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A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations (2011)

• oh_sigh 6y ago
  (2011) is important context here.
  • LolWolf 6y ago
    Very. I read the article and was very confused for quite a while until I realized this.
    • klaaz0r 6y ago
      Yes, maybe the title can include the date.
  • onetimemanytime 6y ago
    actually, it' timeless.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• AbrahamParangi 6y ago
  Whenever you see someone who you believe to be an idiot succeeding, it usually means they're really good at the game and you don't even understand what the game is.
  • aaronbrethorst 6y ago
    Or their family donated enough money to an Ivy to have a building named after them.
    • virgilp 6y ago
      That's not "succeding" though. I like to give Trump as an example: everyone loves to blast him for being an idiot. Is he a good president? No. Is he good at the game, but most people totally miss what his game is? I claim, yes. It's unfortunate that he managed to play the US election system for his own purposes, but that doesn't mean he's just incompetent at everything. E.g. he's a rather good populist - that may not be a quality you like, but at that particular game he's not at all bad.
      • mewpmewp2 6y ago
        Which leads to the following: How do you measure if someone is a good president? What measurements do you use to claim Trump is not a good president? Surely it can't be approval ratings since you can't expect public to understand nuances behind the decisions and what the president actually has to be doing? It can't be just GDP because GDP might have been going up anyway? It can't be what the president is saying in public and how many of those facts are wrong since this doesn't mean what actual decisions the president is making.
        • thdrdt 6y ago
          Aren't there universal measurements for leaders/counties? For example the Bible has a lot of wisdom like: 'If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.' This was already written some 2000 years ago and has been proven true over time. So I would argue you could measure the amount of unity a leader tries to create.
          • bergstromm466 6y ago
            > So I would argue you could measure the amount of unity a leader tries to create. That’s a nice one. Yet do you think then Hitler might be a good leader? (not a joke). He united the white German population in a time of great economic disarray - in both Germany and Europe. Maybe we should measure unity and cooperation with other countries? Global solidarity
  • jes5199 6y ago
    Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Elon Musk
  • ketzo 6y ago
    Damn, this is the kind of quote you see on a title card in a movie about gambling. Nice.
  • 0d9eooo 6y ago
    Or maybe you just don't want to play the game anymore.
    • sunaurus 6y ago
      I think this is sadly very true - trying to actually be a kind person really limits how well you can play "the game". There's no good solution to this either - if there was more kindness in the world, then that would just create even more opportunities for the people playing the game to get ahead, because they would have more victims to exploit.
      • draugadrotten 6y ago
        One of the key solutions is that good people must reward other good people. Nurture the young good ones. Reward the good behaviour.
      • Maxion 6y ago
        One key thing about the game is the definition of "being ahead", and in a way, the meaning you want your life to have. If the definition of being ahead is to work in upper management, or at trendy FAANG making a large amount of money then you are kind-of forced to play the game in order to "get ahead". However, if your version of getting ahead is to have a loving family, or to spend time on the hobbies you like or traveling or <insert other non-monetary thing here> then you can (and sometimes even have to) spend less effort on the game. I'm still working on finding my balance, but I've learned that I enjoy life much more when I'm doing something where I can spend less time playing the game, even if that comes with a large decrease in income and "prestige".
        • lotsofpulp 6y ago
          > I'm still working on finding my balance, but I've learned that I enjoy life much more when I'm doing something where I can spend less time playing the game, even if that comes with a large decrease in income and "prestige". Unfortunately in the US, if you don’t play the game, you have greatly reduced access to healthcare, which is a huge incentive to play the game especially if you have kids.
  • taneq 6y ago
    Or they took more risks than you and it paid off. Or they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Or...
    • koheripbal 6y ago
      Over the course of your entire life, the statistical expected values of the "gambles" tend to net out.
      • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        And over the course of the population there are going to be a lot of outliers (both winners and losers).
      • cxr 6y ago
        If You Say Something Is "Likely," How Likely Do People Think It Is? https://hbr.org/2018/07/if-you-say-something-is-likely-how-likely-do-people-think-it-is https://hbr.org/2018/07/if-you-say-something-is-likely-how-l... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17457000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17457000
      • vharuck 6y ago
        That assumes independent events. But "failing" early (weak social network, poverty, lost a lot on the first big gamble) have a large effect on the size and risk of the next gamble.
  • nsgi 6y ago
    So Trump is really good at the political game, for instance?
    • fwr 6y ago
      Is there a more powerful political position he could have?
      • jeltz 6y ago
        Yes, he could be a president with reliable support from the senate and the house. But that said he still managed to reach very far.
        • ByteJockey 6y ago
          Is that an option these days? When was the last time that existed? 2010?
          • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
            It seems to me (as an outside observer), that this normally happens for the two years after a new President is elected. Normally they don't get 60 in the Senate though, which means that the system is working at intended (you need to stay consistently popular for 6+ years to start swinging the Senate).
        • mcv 6y ago
          He has extremely reliable support from the senate. They did everything they could to shield him from accountability during the impeachment process and prevented him from getting a fair trial. That's more than the senate has ever done for any other president.
    • Bootvis 6y ago
      He did become President of the USA so I think the answer is yes.
  • mewpmewp2 6y ago
    Is Donald Trump a good example?
    • koheripbal 6y ago
      No. Because there are too many emotions for people to think clearly.
  • beefield 6y ago
    Or maybe you do, but simply refuse to play the game due to ethical and moral grounds.
    • koheripbal 6y ago
      I don't see how that applies here. There are lots of ways to make high income that have no ethical dilemmas.
      • pogorniy 6y ago
        Name 3
      • Kye 6y ago
        There's a nonprofit that researches this: https://80000hours.org/ https://80000hours.org/
      • beefield 6y ago
        People with high incomes from sources with no ethical dilemmas may also think that there are successful idiots. And not only because they do not understand the game the idiot is playing.
    • pas 6y ago
      There are games you can't really opt out. Like politics. Whoever wins will have control over you. (So people are highly motivated to play it.)
  • cowsandmilk 6y ago
    And sometimes that game is rack up lots of debt. I’m only in my mid-30s but I’ve already seen multiple occasions of people being swindled by someone they thought was a multimillionaire in lending them $10,000. If you can’t understand where someone’s wealth cane from, there’s a chance it doesn’t exist.
  • thdrdt 6y ago
    Today information is so easy to get that a lot of people think they know everything about every subject. But, like you said, reading the rules of the game does not mean you know how to play. When a company like Netflix launches a new product it is possible they thought about this with different teams for a long time. Then it's very naive to comment on the internet to say they are wrong and made a stupid mistake.
    • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      No, it isn't. Anyone who has been involved in corporate decision making knows that different teams thinking for a long time is absolutely no guarantee of a successful outcome - or even of a barely functional one. Companies make stupid mistakes all the time. When you're in the trenches there's a certain amount of group think, and issues that may be obvious to outsiders may be invisible and/or suppressed by internal politics. Of course Internet comments may be naive and wrong for other reasons. But that's a different question.
      • thdrdt 6y ago
        > different teams thinking for a long time is absolutely no guarantee of a successful outcome Of course it is no guarantee for success. But an outsider has absolutely no clue about what was discussed and what the politics were. So I think it is naive to make comments like "this is never going to work", or "removing the headphone jack will bring Apple down".
    • red_admiral 6y ago
      To take a recent example: when a company like TripleByte launches a new product - namely that key parts of all profiles will suddenly be public - they might have thought about this with different teams for a long time too, but commenters on the internet said they were wrong and eventually they admitted that they made a stupid mistake. Netflix's plan paid off. TripleByte's didn't. Apples and Oranges, I know, but how do you tell the two apart without hindsight?
      • Veen 6y ago
  • risyachka 6y ago
    And in lots of cases you don't need to be smart to build a successful business - time and place often matter the most. Speaking here of my own experience. So yeah, often idiots can be super rich and its absolutely ok. Also you can be a genius going something without resources and connections, so there are millions of reasons why you can be way smarter than the rich guy on top while you are not rich at all.
    • eNTi 6y ago
      Alan Turing comes to mind.
  • raducu 6y ago
    Also, "idiots" can understand other "idiots" better, thus being able to make money. Making money is not a function of pure "intelect", but being able to predict what others need and being able to meet those needs. You can be Einstein smart and not business smart.
  • growlist 6y ago
    or, the people playing the game and the rules of the game are so utterly moronic and worthless that it defies belief, e.g., celebrity culture.
    • WJW 6y ago
      This seems a clear example of the parent comment though. You don't see the value in it and that's fine. Other people enjoy an endless parade of almost free entertainment that they find more interesting than the usual drudgery of life. Even the Romans knew you only needed to supply bread and games to keep the people pacified. Celebrity culture is just a modernized and less directly violent form of "games". The game modern celebrities are playing is apparently completely invisible to you?
      • Kye 6y ago
        It's the same mindset that goes into dismissing pop music as low effort drivel. It actually takes an incredible amount of skill from a bunch of people at the top of their games to make a pop hit.
  • watwut 6y ago
    And other times you understand the game and it adds to your distaste. Like for example, success of Jared Kushner .
  • screye 6y ago
    > really good at the game Called being born rich. Plenty of idiots succeed because success was granted to them the day they were born. ____________ Also, a lot of times when you see an idiot succeeding, the idiot is a face for people to criticize while the master minds go about doing their magic, unseen.
    • AbrahamParangi 6y ago
      Being rich isn't the same as succeeding.
      • koheripbal 6y ago
        No, but there's definitely a correlation, on average.
      • screye 6y ago
        In this context, most commenters are implying society's perception of success which is intimately tied to money. If the definition of success is completely left to a person's own devices, the whole argument of the "game" falls apart too. Since there is no game to play.
    • tcgv 6y ago
      There are also plenty of people who weren't born rich, played the game well, and "made it". Probably not as much as those who were born rich and got a head start.
      • typon 6y ago
        By "plenty" you mean roughly < 5% of the population. [1] https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Faparnamathur%2Ffiles%2F2018%2F07%2FUS-inc.-mobility.jpg https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs...
  • Paperweight 6y ago
    Life is a series of realizations that you were playing the wrong game.
  • blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Tons of responses and no one has thrown out a link to the Ribbonfarm article about the Gervais Principle. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... Don't take it too seriously, but there is also many kernels of truth in there.
    • kgin 6y ago
      At first I thought this would just be a cynical joke, but there are a lot of super interesting points in there. Thank you.
• eximius 6y ago
  Risk aversion and capital?
• jojobas 6y ago
  Should be: > If idiots call everyone else idiots, how come their are not rich?
  • aeternum 6y ago
    The author probably is, assuming she bought NFLX.
• bravoetch 6y ago
  To answer the question posed in the title (and yes, I read the fluffy article) - luck decides who gets rich.
  • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    Even if that's true, it still implies that everyone else mostly aren't idiots, because otherwise it wouldn't take luck to get rich, all it would take is outsmarting all these idiots everywhere.
    • abiogenesis 6y ago
      The point is you cannot outsmart lucky idiots.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • fogetti 6y ago
      Nope. Luck does not imply causality. Everyone can be an idiot (including you) and you can still be lucky. Or there can be a mixture of idiots and geniuses and you can still be lucky.
      • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        "Luck does not exist" is not required, because that's just a separate path to getting rich. You can win the lottery and it's pure luck. But if you're really smarter than everyone else then you should still be able to figure out how to get their money even if you only have the ordinary amount of luck.
  • blobbers 6y ago
    Luck favours the prepared.
    • darcys22 6y ago
• aeternum 6y ago
  Great ideas can still have poor execution. It seems to me that major the flaws in the Netflix execution of the Qwikster spinoff was the source of much of the criticism. Most people lump the idea and execution together.
• bno1 6y ago
  >When internet commentators see odd behavior that they don't understand, why do they assume that the most parsimonious explanation is that management must be a bunch of drooling morons? I don't think most internet commentators have the patience or even the interest of painting an accurate picture. Most of them are shitposting.
• ramraj07 6y ago
  What's ironic to me is (IMO) Netflix is probably the shrewdest big company in existence now. Hastings has dominated not one but two markets, the second obviously larger and more insurmountable than the first. Almost Every single decision they make (including and especially ones that make customers unhappy, like their shitty browsing experience) seems so calculated and thoughtful it's just amazing. Even I thought Disney plus might be the beginning of the end for Netflix, that it finally met a Goliath it couldn't best, but now even that isnt obvious anymore.
  • quickthrower2 6y ago
    Meh, Netflix is one of many for me. Would be happy if it didn't exist, to watch other stuff on other streaming and I don't think they necessarily have the best content. Netflix try's to get you hooked on their originals, but the problem with that is once you binged a series you want something else - they cant keep feeding you the crack that is that current series because they take months to produce, so you switch to something else - and at that point it could be something else on Netflix, or just as easily something else somewhere else. I don't think Netflix is really that sticky. But maybe I am proving the point of the article and I'm missing the strategy.
    • atian 6y ago
      The fact that you're on it is 90% of the strategy.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • ramraj07 6y ago
      Exactly. We all keep talking about leaving Netflix but it looks like we aren't. How long has Netflix now been without major movies? Clearly whatever they're doing works - from my ground-level experience, everyone has at least a couple of shows that they like watching in Netflix, and everyone shares accounts as well so in the end it's a few dollars a month for always having a backup service with a lot of "meh" titles at the least. Perhaps that's what the company is gunning for? Perhaps they noticed that the crowd that sees Adam Sandler movies is the main market and they don't necessarily need to pander to "sophisticated" audience to be a successful company? Who knows. It just looks mindful, minimally, where they're trying to chart out a path that they CAN do, given all their constraints (mainly every major IP now being protected by their parent for their own streaming service).
• georgespencer 6y ago
  This article puts it better than I ever could. I had a similar reaction when I read extremely critical press coverage of some VCs in Europe investing in YPlan, which eventually sold for a nominal amount to Time Out London. The synopsis of all the coverage was: "How could they have spent all that money? And how could the investors have been so STUPID?" My friend Fred Destin wrote a great essay on this[1], and I'll do the horrid thing of quoting my own note to him in reply: > It’s analogous to a soccer fan questioning the manager’s decision to put player X on the field instead of Y. The manager sees both players on the training ground for hours every day, knows their mood, talks to them, understands how they respond to different situations, and consults his coaches. Then the matchgoing fan sees 90 minutes of output on Saturday and makes a judgement with <1% of the data a manager has. > Past a certain point in fundraising and traction, it’s impossible to believe that a startup failing is anything more interesting than a combination of poorer-than-expected execution, and bets not paying off. [1] https://medium.com/tech-london/hey-yplan-how-do-you-dare-go-bust-177bc67efdbb https://medium.com/tech-london/hey-yplan-how-do-you-dare-go-...
  • asdff 6y ago
    Scale this up to anything and you will want to be governed by a benevolent dictator. Not even senators themselves read the full bills they vote on, and I don't blame them with it being hundreds of pages of reading that could easily be parted out to aides, but the electorate certainly doesn't have this advantage. Maybe 1% of voters are truly informed.
    • adrianN 6y ago
      It's perfectly fine not to be informed (or interested!) in most topics. It only becomes dangerous when you're uninformed but trust your own opinion more than the experts. Popular examples are climate change, or the COVID-19 response.
      • DiffEq 6y ago
        SO we are to be ruled by experts? Show me the model produced by he experts that has been right? Show me the science behind the idea of quarantining the entire population in order to slow the spread of Covid-19. There is science behind quarantining sick people - but not healthy people. Show me the science behind the social distancing - 6 foot rule? I mean really - where IS the science to those things? These experts are self-proclaimed. I am more than willing to listen to a bridge builder tell me why I need to use a certain kind of steel as apposed to another - but many of these experts that we have been listening to lately are anything but experts.
• quickthrower2 6y ago
  A interesting take on this phenomenon from the point of view of the insider and outsider - https://commoncog.com/blog/good-synthesis-adapting-to-uncertainty https://commoncog.com/blog/good-synthesis-adapting-to-uncert...
• acoye 6y ago
  Consider `life` been a nonlinear chaotic process, so causality from been smart alone cannot be established.
• DecayingOrganic 6y ago
  While I agree with the article, it is important to distinguish the macro from the micro point of view. From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one. On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater than that of finding there very talented ones, because moderately gifted people are much more numerous and, with the help of luck, have - globally - a statistical advantage to reach a great success, in spite of their lower individual a priori probability.
  • innagadadavida 6y ago
    All of these are good factors, but don't leave out ego. Many smart people would rather be "right" and preserve their ego than make money.
    • Ma8ee 6y ago
      And that many smart people have better things to do with their time than making more money. I have everything I need and really want. I much rather play with my three year old son in the garden than being able to afford a new Tesla.
      • draugadrotten 6y ago
        “For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
        • mellow2020 6y ago
          > This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. A lot of money simply isn't useful for anything interesting or valuable. Surviving is great, some comfort is nice, but after a certain order of magnitude, it's not so much people having money, it's money having people. While large scale projects are also important and those need money and other resources to be pooled in some form, but they don't require any involved person to be filthy rich.
• barrenko 6y ago
  "If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you."
• seqizz 6y ago
  Since this is about money, isn't that a bias? I mean what are the chances of "son of (insert a billionaire name here)" to be rich vs me. TBH I can be stupid too with that amount of money, since I can afford it.
• cathames 6y ago
  2011 is the context: a height of the start-up wave, ascendance of FB--presumably due to "genius". The implication being that if you are really smarter than others you must have the rewards to show it. Hopefully this would be received today as a tone-deaf denial of privilege. The great myth of meritocracy has been blown apart.
  • Animats 6y ago
    Facebook's dominance was earned. Remember Myspace? They were huge when Facebook started. Now they're tiny by comparison. Google tried and failed several times at social networks. Zuckerberg figured out how to manipulate humans in quantity through subtle programmed social cues. That's an achievement on a par with that of Hiram Maxim.
    • rwmj 6y ago
      Oh come on, MySpace was an absolute disaster from a speed and usability point of view. It was obvious anyone could have done better than MySpace. At the time I was using mixi.jp which was "MySpace done right" and was hugely engaging. (It's quite possible that Mixi might have become Facebook had they not committed commercial suicide later with some very stupid decisions. The only social network I know that deliberately tried to limit their userbase.)
  • blackoil 6y ago
    Do you really believe Zuckerberg is an idiot? He has successfully navigated industry shift to mobile. He decisively and swiftly purchased Instagram and WhatsApp, buying his way into two major upcoming trends. You may think he is jerk or evil but no way an idiot.
    • cathames 6y ago
      "idiotic" was stated by the original post, not my reply. My objection is to the formulation that massive financial success in tech is proof of genius-level intellect. Being relatively smart may be necessary, but it is certainly not sufficient. Connections, opportunity, timing, and greed are other prerequisites. On the other hand, moral concerns about the negative downstream effects of your goals--something that a supposed genius would have insight into--would be inhibitors. As to the purchases you mentioned, I would argue that the game is a lot easier when you already have hotels on Boardwalk. And I certainly don't attribute strong imperial instincts as a mark of genius.
• boffinism 6y ago
  Because you're an idiot too. Also me. We're all just muppets, with blind spots, distorted perspectives and emotions that override reason. Some idiots are just lucky in the right ways at the right times. Hey, at least it's consistent.
• okareaman 6y ago
  What do you call people like me who is an anti-materialist and believes the religious impulse that a vow of poverty will make it easier to achieve enlightenment -- but keeps falling ass backwards into money.
• BlackFly 6y ago
  People call people idiots instead of trying to understand how they made a mistake because of fundamental attribution error. We all do it. People are predominantly successful because of luck. Opportunity, connections, upbringing, all luck. Yes, you still need to make the right decision at the right time. There is a pernicious tendency to make a fallacious argument for intelligence because of success; that is, people become convinced of intelligence because of success. The most obvious example today is the president of the USA. He is convinced of his own intelligence because clearly he is one of the most successful people in the country. I don't think many reasonable people would argue for his genius. On the other end of the spectrum, it seems obvious to me that in the billions of poor people on this planet there is an unknown genius unable to escape his or her circumstances. We make mistakes. We don't try to understand the mistakes of others as we call them idiots. We are not necessarily capable of succeeding even if we are smarter than those that have.
  • pdimitar 6y ago
    Thank you! Even if your comment is slightly off-topic I always get upset when people just immediately assume genius because of success. Some people almost literally didn't have to do anything but to open their wallet to receive dollars in, at the right time, while being at the right place. This very often gets overlooked. The world's economy is an MMORPG game and networking / contacts matter much more than many of us who swear in meritocracy would like to believe.
• jjeaff 6y ago
  I agree with the premise of this article. That armchair quarterbacking is rarely helpful and usually oversimplified. But I dislike the common implication in the headline, which is that intelligence somehow always equates to wealth. First of all, it's not always easy to judge how wealthy another person is, no matter their profession or outward appearance. Secondly, I think we all need to disuade ourselves of the notion that everyone in the world wants to become wealthy. Plenty of extremely intelligent people are perfectly happy where they are and are perhaps smarter for not chasing wealth like all those genius entrepreneurs. Just look at the lives of those we idolize so much for their success. Do you really want that life? A lot don't. And there is a good chance people more intelligent than those "successful" people don't want that life either. Additionally, I know quite a few wealthy people that are rather dim. But they were hard workers and an opportunity presented itself because they were at the right place at the right time and they took advantage of that opportunity and worked it dry.
  • koheripbal 6y ago
    Would you agree that higher intelligence equates to a greater likelihood of wealth over the long run (lifetime)?
    • WJW 6y ago
      As a general trend, yes. But since your life is lived with N=1 and you can't generally change your innate intelligence, that is not usually relevant to guide decision making.
    • iQuercus 6y ago
      No. No correlation.
  • skriticos2 6y ago
    I concur. It really depends on the reward function you chaise. Let's say you are a genius OCD person being elated by seeing the numbers on your bank accounts go up and nothing much else. You live 60-90 years and at the end you have some big number there. In this case you were successful. Let's say you are a more typical person, you'll probably have a larger set of reward functions and they may even change over time. Having money on the account to be able to cover costs and do some vanity spending is definitely rewarding to a point - until it becomes hollow. But then there are all those other reward functions, like maintaining a family, seeing your kids grow up, see the world, play games, learn new things and maybe build or invent a thing or two. Maybe just shine as a social focal point or any number of other things. Maybe just watching turtles in various environments. The only thing that we can't extend as a reward function is acquiring more time, like money on the bank account. So balancing the reward functions for a reasonable contentedness with life is generally what we strive to do, even if we don't spell it out that way. We start young and see all the possibilities and the scarceness of time is not a pressing matter - reward functions are more about enjoying life. Then with a family you see time passing, become more aware of it. You learn from the things you messed up and know that some things can't be fixed and your reward function will become more about stability and preservation. And then you die.
• atian 6y ago
  Because at the low level, everyone is an idiot.
• Barrin92 6y ago
  Well, the title is easy to answer, even many exceptionally talented people are never rich, and there's a significant amount of luck involved in being rich. It's pretty easy to be smarter than many people while never having financial success, or respect, or an audience or whatever. It's worth picking up the actual thesis from the article though. If for example Hastings is rich, does that mean he's not an idiot (or does not often make idiotic decisions)? It lowers the chance obviously but on the other hand fame and money is often fleeting. The average S&P 500 company now lives fewer than 20 years. So that means a lot of people who could be considered to have made good decisions in the recent past will fuck up in the near future. The fat tailed nature of tech investing means that someone can make 30 bad decisions and one good one and be insanely rich. At the end of the day they often just survived the bad ones, but you'd still have been right in calling them out on the 29 bad ones. So I think on a case-by-case basis net-worth is a shoddy indicator.
  • solidasparagus 6y ago
    > average S&P 500 company now lives fewer than 20 years No, the average age of an S&P 500 company is now less than 20 years. Which is heavily influenced by the rise of technology and the many S&P 500 companies that were created in the last ~20 years. It does not mean that companies are dying faster, just that S&P 500 is filled with young companies.
    • Barrin92 6y ago
      I don't think that's correct, at least according to this soruce (https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/why-you-will-probably-live-longer-than-most-big-companies/ https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/why-you-will...) "A recent study by McKinsey found that the average life-span of companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that, in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared. They will be bought- out, merged, or will go bankrupt like Enron and Lehman Brothers."
      • solidasparagus 6y ago
• risyachka 6y ago
  Money an intelligence rarely correlate. I know many very smart people that are just not interested in creating the business, though they are working on super complex things just for the sake of science. Also there are lots of idiots why can become rich. There are so many opportunities. So you can be absolutely right saying that some guy is an idiot even if he has billions.
  • tosssingaksla 6y ago
    Depends on what you call "Money" If you meant income, you are wrong. If you meant wealth, you are right. Just do a quick google search with income and IQ correlation. Random first article: https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-intelligence-predict-income https://ifstudies.org/blog/can-intelligence-predict-income , don't even know if it's a good source, but google was showing results for IQ having a correlation to income, and also for show results saying IQ having no correlation to wealth. You own words: > Though they are working on super complex things just for the sake of science Those kind of things tend to pay higher that you usual trade job, and are only available to higher than average IQ. Wealth and Income are very distinct things.
• torstenvl 6y ago
  > I think we should eliminate the corporate income tax . . . and tax income once, when it hits a person. LOL what? Can't have it both ways, pal. I've seen this line of thought expressed a few times before, and it strikes me as disingenuous to hold that a corporation is a person... right up until the moment that idea puts slightly less money in your pocket.
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Corporation tax does have its problems though. In particular it's easy for globalised companies to shift profits around the world to avoid paying it. Personally I'd rather we started treating dividends and even capital gains as normal income and eliminate corporation tax.
  • torstenvl 6y ago
    I'm surprised at the number of downvotes. I feel like my position is self-evident. In my view, either a corporation is a person under the law, in which case this is indeed taxing income when it hits a person; or a corporation is not a person and should not be able to assume sacrificial liability for those controlling it. However, I recognize that what may be self-evident to me may not jive with others' perspectives. Would any of the downvoters care to elaborate as to why, in their view, a corporation should be a person for some purposes but not a person for taxation purposes?
• aetherspawn 6y ago
  It's an intelligence to realize that in order to make a lot of money, you have to be ruthless at business. In order to be ruthless like that, you need to neglect being a good and reasonable person, even to those closest to you. Such is the cost of money. Money doesn't buy real friends or happiness, and so the smartest among us are deliberate in not accumulating wealth needlessly. Whilst everyone else assumes their stupidity for not accumulating wealth, in truth, it’s a Dunning-Kruger situation.
• aytekin 6y ago
  This is why when investors replace founders the companies stop innovating. Obvious ideas don’t have any value. You need deep domain knowledge to see how things really are, and not how things seem to be.
• abellerose 6y ago
  I've encountered a few individuals fairly well off and where they think of everyone as idiots. These individuals came from an upbringing of lower class and they eventually had the right opportunities happen for getting ahold of some money. Example from something comparable to bitcoin happening. Nothing in anyway of were these persons were contributing to society in how they gathered a good portion of wealth. I've also encountered people from wealthy families and these individuals typically don't comment on what they think of others less fortunate in society. They also stay out of politics or anything where people get disgruntled about. I'm unsure if it was how they were raised and or they know the game of life is rigged. In any case, I respect this group the most which is sort of odd because everything was handed to them. Anyway, the first group of individuals probably would have been better persons if they were just born into money as well. They have a fallacy in their head of they earned their success and wouldn't have had it any other way in life. In reality they just had a worse path to eventually becoming financially independent and sadly these individuals place their ego around wealth because of it. I don't necessarily believe in the traditional idea of luck. I think everything is predetermined at birth. But wow does it help to be born into a wealthy family with somewhat decent genetics. Quality of life will be so much better. It's so noticeable that I sometimes wonder how others don't see it as well.
• Antecedent 6y ago
  Maybe I am rich but realize that admitting it just brings me annoyance from lazy people.
• Konohamaru 6y ago
  A good thing to keep in mind for avoiding pride.
• baddox 6y ago
  I don’t really understand the point of the article. It seems to be challenging an assumption that being “smart” has something to do with being financially successful. But why would we start with that assumption? Why would we conflate being “intelligent” with being good at making money? To me, this seems as preposterous as asking “if you’re so smart, why are you so bad at playing the violin, or why aren’t you a Hollywood movie star, or why can’t you run a 4 minute mile, or why don’t you have a million Twitter followers?” Even if we make the questionable assumption that the very concept of general intelligence (something like what an IQ test purports to show) is sensible, why would we assume that it correlates positively with success in any conceivable discipline?
  • mam2 6y ago
    Nah it just means too many people think they are "smart" while not applying their supposed edge to get any practical thing done better. Money is just one example. The baseline is "if you are so smart why how come you don't have a better life", this can be more money, a better job, more time for your children, a hotter wife for some. If you don't like the materialistic versions, My personal version of it is "if you are so smart why are you complaining so much instead of fixing your problems"..
    • rho4 6y ago
      love your personal version
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • m463 6y ago
    I thought there was a correlation between intelligence and income?
  • jesuschroist 6y ago
    The article doesn't really use a strict equality between being "intelligent" and being good at making money. It's more an implication, that being good at making money implies being probably something like "intelligent". Now having this established, your examples of playing the violin and Hollywood stars doesn't make any sense. They are reading the relation backwards. The implication holds the other way round.
• dmortin 6y ago
  Really good time: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49547400 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49547400
  • mckirk 6y ago
    God damn, couldn't you have put a Not Safe For Soul tag there? :(
  • bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    also, the dolphins thought they were more moral than humans.
• axegon_ 6y ago
  There is no correlation between being an idiot and being rich. Being rich is (in most cases) the ability to... Sell yourself, for the lack of a better expression. And smart people commonly can't sell themselves or their products because they often solve problems which are far more complex than the ones ordinary people have. They will spend brutal amounts of resources and efforts to solve a problem which ordinary people just don't have. Ask any developer how often have they been in a non-tech circle having a casual conversation and saying "Wait, you paid how much for someone to do X?" X usually being the work of two (below) average Joe developers which can be done in a few weeks. And there you are, sitting and wondering how to build something big. Which is another common mistake: people rarely become rich overnight and it's a gradual process. You are looking at people who are light years ahead of you, while the route to success is a tight and windy mountain road, full of crests and dips. Looking at the people standing on the mountain peak isn't productive and doesn't give you any valuable information. It's those who are one or two corners ahead of you that you need to be looking at.
  • MagnumOpus 6y ago
    > There is no correlation between being an idiot and being rich Correction: there is actually a rather strong correlation [0]. Of course it is not a perfect correlation and a lot depends on other factors like luck or hard work. So out of a billion people you can always point to millions who are outliers. [0]https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/income-by-afqt-copy-w640.png https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/income-by-afqt-cop...
• teekert 6y ago
  Yeah, you idiots all want to be rich! I'm really smart and don't want to be rich, problem solved.
• fit2rule 6y ago
  Oh, this is easy. The usual response to such a question is - "you're just an anti-intellectual! Being rich doesn't mean you're smart - any fool can do it! Real non-fools write their opinions down and other fools follow them." /s I've known some utterly immoral people become very, very wealthy - I might've even helped them along the way. The reason I'm not rich and they are, is that they decided they didn't want to help me along my way. Being rich isn't an indicator of intelligence, nor is it an indicator of hard work or decent ethics. It does, usually, mean that someone wanted to give you money for some reason - and even a fool or an intellectual can do such a thing for love. Or, not.
  • taneq 6y ago
    > It does, usually, mean that someone wanted to give you money for some reason Isn't that the definition of participation in the economy? You created goods, or provided services, or arranged for goods to be created or services provided, and in exchange people give you money? Cases where people are given money without in some way earning it are far in the minority.
    • pessimizer 6y ago
      > You created goods, or provided services, or arranged for goods to be created or services provided, or drank with someone on a regular basis, or married one of their relatives,
      • taneq 6y ago
        It's almost like building social connections and establishing trust with other people is important to later being trusted in other contexts!
• lazyjones 6y ago
  I love the way people who consider themselves smart rationalize their lack of success/wealth, including here. - I don't want to be wealthy anyway - To be wealthy you have to be ruthless and I prefer to be nice - smart people are so busy with issues much more important than money - wealthy people are just lucky idiots - wealthy people are just idiots who are better at exploiting other idiots - people who are wealthy spend their lives chasing wealth instead of enjoying it It's sad that people refuse to acknowledge that assuming responsibility for one's own or even their family's lives means to take care of every aspect of it, including financial issues. If you are "too busy" to take care of your finances to the best of your abilities, you are incompetent and not in control of your life.
  • mam2 6y ago
    This is so true i don't understand the downvotes
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • Traster 6y ago
      It's getting downvoted because it's not a good argument. Accusing the people you disagree with of coming to their conclusions through motivated reasonsing neither actually addresses the logical arguments people are making, or gives the people you're disagreeing with any intellectual credit. It also throws up some horrendous strawmen - you have to be rich to take care of your family? Want to have an open conversation with someone you disagree with? I have a good tip, don't open the conversation by accusing them of being incompetent and not in control of their own lives.
      • lazyjones 6y ago
        > you have to be rich to take care of your family? No, but your family will certainly benefit from you increasing your wealth instead of claiming you're too busy with more important things or doing what you like. > Want to have an open conversation with someone you disagree with? Don't worry, I don't merely disagree with these people. I find them foolish and obnoxiously self-aggrandising, hence an open discussion would lead nowhere.
• econcon 6y ago
  I've many times tried to people make money but they get pretty defensive with their ideas and dreams and their plans, so I've decided different way, I drop them hints if I care for them enough and move on. A lot of people just look at cause Vs effect in a wrong w
• mdoms 6y ago
  If the thesis of this article is that rich successful people can't be stupid then I disagree. Vehemently.
• foobar_ 6y ago
  Even thieves can be rich. Even idiots can learn how to steal.
• mD5pPxMcS6fVWKE 6y ago
  Communication is a key to a high-level position in a hierarchy, and therefore, to the wealth. But very high IQ people have difficulty connecting with the majority of other people, so they lag behind.
• dustingetz 6y ago
  Communication; gifted people can struggle to explain what they’re doing to normies
  • robocat 6y ago
    In my experience, the ability to explain is a side effect of being gifted. A gifted person can simplify complex subjects and concentrate on the important points, they can find different metaphors that work, or fit their explanation to your knowledge, and are often self aware enough to understand their own thought process. The less gifted often struggle to teach. However “that’s obvious” is also often said intuitively by very smart people, where they are correct but they can’t actually explain how they know they are correct.
    • dustingetz 6y ago
      Reconcile that with how power concentrates on charisma and relationships (Politics, Startups, Businessmen). Power is about getting other people to do things, which is about communication!
• V-2 6y ago
  A non-native speaker here - what does "debacletacular" mean? The word only has a few hits on Google. I understand it's a neologism of sorts, a conflation, but what's the meaning? I'm guessing "a spectacular debacle" - AKA "epic fail"?
  • tomgp 6y ago
    it's a port-manteau of spectacular and debacle i.e. a spectacular debacle
    • V-2 6y ago
      Port-manteau, another one :) Thanks!
  • HPsquared 6y ago
    It's an adjective, based on 'spectacular'. It is to 'debacle' as 'spectacular' is to 'spectacle'. 'Spectacular' meaing "relating to, or having the character of, a spectacle" (Wiktionary). So it would mean something like 'relating to, or having the character of, a debacle' - with hints of 'spectacular debacle'.
• bitxbit 6y ago
  Wealth = Human Connections.
• Traster 6y ago
  I feel like what isn't really properly understood in these situations is the statistical chances that are involved here. 10 people put $50 on the roulette table, and then we celebrate the guy who hit their number. That genius who hit their number still had a negative expected value when placing that bet. Colette Martin would've been right to criticize Reed Hastings if he were making that bet with Netflix's money. But we don't read articles about the CEOs who make bad bets and lose them, and we don't really know if the CEOs who won made good bets or bad bets. It's possible the richest CEOs are actually the worst at picking bets, because they're the ones who picked bets that were the least likely to pay off, and therefore got the biggest pay out when they won. If 50 people were making the same bet as Reed Hastings, then Netflix would've found it far harder to succeed, since they would've been competing for talent, content and customers with 50 other companies. The reason Netflix exploded in growth is partly because they were the only ones serving that market. Maybe that was a genius stroke of insight, or maybe he was one of a thousand people making bad bets, and he's the one that it paid off for.
  • maest 6y ago
    What makes a betting person good or bad? It's hard to score and compare process and intention. The most natural way of determinig the quality of the betting person is by their results. It's not a very informative way of looking at the world, but it's the most straightforward.
  • 082349872349872 6y ago
    Investors diversify, so we need CEOs of individual firms to take more risk than we want for our portfolios as a whole. To be worth their wages, a CEO of a publicly-traded company should be making risky slightly-positive expectation value bets; were the firm too risk-averse, it'd be just as inefficient as if it were to keep too much cash on hand.
  • tomhoward 6y ago
    > we don't read articles about the CEOs who make bad bets and lose them Yes we do, all the time: Theranos, WeWork, WebVan, Myspace, Friendster, BlackBerry, Enron, Worldcom, etc, etc, etc. Sure, we don't hear about companies that never get anywhere because they never did anything interesting to start with, because that's unremarkable. But we hear a lot about the companies that attracted a lot of success or hype early but then "bet" wrong. (In fact, these stories arguably get a disproportionate amount of coverage, due to schadenfreude from journalists and their audience.) The roulette spin analogy is not apt, because building a successful company is not a single bet; it's many many bets, every year/month/day over many years, which moves it well out of the realm of random chance and mostly into the realm of skill. And before someone says it: nobody argues good luck is not a factor in a company's success. But that is mostly at the very beginning (e.g., Steve Jobs meeting Woz; Bill Gates' mother knowing the chairman of IBM) and luck alone is not nearly enough. Skilled leadership over the long term makes all the difference between success and wasted opportunity.
• marcus_holmes 6y ago
  >> I mean, Reed Hastings did manage to build this rather large and successful business that killed off one of the most successful retail operations of its day. It's possible that he just sort of did this by accident. But is this really the most likely explanation? It's possible, yes. And if we consider that there were possibly a few thousand people at that time trying to make that business work, then "by accident" does start to look like the best explanation. Was/is he smarter than everyone else trying to do the same thing? Probably not. Was/is he better connected, better funded, more able to run a business, than the others? Possibly, but probably not. Was/is he luckier than everyone else? Almost by definition, if we define "luck" as "something that helps people succeed". It's a very nebulous definition. But there's definitely a Venn diagram overlap of "by accident" and "by being very lucky". Even without getting to FedEx levels of "lucky", there is definite "luck" involved in making decisions based on incomplete information that will turn out to have outsize effects on the business later. This is a normal activity for startup founders, and I'll bet serious money that more than a few of them were made in Netflix' early years. We always underestimate survivor bias when considering successful startup stories. And without studying the other people who were trying to build the same business at the same time, we have no idea why some of them succeeded and others failed. Without this information, it's impossible to say whether Netflix succeeded "by accident" or by design.
• robert_g 6y ago
  Dismissing a successful person but seeming "dumb" person is a benefit to them. Now, they can continue succeeding with less scrutiny. For a long time I thought many politicians were "dumb" based on their public comments, propelled only by their connections. Now, when I look up some politicians who's spouting objectively false / misleading statements and find they've graduated a top-tier university and have a JD I realize these are not intellectually stupid people. They're skilled in their field, have drive, and less empathy/morals than others. Now, I watch these "dumb" people more closely.
  • krapp 6y ago
    US politicians often act "dumb" because Americans mistrust intellectualism and "book smarts," but they trust plain-spoken cowboys who shoot from the hip and speak like common people. Hillary Clinton attended Wellesley and Yale, and speaks like someone who did, and many Americans hate her. GWB attended Harvard and Yale, but he played up the stereotypical Texas country-boy stereotype and fumbled over his words, and got two terms. Donald Trump went to Wharton business school, but speaks (and shitposts) at the level of a common Reddit troll, and he was elected in large part because of that. You'd think Americans would stop falling for it at some point.
    • pessimizer 6y ago
      > Hillary Clinton attended Wellesley and Yale, and speaks like someone who did, Hillary Clinton put on a terrible fake Arkansas accent for the beginning of her political career, talked about baking pies, and quoted country-western songs in interviews. The reason she uses her natural accent in her later career is because she has positioned herself as a "wonk," and often against Republicans who were doing folksy. i.e. she's looking for a different set of Americans to "fall for it." Trying to appeal to an audience who thinks that everybody else is a sucker and they're the shrewd one. When she goes to black churches, she puts it on again. Instantly starts dropping her g's and praising the lord like she would never do in a white church.
  • Jemm 6y ago
    Empathy / morals seem to be the key thing here. I have be forced to leave a number of potentially very lucrative deals because I refused to scam little old ladies out of their life savings.
• chewz 6y ago
  > Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Catch-22 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8578531-it-takes-brains-not-to-make-money-colonel-cargill-wrote https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8578531-it-takes-brains-not...
• aasasd 6y ago
  [perhaps obsolete now that the title's been changed] > the author uses a witty title on an article on business strategy > the HN poster keeps the title almost verbatim, as is tradition > people in the thread commence writing about the title instead of the article's content So it goes.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Bambooly 6y ago
  There is a correlation between intelligent and income but we have been conditioned to misunderstand what intelligence is. we are taught that schooling is as sign of intelligence but that is just a sign of Memory and a sign of formatting. Many people fail because their ideas as are not formatted correctly or their ability to remember remember during an exam. There are many people who have failed education and still succeed in their dreams. Elon Musk is an example where he said "I didn't go to Harvard but all my lawyers did".Is Musk more intelligent that his lawyers even though he does not have the same education. So what is intelligence? The issues is also how do you measure success. May people choose Money as that quantifies things and then we can compare. The main issue is Quality is not comparable. Neither is Happiness. Success can only be measured with yourself. because you have to do the things that need doing to get into the positions to be seen as dumb. The Politician who says some really dumb thing or the businessman that does not seem to know what he is doing, have done some really smart things to be in a position to be dumb.
  • knolax 6y ago
    Musk went to an Ivy League... > While awaiting Canadian documentation, Musk attended the University of Pretoria for five months.[51] Once in Canada, Musk entered Queen's University in 1989, avoiding mandatory service in the South African military.[52] He left in 1992 to study economics and physics at the University of Pennsylvania; he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and a Bachelor of Science degree in physics.[53][54][failed verification] src: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
• TBurette 6y ago
  It seems people are commenting on the title of the article and not on what the article says : it's easy to think someone is stupid when you read about them making a bad decision in the news. Classic examples are: "Hitler was stupid to invade Russia". In fact he needed to conquer oil fields to keep the ability to wage war andhe Russian army was particularly weak at that point. "Kodak was stupid not to sell digital camera". In fact Kodak did develop digital camera technology. They were behind one of the first commercial digital camera (The Apple QuickTake), they licensed their patent and were number one sellers of digital camera in the US at some point. It's easy to fall into this trap when you only high level information. I think that when you get more detailed information this effect dissipates. You then realize that there are many factors and stakeholders.
• wegs 6y ago
  A much more thoughtful treatment of this problem is "The Dictator's Handbook." There are three possible explanations: 1) The CEO knows something I don't. 2) The CEO is dumb. Those are rarely it. The third one is: 3) The CEO is optimizing for personal wealth / fame / success, and there are political considerations. Most CEOs can recognize that a business decision can be absolutely the right thing to do for the business and not make that decision if it either would cost them (1) their standing with shareholders (2) their annual bonus (3) their standing with the board (4) their standing with internal constituents. The key skill CEOs need to be CEOs can be summarized as: "How to become a CEO." That involves a lot more management of politics than it does business success (but still a fair measure of both). Furthermore, if a strategy leads to business success but costs a CEO their job, they cannot take that strategy.
  • jacobush 6y ago
    They can and sometimes will take that strategy, but of course then be self-selected out of the CEO and be replaced by someone who conforms to nr 3. This is the filtering process that makes psycopaths over-represented at the top.
  • lazyjones 6y ago
    It blows my mind how people can come here and attempt to write a serious answer claiming the CEO "rarely" knows something his armchair critic doesn't (as a basis for their "bad" decision). Then proceed to peddle cliches and conspiracies. Also, shareholders aren't stupid, they usually reward CEOs for good business decisions and so does the board. Sometimes it's unclear what is better long-term and short-term results are preferred, but nobody knowingly punishes or fires a CEO for a good decision. That just exists in the imagination of people whose involvement with business decisions consists of reading Dilbert cartoons.
    • wegs 6y ago
      ... to the extent you consider one of the most influential and best-researched management books a "cliche and conspiracy." I'll mention I didn't claim that a CEO rarely knows something a critic doesn't; just that things like the CEO's greater understanding of something like market dynamics are rarely the basis of what is externally perceived to be a "bad" decision by an armchair critic. The basis is usually political dynamics (which most armchair critics have far less insight into than the CEO -- the information gap is greater). And as a shareholder, I can say I don't think my intelligence matters very much in this story. The amount of time and thought I can put into each company in my portfolio is what matters. That's both especially true because I have index funds, and why I have index funds. As a footnote, if you'd like a more extreme take on this, Pfeffer's Power is a good read (but quite controversial -- the book basically makes the claim that CEOs are fundamentally psychopaths). Pfeffer is at Stanford. Dictator's Handbook is considered hardly controversial at all. It's a game-theoretic argument, backed by pretty good data. The author is at New York University. I'll also mention that simply insulting the poster of an argument ("just exists in the imagination of people whose involvement with business decisions consists of reading Dilbert cartoons") doesn't strengthen your point. You know nothing about my background. It just makes you look like you're either a jerk, or ran out of sound arguments.
• CaptainActuary 6y ago
  Luck. The answer is luck.
• tinyhouse 6y ago
  Didn't bother to read the article. Just the comments. My take? The smartest people I know are the ones who married well and have a great family and social life. Wealth / education are great but worthless if your personal life is a mess. Take Benjamin Netanhau as an example. The guy is very wealthy and successful. I think he graduated from both Harvard and MIT. (Although one degree might be an MBA that anyone with money can do). However, he is married to a psycopat who controls his life and is hated by everyone around them. I don't even want to talk about his son. Do I want his life? Hell no!
• TopHand 6y ago
  Most of us chose the profession/vocation we practice because that is the opportunity that presented itself at the time. Very few people set out to be "rich". What they really want is to be comfortable, and able to pursue contentment. An anecdote from when I was a young person. A friend was working very hard to become a plumber. At the time I thought who would want to be a plumber, it is a gross and dirty job with a limited future. One day I asked him out of curiosity what he thought a plumber's place was. His reply surprised me. He said "a plumber's job is to protect the health of the community." Now that I'm older and reflect back, I can see that being a plumber is a solid vocation, that is needed by most communities, where a person can live anywhere they choose. But they don't get "rich". They make a comfortable living and feel they are contributing to the well being of the community. Isn't that what most of us really want from life?
• LatteLazy 6y ago
  I've been learning this slowly over the last few years. I was a typical science guy. Then a close friend dragged me to the gym (which was just foreat heads right?). And it really helped with my depression and now it's a major activity for me. Same for Networking and Sales skills and Watching Sports and Foreign languages... Embarrassed me would like to publically apologies for assuming everyone else is an idiot and should do what I do. Sorry guys!
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• santoshalper 6y ago
  I had a manager early in my career who used to say "everyone else's job is harder than you think." That really stuck with me.
• goto11 6y ago
  So do not attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by you not understanding the whole picture.
  • koheripbal 6y ago
    ...but how else will we produce our Daily political comedy?
  • kqr 6y ago
    I have for a long time now extended Hanson's razor with "... and never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by ignorance." The beauty of it is that it doesn't need to say who is the ignorant one!
• vikramkr 6y ago
  They picked an example that really aged well. Look at netflix today - it's clear that a little bit of humility would have been warranted in 2011 when talking about the company.
• silveraxe93 6y ago
  While I agree with the main thrust of the article (Chesterton's fence, etc.), the author seems to take as a given the fact that Netflix is sliding back into becoming as expensive as cable, because the content providers are setting the prices. But Netflix's value is not from competing against cable on price, it's competing against piracy on convenience. Content providers will never again see the same profits, because the de-facto price of content is zero. It's too easy to pirate, and morally grey enough that people are willing to do it. Netflix got so big because it captured the market of people who were willing to pay for the convenience. If this gets too high they will just go back to pirating.
  • nemothekid 6y ago
    I’m not sure if that’s a given. People going back to piracy sort of assumes people will happily walk back to watching sketchy streams on laptop screens. I think the bar will pretty high for people who wish to watch on Apple Devices, Rokus or Smart TVs. There has been enough time for people to get locked into walled gardens.
    • asdff 6y ago
      Piracy in 2020 is more polished than first party streaming platforms.
      • p1necone 6y ago
        Not going to link anything here, but certain PLEX/freeNAS plugins can basically let you make your own Netflix, complete with slick UI, but all the content. However most people don't have the requisite knowledge to set all of this up, so I would agree with the other commenter that the majority are probably still going to just go to sketchy streaming sites.
      • nemothekid 6y ago
        I think content acquisition still has several hurdles as well as the pipelines of your favorite metadata scraper isn't exactly trivial to setup. The actual software, once installed is really nice (I have a Plex Server + Infuse on an Apple TV), but in my case I still pay for content (via usenet).
• GlenTheMachine 6y ago
  A similar story that I love regarding the infamous Van Halen brown M&M contract rider: “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes …” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.” https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • bpyne 6y ago
    Interesting. I wonder who thought to add this test into the contract. It's a simple but brilliant strategy.
    • SN76477 6y ago
      I have seen the story many times. I think it is brilliant.
  • michaelcampbell 6y ago
    > So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … ...They didn’t read the contract. I don't know that that necessarily follows. It could be that they read it, said "fuck that", and did everything else to spec. Good story tho.
• doorstar 6y ago
  I kept thinking this when the 'cybertruck' was unveiled. Suddenly everyone around me was explaining in detail why this truck was going to be a complete fiasco and a danger to everyone else on the road. I'll happily acknowledge that Musk is off his rocker, but can people really think that he doesn't know how to make a car? ( I'll admit a soft spot for the thing after someone pointed out it looks like what happens when you let back end engineers design the front end )
  • philwelch 6y ago
    I will fully admit that Musk knows how to make a car. He’s a car person and had a history of owning and enjoying sporty luxury cars before Tesla. But he’s not a truck person.
    • doorstar 6y ago
      He didn't own any rockets either. I don't know if the cybertruck is a good or bad idea. I don't know if it's going to succeed or fail. I don't know how anyone can possibly declare with confidence that they do know how the truck will do when released.
      • philwelch 6y ago
        The whole problem with eg the BMW i-Series or most other electric cars is that they are designed in a silly way that says, “look at me, I’m a weird electric car, I’m not a normal car at all, I’m willing to look like a total dork in order to virtue-signal about being eco-friendly”. Teslas just look like sports cars—except the Cybertruck’s styling is 100% “dorky virtue signal about having a weird special truck”, and truck people are even less likely than car people to put up with that. I looked to see what truck users on /r/Trucks had to say about it.[1][2] Here are some highlights, both positive and negative: > It’s really damn cool aside from the roof coming to a point. I’m not sure I understand that design decision. However, onboard air compressor, 110v/220v accessory power, fast as shit, good ground clearance, integral bed cover and ramps, air ride suspension, and tough shell to boot... there is a lot to like here. I might just have to buy one in a couple years. > Yeah because everyone wants a ‘bed’ you can’t load from the sides. > I think [being able to load the truck bed from the sides] really only matters for people who use their trucks for actual work. This is obviously for people who want a truck for play and not work. > ... he could have taken this seriously and actually made an impact. Now he’s proven the older anti EV crowd 100% correct that an electric truck isn’t a viable alternative. > Clearly designed by someone who has literally never even used a truck once in their entire life. > It's stupid tall bedsides ruin it for slide in campers too. If it wasn't for that the 3500lb payload and huge battery would make it great for a slide in. > I'm surprised you all are not pouncing on the unibody. The other "truck" (Honda) that uses a unibody construction does not get much love. > [People who like the Cybertruck design are] those who've never actually used a truck to haul items and/or trailers. Those who are in the ranching, mining, and other similar industries are laughing at this. > Is the bed cover transparent? Seems like the rear window is only usable when the cover is retracted. I'm sorry. This is a truck for the Ridgeline crowd. No 8ft bed option. Only crew cab configuration. AWD, not 4WD. Can't tow a Gooseneck or 5th wheel, which you're gonna want when towing a 14K trailer. People will buy it. I won't. > It’s a weird case of form over function. He was so focused on the blade runner vibe he forgot to make sure it was usable as a truck. Can’t even get to the front of the bed without opening the tailgate and getting inside. > Trucks have a utilitarian purpose. There is a reason for their shapes. And if you look worldwide there are some differences, but also some commonalities. Like being able to access the frigging bed. That’s a massive failure here. > There’s some things about truck design that are important to the function of being a truck. Like not having angled bed sides so you can fucking reach the first 1/2 of the bed without getting in it or being able to tow a 5th wheel. > After looking at more pictures today I realized it doesn't even have a true 6.5' bed. It's much shorter than that, but angles in underneath the rear seats. Probably ok for hauling a few sheets of plywood, but putting in, say, furniture, would be harder. > I set things in the bed over the bedside a lot. And climb in the sides. I’d have to awkwardly yeet shit over the side of that angled monstrosity > This truck looks like an absolute nightmare to load and unload tbh. I actually even ditched my bed for a Bradford flatbed to make my truck easier to use. Rear/side visibility looks awful. Boasts a 14,000 towing capacity yet it looks like a nightmare to hook up to a trailer. I’d love to know how far this thing can tow 14,000lbs. Payload of “3,900lbs”. What does the truck itself weigh? Does Tesla understand GVWR or how to calculate payload or is it assuming it’s potential buyers do not? I guess I just don’t understand the whole concept and what exactly they’re going for. Seems like they’re trying to do too much. This has been the plague of these types of “crossovers” which is exactly what this is. El Camino, Ford Ranchero, Subaru Brat, Subaru Baja, Chevy Avalanche, Honda Ridgeline, the list goes on and on. > Having a large locking cover would give me so much peace of mind when I'm parked with my tools in there. Having the thing build of stainless steel made me ask why hasn't trucks been main of stainless steel for years. > The bed has some L-Tracks and T-Slots in it too for easy tie downs, which was something I learned from a video I saw that someone did a test drive in > Literally the only good truck feature is the integrated full width ramp in the tailgate. > And you can lower the suspension in the back to make it easier! I would have killed for that the last few times i was loading heavy equipment into the back of my truck by myself. I had to make due with backing up to a hill and using a shitty steel ramp that would fall if i so much as looked at it wrong. > Let's be honest, most people in suburbia/cities with trucks are just drugstore cowboys anyway. This truck will meet the needs of most consumers > Good luck towing a 5th wheel with that thing > If you need a truck, Cybertruck's already disqualified itself. Little clearance, no room for mods, unibody, no side access to the truck bed, likely range issues (once you add a load), and that's just the stuff we know about now. I can only imagine buying this if you buy a truck just so you can feel like you're driving a truck but never plan on using the truck features beyond occasional off-roading. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Trucks/comments/dzvqhx/tesla_truck/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Trucks/comments/dzvqhx/tesla_truck/ [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Trucks/comments/e061ru/style_contrast_tesla_cybertruck_and_ford_f150/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Trucks/comments/e061ru/style_contra...
• iEchoic 6y ago
  Another form of this that seems to have taken over online discussions in the last few years is “<person> did <thing> because they are evil” (or rich). As an example, I’ve noticed that privacy-related discussion on HN is often thought-terminated by comments that reduce down to “<company> is doing <perceived privacy-destroying thing> because they want to destroy your privacy”. On reddit, a common form of this is “<politician> is doing <something implausibly comic book villain-y> because they are evil”. When the motive isn’t clear, I often enter these discussions trying to learn more about why - but more often than not, I just leave feeling the same way as the author here.
• stevens32 6y ago
  It's really easy to think you have the better answer when you don't even understand the problem. You're working in a weightless fantasy land while the actual people involved have to work with the messy, dirty, heavy reality.
• jdofaz 6y ago
  I still have and use their disc rental service. I go to dvd.com and it forwards to dvd.netflix.com where I only rent blu-rays. Maybe they would have had better luck with a different name.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dang 6y ago
  Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3305870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3305870
• heavenlyblue 6y ago
  > A lot of “idiotic” things have reasonable explanations It doesn’t, however - often make them less idiotic.
• esmi 6y ago
  > "If everyone else is such an idiot, how come I'm not rich?" Unfortunately the answer to that question is, I spend way too much time on hacker news.