Comment by lenerdenator

Comment by lenerdenator 4 days ago

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> Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)

That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.

The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.

tibbar 4 days ago

A reference to Larry Ellison as a lawnmower, perhaps? [0]

> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728

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  • edmundsauto 4 days ago

    Generally this is relevant advice for thinking about important people. We know little about them, almost all of it is projection that reflects more of my perspective than any reality of the object’s psychology.

    Humans love to think we know why someone behaves the way they do. We love to diagnose disorders in strangers based on a very very tiny bit of information.

    It is best to treat the decisions as black boxes, or else we are just projecting. I think it’s called the fundamental attribution bias?

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    • soraminazuki 4 days ago

      No, the takeaway from that talk isn't that we shouldn't judge Ellison's intentions. Quite the opposite, actually. Bryan Cantrill states that Ellison's motives are simple. It's only about money and no other human emotions are involved.

      There are so many quotes indicating this:

      "What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."

      "This company is very straightforward in its defense. It's about one man, his alter ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity! That's it!"

      "If you were to about ask Oracle, 'Oracle what are you about? Larry, what are you about? Why Oracle? Tell me about Oracle.' 'Make money.' ' Okay, yeah yeah I get it.' 'Make money. Make money. Make money. That's what we do. Make money.'"

      "The lawn mower can't have empathy!"

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    • lenerdenator 4 days ago

      Idk.

      When you own 98% of Lanai, have a net worth equivalent to the annual gross product of a mid-sized American metropolitan area, and still feel the need to lay off thousands of people to increase your net worth at age 80, that's not a very, very tiny bit of information.

      That's a person being presented with the knowledge that his choices will have a very clear set of consequences for society and proceeding with them anyways. Know the "if you press the button, you'll become a millionaire, but someone you don't know will die" thought experiment?

      Larry has, multiple times, been told that if he presses the button, he'll get millions of dollars at the extreme expense of people he doesn't know, and done it. I think it's fair to say that at least one person has died from it; mass layoffs result in one additional suicide per 4200 male employees and one per 7100 female employees [0]

      [0]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...

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      • lotsofpulp 3 days ago

        Protecting people from sudden loss of income is the responsibility of government, not individual businesses.

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    • lotsofpulp 4 days ago

      Humans feel better “knowing” something than not knowing something (might be called ego or something).

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bitpush 4 days ago

> That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.

A more VC speak of this is

"Strong ideas loosely held"

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noisy_boy 4 days ago

> The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.

Isn't that behavior massively rewarded in the current system of VC-driven capitalism as a general rule? Such founders/companies leach off the society, leave it worse and are given huge valuations and riches. Infact the incentives mean we will see more of such people rise to the top in a ever-worsening feedback cycle until the society puts some checks on them. Which is a extra difficult in this deliberately fragmented environment. Same old loop we can't break out of.

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