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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I think most billionaires have a bit of their brain set to believe in themselves rather more than is warranted. It's great for making money, but maybe not something you want to put your life on the line over.
I think it scratches a similar itch as most techbros: "if I can solve this hard problem, all problems are easy!" It's a mentality I see constantly, especially on the orange site.
Problem: exists for decades and has not been solved by experts with tons of funding in all that time.
Redditor with zero knowledge or context: Why don't they just do X, Y, Z? It's so easy 😏
In this case, the problem was solved over 60 years ago. This billionaire decided to reject the tried and tested solution and came up with their own.
I like asking the "why don't they..." question as a genuine question because it's a great way to learn a lot in a short time
It's worse than that. They're narcissistic and think they have the answer to every problem. I worked for a boss like this who had Aspergers syndrome (undiagnosed, but clear case)
He literally had bumper stickers made up with "[his name] is the answer" - he wasn't joking. If there ever was a problem he would immediately solve the problem in his mind, and that was the way we MUST do it. He would not accept rationalization as to why that might be a bad idea. I learned real fast not to tell him we had a problem.... until I already had a proposal, who was involved, and costs involved to fix the problem before he had a chance to solve the problem himself.
As someone on the autism spectrum myself, we’re usually fairly open to whatever the facts are whether that disproves us or not. There’s a lot of overlap at times between narcissistic traits and autism, are you sure he just wasn’t a narcissist? I say that because refusing to accept the rationalization of what may be a bad idea just sounds dumb.
Alternatively he was just someone with autism who is narcissistic and dumb, who refused to accept any new information that countered what he had settled on.
I worked with him for 13 years, I wasn't the only one who saw the classic traits
The list goes on and on. But needless to say he refused to accept he might have been on the spectrum or get tested despite suggestions by fellow staff members who also dealt with his irrational outbursts on a daily basis
I think is just that it depends on the person, like some ppl might be less open than others bc thats just how they are whether or not they were ND. Maybe thats just how hise personality is or how his traits manifest
Hacker News can be so engaging, but then you go to the comments and it's so enraging.
There was a study done on this kind of mentality. Researches invited pairs of players and before each game flipped a coin to designate one player rich and the other poor. The rich player was then given more money and an easier set of rules. At the end of the game they interviewed the player that inevitably won, and in all cases the players reported that they won because of key decisions they made while playing. Not one mentioned they got lucky with the coin flip.
Summary and interview with a researcher: https://www.marketplace.org/2021/01/19/why-rich-people-tend-think-they-deserve-their-money/amp/
Study (pdf): https://studenttheses.universiteitleiden.nl/access/item%3A2661526/view
I'm surprised this isn't a named sort of cognitive bias. I think there's a related thing where we humans tend to cite external causes outside our control when we are unfortunate or make mistakes, and we tend to cite our own virtues when we are fortunate and successful.
I think this would be considered Self-serving bias.
To be fair, their hubris usually only kills poor people so, progress?
It's implicit bias.
Our forefathers has orchestrated a world of scarcity. They raised us telling us how America is in overwheming, inescapable debt (even though that debt is a useful byproduct of our financial excess and has no deleterious effects on our future) and how everything will always cost something and how we are fools for ever thinking anything could be better than this, right?
After living through that, if you become a billionaire you must feel like you are by and large exempted from those rules.
I had a good bit of thought about this too... This kind of mindset should never be allowed in customer-facing fields in the first place (cough cough all the social media privacy hellhole we are in today...), let alone ones that risk human lives tbh.