4 ms·

All billionaires need somebody whose job it is to tell them their ideas are f***g idiotic to their face periodically. Kinda like “momento mori” without the inc

by rgmerk 3y ago

All billionaires need somebody whose job it is to tell them their ideas are f***g idiotic to their face periodically. Kinda like “momento mori” without the incentive to go and invent tech to make them immortal.

echelon 3y ago
I want billionaires to spend their entire wealth trying to solve disease, disablement, and aging. It works to the benefit of all of us. A billionaire becoming a paraplegic would invest so much money in solving nerve and limb repair. A billionaire going blind would get the brain mapped at a resolution we can only dream of. I'm committing right now to putting my money to work in these areas if I ever make it.
- __loam 3y ago
  What if there were no billionaires and we did this with publicly funded research instead.
  - echelon 3y ago
    Capitalism can hill climb most gradients incredibly fast. War and existential threats can do so even faster. Publicly funded research does a great job of finding the slopes that would ordinarily be overlooked.
    - scarmig 3y ago
      Capitalism is excellent at local gradient descent, better at it than governments. But it gets caught in suboptimal local minima (and, worse than that, it tends to warp the space in its current local neighborhood to make escaping that dip harder). But the more capital you have accessible, the more you can overcome steeper wells. Effective governments can deploy resources to get out of very steep wells.
      - latency-guy2 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    How would that result in a better system exactly? The money going into research each year would grow and no would ever admit if the thing was impossible as it would mean willfully ending a jobs program.
    - rgmerk 3y ago
      That’s not how publicly funded research works. Most research projects are competitively funded by grant money on short timelines, and researchers are employed on fixed-term contracts. University professors with tenure are the exception rather than the rule. Research projects regularly get canned because priorities change or the work just isn’t sexy enough.
  - Nasrudith 3y ago
    What is stopping funding more publicly funded research right now? It isn't the existence of billionaires in spite of the innumerate rhetoric ad nauseam otherwise. There isn't any "doing instead". There being billionaires or not has absolutely nothing to do with the question of why they aren't allocating "doing it instead". That is putting aside that the public and private sector fund research differently with different priorities which results in both discoveries one would make that the other wouldn't and in flaws and anti-patterns observed. Private funding would be more likely to have arbitrary favoritism based on personal biases vs the public sector playing politics in a "lets play pin the jobs on the congressional districts" way.
- rgmerk 3y ago
  For what it’s worth, while these things are undoubtedly more useful than bored apes, it’s not where I’d be investing my money if I were a billionaire. While the idea of cost-benefit analysis in philanthropy has gotten a bad reputation after going down some very weird rabbit holes recently, the idea behind it isn’t completely crazy. Building toilets may not be as sexy as reattaching nerves but the cost-benefit ratios are pretty attractive.
  - tiffanyg 3y ago
    You said it man!* I find the 'ethics' of everything complicated, lately. But, simple non-flashy action to just try to relieve some suffering is about as ... therapeutic as it gets - for everyone, I think. It reminds me of that great folk tune, "Simple Gifts" (famously set by Copeland [in his style]). There's quite a bit to be said for the ideas of groups like the 'Shakers' (though strict celibacy for all does tend to be quite a headwind for perpetuation). There is something very significant in the idea framed, for example, in the Christian Bible as "private prayer"** - the effects this has on the function and other characteristics of a person AND their community (which ideally is the world). The mindset of as substantial a 'selflessness' as is possible for humans seems to make the world much more livable, simple, etc. (for anyone who practices towards it). It doesn't seem so common among people who become billionaires, though - this is not a dig at them at all, nor do I wish to end this comment on the subject in general. But, what's truly absurd and sad, to me, is that what everyone actually wants tends to get further away the more you cling to anything ... simply accumulate anything, including money. * (John Turturro voice, always hear in my head, omit details as much as I can 'help myself' tho...) ** Matthew 6:5, for example - this is ending up rather 'Christianity-heavy', but the key messages are quite 'agnostic' IMO. I find them more-or-less in the 'useful' "spiritual systems" from all regions ...
  - bdw5204 3y ago
    I'd say the best thing for billionaires to spend their money on would be whatever they're interested in. I think philanthropy is probably a poor use of resources compared to starting businesses with a purpose other than just maximizing shareholder value. A business where the goal is to just break even is a business that can focus on maximizing its positive impact on the world. Realistically speaking, no human institution will remain true to its original purpose for very long after the death or departure of its founder. Institutions drift, whether towards maximizing shareholder value (if a publicly traded, i.e. de-facto ownerless, corporation) or towards pushing a political agenda (if a non-profit foundation). The only way to have a chance of avoiding this drift is for the founder to pass on true ownership of the institution to somebody whom he believes shares his vision. Even then, that doesn't exactly work out perfectly because eventually the owner is going to make a poor choice for his successor and the successor will either run the institution into the ground or sell the institution because he doesn't actually want it.
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  I want there to be no billionaires. "It's time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow 'trickling down' to everyone else," said Bucher. "Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn't lift all ships—just the superyachts." https://www.commondreams.org/news/billionaires-policy-failure-oxfam https://www.commondreams.org/news/billionaires-policy-failur...
  - NumberWangMan 3y ago
    This is the best argument I've heard against billionaires--one I had never heard before: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-replaceability https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-re.... I think most arguments for/against the existence of people with such wealth are basically capitalists saying they deserve it for creating value or that we need to incentivize wealth creation, and socialists arguing past them saying that it's just wrong for anyone to have so much more than anyone else. This is the first time I've heard anyone making a good argument that actually, even IF you are a staunch capitalist, and you only consider people who made their money without leaning on government to bend the rules in their favor, maybe billionaires don't deserve all their wealth.
    - sojournerc 3y ago
      Thanks for sharing that. Great way to think about _where_ the billionaires' wealth comes from and where it could've been instead.
    - kortilla 3y ago
      It’s not very good because it somehow thinks billionaires just have that money that can be easily taken. Most billionaires don’t have anywhere near a billion in cash and huge chunks are just ownership stakes in a company. It’s not just cash that accumulated and could be better used somewhere else. It’s a FMV applied to a much larger portion of what the liquid market can support. Nobody gave Bezos $200 billion instead of giving it to charity. He just has ownership of multiple companies with share prices that when multiplied times his stake land at that value. So it’s not surplus at all and it’s just instead, “here appears to be a valuable company, let’s seize and liquidate 10% to fund some socialist endeavors”. It makes no difference if it’s one owner or 10 at that point. It’s illogical because it’s not about wealth at all. The author of that article based the entire premise on Jeff taking in $200 billion in profit himself, which is so uninformed the whole thing can be more or less dismissed outright.
- lynx23 3y ago
  That is some techno-optimism right there! > A billionaire going blind would get the brain mapped at a resolution we can only dream of. I am wondering, being blind myself, what is it exactly that you are hinting at? I am assuming something in the direction of neuralink? I am asking because I really can not relate to your optimism. Tech is great for assistive technologies like talking phones or image to text LLMs and so on. But when people start to suggest all I need is the right implant to "compensate" for my disability, I frankly start to freak out and realize whatever they are thinking is not resonating with me in any way. Is your techno-optimism, in 2023, really that great that you'd want some tech to fuck with your brain? Also, what many people don't realize is that people with sensory disabilities literally grow used to their "new" way of perceiving the world. Most of the interventions people seem to hold in high esteem kind of assume the disability hasn't been going on for a while. For instance, me being blind for 35 years also means that even if I would gain a visual sense through some tech, I'd still have to invest years to make some basic use of it. Imagine, I'd have to learn to read, basically like a preschooler. Its not that easy to "gift" sight to the blind, not even with the most fancy optimistic tech we have in a forseeable future.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
microtherion 3y ago
Maybe the job of the future is Court Jester?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
yowlingcat 3y ago
Theoretically, that could be the job of management consulting, but the firms who have the capability and clout to do this also obviously realize it's far more lucrative to utilize those resources to craft narratives that support whatever goals said billionaires and their firms are prioritizing.

by rgmerk 3y ago

echelon 3y ago

I want billionaires to spend their entire wealth trying to solve disease, disablement, and aging. It works to the benefit of all of us. A billionaire becoming a paraplegic would invest so much money in solving nerve and limb repair. A billionaire going blind would get the brain mapped at a resolution we can only dream of. I'm committing right now to putting my money to work in these areas if I ever make it.

__loam 3y ago
What if there were no billionaires and we did this with publicly funded research instead.
- echelon 3y ago
  Capitalism can hill climb most gradients incredibly fast. War and existential threats can do so even faster. Publicly funded research does a great job of finding the slopes that would ordinarily be overlooked.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    Capitalism is excellent at local gradient descent, better at it than governments. But it gets caught in suboptimal local minima (and, worse than that, it tends to warp the space in its current local neighborhood to make escaping that dip harder). But the more capital you have accessible, the more you can overcome steeper wells. Effective governments can deploy resources to get out of very steep wells.
    - latency-guy2 3y ago
      [flagged]
- edgyquant 3y ago
  How would that result in a better system exactly? The money going into research each year would grow and no would ever admit if the thing was impossible as it would mean willfully ending a jobs program.
  - rgmerk 3y ago
    That’s not how publicly funded research works. Most research projects are competitively funded by grant money on short timelines, and researchers are employed on fixed-term contracts. University professors with tenure are the exception rather than the rule. Research projects regularly get canned because priorities change or the work just isn’t sexy enough.
- Nasrudith 3y ago
  What is stopping funding more publicly funded research right now? It isn't the existence of billionaires in spite of the innumerate rhetoric ad nauseam otherwise. There isn't any "doing instead". There being billionaires or not has absolutely nothing to do with the question of why they aren't allocating "doing it instead". That is putting aside that the public and private sector fund research differently with different priorities which results in both discoveries one would make that the other wouldn't and in flaws and anti-patterns observed. Private funding would be more likely to have arbitrary favoritism based on personal biases vs the public sector playing politics in a "lets play pin the jobs on the congressional districts" way.
rgmerk 3y ago
For what it’s worth, while these things are undoubtedly more useful than bored apes, it’s not where I’d be investing my money if I were a billionaire. While the idea of cost-benefit analysis in philanthropy has gotten a bad reputation after going down some very weird rabbit holes recently, the idea behind it isn’t completely crazy. Building toilets may not be as sexy as reattaching nerves but the cost-benefit ratios are pretty attractive.
- tiffanyg 3y ago
  You said it man!* I find the 'ethics' of everything complicated, lately. But, simple non-flashy action to just try to relieve some suffering is about as ... therapeutic as it gets - for everyone, I think. It reminds me of that great folk tune, "Simple Gifts" (famously set by Copeland [in his style]). There's quite a bit to be said for the ideas of groups like the 'Shakers' (though strict celibacy for all does tend to be quite a headwind for perpetuation). There is something very significant in the idea framed, for example, in the Christian Bible as "private prayer"** - the effects this has on the function and other characteristics of a person AND their community (which ideally is the world). The mindset of as substantial a 'selflessness' as is possible for humans seems to make the world much more livable, simple, etc. (for anyone who practices towards it). It doesn't seem so common among people who become billionaires, though - this is not a dig at them at all, nor do I wish to end this comment on the subject in general. But, what's truly absurd and sad, to me, is that what everyone actually wants tends to get further away the more you cling to anything ... simply accumulate anything, including money. * (John Turturro voice, always hear in my head, omit details as much as I can 'help myself' tho...) ** Matthew 6:5, for example - this is ending up rather 'Christianity-heavy', but the key messages are quite 'agnostic' IMO. I find them more-or-less in the 'useful' "spiritual systems" from all regions ...
- bdw5204 3y ago
  I'd say the best thing for billionaires to spend their money on would be whatever they're interested in. I think philanthropy is probably a poor use of resources compared to starting businesses with a purpose other than just maximizing shareholder value. A business where the goal is to just break even is a business that can focus on maximizing its positive impact on the world. Realistically speaking, no human institution will remain true to its original purpose for very long after the death or departure of its founder. Institutions drift, whether towards maximizing shareholder value (if a publicly traded, i.e. de-facto ownerless, corporation) or towards pushing a political agenda (if a non-profit foundation). The only way to have a chance of avoiding this drift is for the founder to pass on true ownership of the institution to somebody whom he believes shares his vision. Even then, that doesn't exactly work out perfectly because eventually the owner is going to make a poor choice for his successor and the successor will either run the institution into the ground or sell the institution because he doesn't actually want it.
hermitcrab 3y ago
I want there to be no billionaires. "It's time we demolish the convenient myth that tax cuts for the richest result in their wealth somehow 'trickling down' to everyone else," said Bucher. "Forty years of tax cuts for the super-rich have shown that a rising tide doesn't lift all ships—just the superyachts." https://www.commondreams.org/news/billionaires-policy-failure-oxfam https://www.commondreams.org/news/billionaires-policy-failur...
- NumberWangMan 3y ago
  This is the best argument I've heard against billionaires--one I had never heard before: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-replaceability https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-re.... I think most arguments for/against the existence of people with such wealth are basically capitalists saying they deserve it for creating value or that we need to incentivize wealth creation, and socialists arguing past them saying that it's just wrong for anyone to have so much more than anyone else. This is the first time I've heard anyone making a good argument that actually, even IF you are a staunch capitalist, and you only consider people who made their money without leaning on government to bend the rules in their favor, maybe billionaires don't deserve all their wealth.
  - sojournerc 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing that. Great way to think about _where_ the billionaires' wealth comes from and where it could've been instead.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    It’s not very good because it somehow thinks billionaires just have that money that can be easily taken. Most billionaires don’t have anywhere near a billion in cash and huge chunks are just ownership stakes in a company. It’s not just cash that accumulated and could be better used somewhere else. It’s a FMV applied to a much larger portion of what the liquid market can support. Nobody gave Bezos $200 billion instead of giving it to charity. He just has ownership of multiple companies with share prices that when multiplied times his stake land at that value. So it’s not surplus at all and it’s just instead, “here appears to be a valuable company, let’s seize and liquidate 10% to fund some socialist endeavors”. It makes no difference if it’s one owner or 10 at that point. It’s illogical because it’s not about wealth at all. The author of that article based the entire premise on Jeff taking in $200 billion in profit himself, which is so uninformed the whole thing can be more or less dismissed outright.
lynx23 3y ago
That is some techno-optimism right there! > A billionaire going blind would get the brain mapped at a resolution we can only dream of. I am wondering, being blind myself, what is it exactly that you are hinting at? I am assuming something in the direction of neuralink? I am asking because I really can not relate to your optimism. Tech is great for assistive technologies like talking phones or image to text LLMs and so on. But when people start to suggest all I need is the right implant to "compensate" for my disability, I frankly start to freak out and realize whatever they are thinking is not resonating with me in any way. Is your techno-optimism, in 2023, really that great that you'd want some tech to fuck with your brain? Also, what many people don't realize is that people with sensory disabilities literally grow used to their "new" way of perceiving the world. Most of the interventions people seem to hold in high esteem kind of assume the disability hasn't been going on for a while. For instance, me being blind for 35 years also means that even if I would gain a visual sense through some tech, I'd still have to invest years to make some basic use of it. Imagine, I'd have to learn to read, basically like a preschooler. Its not that easy to "gift" sight to the blind, not even with the most fancy optimistic tech we have in a forseeable future.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

microtherion 3y ago

Maybe the job of the future is Court Jester?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

yowlingcat 3y ago

Theoretically, that could be the job of management consulting, but the firms who have the capability and clout to do this also obviously realize it's far more lucrative to utilize those resources to craft narratives that support whatever goals said billionaires and their firms are prioritizing.