Comment by devindotcom
13 hours ago
>one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces
I've got some bad news for you.
13 hours ago
>one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces
I've got some bad news for you.
I really don't find it coherent to call someone who you keep consistently losing to stupid.
Stupidity has always been terrifyingly powerful.
Not really.
Things can look stupid when we don't understand them, but there has to be some intelligence somewhere at some point even if the arrival of wealth then suffocates it with sycophants. If Musk or Trump or GWB were all *merely* the idiots they're often mocked as being, chances are we'd never have even heard of them. They almost certainly weren't even "merely average".
Now, stupidity that arrives after the bank balance reads a billion dollars, that's terrifyingly powerful.
8 replies →
That's literally the meaning of the statement "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".
Irrational means stupid.
Stupid can win for a very long time, and in the end the "loss" is born mostly by bag-holders.
This isn't about people who just happened to make it big in a market rally, though. You're talking as if I'm speaking about people who just happened to buy some Bitcoin in 2012 rather than leaders of some of the most successful corporations on Earth.
They're not infallible, but modelling them as complete idiots that just happened to get lucky is also... Not really consistent with reality, as far as I can tell. These people might not be good people, but they're good at playing a certain kind of game.
Because it's not a single data point, intelligence is a wide surface area where you can be smart in some areas and stupid in others. Furthermore whether you are being intelligent is relative to ideals and goals, and not everyone has the same ones.
"Capability to achieve goals" seems to be fairly independent of goals.
3 replies →
you're likely working under an assumption of meritocracy/overvaluing of kinds of intelligence
At first I thought you were referring to Umberto Eco's laws of fascism: "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as at the same time too strong and too weak."
but it's subtly different, because incompetence is not weakness.
I read it as suggesting that AI models are simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces.
no, it's the current administration, among others like musk.
1 reply →
It is weakness in the long-term.
It's pretty clear in how people talk about billionaires: They must somehow conclude that the people most successful within a system that rewards certain things are not competent because the things the system rewards are not what they think the system should reward (it is fine to believe the system rewards the wrong things, but people walk straight into denying that those people have skill even within the system, or they claim that skill within the bounds of the system does not reflect any "real" skill - totally ignoring that elites tend to stay elites even through, say, Communist uprisings).
Hence how someone can say that Musk is "dumb" with a straight face.
I wouldn't really call cruelty or dishonesty a "skill".
1 reply →
> the system rewards are not what they think the system should reward
It's the grown-up version of nerdy kids hating "the jocks" in high school. We're all just a bunch of dumb kids. Maybe obsolete children, but still children when it counts.
That said, Elon Musk celebrated cutting funding that fed starving children and supported cancer research by waving around a chainsaw on stage. The richest man on earth did this because he wanted lower taxes... for himself.
When Anubis weighs his soul against the feather it's likely to completely destroy the scale.
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heh, no. Eco is referring to how the white house casts groups like academics, immigrants, socialists, and trans people.