from Hacker News

The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me

by 1PlayerOne on 7/7/23, 2:41 PM with 13 comments

• by rapjr9 on 7/7/23, 4:04 PM

  From the article: "Unfortunately, however, these people have enough money to do serious damage."

  Having money does not make anyone fit to change anything outside their business. Maybe there need to be limits set on what can be done with money, government approval of business plans for example, or limits on how much cash can be spent in some area the wealthy person has no understanding of. If someone makes a fortune selling cat food they should not be able to use that money to lobby for rule changes in medicine or to buy their way into running hospitals. Even the business experience side of things is NOT generalizable. There needs to be a requirement of knowledge and experience as a barrier to entry to spending huge amounts of money. Otherwise wealthy people will just fuck things up because then can. An airplane pilot needs training to fly a plane, training for the wealthy should be required to alter an economy.

• by edbaskerville on 7/7/23, 3:39 PM

  It's not just the ones at the top, it's a strong subculture within the industry, built perhaps on valuing certain personality traits that to some extent may correlate with certain kinds of effectiveness.

  I immediately think of HN comments from the recent news about this week being off-the-charts hot, the way a disturbing number of people people seized on technical errors in the popular reporting (the Earth was obviously hotter at points in the distant past; the estimates were "just a computer model"), and jumped straight to, as Krugman puts it, reflexive contrarianism, the notion that the climate scientists must be wrong or corrupt and my gut-instinct priors are correct because I see myself as very smart.

• by greenhearth on 7/7/23, 4:16 PM

  There must be a different brain chemistry at work. Maybe increased levels of comfort and elevated pack status from the freedom of social transactions does this. I never understood why a lot of these fuckers don't just go away and leave everyone else alone when they made enough money for themselves to not worry about money. But I have come to realize that it doesn't work like this at all and there comes a profound change, most likely biochemical that promotes these drives.

• by 1PlayerOne on 7/7/23, 2:44 PM

  Listening to Lex Fridman's podcast with tech bros and billionaires, kind of easy to see what Paul Krugman is talking about.

• by jasonvorhe on 7/7/23, 3:49 PM

  What I don't get about this whole COVID conspiracy thing: If there's no Graphene Oxide in there, why don't some anti-conspiracy people just grab a camera while testing the blood of various volunteer vaxxed/non-vaxxed people, compare it under a microscope and show the results? Because that's what the conspiracy people are doing and they're all finding traces of what looks like graphene oxide based on existing papers about GO.

  If the vaccines are fine, they won't find anything. If there was just one conspiracy person showing what looks like graphene oxide that even reacts to electromagnetic currents under the microscope I'd say they're obviously just looking to cause confusion but I've seen so many videos from different people and doctors showing similar effects in the blood of vaxxed people that I find it irritating that no one is even attempting to debunk them.