Comment by epistasis
1 day ago
"Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." -- Warren Buffet
The original context was very different, about financial markets, but I've been thinking about it a lot the past 12 months. There's a lot of cowards in high places in tech, surprisingly cowardly people. Or they have sold out their principles to be friends with terrible people, which is also a form of cowardice. Hard to say which.
The whole Epstein thing is a really really great marker of this too. Though I'm not sure if the tide has gone out all the way (we mostly know what's going on), or if there's a lot more tide to fall.
LBJ was a real son of a bitch, who, when he finally was thrust into power as president, did something pretty surprising by going all-in on the civil rights movement. Power reveals who people are, and times of trials reveal who people really are.
I think we merely have a system where the best people are selfless and poor and the worse people are rich and in charge. It makes sense; we have a system that rewards immoral behavior so we shouldn't be surprised that immoral people have made it to the top.
Such systems are nothing new, and are in fact the norm. The current system is perhaps even notable for how it has deviated from the past, and in particular Silicon Valley was a means for promoting some of the most selfless and poor into positions of great wealth and influence, especially going back to the Fairchild Semiconductor days. Always been greedy venal and immoral people here, but perhaps less than in other systems of power.
The stoics, people that Zuckerberg and others pretend to understand and follow, would have nothing but disdain for the lack of virtue that's apparent in those like Zuckerberg.
I think if you read Plato's The Republic you might find that this is nothing new. Welcome to society and human nature.
History is full of cowards who are arguably as guilty as the people who committed the atrocities. The people who are remembered positively in history are the people who overcame their fears and did what they thought was right, even if it carried a real risk of it blowing up in their faces.