Comment by ivape
5 days ago
I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia.
I would say it's similar to politicians. We won't really have your, I don't know, career Costco Manager in political leadership. We'll get AOC or a Vance (staying bipartisan to make the point, moving off this topic next sentence). The former knows more about basic commutes and the condition of public bathrooms than your average politician or tech mogul. Our tech leaders are not well-rounded or even representative. That's why they talk crazy shit because they are in a crazy rich insulated world. We tried some contrived way to get women and minorities to become CEOs, but I think it should start more grass roots and maybe think about stopping something like ycombinator (or Google for example) from constantly recruiting based on old boys club pedigree. Regular folks just don't get put into the mix for C-Level for whatever reason unless they are gifted at the ladder-climbing thing.
Exceptionalism dictates that we will never put them into the mix, and I think the world is probably missing out on some good practicality and humanity just based on sheer regular folk experience some people can bring.
Funny:
I think the ideal foundation of democracy consists of:
1) All citizens get mandatory high education on Math, Science, Language and Logic (what level is high enough is open to debate. I'd say college level), regardless of career -> This is to make sure they have the basic knowledge to participate in meaningful discussions;
2) All citizens are encouraged, and by law mandated to attend and organize political stuffs -> This is to ensure that they can speak out when they are not happy about anything;
>mandatory ... college level
I'm curious what your experience is with the world that makes you think every citizen is capable of completing college level classes. People with an IQ of 85 or less are like 15% of population and I think most of them with have a very hard time with high level logic.
Mandatory as in what? You go to jail if you can't pass calculus?
This is pretty much Plato with the (major) caveat that full citizenship was restricted to a subset of the population
You know AOC was a bartender before running for congress right? While most reps are lawyers, many come from a diverse range of backgrounds, there probably is in fact someone in congress who used to manage a supermarket. This diversity of backgrounds is generally seen as a good thing when it comes to understanding the impact of upcoming legislation.
AOC was an intern for Ted Kennedy before being strategically placed in a "bartending" position as part of her background grooming. Her family owned multiple New York Brownstones in the rich part of the city. She has as much claim to humble background as Trump.
Source for any of those claims? It's pretty well known after a few weird political fights that she grew up in a tiny house in Yorktown and that her dad died when she was a freshman in college and that her mom was a house cleaner. [her childhood home: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DhCMERUXUAAY68Z?format=jpg&name=...]. Hard to square with her family "owning multiple brownstones".
Trump's dad gave him millions of dollars to start businesses and then left him somewhere near a billion when he died.
I think those are two pretty different upbringings!
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I understand that but she is pretty much in the mold of Hilary at this point (career politician). It's bartender to straight Congressional aid or something like that and I believe straight to national politics. So, by 27 she is already in the stratosphere (earlier even, in terms of being in the circuit) and no longer down to earth. Talk about going to mars. She's supposed to represent the Bronx, and I can assure you she knows nothing about walking in the Bronx. You need to get robbed in the Bronx a few times before representing it lol.
I don't know, for both the politicians and CEOs, I sort of wonder like when do you get to say "okay I got enough out of regular life to now manage regular life for others"?. Thirty? Fourty? Fifty? So Elon is 55, but we see that simply being fifty is not enough. I'm open to having the wrong line of thinking here.
I’m not sure where you get this impression of AOC. From her Wikipedia article:
> After college, Ocasio-Cortez moved back to the Bronx and took a job as a bartender and waitress to help her mother—a house cleaner and school bus driver—fight foreclosure of their home.
That sounds pretty “real Bronx” to me.
As for her campaign:
> Ocasio-Cortez began her campaign in April 2017 while waiting tables and tending bar at Flats Fix, a taqueria in New York City's Union Square. "For 80 percent of this campaign, I operated out of a paper grocery bag hidden behind that bar,"
I don’t think there’s an age when you are “ripe” to become a politician. I think that in order to be good at it, you have to maintain contact with ordinary people and listen to their concerns. Elon sucks at it not because he’s 55 but because he thinks he knows all the answers and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.
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It’s a problem with representation generally. The political theorist Benjamin Studebaker uses an analogy of getting into a hot air balloon: there are ways you can be of service to those below, giving them an overhead view, maybe warning them of danger, etc. But the further up you go, the less you have skin the game, and the less the little ant-people can truly be real to you.
Rather than trying to force a round peg into a square hole, I’d say this a case for refactoring bicameralism: one house of professionalized legal specialists and technocrats, another house chosen by rotating lottery for short stints of public service by random citizens (sortition).
> I can assure you she knows nothing about walking in the Bronx.
Huh? You think a bartender in the Bronx wouldn't walk while living there?
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