises, bad enough that people will rise and understand who exactly is fucking them... It's sad to realise there's much more pain to happen before it might spark real change, we are kinda bound to live in the aftermath of the erosion of society brought by "shareholder value"-hegemony.
During the Great Depression the Americans did pull together and demanded from President Roosevelt a social reform. That was called the New Deal Coalition.
This time though the fight will be much harder because even the democrats are so strongly indoctrinated in the "free market" idolatry that they are much closer to the republicans than any true social democratic movement (such as labor unions) that would actually be needed in order to help the American working (and soon ex-middle) class.
These crises are occurring right now so I don’t think it will take multiple generations. The rise of neo-fascism, the climate crisis, and the escalating warmongering toward China - a nuclear power - should be seen as symptoms of a system breaking down because it prioritizes profit over people. Intensification of capitalism’s worst tendencies is the capitalist’s last stand. It’s either going to end in mass destruction or people throwing off their chains.
This is very much what professor Richard Wolff is saying.
What you're witnessing down is the systemic failure and breakdown of a system (capitalism) that is completely out of control and ultimately starts to attack the very institutions that enable it in its greedy search for "growth" (i.e. producing more wealth for the already wealthy).
I haven't listened to the talk but read Mobiot's book when it came out last year :)
On the same vein, I'd recommend "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", and even the original "A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto" by Charles Peters to understand how the term is slippery and diverged a lot from the original manifesto.
And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person. The feeling I have is that all the aftermath from the dogmatic implementation of an unsound ideology has brought much of our contemporary malaise, the allowance of finance to take over the real economy, the productive economy, has just eroded any semblance of a good market-driven society. I'm against that, the supremacy of finance over all other economical activity, it's a cancer that festers on every single big corporation.
>And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person
Also, it is interesting that you feel the need to say you aren't a communist before criticising the current system. I guess that is a sign of just how entrenched it is.
Weirdly, right at the moment the US economy is tanking because of severe departures from market fundamentalism. By the people who most claim to be pro capitalism.
There's no departure from market fundamentalism, the belief in shareholder value being supreme is still very much the current Zeitgeist.
As much as the USA's administration is jerking around with trade, the fundamental principle of what governs any corporation is still market fundamentalism: returning value to shareholders, nothing else.
Shareholders are pretty grumpy right now. They've lost a ton of money.
I'm sure that some economist will asset that this will produce more shareholder value in the long run. But the stock market suggests that shareholders do not currently believe that.
Capitalism is incompatible with free markets. Capitalism means all the wealth goes to those with the most capital, while free markets means the wealth flows freely in all directions.
> Capitalism means all the wealth goes to those with the most capital, while free markets means the wealth flows freely in all directions
I don't understand this distinction, why wouldn't capital accumulate under free markets? The freer the market the more capital accumulates.
In a freer market that today you would have to pay a massive toll every time you went to the grocery store, because the road owner has monopoly on that route, that would lead to much more wealth accumulation.
In economics perfect markets mean that your company that raises spherical cows has no moat against others doing the same. If you do something to gain profits to become rich someone else joins the market to compete those profits down to zero. This reduces inefficiency and makes everyone rich.
Deregulation is sold as getting closer to this, in reality it means the money collects wherever the market breaks down, monopolies, network effects, externalities, concentrated special interests, middlemen, oligarchies, gangsters, landlords etc.
When all of the capital ends up in a small number of hands, the market ceases.
Each capitalist tries to corner the market, but if they succeed, the resulting monopoly isn't a free market. In theory a competitor arises, but it takes only an instant to shut it down and restore the monopoly.
>I don't understand this distinction, why wouldn't capital accumulate under free markets?
It would, which is why businesses support deregulation - not because they believe in vigorous competition for the sake of consumers, but because they want as little friction and consequence standing between themselves and oligarchy as possible.
A market in which the wealth "flows freely in all directions" is socialist, not capitalist. "Fair" markets are regulated, and by definition not free.
To me that is the biggest win in public discourse from capitalists: conflating markets with capitalism, as if free markets could only exist under unbounded capitalism. Which, as you say, is incompatible. Capitalism does not want free markets, nor foster free markets, the best end result for a capitalist is the abolition of a market under the control of a monopoly.
Markets are fundamental, and a natural result of human socioeconomic order. Capitalism not at all.
This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness?
If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?
Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them.
Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.
My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.
It doesn't have anything to do with this though. It has to do with having so much power and money in a "meritocracy" and the mental gymnastics needed to maintain those two opposing propositions.
Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals
Zuckerberg is unusually powerful in the company, due to how it's structured (note that few companies of this sort of size are run by their founders...), and he's unusually unhinged.
I was the TL on a Facebook app feature driven by us, the engineers, that was 100% in the category of "good for humanity and it solves a problem for billions of people". I had to fight internal org leads to launch it, because there was almost no benefit for FB.
Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the feature is. That's when I realized how easy it is to present anything Meta works on through the lens of "stealing people's data" and "ads bad". Oculus headsets? VR ads. Smart glasses? AR ads. Spyware. Facebook app feature? Must have some privacy issue.
I'm not saying it's not deserved, with all the scandals, just that at some point it was getting a bit ridiculous with all the "Facebook bad" articles, at least one of which I knew first-hand was complete nonsense. It did seem like news outlets were grasping at straws to write yet another article to put Facebook in a bad light.
It's low-hanging fear-mongering fruit that gets the clicks and it's hard to disprove (not that PR/Legal would let us refute anything in the first place) because the trust is broken.
It's nice to know that despite playing fast and loose with the facts, the film The Social Network does capture something fundamentally true about Zuckerberg's psychology. The pathological need to dominate can be disguised when you're the underdog, but the more power you accrue the more it becomes the sole motivation. To paraphrase Robert Caro, "power does not corrupt, it reveals."
Compliments to the author of this piece, Cory Doctorow, who I believe coined the useful term "enshittification". He has consistently championed consumer rights (presumably at a significant risk of having powerful people come after him) and lots of other worthwhile causes. And his writing is excellent.
This book probably could have been written about any major company. Our corporate system's built-in moral imperative that profits must be optimized above absolutely everything else virtually guarantees that these kind of people end up at the top of each and every one of them.
I'm responding to TheAceOfHearts, I can't seem to reply directly to the original comment.
The question was "if you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?"
You kind of answered the question yourself. He cares so much because he is successful in something else and has extended that need for success into other areas of his life. It seems this is common among successful people, they try to be successful in everything else in their lives, perhaps not realizing they might have got lucky in one area and are convinced they can apply that to all other areas of their lives.
Then you realize that Facebook has been extraordinarily active banning Palestinian posts and accounts over the last year. So the "casual indifference" is at the very least selectively applied.
Maybe I'm jaded, but this is how I understand all US technology companies to be run. In fact, I'd be surprised if all of those things weren't true for most of the enormous "tech bro" companies coming from SV.
>Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
I do wonder what the point of amassing all that money and power is, if it means you end up grovelling to a despot like Xi (or a would-be despot like Trump).
Just riding that hedonic treadmill, probably. Once you have bought all the properties you want, airplanes, helicopters and yachts, I imagine your hedonic set-point adjusts to that level and you begin to cast about for what's missing. (What's missing of course, is what all these people can't seem to find, which is an unwavering set of human-centred values.)
Once you have several mansions, a helicopter and a super yacht, the only possible reason to want more is for status. And you have to be some sort of sociopath to use that much of the world's resources just have a yacht 5m longer than the other guy.
While her boss continues to sexually harass her? Doesn’t sound like a mistake to me. There’s more to life than money, as the author makes quite clear throughout the book, IMO.
Did she say that she renegotiated her compensation? Because early in the book she wrote that unlike basically everyone else she's working with, she poorly negotiated her comp and that she's working for a regular and unimpressive salary while her coworkers are flashing luxury brands that she can't afford.
I've stopped reading after the Myanmar episode so I don't know if she's ever renegotiated her package.
I don’t find the anecdotes very interesting—people with great power are or turn out to be assholes; sure, what else is new?—but this little gem stood out to me. Not that I’m surprised, just that it’s the first I heard of it:
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
I read the book. It’s something that comes up & happens multiple times, and the potential meetings being described are with various global heads of state.
This requires all of the "source" to be available. For PyTorch and a bunch of other projects, this is trivial as all the source is straight up on GitHub. But for proprietary things like Llama, it's really hard to fork something when you don't even have access to what they used to build it (software-wise, not even thinking about the hardware yet).
How could you fork something like Llama when Meta don't even speak clearly about what data they used, literally none of the training code is available, and you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it?
> you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it
I don’t have experience with this so I’m taking it at face value; if this is true, it’s so strange that I have an idea of this being an “open” model. As in, not that they PR’ed to make people believe it but that people who were required to accept those terms seem to believe it (as users seem to repeat it). Seems a little bit of critical thinking should dispel that notion. Are there any, more reasonably open models? Is LLaMa just called open because it’s the most accessible?
Lets say Meta goes under tomorrow (won't happen, but bear with me) and stops making new Llama releases.
Would the community be able to take over the project and train new models, assuming they have access to the same hardware? Obviously, the community doesn't have access to similar hardware, but even if it did, would the community be able to continue releasing Llama models?
And if the answer to that is no, why is that and how could Llama be considered open source if no one could pick up the torch afterwards (even theoretically), even if they had access to hardware for training?
Its unlikely all the training data for Llama is publicly available, let alone under an open source license. If Llama actually had an open source license (IIRC it doesn't), that would still make it a Toxic Candy model under the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning policy. That means no-one could replicate it exactly, even if they had the boatloads of cash it would take to buy enough hardware and electricity to do the training. Eventually the community could maybe find or create enough data, but that would be a new different model.
There are many things to be said about open-source projects and, more broadly, the capabilities of the open-source community.
The most capable parts are for-profit organizations that release open-source software for their business imperative, public benefit companies that write open-source software for ideological reasons but still operate as businesses, and a tiny number of public benefit organizations with unstable cash flow. Most other efforts are unorganized and plagued by bickering.
Llama itself is challenging to take over. The weights are public, but the training data and process is not. It could be evolved, but not fully iterated by anyone else. For a full iteration, the training process and inputs would need to be replicated, with improvements there.
But could another open-source model, as capable as Llama, be produced? Yes. Just like Meta, other companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have the incentive to create a moat around their AI business by offering a free model to the public, one that's just barely under their commercial model's capabilities. That way, no competitor can organically emerge. After all, who would pay for their product if it's inferior to the open-source one? It's a classic barrier to entry in the market - a thing highly sought after by monopolistic companies.
Public benefit companies leading in privacy could develop a model to run offline for privacy purposes, to avoid mass consumer data harvesting. A new open-source ideological project without a stable business could also, in theory, pop up in the same pattern as the Linux project. But these are like unicorns - "one in a million years (maybe)."
So, to answer your question, yes, Llama weights could be evolved; no, an entirely new version cannot be made outside of Meta. Yes, someone else could create such a wholly new open-source model from scratch, and different open-source groups have different incentives. The most likely incentive is monopolistic, to my mind.
I think you've kind of answered a different question. Yes, more LLM models could be created. But specifically Llama? Since it's an open source model, the assumption is that we could (given access to the same compute of course) train one from scratch ourselves, just like we can build our own binaries of open source software.
But this obviously isn't true for Llama, hence the uncertainty if Llama even is open source in the first place. If we cannot create something ourselves (again, given access to compute), how could it possibly be considered open source by anyone?
I think the fact that all (good) LLM datasets are full with licensed/pirated material means we'll never really see a decent open source model under the strict definition. Open weight + open source code is really the best we're going to get, so I'm fine with it coopting the term open source even if it doesn't fully apply.
> we'll never really see a decent open source model under the strict definition
But there are already a bunch of models like that, were everything (architecture, training data, training scripts, etc) is open, public and transparent. Since you weren't aware those existed since before, but you now know that, are you willing to change your perspective on it?
> so I'm fine with it coopting the term open source even if it doesn't fully apply
It really sucks that the community seems OK with this. I probably wouldn't have been a developer without FOSS, and I don't understand how it can seem OK to rob other people of this opportunity to learn from FOSS projects.
Not all of the community is OK with this, lots of folks are strongly against OSI's bullshit OSAID for example. Really it should have been more like the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning Policy, just like last time when the OSI used the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) to create the Open Source Definition (OSD).
AI models aren't really iterative in the way that other software is. Llama 4 is a completely different product from Llama 3, with different parameter counts and even different modalities. The only reason it gets to be called Llama 4 is that the company that made it is the same and it's convenient to not have to come up with new names all the time, not because there's any sort of continuity with Llama 2.
Fine tunes are the correct analogy to iterative software development—they take the existing code (weights) and improve upon it and modify it—and fine tunes can be produced with what Meta has released.
The bigger problem with Meta's claim that it's open source is that they've attached a bunch of strings to the license that prevent you from using it in a bunch of different ways. It's not open source because it's not open, not because weights aren't source.
> No. You need a research lab, compute time and talent to train LLMs.
Right, but even if you had those, could you actually train a Llama model from scratch? You'd still have a lot of work in front of you, compared to a "regular" open source project where you have everything available already, download the source and hit "compile" and you have it done.
It’s a good memoir and like the author of this review. I too only picked it up because of Mark/Meta’s attempt to suppress the promotion of it. Listened to a couple of chapters on an audiobook service before picking up physical copy and was hooked.
Anyone else notice how losing at simple board games seems scarier to billionaires than losing millions in business? Makes you wonder if it's because they can't control the outcome with money or power...
Trying to get Xi to name his child is both completely tone deaf to the point of being offensive, and incredibly debilitating for his child's self-esteem as just a bargaining chip.
I assumed the word choice was a reference to this line from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Given the way the novel is written, this is intentional understatement.
This is exactly the type of people the cultural purge in big tech came to flush out. Trying to change a multi billion dollar company from the inside is delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective. Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of 100,000+ employees companies, of billions invested in them.
The change is going to be political, regulatory. These companies always can't change until regulation is there, and then they miraculously adapt. If you took big tech money for 7 years you were not part of the solution.
The lengths some people will go to self explain why they were not egotistical is amazing! This is not an expose, everything is well known, this is a books worth of convincing herself she is a good person after all.
I don't understand your "delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective" / "egotistical" point. All of this would apply to people trying to change things from the outside too.
Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of hundreds of millions of US citizens, or billions of people globally, to think you can effect political and regulatory change?
And yet, this is how things change, by people working to change them, from either the inside or the outside. Maybe your point is right that anyone trying to be a change agent is self serving and egotistical. But don't fool yourself that there is some big difference here between internal and external activists.
You are equating "Hard" with impossible. Its impossible to turn a for profit company against itself from the inside, its hard to push for regulatory change.
One system is built to create shareholder value, the other is to create social value. Its like a vegan working in a pig farm for 7 years to change the industry from the inside, at some point you need to ask yourself, is she just whitewashing her time there.
This just isn't true that one thing is hard and the other is impossible. Both things are nearly impossible to a similar degree.
What system is "built ... to create social value"? You mean government?
My friend, I'm sorry, but no. Government is built to wield power. Bending that power toward social value is just as hard as bending a business toward ethical behavior.
I don't think this is about convincing anyone that she's a good person. She's forthright about her instincts and values and the institutions she worked at that fostered her understanding of the world.
She documents in detail critical moments where Facebook executives made decisions that exemplified their incompetence and damaged their potential impact.
That the "cultural purge" in big tech is flushing out people with these instincts is precisely why the industry is flailing and groveling at the feet of power, for they have no internal compass save for growth for growth's sake.
Everyone can see that now laid bare on these pages, and these companies that rely on their user's willingness to exchange details about their personal lives for cheap dopamine hits may find that generosity well run dry.
Speculating about her motives isn't fruitful, because her motives don't matter particularly. It has many upvotes because the information in the book is newsworthy and relevant for a place like HN.
Because it's an interesting and positive review of a popular book about the industry covered by this forum. It would be really weird if an article like this didn't get upvoted here...
Reading an audiobook is reading. As a partially blind person, it is the only way I can read comfortably. I'm not sure how a different word would help. If one was reviewing the audiobook, specifically, they might call it out in order to comment on the narration quality, etc. But if you listened to the book, you've read it.
I don’t agree. Your eyes sending signals to your brain is different than your ears. It is a different way to digest information. People tend to remember 20% of what they hear and only 10% of what they read. While the hearing is greater it doesn’t include the same process of acquiring information. “Listening is reading” is a false generalization just because you were able to gather the same information doesn’t mean you “read” the book. I don’t consider a person in a wheel chair a “walker” but I would go for a “stroll” (roaming) with them.
I look forward to reading the book, but I’m not anti-Zuck.
Individuals can change the world. Groups with ideology can change the world.
This is why many of us are here at HN- for the discussion of ideas and for idealism.
Few want to be supreme jerks that ruin things on a massive scale.
Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
Are things fucked up? Were lives ruined? Sure. We all fuck shit up and ruin lives, some of us more than others. Then we own up to that as much as we can and use what we have left to try to continue doing what we did before to try to make the world a better place.
Who hasn’t ruined a life or two for excessive monetary gain? Surely every person on earth right?
Thanks Zuck for ruining lives, selling out the public to advertising and performing psychological experiments on your users, so this guy could send text across the wire. Something not possible before Facebook apparently.
What a disgustingly ass-kissing take. To pull the Godwin: Hitler built the autobahn, should I thank him for allowing me the thrill of going 200km/h (I need a better car...), sure 17++ million of lives(1) were ruined, but whatever!
And yes your beloved communication medium helped the Burmese commit genocide...
Part A sure, but I can say with some certainty that most people do not ruin lives. It's just hard to have that much influence over other people. If you want to be particularly pessimistic, you might be able to argue that many people ruin their children's lives -- But even that's a stretch.
This is a disappointing take on the state of affairs. The book is trying to say the execs couldn't care less about the harm their platform was causing. This is not about "screwing up" inadvertently. This is about prioritising money over everything else.
Yes, individuals have the power to change the world. Some of them in positive ways and some in horrific ways. By all accounts, Zuck and the top execs at FB firmly belong in the latter category.
The great man theory [1] has been thoroughly debunked at this point. I you feel grateful for old Facebook, do thank the thousand nameless engineers that actually built it, not the single man that took all the credit (and money).
Very few people actively try to be supreme jerks and ruin things, that's very abnormal behaviour for a human being.
It's much more common that your inner narrative keeps finding justifications for why what you are doing is important, and the damage you are causing is either justified or not perceived as so damaging.
The issue is the system we live under doesn't really incentivise moral and ethical behaviour, the rewards to be reaped are much larger if you act immorally, people like Zuck are able to tell themselves what they are doing is ok for "making the world a better place". But there's no reward for making the world a better place, the reward is for you showing revenue growth, user growth, and Zuck chased that even though there was an inflection point where the "good" was outweighed by the "bad".
> Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
All of that could still have existed without all the appendages included to extract more money from the machine. Without creating feeds of content measured by "engagement" to the point it became detrimental to the users themselves, all the good Meta has done could have existed if morals and ethics trumped profit-seeking. And for that I do not thank Zuckerberg, at all, even though I do understand he is also a product of the system, in the end he (and Meta) abused one of the most powerful feelings of humans (connection among each other) to extract as much money as they could without regards to the dangerous side-effects that many pointed out were happening when Facebook was growing, there was no care about anyone, you and I were swindled.
It's unfortunate, I hope you can see that, for all the good provided over years on fostering connections, it was just spoiled in the end by his greed, and carelessness.
We can do better than that, no need to thank Zuckerberg for fucking us over.
After the part where she was giving a birth to her child, while still writing emails and doing work stuff, I take everything she said with a grain of salt. As a father, the way she prioritised work to family through out many years of her work at FB, I find it very repelling and disgusting.
I believe that Zuck&team are slimy greedy spoiled brats, but I could also say few things about her. Which make me wonder what is actual truth, book is very biased.
> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.
You've won the lottery, but you don't want to acknowledge that you won the lottery. You want to feel they you deserve your position through hard work and talent. You're living in a society where people are credulous, to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success.
So what will happen? Everyone you hire ends up patting you on the back, telling you what a great guy you are.
> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success
Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
I do.
108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently.
Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent.
So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many billions? If you're posting on HN you've probably got "success" in that extreme even if you've never applied yourself or excelled in anything of any note.
At school I used to play marbles. I had no skill whatsoever so I did "set ups" where I put a marble down and other kids threw theirs from a standard distance to hit it.
I got "marble rich" because I knew who the good players were and when one came a long I put my foot over my marble. Once you knew the trick it was impossible not to win on average and be a few marbles better off every day.
At a certain point I stopped finding this desirable and felt a bit guilty about it - the marbles were of no use to me really and it was enough to know that I had the trick of succeeding.
I wonder if this is roughly how people get wealthy in real life other than that they don't think "enough".
What they want to believe is that their wealth is in proportion to their hard work and talent. But even ignoring luck, in a "tournament market", rewards are a strongly nonlinear function of inputs. Being no 2 in a market which is a natural monopoly has limited rewards.
You can believe it's positive, but not buy the idea that someone is millions of times more hard working or talented than ordinary people.
The guy who has made billions needs the stronger form of this karma-like idea.
A lot of people seem to think of success as the sum of a bunch of independent variables: positioning + insight + hard work + talent + luck - scruples ... Then, they argue about the relative magnitude of each term.
It's obviously more complex than this, but I think it's more useful to think of it as a product. You don't need a high value in any of them to succeed, but a tiny value in even one means you need an astronomical value somewhere else.
I don't personally know any people who believe that hard work and talent have zero positive correlation with success. However I know many people who believe that parents' socioeconomic status, genetics, luck, birthplace, and lack of scruples are all much more significant factors.
I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.
>Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success?
On average or for a particular person? Maybe on average there’s an effect (r=.4), so there will be many people for whom that correlation is in their individual case actually negative. Some struggle with this notion, and assume success must signal talent or hard work in individual cases. How one defines success matters a lot too. If one is comparing zuck to some random CEO, say collison, can you say zuck is more hardworking or talented? He is more successful on paper, but I doubt he is significantly more hardworking or talented.
My take: "winning the lottery" in a Facebook sense requires a floor of talent and work at the early stages, but the odds of winning don't correlate with how much talent and work exists, nor are continued talent and work required once a critical mass of success has occurred. External factors - being in the right place at the right time, having some cushion of familial wealth, etc - dominate once you're over the floor.
But negative, but success is correlated to success so much that at some point work and talent are irrelevant. Let's say Zuck has an idea to make something. He has enough people around him discussing ideas that he can basically pick one he likes and it's already pre-filtered. Then he can give it to basically anytime he chooses, with arbitrary skills threshold and resource allocation. Then he's got a whole support network to make it work. And if it falls? A loss of a few millions means nothing to him and he can try again.
Every step of that is inaccessible to someone hardworking and talented. So let's say you got lucky once or was born with wealth available to you - you can skip the whole talent and work thing.
I think you can certainly make some of your own luck via hard work, but there is a difference between actually making on your own, and starting on 3rd base.
I agree with you that there is positive correlation.
I also believe those two things are correlated with genetics (and of course environment/upbringing)
I suspect talent and hard work are pretty well correlated with becoming wealthy (say >$10m), but I think you then need a big injection of luck to take you from wealthy to ultra wealthy.
How many are born into it? If I think about the people that I personally know who are worth 8-figures or more they were each born into wealth. I wouldn't ever say that they also don't work hard and have talent, because they truly do, but it doesn't apply to their wealth.
> I suspect talent and hard work are pretty well correlated with becoming wealthy (say >$10m)
Statistically, no.
Nah bro all the poors are just lazy bro /s
I think it was a Steve Jobs quote, paraphrase "it's 5% the idea, 95% implementation".
Lots of very intelligent and talented people out there. But when you have the good fortune of coming up with a great idea (Facebook in the mid 00's) you have to use your talent to relentlessly implement it.
This is what separates the plebs from the ultra wealthy. Intelligence + talent + idea + implementation = success
"if hard work was all you needed to get rich, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire".
The clothes I'm wearing right now were probably made by a sweatshop laborer working 12 hours a day under awful conditions, getting paid something like 1% of what I make in my tranquil 7 hour workday sitting comfortably at a computer.
I therefore think that just hard work has an almost zero correlation to success by itself.
If you add in "addressing a valuable market", then yes, hard work helps, in that more effort spent addressing that market will likely yield higher rewards. But working hard on something people don't want will not yield success, in my view.
"The horse was the best worker in the kolkhoz, but never became its chairman". Heck, there is an entirely too depressing to read (but probably mostly correct) theory about how the office politics work [0] and I imagine it roughly translates to the other fields as well. Putting lots of efforts into some random thing most likely won't make you rich and/or powerful. It's putting the effort into becoming rich and powerful that gets you there — but that takes a rather particular personality and skill set.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I have no idea. What I do know is that there's no degree of hard work or talent that will make me a billionaire.
I'd argue that every billionaire has a talent for persuading capable people to join them on a journey.
Having that skill alone isn't enough because you also need to pick the right journey at the right time, but not having that skill definitely means you won't be a billionaire.
Enormous numbers of humans work hard and are talented at the things they do. Hard work and talent gets you a middle-class existence, at least if you were born in the right country and with the right resources to go to university, etc.
In the case of Zuck, he basically did play a lottery ticket, and a perfect confluence of being in the right place at precisely the right time yielded some success. A million other programmers, working just as hard and just as talented, were trying to make their web app hit at that time and failed.
That's how life is. It is a lottery ticket that Zuck is super rich. And it's a strawman to act as if pointing this out means that hard work and talent don't matter.
And FWIW, the overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy. I am kind of a broken record on this, but I think Meta's entire business is basically the oxycontin of the online world, and that everyone involved should feel absolute shame about the negative value they bring to the world. Non-sociopaths would have felt shame and changed course when they realized they were getting rich on the mentally ill, conspiracies, misinformation, etc.
> The overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy
Bingo. Now good luck getting such message into heads of star-stuck young folks who dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025, when its all about money.
I work in banking, much better job than startup/faangs could offer here in Europe, at least people aren't so naive when joining. Had a discussion with my boss recently and we figured we have around 40% of management visibly falling under various sociopathic definitions. Not requirement per se but certainly helps thrive up there.
> Does anyone actually believe
> I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
Alright, setup an experiment and prove it. Should be easy.
Speculation is free. Can't ever be wrong in the land of uncertainty.
Yes, it's totally sensible that someone would setup an experiment to prove a conjecture in a comment thread that will be forgotten in a couple hours. Totally reasonable ask.
I wish I could upvote you twice.
I was interested in this anecdote about the board games, but it seems like there's at least some dispute about how true or inflated this story is:
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-board-game-c...
I think it's easy to believe a narrative like this about someone generally disliked, but the reality about basically everyone is that we have good moments and bad moments. People that are famous are constantly being watched and evaluated.
Given the inevitability of those bad moments being observed and reported, I don't think it's a good foundation for evaluating someone's character. In this case, it's mostly useful for confirming an already negative point of view.
Sure, one single anecdote doesn't say much.
But at this point it would be hard to say that Zuck is not a toxic individual. Not everyone is toxic.
from the article you linked, it seems that Zuck told everyone else to gang up on the next hardest player so he could win.
That they went along with it is... kind of in line with what Wynn-Williams said. Would they still have all teamed up on Zuck's opponent if Zuck hadn't been their boss?
In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time. It’s a constant compulsion. Even if they might intellectually understand the distinction between “just a game” and “actual serious time”, they don’t “feel” that distinction in their bones. They have no off switch.
I think there are some similar remarks on Bill Gates in another good memoir by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen [1]. Even on his school days, Gates was so sure he will not have a competition on Math, since he was the best at math at his school. When he went to Harvard, (which I somehow remember as Princeton(!) as pointed out by a commenter) and saw people better than him, he changed to applied math from Pure math. (Remarks are Paul's)
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.
Maybe it is a common trait in ambitious people.
Edits: Removed some misremembered information.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Man-Memoir-Cofounder-Microsoft/d...
A less unflattering interpretation might be that once they saw the level of skill required to contribute to a field, they switched to a field that they could more meaningfully contribute to.
I think the reality though is you don't need to be in the top 99.999% to contribute to a field, you just need a unique take/voice. Trying to be the best at anything is a bad strategy in a connected world
Yeah, but these are also about people who are not even starting off at a field. These are teenagers. It really stood out that they can think where they can make most impact in the world at such an young age.
Agreed, it's very impressive. The distribution of capability in the human race is incredible.
What are you talking about? Our society harasses every teenager to think again and again and give definite answers to exactly that kind of question. It's completely normal and exactly like every other young person.
Huh. I remember being miles ahead of my peers in computer science in high school. When getting to college and finding people most definitely better than I was, I was incredibly excited to finally find such people, not scared away.
in my experience, people who grow up as the biggest fish in a small pond (whether concerning just fields they care about, or in general) are always 99% of the time, one of these two when they end up a middling fish in the big pond: like you, happy to find peers and inspiring exemplars to collaborate with and learn from, or those who hate that they are not the best anymore.
the former group probably leads the healthiest & happiest life fulfillment while pursuing their interests — i'm heavily biased though because i too fall into this category and am proud of this trait.
the latter group consists of people who either spin their wheels real hard and more often than not burn out in their pursuit of being the best, or pivot hard into something else they think they can be the best at (often repeatedly every time they encounter stronger competition) like gates & co, or in rare cases succeed in being the best even in the more competitive environment.
this last .001% are probably people whose egos get so boosted from the positive reinforcement that they become "overcompetitive" and domineering like zuck or elon, and let their egos control their power and resources to suppress competition rather than compete "fairly" ever again.
i think there's a subset of people from both main groups that may move from one into the other based on life experiences, luck, influence of people close to them, maturity, therapy, or simply wanting something different from life after a certain point. i don't have a good model for whether this is most people, or a tiny percentage.
well put
Excuse me for generalizing the point. That's not fair to do just based on these anecdotes. But, I can also understand their perspective.
Paul continued to be a guitar player all his life and hosted jamming sessions in his home. I started with piano very late in my life and not very regular, but I am just happy to join the fun party.
That’s not a common reaction with humans. When people are the best, there’s a huge serotonin rush. Like literally this is measurable in humans.
Serotonin regulates dominance hierarchies and is associated with happiness. It’s so biological in nature that the same effect can be witnessed in lobsters. People or lobsters high in dominance have more serotonin and are generally happier.
Your story is not only anomalous. But it’s anomalous to the point where it’s unrealistic too. I can’t comment on this but if you did not feel the associated come down of serotonin I’m more inclined to say you’re not being honest with yourself more then you’re a biological anomaly. There’s likely enough variation in genetics to produce people like you so I’m not ruling it out.
"Oh well, I'm not going to be Andres Segovia, so I guess I will never pick up a guitar."
I think that attitude comes from people who are deeply unhappy. They need therapy.
When I was 18 years old and a new classical guitar student, I was very fortunate to hear the Maestro in concert. I even got to meet him briefly afterward because my music professor had some connection to him.
I was blown away at the time by what was possible and that, even though he was very old at the time and had to be led out onstage by the arm, needed help getting seated, and had the guitar placed in his lap, what he could still play was so far advanced of anyone in my class who were all in attendance.
The temptation (and I have felt this many times since then after hearing various guitarists) could have been "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good." But I'm glad I didn't succumb to that and decided that "I'd rather not sound like anyone else" and still feeling pleasure and accomplishment from playing on my own terms.
I’m pretty sure Gates went to Harvard, not Princeton.
You are right. I should have looked it up.
> I was decent in math and Bill was brilliant, but I spoke from experience at Wazzu. One day I watched a professor cover the black board with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics from the Second Dynasty. It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felta little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.
> For Bill it was different. When I saw him again over Christmas break, he seemed subdued. I asked him about his first semester and he said glumly, “I have a math professor who got his PhD at sixteen.” The course was purely theoretical, and the homework load ranged up to thirty hours a week. Bill put everything into it and got a B. When it came to higher mathematics, he might have been one in a hundred thousand students or better. But there were people who were one in a million or one in ten million, and some of them wound up at Harvard. Bill would never be the smartest guy in that room, and I think that hurt his motivation. He eventually switched his major to applied math.
And to understand that there are people who are much better, to internalize it and change the major also requires some intelligence. I wish I had that insight instead of banging my head against the walls, barely passing while others sailed through and continued to Phd with half my effort.
There’s a very very similar story about Jeff bezos and physics.
https://youtu.be/eFnV6EM-wzY?si=Nc_EqhXEFJVuQWS6
I’m not making this up. Seems like a shared personality trait among these people.
> In order to get into Zuckerberg’s position in the first place, you need to have a highly competitive personality type. And competitive people want to win at EVERYTHING, all the time.
Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
> Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
There are far, far fewer of these people than you think. Lance Armstrong was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Barry Bonds was the best, and he cheated to win anyway. Tom Brady was the best, and he cheated to win anyway.
The thing Tom Brady is accused of (deflating footballs) is scientifically proven to be a result of the ideal gas law. The NFL admitted they had no idea that was a thing when they levied the accusations at him.
Even if you believe the NFL and it was "more probable than not" that he was "generally aware" of a scheme to deflate the balls, let's not pretend that accusation is even in the same universe as what Bonds and Armstrong did
>Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.
Apply the phrase to the staff member he lost to, and the situation makes sense. The staff member wants to win the real game (of remaining a high-salary Facebook employee), and will throw an otherwise inconsequential game of Catan to maintain that position's security.
The do anything to win mentality often includes bending the rules where they can. Someone listed some top people in their various sports below but I'd include Lebron too. Dude is the best basketball player the world has ever seen at least when considering longevity but he still flops often to get what he wants even though he doesn't need to to win. He's just going to get every edge.
In my personal experience the will to win and the willingness to cheat in general correlates.
Some people view rigging the game as a part of a larger game.
Yes, that is a convenient escape hatch for justifying amoral behavior.
There is no real game in the fog of business development. You invent your own and see if it works.
"If you're not cheating, you're not trying."
To be fair, some games effectively to force you to move outside normal set of rules eventually ( ie. Monopoly, when bank money supply dries out ).
The game of capitalism is to win by any means necessary. Rigging the game and evading the law is part of game itself. All winners play the game this way.
It's not competition that they like. It's winning.
Competitive athletes expect to lose. They don't want to lose, but there's only one winner (or three podium spots) in any given contest. They turn "not wanting to lose" into their motivation for getting better, still knowing that they are fairly likely to lose. The competition is the point, and when they lose, they are still a little happy if they did better than they did last time.
The people who want to win regardless of the competition, regardless of the rules: we call those people bullies.
Reminds me of this post[0] from a few weeks ago:
>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer
https://www.hgreer.com/PlayingInTheCreek/
I can recall being this way as a small child. So had I not been disciplined as a child so that I would not be a sore loser, did this blunt something that would have led to my being more "successful"?
I suppose I assumed “choosing your battles” had to be a skill they were also good at. Only 24 hours in a day.
I think that while the trait itself is fairly common the ability to bully and pressure everyone around you to give in to this level of petty and demeaning deference is quite rare. You only see it in powerful people because they're the only ones who can actually make people do this.
I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
Money is a potent and addictive hallucinogenic neurotoxin. We have a culture where everything is run by addicts, with predictably disastrous consequences.
s/money/power
Money is a means to an end.
The two sour losers I know just refuse to play any game at all. Cooperative games or team games they think are kinda fine though of they are "forced to". They just can't handle being targeted as individuals.
Maybe Zuckerberg has a lack of self reflection?
I'm like that and really I have lots of free time because of not playing any competitive games
Downside is I obviously don't use that free time to do anything I'm not already skilled at, like art or music or writing or exercise (except for rock climbing which I manage to not be competitive at)
A few years back (2015ish?) I read a big magazine profile of Michael Jordan in his post-basketball life and I was really surprised by how unhappy he seemed - extraordinarily competitive at everything, even casual games of golf, running up huge gambling debts, etc.
This is a guy who was the most dominant athlete of his generation, arguably the greatest the ever play the game, and yet he can't turn it off, he can't relax and rest on his laurels. The same personality quirks that drove him to win at basketball mean he can't tolerate losing in any arena.
Arguably, to be great at modern sports, you have to be good at multiple unrelated thing (On field strategy, Physical Conditioning, Actually the sport itself, playing politics, doing all of that while listening to coach), either you have that kind of drive to be the best at all of them or you'll just be a good athlete
The Bill Gates Chair Jump is another great example of this.
https://youtu.be/YUGk30Wy8vU?t=175
What a ridiculous video that's reading way too much into a silly 5 second clip.
Bill Gates may be competitive, but this specific event, and the whole idea that it somehow represents a shift, is completely unrelated to the current topic. People have different private and public personas, and even present different personas to different people. This is completely normal, and often the only way to cope with being a celebrity, especially for introverted personality types.
It's only 5 seconds edited down to match your attention span. Exceed it, I suppose, because the fact that personas exist is not the pertinent part, it's the glimpse past BillG's persona to see the compulsive competitive behavior: inventing a chair game, "cheating" at it, and instead of brushing it off as silly fun (which everyone would have accepted) getting increasingly flustered until he walked out of an interview.
Way to assume what my attention span is.
Speaking of which, if you watch the (nearly) full interview[1] instead of that 5 second clip, you'll realize that the chair jumping bit had nothing to do with the reason he walked out of that interview. I couldn't find the full version, but you can see that towards the end he gets annoyed at the constant prodding to get him to admit some wrongdoing. The entire segment is made to portray him as some out-of-touch rich guy and tyrant that abuses his employees and competitors. Just poor television all around, more interested in promoting sensationalism for engagement purposes, than showing an honest image of the person. The chair jumping bit is proof of this, given that it's the only thing the public remembers.
Extrapolating that bit to make some grand assumption about his personality is beyond ridiculous.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgwHIwEwGLQ
I'm pretty sure this is the correct and intuitive reason. In a competition to be 'ever above everything else', tragically it selects for the most pathologically ruthless behaviour pattern, be it Musk or Putin. If there were a contestant even more unscrupulous than you, he'd take your place. So, as long as we allow/tolerate obscene wealth, we invariably get this. And if we try to avoid it the wrong way, we get Stalin.
I know a number of wealthy folks, many of them, actually really decent people. They deserve their wealth, and I have no issues with it. They tend to have somewhat different value systems than I do, but we get along, anyway.
I have learned that one word they pretty much never hear, is "No."
Even the very best of them, gets used to having every whacked-out fever dream their Id squeezes out, treated like God's Word.
People who aren't very good at self-analysis and self-control, can have real problems with it.
We are watching a bunch of very public examples of exactly this, right now.
How wealthy are the wealthy folks you know ? a quant or faang principal engineer making 1.5-2 million/year is wealthy and worked hard to get there (although, luck is still a big part of it) yet they're much closer in wealth than a fast food employee than they are to the super rich. Someone who has accumulated 50 millions of assets is wealthy, yet they'll never afford a super yacht or the lifestyle that billionaires can afford.
the principle engineer may have a lot of money but also still has a job with a boss and thus probably still hears (or know they can potentially hear) "no".
Multi-millionaires (not billionaires), but they are business owners and entertainment exec-type folks.
They own a mansion and a yacht (Bugs Bunny reference).
But you are correct. Different orbit from the ultra-wealthy. They still hang out with plebes like me.
However, if this happens to these folks, then you can bet that it also happens to the next valence level.
Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful would have a lot of negative psychological pressures that would likely effect all of us in that situation. Personal growth is difficult. Acknowledging negative parts of ourselves is difficult. Many times, we are forced to confront something negative about ourselves because of how it effects our lives and our relationships.
I think we have all had that friend at some point that was a poor sport. They were poor losers, gloating winners, and just unpleasant to play games with. Usually that person stops getting invited to game night, or you have a “come to Jesus” talk with them about their behavior. The social pressure of losing friends is a powerful motivator.
But what if that person has an unlimited supply of people that would validate, flatter, and reinforce their bad behavior? When you are thinking about who to hang out with from your unlimited rolodex, you will likely subconsciously lean towards people that make you feel validated, understood, respected, etc. Slowly, by degrees, over years, you could find yourself surrounded by sycophants, where you more and more validated and catered to, and are less and less used to hearing constructive criticism of your behavior.
It reminds me of how highly processed “junk” foods can short circuit a lot of our physiological mechanisms around overeating. Basically unlimited availability of junk food is part of why obesity is has shot up. Being ultra wealthy/famous/powerful is the highly processed food of the psyche. It doesn’t mean every rich person become psychologically unhealthy but it makes the rates of it shoot up.
In the 1800s in Spain, king Ferdinand VII, was famously keen on playing billiards while being a really bad player. His opponents were known to, not only play badly, but play so that he would get easy positions to shoot.
"Así se las ponían a Fernando VII" is even nowadays a popular -though not that widely used today- expression to tell someone the task in front of them is an easy one nobody can fail.
I think you'll see this kind of thing in many professions. Some doctors, who are highly specialized and highly trained in their field, act like they should automatically be great at skills they barely have experience with, and then get frustrated when they don't immediately excel or when people with less impressive credentials end up being better at something.
My family member who taught flying to hobbyist pilots always said physicians were the most dangerous students because of their "know-it-all" attitude.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
Yes. As a kid, I read a legend that one of the Charlemagne's knights got so annoyed for losing a game of chess that he killed his opponent with the chessboard.
> this insecure
I agree that such an event would demonstrate insecurity. I would also argue that past elites were not “that insecure”, because they put their lives at risk by waging wars. Of course, later elites figured out ways to address the downsides.
There's a frame question in this, and the history of duelling. Is your image, or self-image, in matters of honor or social status more important than your life? Is it secure or insecure to risk your life simply because of an insult? To what extent does "security" in this context boil down to the capacity for violence, rather than anything else?
But duels were instituted primarily to curb vendettas, deadly street brawls, and retaliatory assassinations that aristocrats regularly engaged in. At least with a duel, the violence was limited to one death and a settlement to the honor of all involved. It was in improvement to the situation they were facing at the time.
But the idea of honor itself was a necessity for most of history, when there was no central government to enforce contracts, punish violence, etc. Your reputation was one of the only protections you had. Whether your family was known to exact revenge to those that wronged you or as weak pushovers would affect someone’s decision to kill one of you, steal your things, or make a deal with you and keep everything for themselves.
You had to show that anything someone could gain at your expense would be outweighed by your commitment to take more back in revenge.
It's hard to speak broadly about this I think but since we already are. Military aristocrats like knights were at the least risk among combatants in an armed conflict, being better armed, armored, and more likely to be mounted compared to the levied militias or even professional soldiers, later in the early modern era.
And social norms at the time were to take them hostage and ransom them back to their family or allied higher lord if possible, so their chances of surviving a lost battle were much higher than that of the men they were leading. So even in this context they are already figuring out "ways to address the downsides."
Vs the like, the normal people who would also be called on to die in battle, but then the rest of the time would be living under the capricious and frequently violent rule of these certainly-no-more-than-average-emotionally-secure men with more or less unchecked power over their daily lives.
What we have now developed from what they had then and a lot of the dynamics are quite similar. The violence is more abstract but that's exactly what the current crop of tech billionaires is trying to change.
I had a conversation with one of these types. He honestly told me, "I really feel I am superior to most people". He was very frank with me. (And, in the things he did, he was actually much better than most people - he did have great talent but also spend almost all of his time on that.)
So my pet peeve theory is when they feel they are not superior and other people are better than them in activities that involve logical thinking for example, they feel extremely uncomfortable as their perception of themselves gets weaker, hence these strange behaviors.
When someone builds their whole identity around being "the smartest person in the room," any situation that challenges that (even something as trivial as losing a game) can feel like a threat to their entire self-image. It's not just ego, it's almost existential.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
This is very Roman Emperor behavior. Or Chinese Emperor, for that matter. It has pretty much always been the case that power and privilege lets you get away with bad behavior while simultaneously holding your subordinates to onerous standards and/or inflicting punishment on a whim.
Building a court who will steer you away from bad ideas rather than surrounding yourself with yes-men requires active effort, and enough humility to be aware of that risk.
The other constant historical trope is of course the abuse of power for sexual purposes.
Success has a part of skill, and a part of luck. It hurts to be reminded about skill issues.
Board games aren't as simple as time invested. I could spend my whole life studying chess, and some 13yo prodigy will handily beat me blindfolded, while juggling three other boards.
Board games cannot be conquered with wealth or a successful business. Or, rather, they can, but only by pressuring your underlings into letting you win; giving you the feeling you crave.
Naw, the rare super talented 13yo child that excells at such games will have also spend an incredible amount of time learning everything there is about it - leaving very little time to pursuit outside of that discipline to improve themselves.
There is a grain of truth to what you're saying, obviously - as Magnus has proven when he started to enter chess tournaments... Outplaying people with decades more experience. But you're also ignoring that he spend pretty much every waking moment of his thinking life playing chess.
But if you knew people were letting you win, wouldn't that ruin the feeling forever?
It seems like there must be another component, but maybe it is just that simple.
If they let me win, that is since I have power over them.
This is the more interesting answer to me because it's a reminder that everyone is playing a different game.
I used to play games to win, but now I play games to maximize the collective enjoyment of playing the game. This shift began with my spouse (who is a very sore loser) but continued with my children. I still let them lose sometimes because I want them to know how to enjoy a losing game, but I (selfishly) want them to enjoy games as much as I do, so that's my focus, and I will play to lose (as non-obviously as possible) frequently.
When I play games against good players now, I notice that I've lost a lot of skill in the kind of strategic ruthlessness required to win. I found this surprising, because playing in a way where you're trying to "fix" the outcomes for other players and modulate the mood of the game based on outcomes still requires a great deal of strategic insight and clever play. I guess the additional attention to the social and emotional dynamics must naturally reduce focus. It's kind of a shame, because you can't maximize enjoyment with a skilled player without being skilled, but I suppose the trade off is that there will always be more unskilled players who can benefit from enjoyment maximizing play than skilled players who will suffer from subpar opponents. Naturally, skilled players are already getting a lot out of the game, or else they wouldn't be playing enough to become skilled.
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies.
Agreed. I have played some truly awful strategies in games (Azul: Queen’s Garden comes to mind) where it was clear within a round or two that it was doomed to fail; my wife / gaming partner expressed dismay that I was doggedly continuing, but to me, I had to see it through without introducing other variables so that I could definitively know (modulo luck of tile draw) that the strategy sucked. I thoroughly enjoyed losing.
EDIT: if anyone is curious, the strategy was to maximize high-point (5/6) tokens above everything else, eschewing end-round bonuses, brief tactical shifts, etc. Turns out it’s really hard to collect enough sets of them to count at game end, and you’re giving up compounding points along the way.
>> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
There is a long history of wealthy elites wanting to always win, even at games, and who want to be the center of attention.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had many of the same characteristics seen in today's ultrawealthy elites. When he commanded forces in German military exercises his side was always the side that won because it was his side.
"Wilhelm II's reign marked a departure from the more restrained leadership of his predecessors, as he sought to assert direct influence over the German Empire's governance and military affairs. This shift toward a more "personalist" system, where loyalty to the Kaiser outweighed true statesmanship, weakened the effectiveness of German leadership and contributed to its eventual strategic missteps."
Source: https://www.deadcarl.com/p/the-kaiser-and-his-men-civil-mili...
Lots of historical echos in the state of the world today.
f you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Zuck 'earning' another billion probably means nothing to him. I doubt he can even keep count. All of that sense of self-worth that people derive from their career or wealth is lost in the noise of Meta's stock price for him. But winning a board game is tangible. It's right there in front of him, as a direct result of his own actions. He can feel that.
If you couple that with him being surrounded by people who know that losing to him makes him feel good, and that Zuck is more generous when he's happy, you can see why people lose on purpose.
It’s more so related to power. Once you’ve acquired enough power, it consumes most people. They don’t like having their power challenged or put in a weakened state. Many of these people are acquiring power via some form or their “genius”. Technical wunderkind, military strategy genius, etc. So that drives their ego. But, they probably know they’re not actually a genius and plenty of people could have done what they did but they got lucky. So they end up getting defensive and insecure when anything challenges their power, risks to expose their genius as a fraud, etc. They’re operating on a mental house of cards and are volatile due to it. For regular people, they seem to be triggered by small things like losing a card game but it’s probably just that, a trigger that unleashed a wave of pent up insecurity.
> If you're wildly successful at something … why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
> And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people…
I see you answered your own question.
I think it is part nature, part nurture.
To get where they are, they need to be quite smart, competitive, and ruthless.
As soon as they succeed, they become magnets to yes-men and people trying to ride their coat-tails.
So you end up in a position where the majority will ask "how high?" when you tell them to jump, and who will never question you.
Do that for a couple of decades, and something has to change - psychologically. You become condition to it.
>I think it is part nature, part nurture.
Really rich people aren't any different from the rest of us. You quickly realize that what sets them apart is privilege. You see behaviors in the wealthy that if they were poor they'd be locked up for. "They just let you do it if you're rich" comes to mind.
There is also a feedback effect. Most people are part of groups which aren't strongly selected for moral character, but the rich and powerful become surrounded by people who are after money and power, unless they deliberately manage to avoid that. So some of their bad behaviour is because the availability heuristic tells them that that's how most people behave, and fills them with cynicism and contempt
No one deserves that much more than others. No one believes they don't deserve what they have. People work backwards to justify why they need so much more power, control, and wealth than others. Worse for Zuck b/c his special shares.
The ambition/success feedback loop never stops, which is why the folks on top seem somehow less secure and content than the rest of us. Most of us figure out we probably won't be the #1 anything pretty early in our journey and stop fixating on comparison and focus on maximizing ourselves.
Most people have to make peace with not being №1, and in doing so, they actually get a shot at real contentment. But when you're at the top, the game never ends. There's always another metric to dominate, another threat to neutralize, another narrative to control.
> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy?
Who says it's limited to the ultra wealthy? My network has a lot of people who have net worths of under $5-6 million USD and a lot of them are highly insecure.
I've witnessed several of them going out of their way to tear down people who are fitter or more attractive than them as well.
Look at the manbaby actions through that lens and you might get some insight.
Hmm. So highly insecure people have to "win" (however it's defined at the moment) in order to bury their insecurities for the moment, but ultra wealthy individuals 1) have more power, so they can make it so that they win more often, and 2) are noticed more (or at least by a wider circle), so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
>so when they do it, a lot more people pay attention.
It makes sense, media glamorizes these people and amplifies their actions, and some of the insecure folks crave attention. Look at that one guy who somehow works harder than all of us but is able to tweet all day every day...
There’s a podcast I love called Real Dictators.
It looks at loads of dictators from history - Stalin, Hitler, Saddam Hussein.
What they all have in common is a love for loyalty and subservience. And they demand loyalty and subservience be constantly proven. Often in very weird and trivial ways.
Eg. Saddam Hussein liked to have a BBQ where he would cook (but not eat) and make the food inedible spicy. Then he would force his top people to eat it while he laughed at them.
They of course had to keep up the pretence that the food was delicious and pay him lots of compliments.
I think it's less a new phenomenon and more a timeless one - we've just digitized the palace
I know these types of people, a lot of them, but I am not one of them. I was a student at Harvard, I've dated the daughter of a film studio owner, the daughter of the then-owner of Gucci, I've worked at an Academy Award winning VFX studio, I know celebrities and CEOs, and I married an Academy Award winner. I know these people.
There is a mechanism in high wealth investment circles that seeks very ambitious and simultaneously low self knowledge individuals to invest heavily. They tend to be driven and charismatic in that drive, while being very ignorant of their negative impact on others. Many high net worth individuals see themselves in such youth, and invest in them, their ideas and their drive. They create psychopaths, and celebrate their mistakes as fuel for control of them later. This mechanism I am describing is very powerful, dominating.
Right? I had a sort of respect for the Zuck, same partner for a long time, seems nice to his children, does charity… And then he gets one of those mega yachts and he can’t stand loosing at board games. So disappointing.
Surprise surprise, probably the image you had of Zuckerberg was not an intimate look into his personal life but instead a carefully crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people.
Somehow, actual real life details are starting to come out (he does seem more "daring" as of late, might be why), destroying the picture painted by the professionals for all this time.
Celebrity worship really needs to end, including the worship of the celebrity programmer. We're all humans, with a bunch of flaws, and it's easy to forget when what you're consuming is a fake impression of someone.
> crafted image created by an professional agency whose life and blood is creating neat images of famous people
Melon should fire his!
Probably did.
There is definitely a point where we need to stop assuming that people who are good at building tech companies are, by default, good at _anything_ else.
They might be, sure. But we shouldn't assume it.
I'd think the ruining society for profit part would be a red flag.
Imagine being so spineless, so utterly desperate for power, that you’re willing to contort your public persona just to appease a man who made lying a brand. Zuckerberg didn’t just sell out—he gift-wrapped his integrity and hand-delivered it to Cheetolini.
One of my favorite tweets:
> Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day
https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
It’s possible that exact personality trait is what drove them to such success in the first place. Perhaps like an obsession with winning.
It's weird how moments can go from "we were playing a game when.." to "The New York Times is covering a game we played 15 years ago". What I've heard from people who were in the game was that he wanted to go to bed so he was trying to negotiate a quick end to the game. There was a time at a con where I did something similar (i.e. we had to finish, we couldn't just leave the game setup and play later.)
Everything is viewed through a mirror darkly.
"HE FORCED OTHERS TO KNEEL BEFORE HIM, EVEN IN BOARD GAMES!1!" vs. "He wanted to go to bed so made a dickhead comment that would let him both win and sleep." Think back to your 20s, which feels more likely.
Probably have been told their whole lives that they are so smart, clever, and special, that they will (and rightly should) always win. So any loss immediately looks to them like foul play by their opponent(s). Even if it's just a casual game. Anyone telling them otherwise doesn't last long in their orbit. As they gain power, they naturally grow a bubble of sycophants who reinforce their "I always win" beliefs.
There's also no shortage of people willing to tell Zuck and Musk (from a relatively safe distance, like in public here at HN) that they're insecure manbabies born into wealth who don't deserve a fraction of the power they've managed to claw themselves. I suspect that we, and the desire to show us wrong (or at the least spite us) are also part of the equation for why the current crop of billionaires are as they are.
Not that this means we're wrong, exactly.
From an Eastern philosophy point of view, low ego with high confidence, is a skill that can be trained. It is also a skill someone can get worst at. That being said, I don't think that Zuck and Musk would have become low ego people without internet criticism, since they are on the completely wrong path.
For £1M/year after tax, I'd tell Zuck anything he wants to hear from 9 to 5, excluding weekends, bank holidays and 28 days of annual leave.
We all have a price really.
You could make more than that without compromising yourself. Aim higher.
Here on HN, we're not telling Zuck and Musk anything. We're telling each other things about Zuck and Musk. Zuck and Musk aren't dropping by to find out what we think of them, ever.
Figuratively speaking, we're telling them, since we're saying it loudly in public. You bet they know people are saying it. They might even peek in - we know some of their friends (arguably friends) who do, and Musk is among other things famous for being a bit of a social media addict.
You mean "us jealous poor people who are mad that he is bright and successful".
I've known a few people in the hundreds and millions of dollars in wealth category and that seemed to be their go to response when anyone had to say anything negative about their behaviors.
In the US at least, never underestimate the amount of calvinism and prosperity gospel that has creeped into every facet of our lives.
These guys are sort of like a type of inherited wealth. They created companies at a time where you could go public and have no accountability to a board with power.
When you take a genius and drown them in good fortune… you sometimes get a sense of personal infallibility.
We all have personal quirks which would appear silly if publicly known. But most of us are not billionares, so these quirks do not come to light, or do not seem that strange in ordinary people. "Not wanting to lose at board games" is actually quite a mild personal quirk compared to some of the things I know about myself or about my close friends. I know a guy who spends 20 minutes picking out tomatoes.
There is a huge difference between not wanting to lose and getting angry when someone doesn't let you win.
I think it's easy to unknowingly surround yourself with yes-men and become insulated from failure. Losing then seems like an exception to the rule, a bug.
That's interesting becasue at least with Zuckerberg, he entered a local bjj tournament under a fake name.
And tbh if you eventually do find yourself against him your going to want the opportunity to say you submitted him. No one's letting him win at a tournament
At the Versailles court of the Louies there were constant parties and games, gambling and otherwise. It wasn't to bond or for fun, it was to keep the aristocracy too busy to threaten the dictatorship, as well as letting the king exert an immediate influence over them through a borderline insanity.
Infamously the first or second Versailles Louis, I forgot which, got very aggressive around the topic of toilet excretions, basically forcing aristocrats to try and handle being drunk and desperately needing both to piss and stay in his vicinity. The ceremony around the parties and the court in general over time got more and more intricate and maddening, causing the aristocracy to spend more and more resources on getting clothes and drinks and showing up at the right time and doing the right thing and being on top of the fashion of the day.
It would be weird if a late modern corporate dictator didn't apply similar tactics, since they are known to work and didn't come to an end until the guillotines rolled into town. Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
Louis XIV had a notably insecure childhood, with portions of the nobility were in open rebellion. When he came of age, he set about to make damn sure that they were under his thumb.
But the parallel seems lacking to me: Musk and Zuckerman can't jail recalcitrant managers.
>Things like sleepovers in the office, ceremonial games, constant 'after work', oddball demands regarding clothing and behaviour, intimate surveillance and gossiping, and so on.
That sounds more like a cult than a company.
I don't understand why anyone would put up with that, if they had any other alternative. And most people do have alternatives.
With the number of people that have been swept up in cults over history the entire idea that "people can just easily leave" doesn't seem to pan out well.
> I don't understand why anyone would put up with that
To paraphrase McBain's answer to "how do you sleep at night?"
"On top of a pile of money with many beautiful ladies".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO0JaecRWy0
People with the skills to earn lots of money can generally also get well paid jobs at companies not run by sociopaths.
Finding those companies is hard, especially when there's an obvious winner. Hell, I'd have joined facebook (not in hindsight, though) in the early 2000s because the specific challenges they were facing would have been novel. That being said, I'd likely feel terrible for what FB became had I did.
I visited the FB campus ~2015 on the invitation of some former colleagues that worked there. It felt very culty at the time and I left with the vague feeling that I always got when I left the house of my spoiled and over-privileged friend that I had in grade school. How they were working with the scale of data that they had to deal with was very cool, though.
> Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy
It makes a better story in a tell-all memoir?
The game thing is just the tip of the iceberg.
There's lots of talk in the entertainment world, from the long-term famous, about how money and fame tend to be fundamentally warping. Bill Murray said to Pete Davidson that, once it happens, nearly everyone is an asshole for about two years. People fawn all over you; they do things for you. They give you things for free. You can get things normal people can't get. If you're making a few million a year, you have economic power beyond nearly everyone you've ever known. At a certain level, travel is a whim, not a slog through TSA and airport lines. And you lose the ability to deal with pushback of any kind.
The smart ones -- the ones with some capacity for self-awareness -- course-correct. The others don't.
But in Hollywood, one assumes, the bubble is far less perfect than the one around someone like Zuck, whose power over Facebook is absolute and inviolate, and who has money and power beyond almost every other person on the planet. So there's only a very small chance of any course-correction, and thus he stays an asshole, and that assholery extends to insisting that he win at trivial board games.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
All the other comments are about Zuckerberg being an out-of-touch egomaniac, but I think this is a reflection of people.
We want our leaders to be infaliable and we use the stupidest metrics to judge people. Remember how Ed miliband eating a sandwich became a scandal? For every one person that would see losing as not a big deal, there's like ten people that will think "this guy can't win a game of settlers of Catan, and he's running the company???".
I am reminded of that joe rogan clip where he's just in awe of Elon Musk because of his Diablo rankings or something. People feed into the mythology.
It's all stupid and insane, but I don't see how anyone can look at the current state of politics or the stock market and not say that the world is full of crazy things that just run on vibes.
i see it in local politics a lot too, people don't dare to contradict the leaders, who in turn end up believing they are right on everything, it's a sad thing really
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
The modern phenomenon, relative to history in general, is that upsetting an elite doesn't get you immediately killed or sold into slavery. But yes, they have always been like this. Behind every great fortune is a crime, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It’s part of the pathology. So much so it’s violating otherwise core tenets of their culture and customs:
Look, today meritocracy and brutal honesty are absolutes, they’re considered critical, exactly to overcome biases that stand in your way. The Zuck types are 100% believers in this (heck they accelerated it), yet they still need positive affirmations like winning board games.
Most people (especially smart and opportunistic ones) fold because they know winning a private board game means nothing.
It’s a personality trait that leads him to success.
Yes Zuckerberg won the lottery. But at the same time his business acumen and ruthless personality put him in a position to win the lottery.
It's an old problem. Medieval kings had this problem. One way around it was the fool/jester, who could (within limits) say the things that nobody else was free to say.
> Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
I don't think _all_ the superrich _are_ this insecure. Like, the obvious examples of this sort of behaviour are Trump (golf, in particular), Musk (video game nonsense), Zuck (this). But all three of those are very obviously fucked-up, socially maladjusted people in _other_ ways, too. Potentially the issue is more that being very rich allowed them to _get away_ with this behaviour; poor weirdos have more incentive to suppress it because people will only accept it from rich weirdos.
Though the phenomenon of "adult manbaby gets upset when not allowed to win game (especially by his partner)" is _absolutely_ out there, even for non-absurdly-rich people; see any subreddit about relationships for examples.
That phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to men. All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person.
Nah, definitely not exclusive to men, but you do see it more from men. I think possibly at least partially because it _is_ seen as somewhat more socially acceptable from men than from women; the boy who never grew up is viewed more favourably than the girl who ditto.
> All it takes is someone insecure enough to feel that losing a game threatens their sense of worth as a person
You also need them to think that they'll get away with this behaviour, whether it be just being very rich, or because there is some societal tolerance of Homer Simpson-esque emotionally immature men, or for some other reason.
He should have eaten his own dog food and played the games inside the Metaverse where he could have had the environment ensure his desired outcome. But maybe the Metaverse itself is now a painful reminder of failure.
People who have built empires who then surround themselves with Yes Men is probably the strongest indicator they’re about to lose it all
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
I think that successful people tend to be people who pay a lot of attention to "winning" in as many situations as possible. If you accept losing as a part of life and move on, you're not going to be successful, because you don't spend time thinking how you could've won. Of course this looks funny in situations where one cannot win, but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
> but it's really helpful when it comes to fixing your mistakes, allowing you to be successful.
It would be helpful if they'd take a loss as a learning opportunity. But as stated in the original quote they threw a tantrum and accused the opponent of cheating, taking away no lesson to improve the next time around.
you're getting the order of events backwards. it's not "Become a billionaire, then become a baby who insists they be allowed to win board games". The order is, first you're an entitled, manipulative jackass with absolutely no bottom for unethical behavior and zero tolerance for "losing", then become a billionaire by being so brazenly shitty in all areas of life and getting people to go along with you. Caveat, you have to be a white guy for this to work and it works much better if you already inherited millions from your dad.
As an exercise, apply this rule to all the other billionaires you know.
used to be such accusations were grounds to seek satisfaction in a duel.. might be time to revive that practice
Many many many years ago I used to like playing Scrabble (knockoff) on Yahoo Games.
I quit playing completely when my opponent accused me of cheating because I made a high point move and was winning.
First person shooters were like this back before I stopped playing them online.
Get decent and dominate a few rounds? Here's a kick ban, must be cheating. Couldn't be because they keep bunching up.
> If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?
Deep running narcissism, bordering on sociopathy or psychopathy.
Because they are psychopaths and sociopaths.
Anyone with a conscience would worry about having the work of your lifetime being used in genocide. Zuck isn't like that. He doesn't care. What he cares is winning at board games.
Given this, I don't want to imagine how much Elon Musk is suffering right now for the bullying he gets and for Tesla, which have higher stakes than a tabletop game.
And I don't feel bad for it
He doesn't care about Tesla anymore. His president will kill EV subsidies and give them to coal. He never cared about the mission of Tesla, and anyone working at Tesla who still believes in it is a sucker.
So, why is he not selling all his Tesla stocks, then?
IIRC, he borrowed against them for a lot of stuff, including the Twitter acquisition. It's probably why he's freaking out a bit and returning to it. It's also not the first time he's had liquidity problems. Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse. The infamous "refundable deposit" for the car back then that ended up being almost twice as much as promised was essentially an unsecured loan. People were almost out all their money.
Bethany McLean (a journalist that was among the first to start questioning Enron's numbers and wrote the book "the smartest men in the room" on it that also became a documentary) has been following Elon Musk for well over a decade.
She once said "Whenever Elon is lashing out is when he's under enormous stress". Also, he has a large cult of true believers who believe a man who's taken credit for others work as his own all his life. Watch this documentary called "the cult of the dead stock" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Bd6YxifCo ; it's like that x100.
Because as soon as he starts selling them, they'll devaluate immensely
That's not how it works. You can't sell without someone buying from you, and if you're selling everything then buyers will know your stock is worthless and will not exactly be rushing to take you up on the offer, except at whatever severely depressed prices will generate a profit margin from liquidating your assets.
He's much better off propping up the stock with a bit more grifting for as long as that will last and living off loans taken with stocks as the collateral.
I think they don't have to pay the same amount of taxes if they use the stock as collateral for getting loans
Chances are there are some considerations which I don't know about
One cannot simply sell all of their stock if they own that much.
I don’t think Elon cares about Tesla as a vision anymore, but does he care about being “the richest man in the world” or at least one of them. Absolutely, and TSLA is the reason that’s true.
Because he can afford not to, for now.
I’m only part of the way through the book, so have nothing to spoil here. But it’s entertaining. And shocking. The author will relate a scene that’s so absurd that you think “ah, this can’t be true, this is made up for dramatic effect, nobody would act like that” and then you Google it and you realize the absurd thing is totally true and was fully documented at the time. All the author is adding is a perspective from the inside.
I understand why Facebook people might have wanted the book to go away. That their attempt to do so comically backfired and resulted in entirely the opposite effect, well, that’s also pretty much what you’d expect from this crew after reading the book.
It's called the Streisand Effect. :)
It's kind of amazing that people still hit this, really. Like, if you're Facebook's lawyers, how are you not telling them "don't talk about this; anything you say or do will only promote it further"? The lawyers must _know_.
From the lawyer's point of view I guess you're making a risk judgement, presumably they thought the chance of getting a successful court order outweighed the potential increase in press of they happened to fail.
Even if they got a court order (they did get partial bars on publicity AIUI) it would _still make the problem for Facebook worse_, tho.
After reading the article, it seems plausible that they were advised against this and, well... didn’t care.
(Perhaps it’s more accurate to say they did not think it would manifest but that’s not a fun play on words.)
For a company that supposedly runs on data and strategy, they're shockingly bad at anticipating how people will react when they try to bury criticism
What is the thing? (you can rot13 it for spoilers)
It's hardly just one single thing. The book is full of absurd scenes all the way through.
Please tell me exactly when it gets interesting, Im listening to it and completely uninterested in the author’s “job pitch”
> completely uninterested in the author’s “job pitch”
It's central to the arc of the narrative though. She begins with the idealistic possibilities for Facebook; and now, in a real-life epilogue, is concluding by pulling back the curtain on how horrible these people are. And by extension this company.
I used the form on the author of the book's website a few weeks ago to invite her on our books podcast:
https://sarahwynnwilliams.com
She didn't respond, which is fair enough, it's probably not big enough to be interesting to her. But then I got auto-added to her PR mailing list. I didn't ask or consent to be on the PR mailing list (all the page says as of now is "To contact Sarah, please complete the form below"). Seems I was just added because I used the "contact" form.
Auto-adding someone who contacts you to a PR mailing list is a dark pattern. Seems she learned something at Facebook. I found it ironic.
The book is a good read and she also testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee[0], repeating many of the claims from the book under oath. One of the striking things is that it's clear that Mark and several others from Facebook perjured themselves in prior hearings. I expect there will be no consequence for this.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3DAnORfgB8
As long as we have this concentration of wealth in this country we are going to have this selective enforcement of laws based on class lines.
"The big thieves hang the little ones." Czech Proverb
I believe it will take at least a couple of generations after a new political ideology is cemented in the USA to change anything.
Market fundamentalism has been the game since the 80s with Reagan, it was building up to it but Reagan was the watershed moment when it really gripped. You see it everywhere now, here on HN especially, any deviation from the dogma of market fundamentalism is met with the usual retort about "innovation", "growth", and all the buzzwords implemented to make it seem to be the only alternative we have. Any discussion about regulation, breaking down behemoths wielding massive power, betterment of wealth distribution, workers' rights, etc. will attract that mass who are true believers of the dogma.
To undo this will require a whole political ideology from the ground up in the USA where the two parties are just two sides of the same coin, I really cannot see how this can realistically change without a series of major crises, bad enough that people will rise and understand who exactly is fucking them... It's sad to realise there's much more pain to happen before it might spark real change, we are kinda bound to live in the aftermath of the erosion of society brought by "shareholder value"-hegemony.
Not necessarily..
During the Great Depression the Americans did pull together and demanded from President Roosevelt a social reform. That was called the New Deal Coalition.
This time though the fight will be much harder because even the democrats are so strongly indoctrinated in the "free market" idolatry that they are much closer to the republicans than any true social democratic movement (such as labor unions) that would actually be needed in order to help the American working (and soon ex-middle) class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal_coalition
These crises are occurring right now so I don’t think it will take multiple generations. The rise of neo-fascism, the climate crisis, and the escalating warmongering toward China - a nuclear power - should be seen as symptoms of a system breaking down because it prioritizes profit over people. Intensification of capitalism’s worst tendencies is the capitalist’s last stand. It’s either going to end in mass destruction or people throwing off their chains.
This is very much what professor Richard Wolff is saying.
What you're witnessing down is the systemic failure and breakdown of a system (capitalism) that is completely out of control and ultimately starts to attack the very institutions that enable it in its greedy search for "growth" (i.e. producing more wealth for the already wealthy).
The system will eventually collapse.
Recommended video, an interview with Prof Wolff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeWiKOEkfj8
You might find this recent talk on neo-liberalism, by journalist and activist George Monbiot, interesting:
https://shows.acast.com/rhlstp/episodes/rhlstp-book-club-134...
I haven't listened to the talk but read Mobiot's book when it came out last year :)
On the same vein, I'd recommend "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", and even the original "A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto" by Charles Peters to understand how the term is slippery and diverged a lot from the original manifesto.
And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person. The feeling I have is that all the aftermath from the dogmatic implementation of an unsound ideology has brought much of our contemporary malaise, the allowance of finance to take over the real economy, the productive economy, has just eroded any semblance of a good market-driven society. I'm against that, the supremacy of finance over all other economical activity, it's a cancer that festers on every single big corporation.
Amen to that. Thanks for the reading recommendations. However my book backlog is a bit out of control. ;0)
>And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person
Also, it is interesting that you feel the need to say you aren't a communist before criticising the current system. I guess that is a sign of just how entrenched it is.
Weirdly, right at the moment the US economy is tanking because of severe departures from market fundamentalism. By the people who most claim to be pro capitalism.
There's no departure from market fundamentalism, the belief in shareholder value being supreme is still very much the current Zeitgeist.
As much as the USA's administration is jerking around with trade, the fundamental principle of what governs any corporation is still market fundamentalism: returning value to shareholders, nothing else.
Shareholders are pretty grumpy right now. They've lost a ton of money.
I'm sure that some economist will asset that this will produce more shareholder value in the long run. But the stock market suggests that shareholders do not currently believe that.
We might have just exited from the era where shareholders mattered.
Capitalism is incompatible with free markets. Capitalism means all the wealth goes to those with the most capital, while free markets means the wealth flows freely in all directions.
> Capitalism means all the wealth goes to those with the most capital, while free markets means the wealth flows freely in all directions
I don't understand this distinction, why wouldn't capital accumulate under free markets? The freer the market the more capital accumulates.
In a freer market that today you would have to pay a massive toll every time you went to the grocery store, because the road owner has monopoly on that route, that would lead to much more wealth accumulation.
In economics perfect markets mean that your company that raises spherical cows has no moat against others doing the same. If you do something to gain profits to become rich someone else joins the market to compete those profits down to zero. This reduces inefficiency and makes everyone rich.
Deregulation is sold as getting closer to this, in reality it means the money collects wherever the market breaks down, monopolies, network effects, externalities, concentrated special interests, middlemen, oligarchies, gangsters, landlords etc.
When all of the capital ends up in a small number of hands, the market ceases.
Each capitalist tries to corner the market, but if they succeed, the resulting monopoly isn't a free market. In theory a competitor arises, but it takes only an instant to shut it down and restore the monopoly.
>I don't understand this distinction, why wouldn't capital accumulate under free markets?
It would, which is why businesses support deregulation - not because they believe in vigorous competition for the sake of consumers, but because they want as little friction and consequence standing between themselves and oligarchy as possible.
A market in which the wealth "flows freely in all directions" is socialist, not capitalist. "Fair" markets are regulated, and by definition not free.
To me that is the biggest win in public discourse from capitalists: conflating markets with capitalism, as if free markets could only exist under unbounded capitalism. Which, as you say, is incompatible. Capitalism does not want free markets, nor foster free markets, the best end result for a capitalist is the abolition of a market under the control of a monopoly.
Markets are fundamental, and a natural result of human socioeconomic order. Capitalism not at all.
This may be a little naive from my side, but I'm wondering - is every big tech company the same as Meta and it's leadership? Or is there something special, a perfect storm of circumstances that we only hear so much about so many instances of outright - can't even find the right word here - evil, stupidity, brashness?
If we assume that every big (let's say FAANG) company is the same, why we hear about Meta time and time again?
Bias disclaimer: I've worked at multiple FAANGs and Meta isn't one of them, but as with anyone in the industry I've had friends at all of them.
Meta feels very different - both at the top, with Zuckerberg's immunity from the board, full control, and personality "quirks" on public display - but also at the lower levels. Every company has a stable of people who will do what they're told to collect a paycheck but Meta had a much higher ratio of people - including people I know, respect, and consider very smart in other aspects - who bought in to the vision that what the company was doing was good for the world even in a post-2016 world when all of the consequences of social media and Meta's specific actions were fully evident.
My Amazon friends won't defend the bad things Amazon does, my Alphabet friends love to gripe, my Microsoft friends....you get the idea. But my friends at Meta would repeatedly try to defend bad things in a way the others don't.
I think Facebook's core product is inherently evil in a way that other FAANG's core products may not be.
It doesn't have anything to do with this though. It has to do with having so much power and money in a "meritocracy" and the mental gymnastics needed to maintain those two opposing propositions.
Meta's core product is a machine to sell ads, just like YouTube, TikTok, Netflix (now), etc. It's not that unique. And these stories are all over the valley for even much less powerful individuals
Zuckerberg is unusually powerful in the company, due to how it's structured (note that few companies of this sort of size are run by their founders...), and he's unusually unhinged.
Have you heard the stories about Uber?
I haven't. What stories?
I was the TL on a Facebook app feature driven by us, the engineers, that was 100% in the category of "good for humanity and it solves a problem for billions of people". I had to fight internal org leads to launch it, because there was almost no benefit for FB.
Jane leaked the feature and put this entire 'evil Facebook' shade on it, with no real proof, just wildly false speculation based on what she thought the feature is. That's when I realized how easy it is to present anything Meta works on through the lens of "stealing people's data" and "ads bad". Oculus headsets? VR ads. Smart glasses? AR ads. Spyware. Facebook app feature? Must have some privacy issue.
I'm not saying it's not deserved, with all the scandals, just that at some point it was getting a bit ridiculous with all the "Facebook bad" articles, at least one of which I knew first-hand was complete nonsense. It did seem like news outlets were grasping at straws to write yet another article to put Facebook in a bad light.
It's low-hanging fear-mongering fruit that gets the clicks and it's hard to disprove (not that PR/Legal would let us refute anything in the first place) because the trust is broken.
Because Zuckerberg is a worse human being than the senior people in the other FAANG companies.
It's nice to know that despite playing fast and loose with the facts, the film The Social Network does capture something fundamentally true about Zuckerberg's psychology. The pathological need to dominate can be disguised when you're the underdog, but the more power you accrue the more it becomes the sole motivation. To paraphrase Robert Caro, "power does not corrupt, it reveals."
Compliments to the author of this piece, Cory Doctorow, who I believe coined the useful term "enshittification". He has consistently championed consumer rights (presumably at a significant risk of having powerful people come after him) and lots of other worthwhile causes. And his writing is excellent.
Don't mess with a Kiwi I guess :)
That said FB sounds evil not careless.
Evil and careless can be one and the same. They (FB) could not care-less about the consequences of their actions on other peoples' lives.
"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference." - Elie Wiesel
The banality of evil.
This book probably could have been written about any major company. Our corporate system's built-in moral imperative that profits must be optimized above absolutely everything else virtually guarantees that these kind of people end up at the top of each and every one of them.
I'm responding to TheAceOfHearts, I can't seem to reply directly to the original comment.
The question was "if you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game?"
You kind of answered the question yourself. He cares so much because he is successful in something else and has extended that need for success into other areas of his life. It seems this is common among successful people, they try to be successful in everything else in their lives, perhaps not realizing they might have got lucky in one area and are convinced they can apply that to all other areas of their lives.
Zuck begs Xi to name his child? Why would Xi want Zuck to name his child? What a bag of hubris~~
The opposite - Zuck begged Xi to name Zuck's child as a form of flattery.
;) I know but it can be read both ways. Leaning into the ambiguity.
To be fair, Catan really brings out the worse in people, despite it being a friendly Euro game. It's worse than Monopoly in a lot of ways.
I read the book. It’s a very interesting read. A few things stood out ( no spoilers )
- Casual indifference at exec level to atrocities happening because of FB/ Meta.
- Money/power does make you insensitive
- Tech bro view of the world permeates most decisions that Meta takes.
- Casual sexual harassment for women ( follows from the tech bro worldview I guess )
- US centric world view influencing how execs treat world leaders.
All in all worth a read or two!
The casual indifference part really got to me too.
Then you realize that Facebook has been extraordinarily active banning Palestinian posts and accounts over the last year. So the "casual indifference" is at the very least selectively applied.
Maybe I'm jaded, but this is how I understand all US technology companies to be run. In fact, I'd be surprised if all of those things weren't true for most of the enormous "tech bro" companies coming from SV.
There's a reason the Silicon Valley TV show's humor was so biting.
>Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
I do wonder what the point of amassing all that money and power is, if it means you end up grovelling to a despot like Xi (or a would-be despot like Trump).
Just riding that hedonic treadmill, probably. Once you have bought all the properties you want, airplanes, helicopters and yachts, I imagine your hedonic set-point adjusts to that level and you begin to cast about for what's missing. (What's missing of course, is what all these people can't seem to find, which is an unwavering set of human-centred values.)
Once you have several mansions, a helicopter and a super yacht, the only possible reason to want more is for status. And you have to be some sort of sociopath to use that much of the world's resources just have a yacht 5m longer than the other guy.
Its a good book I read it, the only thing that she messed up though is not letting her exec level shares vest and be quiet until then imo :)
While her boss continues to sexually harass her? Doesn’t sound like a mistake to me. There’s more to life than money, as the author makes quite clear throughout the book, IMO.
just the opposite. She put her money where her mouth was and didn't trade her dignity for some cash
Yes correct in some absolute ethical context, but would have been easier to fight with a few hundred million budget to pay for legal fees
Did she say that she renegotiated her compensation? Because early in the book she wrote that unlike basically everyone else she's working with, she poorly negotiated her comp and that she's working for a regular and unimpressive salary while her coworkers are flashing luxury brands that she can't afford.
I've stopped reading after the Myanmar episode so I don't know if she's ever renegotiated her package.
Why does our country continue to exalt people like this? Can we have some compassion up top for once?
I don’t find the anecdotes very interesting—people with great power are or turn out to be assholes; sure, what else is new?—but this little gem stood out to me. Not that I’m surprised, just that it’s the first I heard of it:
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
> "[Zuck] blows key meetings because he refuses to get out of bed before noon."
Is this meant to be taken literally or is it an expression for arrogance?
I read the book. It’s something that comes up & happens multiple times, and the potential meetings being described are with various global heads of state.
Can't see any reason not to take it at face value. It's not a common phrase or expression.
I suddenly now imagine Zuck no differently from some of my unemployed friends.
Whenever these kind of articles pop up, I always think how sad it is that PyTorch, Llama and many widely used opens source projects are tied to Meta.
They are open-source. Shouldn’t we be happy that at least something good comes of that sentient pile of cash?
So get a group of other sympathetic people and fork them.
This is virtually the only place where you have a chance to take power from them by your actions.
"The best way to complain is to create things," and yes that's a poster I got for free back when I worked at Facebook.
> fork them
This requires all of the "source" to be available. For PyTorch and a bunch of other projects, this is trivial as all the source is straight up on GitHub. But for proprietary things like Llama, it's really hard to fork something when you don't even have access to what they used to build it (software-wise, not even thinking about the hardware yet).
How could you fork something like Llama when Meta don't even speak clearly about what data they used, literally none of the training code is available, and you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it?
> you have to agree to terms and conditions before you're "allowed" to do anything with it
I don’t have experience with this so I’m taking it at face value; if this is true, it’s so strange that I have an idea of this being an “open” model. As in, not that they PR’ed to make people believe it but that people who were required to accept those terms seem to believe it (as users seem to repeat it). Seems a little bit of critical thinking should dispel that notion. Are there any, more reasonably open models? Is LLaMa just called open because it’s the most accessible?
Be thankful they are open source at all. See OpenAI for the alternative.
Lets say Meta goes under tomorrow (won't happen, but bear with me) and stops making new Llama releases.
Would the community be able to take over the project and train new models, assuming they have access to the same hardware? Obviously, the community doesn't have access to similar hardware, but even if it did, would the community be able to continue releasing Llama models?
And if the answer to that is no, why is that and how could Llama be considered open source if no one could pick up the torch afterwards (even theoretically), even if they had access to hardware for training?
Its unlikely all the training data for Llama is publicly available, let alone under an open source license. If Llama actually had an open source license (IIRC it doesn't), that would still make it a Toxic Candy model under the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning policy. That means no-one could replicate it exactly, even if they had the boatloads of cash it would take to buy enough hardware and electricity to do the training. Eventually the community could maybe find or create enough data, but that would be a new different model.
https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy
There are many things to be said about open-source projects and, more broadly, the capabilities of the open-source community.
The most capable parts are for-profit organizations that release open-source software for their business imperative, public benefit companies that write open-source software for ideological reasons but still operate as businesses, and a tiny number of public benefit organizations with unstable cash flow. Most other efforts are unorganized and plagued by bickering.
Llama itself is challenging to take over. The weights are public, but the training data and process is not. It could be evolved, but not fully iterated by anyone else. For a full iteration, the training process and inputs would need to be replicated, with improvements there.
But could another open-source model, as capable as Llama, be produced? Yes. Just like Meta, other companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have the incentive to create a moat around their AI business by offering a free model to the public, one that's just barely under their commercial model's capabilities. That way, no competitor can organically emerge. After all, who would pay for their product if it's inferior to the open-source one? It's a classic barrier to entry in the market - a thing highly sought after by monopolistic companies.
Public benefit companies leading in privacy could develop a model to run offline for privacy purposes, to avoid mass consumer data harvesting. A new open-source ideological project without a stable business could also, in theory, pop up in the same pattern as the Linux project. But these are like unicorns - "one in a million years (maybe)."
So, to answer your question, yes, Llama weights could be evolved; no, an entirely new version cannot be made outside of Meta. Yes, someone else could create such a wholly new open-source model from scratch, and different open-source groups have different incentives. The most likely incentive is monopolistic, to my mind.
I think you've kind of answered a different question. Yes, more LLM models could be created. But specifically Llama? Since it's an open source model, the assumption is that we could (given access to the same compute of course) train one from scratch ourselves, just like we can build our own binaries of open source software.
But this obviously isn't true for Llama, hence the uncertainty if Llama even is open source in the first place. If we cannot create something ourselves (again, given access to compute), how could it possibly be considered open source by anyone?
I think the fact that all (good) LLM datasets are full with licensed/pirated material means we'll never really see a decent open source model under the strict definition. Open weight + open source code is really the best we're going to get, so I'm fine with it coopting the term open source even if it doesn't fully apply.
> we'll never really see a decent open source model under the strict definition
But there are already a bunch of models like that, were everything (architecture, training data, training scripts, etc) is open, public and transparent. Since you weren't aware those existed since before, but you now know that, are you willing to change your perspective on it?
> so I'm fine with it coopting the term open source even if it doesn't fully apply
It really sucks that the community seems OK with this. I probably wouldn't have been a developer without FOSS, and I don't understand how it can seem OK to rob other people of this opportunity to learn from FOSS projects.
Not all of the community is OK with this, lots of folks are strongly against OSI's bullshit OSAID for example. Really it should have been more like the Debian Deep Learning Team's Machine Learning Policy, just like last time when the OSI used the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) to create the Open Source Definition (OSD).
https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy
AI models aren't really iterative in the way that other software is. Llama 4 is a completely different product from Llama 3, with different parameter counts and even different modalities. The only reason it gets to be called Llama 4 is that the company that made it is the same and it's convenient to not have to come up with new names all the time, not because there's any sort of continuity with Llama 2.
Fine tunes are the correct analogy to iterative software development—they take the existing code (weights) and improve upon it and modify it—and fine tunes can be produced with what Meta has released.
The bigger problem with Meta's claim that it's open source is that they've attached a bunch of strings to the license that prevent you from using it in a bunch of different ways. It's not open source because it's not open, not because weights aren't source.
No. You need a research lab, compute time and talent to train LLMs.
> No. You need a research lab, compute time and talent to train LLMs.
Right, but even if you had those, could you actually train a Llama model from scratch? You'd still have a lot of work in front of you, compared to a "regular" open source project where you have everything available already, download the source and hit "compile" and you have it done.
And truckloads of data.
It’s a good memoir and like the author of this review. I too only picked it up because of Mark/Meta’s attempt to suppress the promotion of it. Listened to a couple of chapters on an audiobook service before picking up physical copy and was hooked.
How abstract is this book? Are there many examples of things that are relevant at meta today, especially on the web and developer front?
Maybe depends on if by relevant you mean, "I'm working on airflow surface turbulence" vs "am I making a cruise missile?"
Anyone else notice how losing at simple board games seems scarier to billionaires than losing millions in business? Makes you wonder if it's because they can't control the outcome with money or power...
Will definitely read the book after this readout.
Trying to get Xi to name his child is both completely tone deaf to the point of being offensive, and incredibly debilitating for his child's self-esteem as just a bargaining chip.
"Careless" is doing some seriously heavy duty lifting here.
I assumed the word choice was a reference to this line from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Given the way the novel is written, this is intentional understatement.
Yeah, that’s rather the point of the article. They are careless in many ways as the author points out.
This is exactly the type of people the cultural purge in big tech came to flush out. Trying to change a multi billion dollar company from the inside is delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective. Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of 100,000+ employees companies, of billions invested in them.
The change is going to be political, regulatory. These companies always can't change until regulation is there, and then they miraculously adapt. If you took big tech money for 7 years you were not part of the solution.
The lengths some people will go to self explain why they were not egotistical is amazing! This is not an expose, everything is well known, this is a books worth of convincing herself she is a good person after all.
I don't understand your "delusional, self serving, narcissistic and ineffective" / "egotistical" point. All of this would apply to people trying to change things from the outside too.
Who the hell do you think you are in the great machine of hundreds of millions of US citizens, or billions of people globally, to think you can effect political and regulatory change?
And yet, this is how things change, by people working to change them, from either the inside or the outside. Maybe your point is right that anyone trying to be a change agent is self serving and egotistical. But don't fool yourself that there is some big difference here between internal and external activists.
You are equating "Hard" with impossible. Its impossible to turn a for profit company against itself from the inside, its hard to push for regulatory change. One system is built to create shareholder value, the other is to create social value. Its like a vegan working in a pig farm for 7 years to change the industry from the inside, at some point you need to ask yourself, is she just whitewashing her time there.
This just isn't true that one thing is hard and the other is impossible. Both things are nearly impossible to a similar degree.
What system is "built ... to create social value"? You mean government?
My friend, I'm sorry, but no. Government is built to wield power. Bending that power toward social value is just as hard as bending a business toward ethical behavior.
I don't think this is about convincing anyone that she's a good person. She's forthright about her instincts and values and the institutions she worked at that fostered her understanding of the world.
She documents in detail critical moments where Facebook executives made decisions that exemplified their incompetence and damaged their potential impact.
That the "cultural purge" in big tech is flushing out people with these instincts is precisely why the industry is flailing and groveling at the feet of power, for they have no internal compass save for growth for growth's sake.
Everyone can see that now laid bare on these pages, and these companies that rely on their user's willingness to exchange details about their personal lives for cheap dopamine hits may find that generosity well run dry.
Disgruntled ex-employee disparaging their old colleagues and bosses is extremely common, I don't get why this is getting so many upvotes...
Speculating about her motives isn't fruitful, because her motives don't matter particularly. It has many upvotes because the information in the book is newsworthy and relevant for a place like HN.
Because it's an interesting and positive review of a popular book about the industry covered by this forum. It would be really weird if an article like this didn't get upvoted here...
ex-employes can be disgruntled for good reasons
It’s jarring when people refer to having read something and then it turns out they listened to the audiobook.
This is not a jab on this specific blogger but a general thing.
There should be a term for listening to an audiobook that’s not reading but does refer to a book on audio level, or just say you listened to the book.
Reading an audiobook is reading. As a partially blind person, it is the only way I can read comfortably. I'm not sure how a different word would help. If one was reviewing the audiobook, specifically, they might call it out in order to comment on the narration quality, etc. But if you listened to the book, you've read it.
I don’t agree. Your eyes sending signals to your brain is different than your ears. It is a different way to digest information. People tend to remember 20% of what they hear and only 10% of what they read. While the hearing is greater it doesn’t include the same process of acquiring information. “Listening is reading” is a false generalization just because you were able to gather the same information doesn’t mean you “read” the book. I don’t consider a person in a wheel chair a “walker” but I would go for a “stroll” (roaming) with them.
I look forward to reading the book, but I’m not anti-Zuck.
Individuals can change the world. Groups with ideology can change the world.
This is why many of us are here at HN- for the discussion of ideas and for idealism.
Few want to be supreme jerks that ruin things on a massive scale.
Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
Are things fucked up? Were lives ruined? Sure. We all fuck shit up and ruin lives, some of us more than others. Then we own up to that as much as we can and use what we have left to try to continue doing what we did before to try to make the world a better place.
Who hasn’t ruined a life or two for excessive monetary gain? Surely every person on earth right?
Thanks Zuck for ruining lives, selling out the public to advertising and performing psychological experiments on your users, so this guy could send text across the wire. Something not possible before Facebook apparently.
What a disgustingly ass-kissing take. To pull the Godwin: Hitler built the autobahn, should I thank him for allowing me the thrill of going 200km/h (I need a better car...), sure 17++ million of lives(1) were ruined, but whatever!
And yes your beloved communication medium helped the Burmese commit genocide...
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Nazi_Germany
> We all fuck shit up and ruin lives
Part A sure, but I can say with some certainty that most people do not ruin lives. It's just hard to have that much influence over other people. If you want to be particularly pessimistic, you might be able to argue that many people ruin their children's lives -- But even that's a stretch.
This is a disappointing take on the state of affairs. The book is trying to say the execs couldn't care less about the harm their platform was causing. This is not about "screwing up" inadvertently. This is about prioritising money over everything else.
Yes, individuals have the power to change the world. Some of them in positive ways and some in horrific ways. By all accounts, Zuck and the top execs at FB firmly belong in the latter category.
The great man theory [1] has been thoroughly debunked at this point. I you feel grateful for old Facebook, do thank the thousand nameless engineers that actually built it, not the single man that took all the credit (and money).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory
Where is it “thoroughly debunked” in that link?
Very few people actively try to be supreme jerks and ruin things, that's very abnormal behaviour for a human being.
It's much more common that your inner narrative keeps finding justifications for why what you are doing is important, and the damage you are causing is either justified or not perceived as so damaging.
The issue is the system we live under doesn't really incentivise moral and ethical behaviour, the rewards to be reaped are much larger if you act immorally, people like Zuck are able to tell themselves what they are doing is ok for "making the world a better place". But there's no reward for making the world a better place, the reward is for you showing revenue growth, user growth, and Zuck chased that even though there was an inflection point where the "good" was outweighed by the "bad".
> Zuck, if you’re reading this- thanks for being part of the thing that allowed me to continue communication with my friends when they weren’t nearby, and thanks for continuing to provide that for my children.
All of that could still have existed without all the appendages included to extract more money from the machine. Without creating feeds of content measured by "engagement" to the point it became detrimental to the users themselves, all the good Meta has done could have existed if morals and ethics trumped profit-seeking. And for that I do not thank Zuckerberg, at all, even though I do understand he is also a product of the system, in the end he (and Meta) abused one of the most powerful feelings of humans (connection among each other) to extract as much money as they could without regards to the dangerous side-effects that many pointed out were happening when Facebook was growing, there was no care about anyone, you and I were swindled.
It's unfortunate, I hope you can see that, for all the good provided over years on fostering connections, it was just spoiled in the end by his greed, and carelessness.
We can do better than that, no need to thank Zuckerberg for fucking us over.
I read the book.
After the part where she was giving a birth to her child, while still writing emails and doing work stuff, I take everything she said with a grain of salt. As a father, the way she prioritised work to family through out many years of her work at FB, I find it very repelling and disgusting.
I believe that Zuck&team are slimy greedy spoiled brats, but I could also say few things about her. Which make me wonder what is actual truth, book is very biased.