Whenever you see someone who you believe to be an idiot succeeding, it usually means they're really good at the game and you don't even understand what the game is.
Today information is so easy to get that a lot of people think they know everything about every subject. But, like you said, reading the rules of the game does not mean you know how to play.
When a company like Netflix launches a new product it is possible they thought about this with different teams for a long time. Then it's very naive to comment on the internet to say they are wrong and made a stupid mistake.
No, it isn't. Anyone who has been involved in corporate decision making knows that different teams thinking for a long time is absolutely no guarantee of a successful outcome - or even of a barely functional one.
Companies make stupid mistakes all the time. When you're in the trenches there's a certain amount of group think, and issues that may be obvious to outsiders may be invisible and/or suppressed by internal politics.
Of course Internet comments may be naive and wrong for other reasons. But that's a different question.
> different teams thinking for a long time is absolutely no guarantee of a successful outcome
Of course it is no guarantee for success. But an outsider has absolutely no clue about what was discussed and what the politics were. So I think it is naive to make comments like "this is never going to work", or "removing the headphone jack will bring Apple down".
To take a recent example: when a company like TripleByte launches a new product - namely that key parts of all profiles will suddenly be public - they might have thought about this with different teams for a long time too, but commenters on the internet said they were wrong and eventually they admitted that they made a stupid mistake.
Netflix's plan paid off. TripleByte's didn't.
Apples and Oranges, I know, but how do you tell the two apart without hindsight?
It's easy to tell them apart because ethical and instrumental reasoning have distinct value systems.
It is irrelevant that Triplebyte's public profiles may have been instrumentally valuable for the company in the long run. No one arguing against them cared about that. But they did care about the ethical implications of that decision -- it was wrong even if it turned out to be good for Triplebyte, which it didn't because their plan was so brazenly unethical that they got a spanking.
Plenty of idiots succeed because success was granted to them the day they were born.
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Also, a lot of times when you see an idiot succeeding, the idiot is a face for people to criticize while the master minds go about doing their magic, unseen.
There are also plenty of people who weren't born rich, played the game well, and "made it". Probably not as much as those who were born rich and got a head start.
In this context, most commenters are implying society's perception of success which is intimately tied to money.
If the definition of success is completely left to a person's own devices, the whole argument of the "game" falls apart too. Since there is no game to play.
I think this is sadly very true - trying to actually be a kind person really limits how well you can play "the game".
There's no good solution to this either - if there was more kindness in the world, then that would just create even more opportunities for the people playing the game to get ahead, because they would have more victims to exploit.
One key thing about the game is the definition of "being ahead", and in a way, the meaning you want your life to have.
If the definition of being ahead is to work in upper management, or at trendy FAANG making a large amount of money then you are kind-of forced to play the game in order to "get ahead".
However, if your version of getting ahead is to have a loving family, or to spend time on the hobbies you like or traveling or <insert other non-monetary thing here> then you can (and sometimes even have to) spend less effort on the game.
I'm still working on finding my balance, but I've learned that I enjoy life much more when I'm doing something where I can spend less time playing the game, even if that comes with a large decrease in income and "prestige".
What if I told you that desire to "travel" can be equally phony, a result of careful marketing tactics, a carrot on a stick. If only I had more money I'd travel the world and volunteer and become an Instagramer or Youtuber and just blog about the best places to get coconut water on the beach, that would be perfect. Now back to the office.
As Zizek often says, ideology shows itself exactly in the ways that you try to one-up the ideology. When you long to escape the rat race, you have to immediately associate to something that is only attainable via doing the rat race itself and making money (e. g. Travel the world, beaches etc). It has to be firmly in dreamland.
What the system doesn't want you to do: be frugal and marketing-resistant, demand payment relative to the value you provide, be satisfied with living in a normal house with a normal family, not craving products, being mentally self reliant, etc. There is no juice to squeeze out from such a person, but it might exactly be the kind of person your family and community would need.
Not saying this would be your best option necessarily, you can definitely put up with getting squeezed a bit, but be conscious of it.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, but of all the dreams to pin your critique on, I’d recommend not using travel or public service. While there is definitely consumerist travel of the Instagram variety and plenty of misguided philanthropy, there’s a beautiful baby in that bathwater.
There is, for sure. But we certainly have a tendency to dream of taking that great leap and saving all the children in Africa etc. I do see people from richer countries and families actually doing it, and posing with the African kids in Kenya on Facebook pretending it's something other than a vacation. (There are some articles on how this help is often useless or even positively counterproductive, only offset by the participation fee.)
My point is not to shit on philanthropy though it's a bit more nuanced.
So there are some who do go to save the kids a continent away, and who gave up their jobs and then go to travel the world, the interesting thing is not them, but why they are fascinating to the audience. It's all about "if only I could do that, then..." A dream, an outlet. And it has to be far away.
How about this (nothing personal). When did you last talk with your family members' and friends' deep thoughts, fears, desires, worries and things of pride, cherished achievements, aspired goals etc. Not in an interrogation way, but naturally, while doing activities, cooking, fishing, sitting at the campfire. How many of them can you rely on to know yours?
How often have you talked with your neighbors? How is your local community (street, apartment block) doing, what are the problems, is someone in need of help because their kid is sick?
I found this articulated really well in Jordan Peterson's writing (I know, divisive guy). The point isn't to denounce faraway volunteering and a philanthropic traveler lifestyle. Rather that people are setting up dreams at a safe distance that they can then safely regard as unattainable.
It's much more scary to think of helping people in your apartment block, because eww, those people are nasty they are loud, they cook smelly cabbage on Sundays, they are too dumb for your liking. If only you had some angelic far away people who are simply waiting for you as their savior, it would be so much easier.
This kind of "set your house in order first" idea is upsetting, but humans and societies are complex enough that you have to get a feel for how things go wrong and how they go right, if you learn by setting yourself straight first, then attend to your family and close friends, then the community etc. Yes, your neighbor may betray you and always beg you for loans if you appear to philanthropic. True. You'll have the same issue when trying to hand out stuff to Ukrainians or the Syrians. Which group is the "good guys"? Are you being manipulated, etc.?
It's complicated, but we can push it all away to dreamland by saying, one day, I will travel and have a beachfront house in Africa and help all the kids (or one of these). Till then, I hammer away to get that promotion.
Again, travelling can be extremely beneficial if you have the right mindset and prepare. You can see different ways of living, different ways of thinking, mentalities, types of interactions. Or simply different sceneries than the one at home. But as someone who has traveled to some places and swam at beautiful beaches, it isn't all that euphoric in itself. Perhaps this is a "no shit, Sherlock" type of claim, but actually sunbathing on the Copacabana isn't that much better than sunbathing by the lakeside in Hungary (but one is more useful than the other in spiting your colleagues). It's more about the people you're bonding with while doing it. Plus if you actually interact with locals, but many just stay in their hotel resort. And you could indeed already do many facets of it at home, bringing your communities closer, but of course everything incentivizes us away from this. (People constantly move around etc.)
(PS. I'm crap at all of the above and just ranting)
> I'm still working on finding my balance, but I've learned that I enjoy life much more when I'm doing something where I can spend less time playing the game, even if that comes with a large decrease in income and "prestige".
Unfortunately in the US, if you don’t play the game, you have greatly reduced access to healthcare, which is a huge incentive to play the game especially if you have kids.
1) This isn't even true in general. Aside from optional things like cosmetic surgery which you need to pay for out of pocket, the people on the taxpayer-subsidized obamacare bronze-level packages have access to the same doctors, facilities and treatments as people with high incomes and high quality employer-sponsored insurance plans. The only difference is deductibles and copays, which might vary by a few thousand dollars in the event of major surgery.
2) Even if it was true, is a society where freeloaders are rewarded equally to those who contribute a good thing or a just society? Healthcare, like all goods and services, comes from the labor of the working classes. It's perfectly fair and reasonable that the people working to pay for this (whether through insurance premiums, taxes, etc) receive the fruits of their labor, rather than having it siphoned away by non-contributing people.
Regarding #1, I meant that people can't afford it. Bronze plans are designed to only pay 60% of expected healthcare costs, and still cost $1k to $2k per month per family, and have an out of pocket cost of ~$13k+ per year.
Generally, if your employer doesn't offer subsidized health insurance, then it means you're not paid much as it is, so adding premiums that cost $10k to $20k per year plus needing $13k per year saved for OOP costs (double that if you have a problem at the end of the calendar year) is a tall order.
And yes, you get premium subsidies if you make less than a certain amount, but it's no where near a comfortable life. The government makes sure you are right on the edge of being able to afford the basics.
This is not simply "unfortunate", it's done on purpose.
People who are not able or willing to earn money under the existing economic system are denied food, housing, clothing, healthcare, legal representation...
> However, if your version of getting ahead is to have a loving family, or to spend time on the hobbies you like or traveling or <insert other non-monetary thing here> then you can (and sometimes even have to) spend less effort on the game.
Money – and thus at least understanding the game enough – is often a precursor to getting enjoyment out of those things though, to various degrees. Probably less so with family, if the dynmaics are healthy, but definitely more needed for certain hobbies and travel.
In some ways one goes alongside another, it's getting more difficult financially to have a loving family, do hobbies, travelling unless you earn enough money. You have to play the game a lot to be able to have things
There is no "not playing the game". You can opt for different mini-games, but the game is eternal, beyond humans, beyond life even. Reading zen stories definitely helps you see this. Even denouncing the game is part of the game. Don't be afraid of playing it. If you don't enjoy in, you need to play it better on a higher level, by stepping back a bit.
And in lots of cases you don't need to be smart to build a successful business - time and place often matter the most.
Speaking here of my own experience.
So yeah, often idiots can be super rich and its absolutely ok.
Also you can be a genius going something without resources and connections, so there are millions of reasons why you can be way smarter than the rich guy on top while you are not rich at all.
That assumes independent events. But "failing" early (weak social network, poverty, lost a lot on the first big gamble) have a large effect on the size and risk of the next gamble.
And sometimes that game is rack up lots of debt. I’m only in my mid-30s but I’ve already seen multiple occasions of people being swindled by someone they thought was a multimillionaire in lending them $10,000. If you can’t understand where someone’s wealth cane from, there’s a chance it doesn’t exist.
This seems a clear example of the parent comment though. You don't see the value in it and that's fine. Other people enjoy an endless parade of almost free entertainment that they find more interesting than the usual drudgery of life.
Even the Romans knew you only needed to supply bread and games to keep the people pacified. Celebrity culture is just a modernized and less directly violent form of "games". The game modern celebrities are playing is apparently completely invisible to you?
It's the same mindset that goes into dismissing pop music as low effort drivel. It actually takes an incredible amount of skill from a bunch of people at the top of their games to make a pop hit.
People with high incomes from sources with no ethical dilemmas may also think that there are successful idiots. And not only because they do not understand the game the idiot is playing.
Now you are moving the goalposts from singular they are good at the game, to their family as a collective is good at the game. A statement perfectly compatible with that particular family member being an idiot.
Idiot usually means someone who doesn't know basic facts or has trouble anticipating consequences for their actions. But I think part of GPs comment was to note that the concept of idiot needs to be readdressed. For example, if your hypothetical person has a family network (just another tool; but a v. good one!) that helps them, then they choose to either stick with their family or try to strike out on their own. We're already discussing the situation where they have chosen to leverage their family network.
And maybe one could respect people who go their own way to get out of their family's shadow so they can be seen as making it on their own. But if that's not the game then both people are 'idiots' (in this thought experiment).
Success is not guaranteed just because someone was sent to an Ivy League school by his rich parents.
This is the blank slate fallacy where people believe (for political correctness reasons) that any kid had same chance of success if he was given the same opportunity as the success of kids.
In the end it's not about the money. As you said, there are lottery winners who lose everything in a few years, and there are people who build a new fortune after losing everything.
That doesn't mean that being born into a privileged life doesn't have advantages, but it's about way more than just the money. It's also the connections you have. The best example right now is Trump, who is a complete and utter failure as a businessman yet people keep throwing money at him.
The child is probably playing a different game than the ancestor who acquired the wealth in the first place.
The game the (alleged) idiot is playing is "don't lose the family fortune". If you weren't born wealthy but want to be, you are playing the "make more than you spend" game in one of its variations. There is for example an obvious slow way that might give your children a better shot at the "don't lose the family fortune" game and there are also many also many higher variability games like the "lottery" and "startup" games.
Not every game requires the same skills and personality type.
It means that not only do they have a business idea (or stole one), but they have the network and (financial) risk buffer to develop it into a business.
One thing to keep in mind is that the majority of businesses and products fail. Remember survivorship bias. For every successful Netflix there are a dozen failed movie streaming services. Anyone who has had a few weeks worth of software engineering can produce a Twitter clone, but none have been successful.
Mastodon does okay. It's not as big as Twitter, but people who stick with it are happy with what they have. All it did was flip the model: interconnected, community-funded instances instead of one big, expensive to run silo.
That's true, but a lot of people think the school you attend matters. For example, in the context of hiring, if you have 2 otherwise candidates but you can only choose one, most people would choose the person who went to Stanford over the guy who taught himself to code or attended a lesser respected school (in most cases). Some companies are stupid enough to only hire people from fancy schools. I think Google did something like this for a while, but thankfully they stopped.
Thus, attending a fancy school is a big advantage if you've got the money or have another way to get in.
Yep, I've seen more than a few job postings over the years stating some version of "Must hold a degree from a Top 10 school." Who would want to work with a bunch of elitist jerks, anyway?
Well, there is a lot of graduates from those universities to begin with, so it's only logical that there is a certain amount of useless graduates that end up unemployed. The same logic applies to the rest of humanity.
The real question is whether those graduates are more likely to be useless and unemployed than people who did not graduate from the same universities.
He said success, not wealth. Yes, obviously someone inheriting their parents' billion dollar business is wealthy, but I wouldn't consider them successful unless they've done something on their own.
It's often not all that hard to disguise one as the other. I worked for a guy once who was drowning in family wealth and all he had to show for it was a failing business.
After years of losses that almost nobody else would have been able (or willing) to sustain he made it into a moderate success.
Outwardly, at face value, he's doing pretty well, until you count the decade of losses which nobody talks about.
Another friend is a moderately renowned documentary maker. Again, facilitated by family wealth. Outwardly, the appearance is of being successful, which cost a fair chunk of family wealth.
I think in both cases, family wealth drove something akin to an obsession to appear successful, which they largely achieved and nobody mentions the uncomfortable facts about how they got there in polite company.
Microsoft's division that made X-Box {,360,One} was in the red for years as well and lost billions before it made its first profit (I think it's now profitable overall, but I wouldn't be surprised if it actually didn't yet return all the money put in to it through the years).
Almost nobody else would have been able (or willing) to sustain the costs that made it into a success.
With more money can of course learn to fail in greater scale, but IMHO this also has benefits in it's own. Learning to think big is a skill of it's own. Small business plays by different rules than big business, even if they have overlaps.
And I also think how succesfull you really were can only be said after staying on your peak for some time, because some games go really really long.
I like to think of this example [0] when I have the feeling that I got to where I am all by myself, and forget how many and how much others have worked to "build my boat", and how much luck was involved at every step.
I like to give Trump as an example: everyone loves to blast him for being an idiot. Is he a good president? No. Is he good at the game, but most people totally miss what his game is? I claim, yes. It's unfortunate that he managed to play the US election system for his own purposes, but that doesn't mean he's just incompetent at everything. E.g. he's a rather good populist - that may not be a quality you like, but at that particular game he's not at all bad.
Which leads to the following:
How do you measure if someone is a good president? What measurements do you use to claim Trump is not a good president?
Surely it can't be approval ratings since you can't expect public to understand nuances behind the decisions and what the president actually has to be doing? It can't be just GDP because GDP might have been going up anyway? It can't be what the president is saying in public and how many of those facts are wrong since this doesn't mean what actual decisions the president is making.
Aren't there universal measurements for leaders/counties?
For example the Bible has a lot of wisdom like: 'If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.' This was already written some 2000 years ago and has been proven true over time.
So I would argue you could measure the amount of unity a leader tries to create.
> So I would argue you could measure the amount of unity a leader tries to create.
That’s a nice one. Yet do you think then Hitler might be a good leader? (not a joke). He united the white German population in a time of great economic disarray - in both Germany and Europe. Maybe we should measure unity and cooperation with other countries? Global solidarity
Some combination of GINI, average life expectancy, number of bankruptcies, business closures, unemployment, changes in all-cause mortality, median household debt, disposable income, educational attainment, and so on.
If you look at a basket of well-being measures as opposed to raw GDP it's hard to argue that Trump has done a good job.
Of course Covid has had a big effect. But there were many policy options for handling that, and Trump - and his far-right equivalents in other countries - reliably picked some of the least effective ones.
Never met a person on the right who considered GINI index as a good measure.
Regarding bankruptcies, unemployment, household debt Etc, Obama's first term would show really low score on these things, presuming that's all he had, almost none of it was caused by the actions taken by him during his presidency.
It seems to me (as an outside observer), that this normally happens for the two years after a new President is elected.
Normally they don't get 60 in the Senate though, which means that the system is working at intended (you need to stay consistently popular for 6+ years to start swinging the Senate).
He sure as hell isn't, but has some understanding of marketing, and access to people and resources (Bannon, Russian propaganda, Republican playmakers via Pence) that could push him over the edge.
How much of his agenda is really his, anyway? He's a punching bag to distract everyone while the real power players get their way.
I think Trump is a good example of how luck and skill interact. He absolutely has a talent for selling his ideas to a big chunk of people. I don't think he would have actually become president though, if it weren't for a number of things out of his control: if Putin hadn't been trying to stir up discord, if there'd been a compelling Republican alternative, if James Comey hadn't made that last-minute announcement reminding everyone of the emails again.
I would say yes, if you define success in the political game as being elected to a high office. Most of us consider him an idiot, and in many way he certainly is. But he do knows who to get people to vote for him, which is what matters. He didn't fall into the precidency by accident or by being rich or well connected. He did what mattered to become elected (with a bit of help from Putin).
Many smarter people with more money and better connections failed, see e.g. Bloomberg.
You could think of it as, "Trump is good enough at the game to get elected president."
You could also think of it as, "Those with enough money and power to influence who gets elected president are good enough at the game to get Trump elected president."
Scott Adams claimed that Trump uses methods from hypnosis. I have no idea if that's true, but it's the best explanation I've seen for the irrational support he still gets.
No one is making the argument that he's the best president ever, or even a good one. The point is that he became the President of the USA - he played the game very very well.
It becomes more apparent when you see his videos on the subject from the 1980s - he was planning this move for decades.
perhaps the point I missed, is that because he is so visibly un-sellable, yet successfully sold himself, he wins, because Blair and Obama had underlying competencies. Trump is the best salesman, because he is selling.. nothing. And its being bought.
Getting them to pay was never a concern -- he's trying to rile up the base.
Plus he's a construction magnate -- get enough traction to get a preliminary budget and start allocating funds to his buddies. Even if it's just a concrete wall for 1/3 of Texas that's big $$$ for his construction cronies.
Indeed. He's not getting paid (in both actual dollars and in attention) for having walls built. Whether the wall gets built or not is entirely irrelevant as long as he gets votes.
He's like a vacuum salesman who promises to give his customers dishwashers and toasters for free if they buy a vacuum cleaner.
When they buy the vacuum cleaner, it turns out he lied about the other goods but they still ended up with the vacuum cleaner. But what a lot of people really wanted was the dishwasher.
