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Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

272 points by zdw 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
nine_zeros 6mo ago
That is the entire basis of the TV show - "The boys" - and the entire reason for no kings in America.
qznc 6mo ago
For my mental model how White House politics work, this article was very influential: https://www.thewrap.com/obama-aides-say-veep-accurate-west-wing-house-cards/ https://www.thewrap.com/obama-aides-say-veep-accurate-west-w... > “The funny thing about ‘Veep’ is, we as people who worked in the White House always get asked, okay, what’s the most real? Is it ‘House of Cards? Is it ‘West Wing’? And the answer is, it’s ‘Veep.’ Because you guys nail the fragility of the egos, and the, like, day-to-day idiocy of the decision-making,” Vietor said. Same vibe as "conspiracy theorists are optimists because they believe there is a great plan."
- muglug 6mo ago
  All gossip I hear about the extremely powerful leads me to believe that they’d be utterly unable to organise any sort of conspiracy themselves. Most haven’t touched Google Calendar in a decade. They can’t call anyone without their assistant typing in the number first.
  - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
    This might have more to do with their average age than anything though
- mastermage 6mo ago
  and the best thing is then the conspiracy theorists do not go after like the realy small set of things that actualy could be called a real conspiracy. Coughs in the trump files ft. epstein.
sfink 6mo ago
I kind of feel like people know how to human, and how the humans around them human, but someone they've never met but only heard about or seen on TV or in meme posts? No clue at all. Sure, we know the hotshot CEO of COMPANY_NAME_HERE has to put on his pants one leg at a time, but the similarity ends there. They're different, they won't fall for the stupid tricks we fall for. They don't have trouble getting out of bed or ever worry about what their kids are up to. They have CEO spouses that don't ask them to take out the trash or think about which yogurt to buy. On the flip side, if they do something bad, that's because they're evil. A deep dark evil totally unlike the banal lameness of the people around us. They don't do stupid shit when someone jerks their chain and they get all worked up. Why would they, they're surrounded by money and other powerful people and have servants feeding them brilliant insights all day long. Everything they do is planned and calculated and they think through the damage they're doing to people in excruciating detail. There's only one species of humans on Earth, and we're all dumb as shit.
- mitthrowaway2 6mo ago
  If they're not special, why do we have to pay them so much just to get out of bed?
  - sfink 6mo ago
    That's a good question, and although I think I have a good answer, I fear it would be too much of a tangent to speculate on here.
    - jamauro 6mo ago
      If we're not speculating, what are we even doing here?
  - dzikimarian 6mo ago
    I was part of CEO recruitment process (sadly not FAANG-like, so maybe it wasn't "so much"-level yet). Amount of people who are both seriously willing to take the job(considering pressure) and have necessary skills is not very high. Tbh same is truth for any management job - a lot of competent people prefer calmer life. Obviously for the very top compensation is bonkers and there's fair share of frauds that ended in the position for various reasons, but if you want someone reasonable pool shrinks quite fast.
cosmotic 6mo ago
Better title: Sometimes people do dumb shit, even powerful people
lmm 6mo ago
And how does the price Musk paid for Twitter look now? Sure, maybe it was really a dumb move and he just got lucky. But he's been lucky a hell of a lot.
- WatchDog 6mo ago
  He bailed out his Twitter investors by having xAi purchase Twitter, then he bailed out his xAi investors by having SpaceX purchase xAi, and how he is trying to bail out SpaceX by having the index funds be forced to purchase SpaceX. Twitter valuation aside, there must be some intangible benefits to the purchase. Lots of influential people use Twitter, he has amplified his reach, and the purchase seems to have moved the overton window in favor of his agenda.
  - zarzavat 6mo ago
    > the index funds be forced to purchase SpaceX SpaceX is a fantastic company full of the smartest engineers that has brought fast internet to the most remote regions on Earth. Even if it wasn't for index funds, investors would buy the shit out of it. xAI has built an almost-frontier model. It's not Anthropic or OpenAI but it's also not valued like Anthropic or OpenAI either. Twitter is doing OK, despite predictions. It found a niche with obnoxious right-wing assholes instead of obnoxious left-wing assholes. Twitter does seem to be less excited about getting people fired for wrongthink than before which is a societal improvement. It did succeed in buying Musk influence at the highest levels, but he threw it away. Mixed success. I know Musk gets a lot of hatred on here for his behavior and beliefs, including from myself, but that doesn't imply that his businesses are all scams. Hugo Boss was a Nazi too and his business is doing fine.
    - WatchDog 6mo ago
      Elon has made multiple comments in the past about how much keeping SpaceX private, makes it easier to run, and achieve it's goals of colonising Mars. He has given up on that, he has abandoned the Mars goal, and he is sacrificing the company to the whims of the public markets, just so he can have a payday. xAi raised $45 billion and Grok loses benchmarks to Chinese(GPU sanctioned) open weight models. I'm overall positive about the Twitter acquisition, I mean it was terrible financially, and Elon has made a lot of unforced errors in it's management, but yes, it does feel like the idpol witch hunts have died down a bit since.
IIAOPSW 6mo ago
Something I've learned is that in a certain social strata when people do audaciously stupid, its rarely because they lack the common sense to have covered their tracks. Its because they've learned they don't have to. No one is working hard to try and catch them, and even if by some miracle someone does (and people believe them), no government or regulatory body is really interested in punishing them anyway. This broadly goes for non-criminal acts too. Sometimes powerful people do seemingly dumb things because they are only dumb in the context of the incentive structures if one of us tried to do it. In their context, it would be stupid not to egregiously take advantage.
- ozim 6mo ago
  Conversely I didn’t understand incentives for junkies to steal bikes to sell those only for 10 or 20 bucks. My incentive structure is nowhere near to theirs. It took a lot of mental effort and empathy for me to grasp what kind of environment they navigate in life to steal my bike I bought for $200. So I also lack understanding of being a millionaire or a billionaire but I definitely lack empathy for those people.
- nearbuy 6mo ago
  In my experience, people of every social strata sometimes do audaciously stupid things, and it's not because they get special treatment. It's often the people who have gotten in trouble the most that do audaciously stupid things the most frequently, despite experiencing past punishment. Your observation matches what we would see if those people you speak of were just stupid for no reason and committed crimes that aren't caught as often. If a crime is only caught 10% of the time, they probably won't get caught the first few times. You can interpret that as them learning they can get away with it, but the person who just does stupid stuff for no reason will do the same thing, it isn't evidence one way or the other. And they'd still be stupid the first time they committed the crime, before they've learned they can get away with it. And if they get convicted eventually, it was still stupid in the end. And if they don't get caught, we usually don't know about it, which makes it hard to argue that it's actually worth it for them to do these seemingly stupid crimes; we know of their failures but not their successes.
vjk800 6mo ago
"The Wire" TV show portrays these things well. In it, the powerful people often have the least clue about anything. They are just playing the game and often winning by sheer luck. They also often do fuck up, but because they are powerful, are able to get other people to take the hit for them or build a narrative that hides the fuck up. The older I get, the more I think that this TV show is actually the most realistic portrayal of how the real world works there is.
- grebc 6mo ago
  Which character is DJT? I think some combo of Carcetti & Burrell. Ability to play the game but all the gear and no idea.
- bestconncomp 6mo ago
  [dead]
utopiah 6mo ago
We ALL do dumb shit. The shit from powerful people just has more impact. The "trick" is that cunning powerful people fail forward, so they keep on doing dumb shit with even more impact.
csallen 6mo ago
The challenge with the world is that it requires nuance, ad hoc thinking, and effortful thinking. The human brain doesn't like putting effort into thinking. It's uncomfortable. It's easier for us to just have one rule, one heuristic, that we can simply apply to many similar situations. This is why ideology exists and is so powerful. You can always find people chanting the same phrase or slogan, over and over, regardless of the circumstance. Because it's easier for them to do that than it is for them to treat every situation as unique and to reason through it from first principles. Hell, sometimes that's just not feasible. In this situation, yeah, sometimes powerful people do dumb shit. And ideologues come by and say, "You just don't understand the 4d chess!" But also, sometimes it's the opposite! And the powerful person does something smart, but that's unclear or unfamiliar to the average person without massive wealth/access/power. And ideologues from the peanut gallery come by and say, "Another powerful person doing stupid stuff!" And of course, the right (but alas more effortful) approach is to evaluate each situation individually, and reason through the factors, and also to wait to see how it turns out, before evaluating. For example, the author evaluations Elon's purchase of Twitter as an irredeemably stupid decision. And I agree, many things about how that went down seem very stupid. But at the same time, dude has launched an AI lab that's gotten tons of press and exposure thanks in large part to X, combined it with his other companies, and is about to IPO for $1.5T+. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe I don't like it. Maybe there's lots to complain about here, but it's difficult to describe this as a "stupid" move. Does that mean he was playing 4D chess? Also, maybe not! Maybe he just lucked into this situation. Maybe he didn't foresee it initially, but figured it out later. Or maybe, much more reasonably, he figured that he has tons of optionality and tons of leeway, so even if he doesn't have a good plan to begin with, he'll likely figure it out. Who knows. It's tough to be a speculator judging from the sidelines with incomplete knowledge. And it's even tougher to avoid allowing our biases and ideologies to compel us to simply shout our beliefs rather than being objective and analytical.
- riffraff 6mo ago
  Yeah I don't buy that xAI story, musk would have gotten a popular ai lab even without Twitter if he wanted. Except.. his ai lab is not popular. It has zero value and people only use it because it's on Twitter and they don't pay for it. The fact that he had to merge it with a successful unrelated company tells you all you need to know.
taffydavid 6mo ago
Elons robot obsession is probably more 4d chess / hidden plan theory. At a time when Tesla sales are flagging in Europe despite an enormous surge in overall EV sales due to yet another energy crisis, he's turning Tesla factories into humanoid robot factories to make a robot that doesn't yet work that nobody asked for. I'm sure lots of Tesla fan boys will pay 20k for a robot butler, but an EV fills a need for the average family and an incompetent bipedal Roomba really does not. They should be focused on PR, it's such a short step from where they are now back to being on top of the EV market.
florkbork 6mo ago
I disagree with the parts about Trump: he does know what he is doing. Not because it's a well crafted plan of 4D chess, but because he's deeply anxious/insecure and "lie with grandiosity" is a learned survival mechanism to protect his feelings from reality. It's like expecting a fish to stop swimming - it feels like it's suffocating, it's going to panic and do everything it can to get back into the water, get moving again. The fish isn't playing 4d chess, it's just flipping all over the place until it feels safe again, and then probably forget all of the chaos minutes later. How much this is applicable to the other examples - Musk, Napoleon - unclear. But saying they do "stupid" things without looking at why they might do stupid things is reductionist/overly simple/can PROBABLY be answered with psychology in most cases.
- riffraff 6mo ago
  I think you have to qualify what you think trump is doing knowingly or not. Lie in every press conference? Sure. Posting an image of himself as Jesus? The guy has dementia.
  - quantummagic 6mo ago
    > The guy has dementia. I think you're right, but it isn't as advanced as Joe Biden's was, by the end of his term.
    - actionfromafar 6mo ago
      Trump is very vigorous, even in dementia! Interesting times ahead.
    - 63stack 6mo ago
      Could you post a link to a video where Trump talks for 15 minutes coherently?
0xbadcafebee 6mo ago
And sometimes people put out hit pieces about companies they don't like, while objectively much worse companies in the same industry are beloved. Who knows why people do things!
obscurette 6mo ago
I think the age of social media has made the problem much worse. People are much more focused on how to gain fame and glory, but they can easily distance themselves from taking responsibility for the consequences.
mastermage 6mo ago
I would actualy give the not so benefit of the doubt even to powerful people. Everyone does stupid shit all the time. There is however a significant difference in how the fallout of this dumb shit affects people. Powerful people may do dumb shit and then due to the power sweep the consequences away from themselves. While everyone else would have had to face these consequences. And thats the fundamental issue. Too much power allows dumb decisions to stand unchallenged, and removes the possibility for self correction (due to consequences). Which is fundamentally why the power of singular people needs to be limited.
ggm 6mo ago
I related to this. I think the 4D chess crowd are, like the "I did my own research" crowd projecting a dominance view in the moment, not actually providing a rebuttal. It's the deux ex machina of our times. How can Elon be wrong about invading Moscow. You don't understand but I do
khnad10 6mo ago
The post cleverly and preemptively disparages people who "show up in a thread and claim that everything is part of a larger plan". Posting a picture of Napoleon is cute, but does not prove anything. Those were different times. - The Iran attack plans go back a long way. Netanyahu tried the same during the Obama administration and was rejected. There are Brookings Institute papers that outline all countries that need to fall before attacking Iran. The last one was Syria that fell in 2024. - As is evident now, Trump is not MAGA. Vance was an anti-Trumper in 2016 and is the deepest of deep state via his Thiel sponsor. They are just executing the plans. - The "pro-Russia" sentiment of Vance and Trump appears to be a ruse. They want to make the EU pay more but continue the Ukraine war. - Vance's "support" for Orban was fake and achieved the intended goal: people voted for the opposite and $90 billion for Ukraine of EU money is unblocked. - Vance deliberately torpedoed the Pakistan peace talks. - Democrat protests are weak. Hillary Clinton only criticizes the (ostensible) lack of a plan. The plan is to weaken Russia, China and the EU. The latter two are targeted by high energy prices and increased US dependencies in the case of the EU. The problem is not lone commentators pointing all this out. The problem is that there is a concerted effort to blame all of this on Trump and Israel. Blaming Israel was forbidden prior to the Iran war, now it is a mainstream excuse promoted by mainstream media, left and right wing podcasts and almost all Internet commenters. That is a deliberate strategy to distract from long term goals.
- Sankozi 6mo ago
  Your post is great example of 4D chess arguments. They seem believable at first glance but if you look deeper they either don't make sense (like vice president taking role of a clown to lower support of an ally) or are distraction (the Iran attack plans argument - lots of people predicted Hormuz problem, previous plans doesn't matter much here).
  - army_unit_77 6mo ago
    > like vice president taking role of a clown to lower support of an ally) Your premise is that Orban is an "ally". He was an ally in the culture war distractions (anti-woke). Hegseth told the EU to take over and pay for the Ukraine war in 2025. $90 billion supersede culture war issues. Vance already made a clown of himself by pivoting from Trump is a "moral disaster" and an "idiot" in 2016 to running with him in 2024. Your post is a great example of sinking a post without any coherent arguments. It is impossible to discern what you even mean by the second "Iran" arguments. There are no premises and there is no logic.
Tinned_Tuna 6mo ago
I don't think the author read even the Wikipedia page on Napoleon's invasion of Russia? Napoleon _did_ have reasons for attacking Russia, he _did_ prepare logistics. His motives, rationale, and actions are well-documented and widely studied. > watching an unchecked megalomaniac march 685,000 soldiers into a Russian winter without a fur coat in sight Napoleon famously crossed the Neman River in *June*.
- Arainach 6mo ago
  If you believe a war with a country the size of Russia will be over within 4 months you might not be a genius.
  - bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
    I think the belief was probably taking Moscow and forcing a treaty.
  - wood_spirit 6mo ago
    Through a modern lenses and with hindsight and memes that follow from napoleons failed attempt we can say flippant things like this and say napoleon wasn’t a genius. But students of history and future generals will obviously investigate the facts and see things through the lenses and circumstances of the time rather than from the seat or the internet commentator.
    - bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
      but they have already, rhetorically, dealt with anyone that might come with some sort of context that does not agree with their conclusion: >There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value, and you’ve met them. I am absolutely sure of it. They show up in every comment section and reply thread where someone powerful does something that looks, on its face, like a mistake - and their argument always runs the same way: you don’t understand, this is actually part of a larger plan, there’s a strategy here that you and I can’t see because we’re not operating at that annointed and elevated level… Which is, of course, one of the things you have to do when dealing with shooting some bullshit in order to get to your next level of argument, you have to deploy arguments as to why the people who might show up to say hey that's bullshit are actually the stupid people who talk the bullshit, and not you. As an example of the genre it's pretty tepid, they manage the "I'm telling you the truth part" and the talking down part of the message, but I personally find the best of this genre always includes a pithy little witticism that is just so bitchy and deliciously mean that nobody wants to make the bullshit accusation. At least that's my recommend! I give it a C+/B- for effort. on edit: I of course mean what the original article did, in making its flippant comments, not what Arainach did.
franze 6mo ago
Sometimes?
deleted 6mo ago
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gobdovan 6mo ago
One thing I'd highlight is that the mechanism the OP notices in all the actors is a low-cost way of reducing uncertainty. At each step, what does it cost to admit uncertainty or error vs what is gained from doing so? For a powerful person, appearing decisive often has a lower immediate cost than being indecisive. For a committed supporter, doubting the figure they've invested in has social, psychological and identity costs that outweigh any benefit of changing their beliefs. When the local cost of uncertainty is higher than the perceived benefit of being right, people resolve toward certainty. So the phenomenon could be seen as a cost-minimizing collapse where beliefs and actions settle on whatever preserves stability, even if it means denying something real. So: Benefit(belief update) < Cost(belief update) => certainty collapse -> people believe weird shit
NoPicklez 6mo ago
Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit, because they're still a human being like all of us. It's easy to look at Musk and say, he's done some dumb shit when his dumb shit makes news. But very few of us have the same type of scrutiny that powerful people have. He's done dumb shit, but he's done a lot of pretty good shit across his lifetime. Nobody is infallible.
- dozerly 6mo ago
  It’s easy to look at musk because he’s a piece of shit
- pasquinelli 6mo ago
  but i have to wonder what powerful people actually bring to the table.
  - wallst07 6mo ago
    Leadership. Most here won't want to hear it, but the average person does not want to lead. They want to be told everything will be alright. Leading + consequences is difficult and stressful. Heck, just leading your own household is stressful, try doing it for someone else or 1000s.
    - jq-r 6mo ago
      Mismanaging your household finances can ruin your livelihood and you might end up on the street. Mismanaging a company which you didn’t build won’t ruin your livelihood. It might of the employees. It may weight heavy on your conscience but we’ve heard enough of those “I take full responsibility” phrases that we know how heavy is that.
  - NoGravitas 6mo ago
    Capital or the ability to raise capital.
- spiderfarmer 6mo ago
  Regular people do dumb shit and embarrass themselves at a barbecue. Powerful people do dumb shit and move markets, wreck products, distort public discourse, and still get a choir singing about their ‘pretty good shit across his lifetime.’ At some point it stops being nuance and starts being unpaid PR.
trick-or-treat 6mo ago
He got a top social media platform reaching billions for around 5% of his net worth, that doesn't sound like a huge L to me.
orleyhuxwell 6mo ago
'Clever Hans was a horse that appeared to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks during exhibitions in Germany in the early 20th century.' - wikipedia We should be able to hold 2 things in mind at the same time.: a leader (i.e. Elon Musk) can be extremally charismaric (in his specific nerdy way), can have a great talent in filtering ideas that people pitch to him - optimizing for coolness factor. He can even be able to speak about these ideas for hours in captivating maner. A skill in deal-making, getting financed, inspiring people is also real. At the same time such person can be extremally narcissistic and impulsive + clearly addicted to public drama focused on him or her. And these character tratis seem to control him, so this person will always choose the 'more power, more news, more controversy' path even when it clearly doesn't make sense. Add to it a society with a strong cult of personality (a feature of US culture) and some of the lucky reckless charismatic people will get very powerful eventually and also get rewarded for doubling down on their worse decisions.
samrus 6mo ago
I agree with the thesis but i dont agree about elon buying twitter. That was really messy, but it was clear later on that he did it to manipulate the election for trump, and that bet paid off amazongly well for him in hindsight. Not only did twitter turn out to be ceitical in spreading misinformation (how many morons didnt vote for harris because they thought shed start a war in the middle east) but that then also gave him crazy access to the government. It fell out later, but it was probably the most effective 40bil anyone today could hope to spend
foo42 6mo ago
I suspect sycophancy has a lot to do with things . People with power attract those who want their favour and/or money who will align themselves to please the powerful rather than steer them to their best selves. Furthermore as the sycophants accumulate the genuine voices likely begin to sound out of place, like their _against_ the individual. Ironically paranoia gets deployed in the wrong direction to push out the true voices. I worry this fate will become more common. Everyone can hit up an artificial sycophant at will who they've been told is super intelligent and yet claims their ideas are full of deep insight.
stared 6mo ago
While the premise is good and explains a lot of failures, I the Musk example is misplaced. Musk bought Twitter. And then he succeeded - Trump became elected and he became his right hand. Is it, for Musk, a failure? Sure, it is not 4D chess. It is just "some people lie as a tool to get their goals". The same way when politicians introduce surveillance to "protect children" and it makes children less, it is not a failure. It is a win - more control, and more fuel for further campaigns.
chrz 6mo ago
I thinknm we are missing one scenario - sometimes with their practically unlimited money they just buy something to destroy it
simianwords 6mo ago
There’s a particular kind of influencer who follows the archetype I call “perpetual bull”. They are highly cynical and show an immense confidence in their own predictions despite not being in the thick of it. And usually it follows the same format: the ideology is that the elites are stupid and completely irrational, evil as well as extremely powerful (they can’t see the contradiction in this). So they attempt to “balance the narrative” by showing the other side. In the past year or so I heard multiple things about A.I.: I was kept being told that the AI bubble will crash any time soon. Still didn’t happen. I was told ChatGPT is not here to stay. It’s one of the most downloaded apps in the world. I was told that Elon firing 80% of staff will cause twitter to crash. It didn’t. It’s running perfectly fine. The modus operandi seems to be that you may just be cynical about everything because civilisationally important discoveries happen only once a while
- simianwords 6mo ago
  Here's a Paul Krugman quote on the Internet "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s"
lovegrenoble 6mo ago
It wasn't the Russian winter, but Kutuzov's genius.
- TonyStr 6mo ago
  Kutuzov's genius of repeatedly pulling back until the Grande Armee was standing at the doorstep of their ancient capital, fighting one of the most stubborn battles in the Napoleonic era, yet loosing significantly more men than their attackers, and finally backing off, to behind their capital, allowing it to be plundered and burnt down during the occupation? (The city didn't burn down in a day, but a series of fires occurred almost every day until the Grande Armee left). Even when the attackers were retreating, he was still indecisive.
  - Atatator 6mo ago
    > standing at the doorstep of their ancient capital Moscow was neither "ancient capital" nor current capital of Russia in 1812.
    - TonyStr 6mo ago
      My apologies, I think I was misremembering a quote from War and Peace. I actually went and found the passage that confused me: https://literaturepage.com/read/warandpeace-1228.html https://literaturepage.com/read/warandpeace-1228.html Thank you for correcting me! Tolstoy meant it philosophically/culturally, not literally.
vrganj 6mo ago
Not sometimes. Most of the time. Have you seen the news lately? Powerful people operate on unchecked egos and surround themselves with sycophants.
danielparsons 6mo ago
I've been following this guy on youtube since he started - cool to see him posted here
monour 6mo ago
when someone so successful sometime they gained wrong trust in their selves and do not doubt themselves at all
ting0 6mo ago
The Twitter example is a bad one. Elon Musk, at the time, was making hundreds-of-millions through crypto-market manipulation on Twitter. At that time he realized that having control over the entire Twitter platform would unlock many billions of dollars worth of profit opportunity. Attention is the most valuable and powerful currency in this world. Not only for manipulating markets, but also for political propaganda. The information we consume literally shapes the world. So yes, it was a 4D chess move.
roncesvalles 6mo ago
1. Outcome bias. Just because a decision didn't pan out doesn't mean it was a bad decision at the time it was made. 2. Rich/successful people have a bias for big bets because big bets are how they got this far. 3. People get less sharp as they get older but are more confident because of the successes of their youth.
michaelteter 6mo ago
Some people are just really good at leveraging others. Leverage enough other people, and you can get rich and or powerful. And the more you leverage, the more you get. A lot of current powerful people got lucky at one key moment (often involving imaginary money and hype applied to the stock market). And once they got their big level up, they suddenly became visionaries. That includes some of the more outspoken people that many HN readers idolize. Many of those people believe their own bullshit, partly because they naturally are insulated within a group of sycophants (who are either groupies or usually looking for a lift up to a level of stature they don’t deserve).
TonyStr 6mo ago
The main goal of Napoleon's invasion of Russia was to beat their military in a decisive battle long before reaching Moscow, forcing Alexander to comply with the continental system - a European trade embargo created by Napoleon to weaken the British Empire who have been hostile toward France since long before the French revolution. Alexander signed this trade embargo during the treaty of Tilsit of 1807, and had been breaking the treaty for years by allowing trade with the British. The Russians did intend to fight, and set up redoubts several times close to the invading army, but would always retreat when the Grande Armée approached. The military leadership in Russia was very indecisive, caught up in internal rivalries and disagreements. It didn't help that a large part of their military leadership was German. Aside from small skirmishes, they only gave battle once they were practically standing at the doorstep of Moscow, in the battle of Borodino. The 400,000 dead soldiers died mostly to disease. Recent studies have found evidence of Borrelia Recurrentis which causes a form of relapsing fever. The western soldiers wouldn't have had any exposure to this bacteria before, so they were particularly weak to it. It was also exceptionally hot during the summer while they were invading (when the majority of soldiers died), which contributed to spread of disease and exhausting the horses. Disease and dying horses did way more damage to the Grande Armée than the Russian military did. The campaign was a military disaster (though the people at home might not be aware, due to slow information flow and propaganda), but it was not without aim, and it was not obvious to anyone that 70% of the army would die to disease before a single major battle. I appreciate that you at least didn't propagate the myth that Napoleon invaded in the winter, or that he lost because Kutuzov "outsmarted" him by giving him free passage to Moscow and burning it down. > There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value I would hope that the majority of readers here are taking the story with a huge pinch of salt. Napoleon's invasion of Russia is one of the most misunderstood events in modern history. Maybe that's why it's so popular to use it as an anecdote - because it can be molded to mean whatever you like, and people probably won't question you.
- eesmith 6mo ago
  > The 400,000 dead soldiers died mostly to disease. I believe that in every major war of the 1800s, more soldiers died from disease than from combat. Consider the War of 1812. "fully three-quarters of the war deaths resulted from disease, most commonly typhoid fever, pneumonia, malaria, measles, typhus, smallpox and diarrhea" - https://www.nps.gov/articles/military-medicine.htm https://www.nps.gov/articles/military-medicine.htm Consider the Crimean War. "death by disease exceeded the sum of "killed in action" or "died of wounds"" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War Consider the US Civil War. "Of the nearly 700,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War, nearly two thirds or 467,000 died from sickness and disease." - https://www.nps.gov/gett/learn/education/a-nation-at-war-traveling-trunk-table-5-the-medical-corps-at-war.htm https://www.nps.gov/gett/learn/education/a-nation-at-war-tra... Oh, hey - in the Franco-Prussian War more soldiers died of combat than from disease (for the Germans, 28,000 battle deaths vs 12,000 by disease, and for the French, 77,000 battle deaths vs 45,000 by disease) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War , so I was wrong! Though those numbers exclude "162,000 German[ civilian deaths] in a smallpox epidemic spread by French POWs" and "450,000 French civilians dead from war-related famine and disease".
benterix 6mo ago
"Sometimes"?
NordStreamYacht 6mo ago
The podcast purchase? Shades of Bari Weiss.
TruffleLabs 6mo ago
https://www.edwardtufte.com/product/napoleons-march/ https://www.edwardtufte.com/product/napoleons-march/ Via Edward Tufte "Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales."

272 points by zdw 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

nine_zeros 6mo ago

That is the entire basis of the TV show - "The boys" - and the entire reason for no kings in America.

qznc 6mo ago

For my mental model how White House politics work, this article was very influential: https://www.thewrap.com/obama-aides-say-veep-accurate-west-wing-house-cards/ https://www.thewrap.com/obama-aides-say-veep-accurate-west-w... > “The funny thing about ‘Veep’ is, we as people who worked in the White House always get asked, okay, what’s the most real? Is it ‘House of Cards? Is it ‘West Wing’? And the answer is, it’s ‘Veep.’ Because you guys nail the fragility of the egos, and the, like, day-to-day idiocy of the decision-making,” Vietor said. Same vibe as "conspiracy theorists are optimists because they believe there is a great plan."

muglug 6mo ago
All gossip I hear about the extremely powerful leads me to believe that they’d be utterly unable to organise any sort of conspiracy themselves. Most haven’t touched Google Calendar in a decade. They can’t call anyone without their assistant typing in the number first.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  This might have more to do with their average age than anything though
mastermage 6mo ago
and the best thing is then the conspiracy theorists do not go after like the realy small set of things that actualy could be called a real conspiracy. Coughs in the trump files ft. epstein.

sfink 6mo ago

I kind of feel like people know how to human, and how the humans around them human, but someone they've never met but only heard about or seen on TV or in meme posts? No clue at all. Sure, we know the hotshot CEO of COMPANY_NAME_HERE has to put on his pants one leg at a time, but the similarity ends there. They're different, they won't fall for the stupid tricks we fall for. They don't have trouble getting out of bed or ever worry about what their kids are up to. They have CEO spouses that don't ask them to take out the trash or think about which yogurt to buy. On the flip side, if they do something bad, that's because they're evil. A deep dark evil totally unlike the banal lameness of the people around us. They don't do stupid shit when someone jerks their chain and they get all worked up. Why would they, they're surrounded by money and other powerful people and have servants feeding them brilliant insights all day long. Everything they do is planned and calculated and they think through the damage they're doing to people in excruciating detail. There's only one species of humans on Earth, and we're all dumb as shit.

mitthrowaway2 6mo ago
If they're not special, why do we have to pay them so much just to get out of bed?
- sfink 6mo ago
  That's a good question, and although I think I have a good answer, I fear it would be too much of a tangent to speculate on here.
  - jamauro 6mo ago
    If we're not speculating, what are we even doing here?
- dzikimarian 6mo ago
  I was part of CEO recruitment process (sadly not FAANG-like, so maybe it wasn't "so much"-level yet). Amount of people who are both seriously willing to take the job(considering pressure) and have necessary skills is not very high. Tbh same is truth for any management job - a lot of competent people prefer calmer life. Obviously for the very top compensation is bonkers and there's fair share of frauds that ended in the position for various reasons, but if you want someone reasonable pool shrinks quite fast.

cosmotic 6mo ago

Better title: Sometimes people do dumb shit, even powerful people

lmm 6mo ago

And how does the price Musk paid for Twitter look now? Sure, maybe it was really a dumb move and he just got lucky. But he's been lucky a hell of a lot.

WatchDog 6mo ago
He bailed out his Twitter investors by having xAi purchase Twitter, then he bailed out his xAi investors by having SpaceX purchase xAi, and how he is trying to bail out SpaceX by having the index funds be forced to purchase SpaceX. Twitter valuation aside, there must be some intangible benefits to the purchase. Lots of influential people use Twitter, he has amplified his reach, and the purchase seems to have moved the overton window in favor of his agenda.
- zarzavat 6mo ago
  > the index funds be forced to purchase SpaceX SpaceX is a fantastic company full of the smartest engineers that has brought fast internet to the most remote regions on Earth. Even if it wasn't for index funds, investors would buy the shit out of it. xAI has built an almost-frontier model. It's not Anthropic or OpenAI but it's also not valued like Anthropic or OpenAI either. Twitter is doing OK, despite predictions. It found a niche with obnoxious right-wing assholes instead of obnoxious left-wing assholes. Twitter does seem to be less excited about getting people fired for wrongthink than before which is a societal improvement. It did succeed in buying Musk influence at the highest levels, but he threw it away. Mixed success. I know Musk gets a lot of hatred on here for his behavior and beliefs, including from myself, but that doesn't imply that his businesses are all scams. Hugo Boss was a Nazi too and his business is doing fine.
  - WatchDog 6mo ago
    Elon has made multiple comments in the past about how much keeping SpaceX private, makes it easier to run, and achieve it's goals of colonising Mars. He has given up on that, he has abandoned the Mars goal, and he is sacrificing the company to the whims of the public markets, just so he can have a payday. xAi raised $45 billion and Grok loses benchmarks to Chinese(GPU sanctioned) open weight models. I'm overall positive about the Twitter acquisition, I mean it was terrible financially, and Elon has made a lot of unforced errors in it's management, but yes, it does feel like the idpol witch hunts have died down a bit since.

IIAOPSW 6mo ago

Something I've learned is that in a certain social strata when people do audaciously stupid, its rarely because they lack the common sense to have covered their tracks. Its because they've learned they don't have to. No one is working hard to try and catch them, and even if by some miracle someone does (and people believe them), no government or regulatory body is really interested in punishing them anyway. This broadly goes for non-criminal acts too. Sometimes powerful people do seemingly dumb things because they are only dumb in the context of the incentive structures if one of us tried to do it. In their context, it would be stupid not to egregiously take advantage.

ozim 6mo ago
Conversely I didn’t understand incentives for junkies to steal bikes to sell those only for 10 or 20 bucks. My incentive structure is nowhere near to theirs. It took a lot of mental effort and empathy for me to grasp what kind of environment they navigate in life to steal my bike I bought for $200. So I also lack understanding of being a millionaire or a billionaire but I definitely lack empathy for those people.
nearbuy 6mo ago
In my experience, people of every social strata sometimes do audaciously stupid things, and it's not because they get special treatment. It's often the people who have gotten in trouble the most that do audaciously stupid things the most frequently, despite experiencing past punishment. Your observation matches what we would see if those people you speak of were just stupid for no reason and committed crimes that aren't caught as often. If a crime is only caught 10% of the time, they probably won't get caught the first few times. You can interpret that as them learning they can get away with it, but the person who just does stupid stuff for no reason will do the same thing, it isn't evidence one way or the other. And they'd still be stupid the first time they committed the crime, before they've learned they can get away with it. And if they get convicted eventually, it was still stupid in the end. And if they don't get caught, we usually don't know about it, which makes it hard to argue that it's actually worth it for them to do these seemingly stupid crimes; we know of their failures but not their successes.

vjk800 6mo ago

"The Wire" TV show portrays these things well. In it, the powerful people often have the least clue about anything. They are just playing the game and often winning by sheer luck. They also often do fuck up, but because they are powerful, are able to get other people to take the hit for them or build a narrative that hides the fuck up. The older I get, the more I think that this TV show is actually the most realistic portrayal of how the real world works there is.

grebc 6mo ago
Which character is DJT? I think some combo of Carcetti & Burrell. Ability to play the game but all the gear and no idea.
bestconncomp 6mo ago
[dead]

utopiah 6mo ago

We ALL do dumb shit. The shit from powerful people just has more impact. The "trick" is that cunning powerful people fail forward, so they keep on doing dumb shit with even more impact.

csallen 6mo ago

The challenge with the world is that it requires nuance, ad hoc thinking, and effortful thinking. The human brain doesn't like putting effort into thinking. It's uncomfortable. It's easier for us to just have one rule, one heuristic, that we can simply apply to many similar situations. This is why ideology exists and is so powerful. You can always find people chanting the same phrase or slogan, over and over, regardless of the circumstance. Because it's easier for them to do that than it is for them to treat every situation as unique and to reason through it from first principles. Hell, sometimes that's just not feasible. In this situation, yeah, sometimes powerful people do dumb shit. And ideologues come by and say, "You just don't understand the 4d chess!" But also, sometimes it's the opposite! And the powerful person does something smart, but that's unclear or unfamiliar to the average person without massive wealth/access/power. And ideologues from the peanut gallery come by and say, "Another powerful person doing stupid stuff!" And of course, the right (but alas more effortful) approach is to evaluate each situation individually, and reason through the factors, and also to wait to see how it turns out, before evaluating. For example, the author evaluations Elon's purchase of Twitter as an irredeemably stupid decision. And I agree, many things about how that went down seem very stupid. But at the same time, dude has launched an AI lab that's gotten tons of press and exposure thanks in large part to X, combined it with his other companies, and is about to IPO for $1.5T+. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe I don't like it. Maybe there's lots to complain about here, but it's difficult to describe this as a "stupid" move. Does that mean he was playing 4D chess? Also, maybe not! Maybe he just lucked into this situation. Maybe he didn't foresee it initially, but figured it out later. Or maybe, much more reasonably, he figured that he has tons of optionality and tons of leeway, so even if he doesn't have a good plan to begin with, he'll likely figure it out. Who knows. It's tough to be a speculator judging from the sidelines with incomplete knowledge. And it's even tougher to avoid allowing our biases and ideologies to compel us to simply shout our beliefs rather than being objective and analytical.

riffraff 6mo ago
Yeah I don't buy that xAI story, musk would have gotten a popular ai lab even without Twitter if he wanted. Except.. his ai lab is not popular. It has zero value and people only use it because it's on Twitter and they don't pay for it. The fact that he had to merge it with a successful unrelated company tells you all you need to know.

taffydavid 6mo ago

Elons robot obsession is probably more 4d chess / hidden plan theory. At a time when Tesla sales are flagging in Europe despite an enormous surge in overall EV sales due to yet another energy crisis, he's turning Tesla factories into humanoid robot factories to make a robot that doesn't yet work that nobody asked for. I'm sure lots of Tesla fan boys will pay 20k for a robot butler, but an EV fills a need for the average family and an incompetent bipedal Roomba really does not. They should be focused on PR, it's such a short step from where they are now back to being on top of the EV market.

florkbork 6mo ago

I disagree with the parts about Trump: he does know what he is doing. Not because it's a well crafted plan of 4D chess, but because he's deeply anxious/insecure and "lie with grandiosity" is a learned survival mechanism to protect his feelings from reality. It's like expecting a fish to stop swimming - it feels like it's suffocating, it's going to panic and do everything it can to get back into the water, get moving again. The fish isn't playing 4d chess, it's just flipping all over the place until it feels safe again, and then probably forget all of the chaos minutes later. How much this is applicable to the other examples - Musk, Napoleon - unclear. But saying they do "stupid" things without looking at why they might do stupid things is reductionist/overly simple/can PROBABLY be answered with psychology in most cases.

riffraff 6mo ago
I think you have to qualify what you think trump is doing knowingly or not. Lie in every press conference? Sure. Posting an image of himself as Jesus? The guy has dementia.
- quantummagic 6mo ago
  > The guy has dementia. I think you're right, but it isn't as advanced as Joe Biden's was, by the end of his term.
  - actionfromafar 6mo ago
    Trump is very vigorous, even in dementia! Interesting times ahead.
  - 63stack 6mo ago
    Could you post a link to a video where Trump talks for 15 minutes coherently?

0xbadcafebee 6mo ago

And sometimes people put out hit pieces about companies they don't like, while objectively much worse companies in the same industry are beloved. Who knows why people do things!

obscurette 6mo ago

I think the age of social media has made the problem much worse. People are much more focused on how to gain fame and glory, but they can easily distance themselves from taking responsibility for the consequences.

mastermage 6mo ago

I would actualy give the not so benefit of the doubt even to powerful people. Everyone does stupid shit all the time. There is however a significant difference in how the fallout of this dumb shit affects people. Powerful people may do dumb shit and then due to the power sweep the consequences away from themselves. While everyone else would have had to face these consequences. And thats the fundamental issue. Too much power allows dumb decisions to stand unchallenged, and removes the possibility for self correction (due to consequences). Which is fundamentally why the power of singular people needs to be limited.

ggm 6mo ago

I related to this. I think the 4D chess crowd are, like the "I did my own research" crowd projecting a dominance view in the moment, not actually providing a rebuttal. It's the deux ex machina of our times. How can Elon be wrong about invading Moscow. You don't understand but I do

khnad10 6mo ago

The post cleverly and preemptively disparages people who "show up in a thread and claim that everything is part of a larger plan". Posting a picture of Napoleon is cute, but does not prove anything. Those were different times. - The Iran attack plans go back a long way. Netanyahu tried the same during the Obama administration and was rejected. There are Brookings Institute papers that outline all countries that need to fall before attacking Iran. The last one was Syria that fell in 2024. - As is evident now, Trump is not MAGA. Vance was an anti-Trumper in 2016 and is the deepest of deep state via his Thiel sponsor. They are just executing the plans. - The "pro-Russia" sentiment of Vance and Trump appears to be a ruse. They want to make the EU pay more but continue the Ukraine war. - Vance's "support" for Orban was fake and achieved the intended goal: people voted for the opposite and $90 billion for Ukraine of EU money is unblocked. - Vance deliberately torpedoed the Pakistan peace talks. - Democrat protests are weak. Hillary Clinton only criticizes the (ostensible) lack of a plan. The plan is to weaken Russia, China and the EU. The latter two are targeted by high energy prices and increased US dependencies in the case of the EU. The problem is not lone commentators pointing all this out. The problem is that there is a concerted effort to blame all of this on Trump and Israel. Blaming Israel was forbidden prior to the Iran war, now it is a mainstream excuse promoted by mainstream media, left and right wing podcasts and almost all Internet commenters. That is a deliberate strategy to distract from long term goals.

Sankozi 6mo ago
Your post is great example of 4D chess arguments. They seem believable at first glance but if you look deeper they either don't make sense (like vice president taking role of a clown to lower support of an ally) or are distraction (the Iran attack plans argument - lots of people predicted Hormuz problem, previous plans doesn't matter much here).
- army_unit_77 6mo ago
  > like vice president taking role of a clown to lower support of an ally) Your premise is that Orban is an "ally". He was an ally in the culture war distractions (anti-woke). Hegseth told the EU to take over and pay for the Ukraine war in 2025. $90 billion supersede culture war issues. Vance already made a clown of himself by pivoting from Trump is a "moral disaster" and an "idiot" in 2016 to running with him in 2024. Your post is a great example of sinking a post without any coherent arguments. It is impossible to discern what you even mean by the second "Iran" arguments. There are no premises and there is no logic.

Tinned_Tuna 6mo ago

I don't think the author read even the Wikipedia page on Napoleon's invasion of Russia? Napoleon _did_ have reasons for attacking Russia, he _did_ prepare logistics. His motives, rationale, and actions are well-documented and widely studied. > watching an unchecked megalomaniac march 685,000 soldiers into a Russian winter without a fur coat in sight Napoleon famously crossed the Neman River in *June*.

Arainach 6mo ago
If you believe a war with a country the size of Russia will be over within 4 months you might not be a genius.
- bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
  I think the belief was probably taking Moscow and forcing a treaty.
- wood_spirit 6mo ago
  Through a modern lenses and with hindsight and memes that follow from napoleons failed attempt we can say flippant things like this and say napoleon wasn’t a genius. But students of history and future generals will obviously investigate the facts and see things through the lenses and circumstances of the time rather than from the seat or the internet commentator.
  - bryanrasmussen 6mo ago
    but they have already, rhetorically, dealt with anyone that might come with some sort of context that does not agree with their conclusion: >There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value, and you’ve met them. I am absolutely sure of it. They show up in every comment section and reply thread where someone powerful does something that looks, on its face, like a mistake - and their argument always runs the same way: you don’t understand, this is actually part of a larger plan, there’s a strategy here that you and I can’t see because we’re not operating at that annointed and elevated level… Which is, of course, one of the things you have to do when dealing with shooting some bullshit in order to get to your next level of argument, you have to deploy arguments as to why the people who might show up to say hey that's bullshit are actually the stupid people who talk the bullshit, and not you. As an example of the genre it's pretty tepid, they manage the "I'm telling you the truth part" and the talking down part of the message, but I personally find the best of this genre always includes a pithy little witticism that is just so bitchy and deliciously mean that nobody wants to make the bullshit accusation. At least that's my recommend! I give it a C+/B- for effort. on edit: I of course mean what the original article did, in making its flippant comments, not what Arainach did.

franze 6mo ago

Sometimes?

deleted 6mo ago

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deleted 6mo ago

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gobdovan 6mo ago

One thing I'd highlight is that the mechanism the OP notices in all the actors is a low-cost way of reducing uncertainty. At each step, what does it cost to admit uncertainty or error vs what is gained from doing so? For a powerful person, appearing decisive often has a lower immediate cost than being indecisive. For a committed supporter, doubting the figure they've invested in has social, psychological and identity costs that outweigh any benefit of changing their beliefs. When the local cost of uncertainty is higher than the perceived benefit of being right, people resolve toward certainty. So the phenomenon could be seen as a cost-minimizing collapse where beliefs and actions settle on whatever preserves stability, even if it means denying something real. So: Benefit(belief update) < Cost(belief update) => certainty collapse -> people believe weird shit

NoPicklez 6mo ago

Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit, because they're still a human being like all of us. It's easy to look at Musk and say, he's done some dumb shit when his dumb shit makes news. But very few of us have the same type of scrutiny that powerful people have. He's done dumb shit, but he's done a lot of pretty good shit across his lifetime. Nobody is infallible.

dozerly 6mo ago
It’s easy to look at musk because he’s a piece of shit
pasquinelli 6mo ago
but i have to wonder what powerful people actually bring to the table.
- wallst07 6mo ago
  Leadership. Most here won't want to hear it, but the average person does not want to lead. They want to be told everything will be alright. Leading + consequences is difficult and stressful. Heck, just leading your own household is stressful, try doing it for someone else or 1000s.
  - jq-r 6mo ago
    Mismanaging your household finances can ruin your livelihood and you might end up on the street. Mismanaging a company which you didn’t build won’t ruin your livelihood. It might of the employees. It may weight heavy on your conscience but we’ve heard enough of those “I take full responsibility” phrases that we know how heavy is that.
- NoGravitas 6mo ago
  Capital or the ability to raise capital.
spiderfarmer 6mo ago
Regular people do dumb shit and embarrass themselves at a barbecue. Powerful people do dumb shit and move markets, wreck products, distort public discourse, and still get a choir singing about their ‘pretty good shit across his lifetime.’ At some point it stops being nuance and starts being unpaid PR.

trick-or-treat 6mo ago

He got a top social media platform reaching billions for around 5% of his net worth, that doesn't sound like a huge L to me.

orleyhuxwell 6mo ago

'Clever Hans was a horse that appeared to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks during exhibitions in Germany in the early 20th century.' - wikipedia We should be able to hold 2 things in mind at the same time.: a leader (i.e. Elon Musk) can be extremally charismaric (in his specific nerdy way), can have a great talent in filtering ideas that people pitch to him - optimizing for coolness factor. He can even be able to speak about these ideas for hours in captivating maner. A skill in deal-making, getting financed, inspiring people is also real. At the same time such person can be extremally narcissistic and impulsive + clearly addicted to public drama focused on him or her. And these character tratis seem to control him, so this person will always choose the 'more power, more news, more controversy' path even when it clearly doesn't make sense. Add to it a society with a strong cult of personality (a feature of US culture) and some of the lucky reckless charismatic people will get very powerful eventually and also get rewarded for doubling down on their worse decisions.

samrus 6mo ago

I agree with the thesis but i dont agree about elon buying twitter. That was really messy, but it was clear later on that he did it to manipulate the election for trump, and that bet paid off amazongly well for him in hindsight. Not only did twitter turn out to be ceitical in spreading misinformation (how many morons didnt vote for harris because they thought shed start a war in the middle east) but that then also gave him crazy access to the government. It fell out later, but it was probably the most effective 40bil anyone today could hope to spend

foo42 6mo ago

I suspect sycophancy has a lot to do with things . People with power attract those who want their favour and/or money who will align themselves to please the powerful rather than steer them to their best selves. Furthermore as the sycophants accumulate the genuine voices likely begin to sound out of place, like their _against_ the individual. Ironically paranoia gets deployed in the wrong direction to push out the true voices. I worry this fate will become more common. Everyone can hit up an artificial sycophant at will who they've been told is super intelligent and yet claims their ideas are full of deep insight.

stared 6mo ago

While the premise is good and explains a lot of failures, I the Musk example is misplaced. Musk bought Twitter. And then he succeeded - Trump became elected and he became his right hand. Is it, for Musk, a failure? Sure, it is not 4D chess. It is just "some people lie as a tool to get their goals". The same way when politicians introduce surveillance to "protect children" and it makes children less, it is not a failure. It is a win - more control, and more fuel for further campaigns.

chrz 6mo ago

I thinknm we are missing one scenario - sometimes with their practically unlimited money they just buy something to destroy it

simianwords 6mo ago

There’s a particular kind of influencer who follows the archetype I call “perpetual bull”. They are highly cynical and show an immense confidence in their own predictions despite not being in the thick of it. And usually it follows the same format: the ideology is that the elites are stupid and completely irrational, evil as well as extremely powerful (they can’t see the contradiction in this). So they attempt to “balance the narrative” by showing the other side. In the past year or so I heard multiple things about A.I.: I was kept being told that the AI bubble will crash any time soon. Still didn’t happen. I was told ChatGPT is not here to stay. It’s one of the most downloaded apps in the world. I was told that Elon firing 80% of staff will cause twitter to crash. It didn’t. It’s running perfectly fine. The modus operandi seems to be that you may just be cynical about everything because civilisationally important discoveries happen only once a while

simianwords 6mo ago
Here's a Paul Krugman quote on the Internet "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s"

lovegrenoble 6mo ago

It wasn't the Russian winter, but Kutuzov's genius.

TonyStr 6mo ago
Kutuzov's genius of repeatedly pulling back until the Grande Armee was standing at the doorstep of their ancient capital, fighting one of the most stubborn battles in the Napoleonic era, yet loosing significantly more men than their attackers, and finally backing off, to behind their capital, allowing it to be plundered and burnt down during the occupation? (The city didn't burn down in a day, but a series of fires occurred almost every day until the Grande Armee left). Even when the attackers were retreating, he was still indecisive.
- Atatator 6mo ago
  > standing at the doorstep of their ancient capital Moscow was neither "ancient capital" nor current capital of Russia in 1812.
  - TonyStr 6mo ago
    My apologies, I think I was misremembering a quote from War and Peace. I actually went and found the passage that confused me: https://literaturepage.com/read/warandpeace-1228.html https://literaturepage.com/read/warandpeace-1228.html Thank you for correcting me! Tolstoy meant it philosophically/culturally, not literally.

vrganj 6mo ago

Not sometimes. Most of the time. Have you seen the news lately? Powerful people operate on unchecked egos and surround themselves with sycophants.

danielparsons 6mo ago

I've been following this guy on youtube since he started - cool to see him posted here

monour 6mo ago

when someone so successful sometime they gained wrong trust in their selves and do not doubt themselves at all

ting0 6mo ago

The Twitter example is a bad one. Elon Musk, at the time, was making hundreds-of-millions through crypto-market manipulation on Twitter. At that time he realized that having control over the entire Twitter platform would unlock many billions of dollars worth of profit opportunity. Attention is the most valuable and powerful currency in this world. Not only for manipulating markets, but also for political propaganda. The information we consume literally shapes the world. So yes, it was a 4D chess move.

roncesvalles 6mo ago

1. Outcome bias. Just because a decision didn't pan out doesn't mean it was a bad decision at the time it was made. 2. Rich/successful people have a bias for big bets because big bets are how they got this far. 3. People get less sharp as they get older but are more confident because of the successes of their youth.

michaelteter 6mo ago

Some people are just really good at leveraging others. Leverage enough other people, and you can get rich and or powerful. And the more you leverage, the more you get. A lot of current powerful people got lucky at one key moment (often involving imaginary money and hype applied to the stock market). And once they got their big level up, they suddenly became visionaries. That includes some of the more outspoken people that many HN readers idolize. Many of those people believe their own bullshit, partly because they naturally are insulated within a group of sycophants (who are either groupies or usually looking for a lift up to a level of stature they don’t deserve).

TonyStr 6mo ago

The main goal of Napoleon's invasion of Russia was to beat their military in a decisive battle long before reaching Moscow, forcing Alexander to comply with the continental system - a European trade embargo created by Napoleon to weaken the British Empire who have been hostile toward France since long before the French revolution. Alexander signed this trade embargo during the treaty of Tilsit of 1807, and had been breaking the treaty for years by allowing trade with the British. The Russians did intend to fight, and set up redoubts several times close to the invading army, but would always retreat when the Grande Armée approached. The military leadership in Russia was very indecisive, caught up in internal rivalries and disagreements. It didn't help that a large part of their military leadership was German. Aside from small skirmishes, they only gave battle once they were practically standing at the doorstep of Moscow, in the battle of Borodino. The 400,000 dead soldiers died mostly to disease. Recent studies have found evidence of Borrelia Recurrentis which causes a form of relapsing fever. The western soldiers wouldn't have had any exposure to this bacteria before, so they were particularly weak to it. It was also exceptionally hot during the summer while they were invading (when the majority of soldiers died), which contributed to spread of disease and exhausting the horses. Disease and dying horses did way more damage to the Grande Armée than the Russian military did. The campaign was a military disaster (though the people at home might not be aware, due to slow information flow and propaganda), but it was not without aim, and it was not obvious to anyone that 70% of the army would die to disease before a single major battle. I appreciate that you at least didn't propagate the myth that Napoleon invaded in the winter, or that he lost because Kutuzov "outsmarted" him by giving him free passage to Moscow and burning it down. > There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value I would hope that the majority of readers here are taking the story with a huge pinch of salt. Napoleon's invasion of Russia is one of the most misunderstood events in modern history. Maybe that's why it's so popular to use it as an anecdote - because it can be molded to mean whatever you like, and people probably won't question you.

eesmith 6mo ago
> The 400,000 dead soldiers died mostly to disease. I believe that in every major war of the 1800s, more soldiers died from disease than from combat. Consider the War of 1812. "fully three-quarters of the war deaths resulted from disease, most commonly typhoid fever, pneumonia, malaria, measles, typhus, smallpox and diarrhea" - https://www.nps.gov/articles/military-medicine.htm https://www.nps.gov/articles/military-medicine.htm Consider the Crimean War. "death by disease exceeded the sum of "killed in action" or "died of wounds"" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War Consider the US Civil War. "Of the nearly 700,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War, nearly two thirds or 467,000 died from sickness and disease." - https://www.nps.gov/gett/learn/education/a-nation-at-war-traveling-trunk-table-5-the-medical-corps-at-war.htm https://www.nps.gov/gett/learn/education/a-nation-at-war-tra... Oh, hey - in the Franco-Prussian War more soldiers died of combat than from disease (for the Germans, 28,000 battle deaths vs 12,000 by disease, and for the French, 77,000 battle deaths vs 45,000 by disease) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War , so I was wrong! Though those numbers exclude "162,000 German[ civilian deaths] in a smallpox epidemic spread by French POWs" and "450,000 French civilians dead from war-related famine and disease".

benterix 6mo ago

"Sometimes"?

NordStreamYacht 6mo ago

The podcast purchase? Shades of Bari Weiss.

TruffleLabs 6mo ago

https://www.edwardtufte.com/product/napoleons-march/ https://www.edwardtufte.com/product/napoleons-march/ Via Edward Tufte "Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales."