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>[. . .] the Dorr brothers simply seek “to stir the pot and make as much animosity as they can, and then raise money off that animosity. I am fascinated by peo

• ModernMech 7y ago
  Some people have a nonexistent or weak conscience. We call them psychopaths and sociopaths. They are not all bloodthirsty ax murderers as portrayed by Hollywood.
  • Ididntdothis 7y ago
    That’s a very good trait to have success in business.
    • ModernMech 7y ago
      I linked to this in another thread today. Relevant even more here: https://www.psychology.org.au/news/media_releases/13September2016/Brooks/ https://www.psychology.org.au/news/media_releases/13Septembe... "One study of 261 corporate professionals in the supply chain management industry showed extremely high prevalence rates of psychopathy, with 21% of participants found to have clinically significant levels of psychopathic traits - a figure comparable to prison populations."
      • christkv 7y ago
        So there is a 21% chance according to that study that Tim Cook is a psychopath :)
        • bryanrasmussen 7y ago
          Are you sure that having significant psychopathic traits is the same as being a psychopath?
          • tekdude 7y ago
            That is how the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) works. Psychologists identify people exhibiting similar disordered behavior, then they extrapolate underlying traits that are likely related to that disorder. The disorder and the traits get published in the DSM, with the guidelines of, "Subjects who exhibit N of these traits can be designated a psychopath."
      • dchyrdvh 7y ago
        The goal of business is to undermine competitors. It's hard to imagine a good person with such mindset.
        • battery_cowboy 7y ago
          The goal used to be too provide a good or service that people need and exchange them for a fair price so you can survive. Now, business has been turned into a way to fuck other people over so you can get more resources than you'll need for 1000 lifetimes.
          • dchyrdvh 7y ago
            The goal has ever been making as much as possible while giving as little as possible. That's how it's been since humans developed ego. You're describing business between post-ego humans also known as saints. We don't have many of those yet.
    • Animats 7y ago
      Yes, unfortunately. See "Assholes, a Theory", by Aaron James, a serious book on this topic.
      • seppin 7y ago
        A good businessperson only makes a sale if the person on the other end will come back for more.
        • sigkill 7y ago
          Unless of course, you can drown it out by sheer volume of sales.
          • seppin 7y ago
            The traveling huckster model breaks down eventually too, there's only so many people you can scam. Also, that life isn't a good one.
            • yellow_postit 7y ago
              At internet scale though you can get pretty far and if a new huckster is born every minute then it’s a revolving door of trolling. State sponsored money can’t hurt either.
        • NortySpock 7y ago
          But only if repeat business is relatively frequent. This isn't particularly true for durable goods sellers or people who sell one-off things. Is the car salesman ever going to see you again? Is the realtor ever going to see you again? Is the mattress store salesman ever going to see you again? Is the artist who sells you band merch or paintings going to see you again? Probably not.
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
        • abawany 7y ago
    • KarlKemp 7y ago
      It's not. Good businesses thrive with their customers/employees/other stakeholders. You're thinking of slavers, or the mafia.
      • Ididntdothis 7y ago
        Read biographies of famous business people. You will find them full of stories where they act in a very cruel manner if it benefits them.
• procgen 7y ago
  Sociopathy.
• Animats 7y ago
  There have been jerks like that for a long time, back at least to the Roman Empire. The difference today is that the Internet's combination of scale and anonymity makes it possible for minor players to pretend to be a large movement. It used to require ownership of a newspaper or a radio station to pull this off.
  • rconti 7y ago
    And because social media platforms incentivize controversial opinions that get lots of engagement, even if most of it is disagreement. Twitter's particularly bad for this because of it's default-public-broadcast nature, but you'll see this in public Facebook posts as well. (eg, I have a friend who is a state-level politician, and I made the mistake of reading the comments in one of his posts, and they're all sub-human trolls. You know; you look at the profile and there's no content. Just 'evocative images' like stylized pictures of the constitution and the US flag, but no original content, no grandkids pictures, etc).
    • dvtrn 7y ago
      And because social media platforms incentivize controversial opinions that get lots of engagement, even if most of it is disagreement. IMO this puts the carriage before the horse: the platforms incentivize engagement, sans enough social pressure to actually tackle it, the platform seems not to care much what that engagement looks like, and this is what we get.
      • rconti 7y ago
        I agree, and I used to make this same technology-neutral point, but I figure we might as well call a spade a spade at this point, since it's obvious what we get.
  • chatmasta 7y ago
    Re: Roman Empire, here’s a nice list of graffiti from Roman bathrooms: https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...
• jedberg 7y ago
  Some people measure their worth and the worth of others based on their bank accounts. They want to increase their self worth relative to others, which means making their bank account bigger.
• wyldfire 7y ago
  > Even if you believe in gun rights to the extreme, being purposefully combative, negative, divisive, and awful just to make money is not a great look. From what I've read on this page and others, they raise money not necessarily for personal wealth's sake but instead to further their cause. "Give us money because this latest news report says they are coming over to your house tomorrow morning to take your guns." It seems in line with other cable entertainment ("news") sources who hold sessions to discuss the latest "sky is falling" policy proposals from lawmakers whose ideology they oppose.
  • oldsklgdfth 7y ago
    Both create information glut. So much content so rapidly that you cannot properly process. If it passes the sniff test (which is usually underpinned by personal experiences, preferences and biases) and falls in line with your intuition it's one more thing that you "know" withou understanding. Similar to strange danger, the true disinformation is the subtle inaccurate "facts" we allow ourselves to believe.
  • SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    > Give us money because this latest news report says they are coming over to your house tomorrow morning to take your guns." Here is the thing about that. You can’t use that as “crazy” anymore. This presidential cycle a candidate stood up and said “hell yes we’re coming to take your [most popular rifles in America]”, it was met with studio applause and not one single candidate interjected with a “hey now wait”. Biden was the “most critical” saying he wasn’t sure that would be constitutional but then also said the guy that made the statement would be his chosen “gun tzar”. The New Jersey NICS (background check system) was off for weeks because of Covid19. Meaning it was ENTIRELY illegal to buy / sell / trade a firearm in the entire state. This is the system they want for the whole county. The Gov and legislature in VA just publicly floated using the National Guard to carry out their gun ban proposal. So... I don’t have a stated position on the topic, but that example of “look how crazy these people are! They think people are trying to do exactly what they say!” Isn’t a good one.
    • frockington1 7y ago
• lilyball 7y ago
  Because society rewards them for it.
• seppin 7y ago
  They share the same mentality that every criminal has always held to justify their crimes, "it's a bad world and i'm just part of it". Trump says the same thing often, too.
• oldsklgdfth 7y ago
  Troll level one million! I have a couple of friends that are trolls(they call themselves that). They frequent Facebook and they make silly comments are try to rile people up, because....well i guess they're bored. They take pride in being banned from Facebook so shock humor. They are pretty funny. Why is this relevant? What I have learned from them is that high-speed internet is conducive to trolling at all levels. Facebook users want comments and reactions, so their post do just that. Large sites want clicks and attention, so their content does just that. A deep multifaceted conversation is boring and difficult to do. And above all else does not give you the same satisfaction as emotional content. The internet is an emotional medium, not a rational one. I treat it that way. To learn more on this check out neil portman, specifically his book "amusing ourselves to death". I try to remind myself that things on the internet could very well have been produced by an angry techsavvy teenager, rather than to attribute any authority to it.
  • dboreham 7y ago
    Something I've noticed, and fallen victim to in recent weeks, is that FB will often display in my feed a post by a news site (for me, they're usually NPR, CNBC or the local TV station), and underneath they'll display exactly _one_ comment. That one comment is almost always something insane (no more serious than the flu, they're counting all dead people not just dead from the virus, you get the picture). But when I open the story to view all comments, there are hundreds of not-insane ones. In fact it is often impossible to find the "featured" comment if I wanted to reply since there are so many others. I get the distinct impression that FB has an algorithm that promotes disinformation comments in order to....well I assume in order to make more money somehow. I've had to train myself to read the news stories (which are useful to me) but brain-skip over the featured comment.
    • oldsklgdfth 7y ago
      That's probably my buddy, don't bite ;) I would argue the case that facebook is not malicious and promote disinformation. If their algorithm promotes comments that get lots of emojis and responses you would see the same behavior. I see it in many forums, the top comments are usually controversial. Now add to that fact that all sites rely on web traffic to make money and you get a systems of incentives that breeds discontent and divisiveness. On top of all that high speed visual medium, such as the internet, produce an emotional response with little time to rationally process information.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• grecy 7y ago
  People have been making billions for decades by wilfully destroying the planet, or exploiting third world populations. This is nothing new, it's just hitting closer to home than you're used to.
• inscionent 7y ago
  Rules of Acquisition 34: War is good for business. 35: Peace is good for business.
  • saagarjha 7y ago
    I would not use those rule numbers.
    • wtallis 7y ago
      It's a Star Trek reference: https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Ferengi_Rules_of_Acquisition https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Ferengi_Rules_of_Acquisi...
      • saagarjha 7y ago
        I guess I’ve been exposed to the wrong things…
• losteric 7y ago
  For some people, I think it's away of dealing with feeling isolated and alone... hurting others makes them feel better, less alone, in their unhappiness. Also probably scratches an itch for ignorant/powerless sociopaths.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• dmos62 7y ago
  There can be a wider sense to being destructive. Example mindset: if we as a society have too much inertia to steer away from tragedy, it's better to hasten its arrival, rather than slow it, because the later it comes, the more destructive it will be. Constructive destruction. In that vein, populism is good, identity politics is good, culture of greed is good, growing inequality is good, etc. I don't share that viewpoint, but, I do think that many of these destructive trends are an unconscious civilization-level self-regulation, which has the purpose of dropping inertia by gradually destroying self.
  • castratikron 7y ago
    So basically their answer to the trolley problem is to flip the switch and have it run over one person instead of five. It only makes sense to act that way if you absolutely know a tragedy will occur. Of course, in the real world, the future is not so certain. You can't know for sure if the damage you do in the short term is any less than the damage that would have happened.
    • dmos62 7y ago
      I think there's a fair amount of people who think that status quo is untenable. That, and a sense of overwhelming inertia is all it takes.
  • phs318u 7y ago
    Sounds like self-serving, "ends justify the means" bullshit to me.
    • dmos62 7y ago
      Like a villain in a movie, right? Where you're setup to despise him, but also sympathize with him just a bit. I think that people who are genuinely destructive might have rationalizations about why they're doing what they're doing, but the rationalization is just a distraction. Ultimately they don't really know, because it's bigger than them.
    • crocodiletears 7y ago
• viklove 7y ago
  It's just common sense in a system of capitalism. When you have people like Adam Neumann, Martin Shkreli, etc. getting filthy rich off of their non-existent consciences, then it's only natural that you'll have smaller fish like this trying to do the same. Most of them don't even end up in prison.
• TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Well - this is basically the Twitter and Facebook business model. It's just that they're wilfully curating and disseminating the bullshit for profit instead of creating it. And even that is just a reinvention of the old tabloid business model, but with better analytics and slightly more ass covering - especially on FB, which can't quite decide if it should remove this traffic for moral reasons, or optimise its algos for the user engagement it generates. The troll business has always been toxic and poisonous, but now it's far more concentrated. Without social media and the more insane elements in the MSM, trolls would be limited to mad little mail order operations and micro-niche lecture tours of mostly empty church halls.
• u801e 7y ago
  > Being purposefully combative, negative, divisive, and awful just to make money is not a great look. How? Why? Why do people do these things? I actually came across a BBC article[1] several weeks ago that examined the motivations behind one of the sources of fake news. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_godfather_of_fake_news https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_godfather_of...
• hliyan 7y ago
  My theory: a certain percentage of people have a lower than average empathetic response, usually by birth, but sometimes also by repeated exposure to mistreatment/neglect at a young age. These indivduals probably played an evolutionary role in human tribes (perhaps something similar to those "soldier" ants in some ant colonies). But the scale and connectedness of modern society allows such individuals to expand their influence in ways that were not possible in prehisotric societies. And so they go ahead and do it. I don't believe they have any problems sleeping at night or looking at themselves in the mirror. Those circuits in their brains either don't function or are heavily attenuated.
• 55555 7y ago
  They want money and aren't as socialized as you.
• DaniloDias 7y ago
  Americans are busy. The only reliable way to get attention is to be pithy and controversial. This is how politics on both sides has been working for the last 30 years. They do it because the other side is fighting the same dirty way, and if they don’t respond in kind, they will lose something they value.
• dwd 7y ago
  Follow the money? Alex Jones for example sets himself up to profit from the conspiracy theories he pushes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2018/08/16/alex-jones-top-10-health-claims-and-why-they-are-wrong/#237de4613e7f https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2018/08/16/alex-jones-...
• chadlavi 7y ago
  Sociopathy?
• Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  They're basically the kind of people who would be picked up in secret by the FBI/CIA and co in the Cold War for inciting unrest and instability, because who would benefit from a sweeping pandemic in the US and consequent instability? Superficially, it'd be the gun sellers, because more individuality and chaos means more people will want to "protect" themselves. But beyond that, internationally there's foreign nations that can benefit from the US being disorganized. It means they can buy in / loan out financial dependency (e.g. China building ports and infrastructure in Africa which they will gain full ownership of if they can't pay off the loans), which leads to control and an advantage in e.g. trade deals. Plus if the US is finally forced to deal with its own problems, it won't stir as much shit abroad. Russia seems to have an interest in (re)claiming territory; who is going to stop them from claiming Afghanistan (again) if the US is too busy dealing with an epidemic and/or a revolution? Disclaimers: Not an American, not a historian or politician, I'm just spewing random bullshit, citation needed etc.