I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun.
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. PayPal isn’t revolutionary and getting rich off of that doesn’t make you an expert on (for example) AI.
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.
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;
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.
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!
> https://ocasio-cortez.house.gov/about
>
> After high school, Alexandria attended Boston University, and graduated with degrees in Economics and International Relations (and tens of thousands of dollars in student loans). During this period she also had the opportunity to intern in the office of the late Senator Ted Kennedy.
She was indeed a congressional intern, but then her father died and family finances got rough, and a year later Ted Kennedy died (August 25, 2009) so she lost the job in his office.
> Following the financial crisis of 2008, tragedy struck when her father passed away suddenly from cancer. The medical bills and other growing expenses placed their home at risk of foreclosure. Alexandria pulled extra shifts to work as a waitress and bartender to support her family,
Her father seems to have been in the business of home remodeling and renovations. I haven't found any source for "owned multiple brownstones", but a little bit of house-flipping or some rental properties wouldn't be weird to see in that kind of business. Being a landlord with a mortgage doesn't necessarily mean huge wealth, and it it's easy to believe a combination of cancer treatment bills/being unable to work/2008 housing crisis could take a situation like that from comfortable to house-poor to foreclosure on upside-down loans in an awful hurry.
Right - the rest is pretty much nonsense. She grew up in a 2-bedroom house and went to the ~4th best school in Boston and we're supposed to believe she's some long con plant? Just silly.
Looking into this she seems to come from an upper-middle-class background but nothing elite. I will say before looking it up for some reason I had the impression that she came from a very humble working-class immigrant background.
The actual land records that prove this are impossible to link, for reasons that are charitably described as "Monstrous incompetence of government officials".
None of which mentions brownstones or growing up wealthy.. the land records are accurate but she’s renting the spaces so her landlords name is on ACRIS.
Nothing in this article talks about her family owning multiple brownstones. At all. Nothing about land records.
This article talks about her dad's Bronx condo that she lived in, or claimed to live in. No offense to the people of the Bronx, but that is not a "rich" part of NYC. Units for sale in the building mentioned are rather cheap for NYC, in fact.
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.
You are skipping the part where she moved out of the Bronx at 5 and grew up in Westchester for the entirety of her schooling, graduated cum laude from BU and worked in DC. She only moved to the Bronx to leverage her Puerto Rican heritage after having her political ambitions shaped. When "after college" did she even move to the Bronx? Her registration in 2016 was still Westchester.
I like her, but to pretend that she's just some up-start from the Bronx to go against the grain is absolutely false. She was selected, groomed, and installed because she fit a profile and she is a very manufactured candidate.
Yeah I get it, Jensen Huang worked at Dennys too (I sound nippy, but I'm not trying to be). I just don't think these people stayed in those environments long enough, but her upbringing definitely sounds "for real". If you are out into national politics before 30 you are out of any normalcy imho. Some people are bartenders for a lot longer if you catch my drift.
I don’t really catch your drift. Part of the reason I’m digging in on this is because you picked a perfect counterexample as your example. AOC came from a working class background, was elected on the basis of grassroots organizing against a guy with a huge war chest, and is widely known for staying involved in her community (to a degree many politicians don’t) so she can best represent their interests. As a result of her local activism and accessibility her constituents love her and as a result she has been able to beat back candidates from both parties running on massive budgets and even has crossover support from Trump voters in her district.
ivape thinks AOC is out of touch, funny how his written assumptions and lack of actual familiarity with her shows that he's the one out of touch. I follow AOC on Instagram (all the haters can now jump to dismiss me as a biased fanboy), and she does things in her area like charity runs, attend local events and organize townhalls...
And she grills "witnesses" of congressional hearings the way a politician who is actually doing her work grills them. Compared to "career politicians" who are probably too busy golfing with rich "campaign donors" to read the briefing and understand the issues they need to deal with..
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).
Its not just tech bros though, anyone who's made lots of money from business is treated like they're the smartest person in the room by many people. The person who made millions from making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone you want in charge of anything.
> The person who made millions from making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone you want in charge of anything.
Quite literally in the case of former Apple CEO John Sculley.
"not necessarily pretty smart" is a very nice way of putting it.
I don't know where the threshold ought to be, but beyond a certain size a pile of money can only indicate bad things about its owner. Either they're too unimaginative to turn that potential into action, or their designs are so against the will of the people that it's going to take gargantuan amounts of coercion to get them done. Either way, a billionaire is an individual of dubious merit.
Most rich people aren't sitting on piles of cash; their capital is (usually) invested in a corporation which is busy turning potential into action, as you put it. I think there's an argument to be made that amassing and hoarding great wealth, particularly near the end of one's life with the intent to pass it directly onto one's heirs, is morally questionable if you believe in any kind of universalist ethic. But I think criticizing someone as uncreative simply because they're not selling off all their equity to go pursue some other venture is way off
That sounds very good but it's difficult to square with the behavior of those corporations. Can it really be that the change all of these well meaning rich people want to see in the world is... products that spy on an manipulates their users, products that can't be repaired, and products that putting future generations at risk by damaging the environment?
Either these investments are not paying off, or they are and the investors have a very dark vision for us. Neither reflects very well on the investor.
I would guess it's not so much that they "want to see this change" as much as "they want to make as much money as possible and don't care about these consequences"
Yeah, I agree. But of what use is that money, if not to ensure that you can shape the consequences according to your vision? If you have to make things worse to make money, and you need money to make things better, then a sane person would course-correct.
Beyond a certain point, supposing that your investments continue to yield monetary returns at the cost of making others tolerate worse outcomes, it's just an indicator that you're a junkie.
> products that spy on an manipulates their users, products that can't be repaired, and products that putting future generations at risk by damaging the environment?
You seem to have a very narrow view of the range of products that exist. Are you basically just talking about smartphones?
When I wrote that I was thinking about the coersive trend of SaaS products in general, the labyrinthine firmware used by my HVAC system, and land investments that result in rainforests being burned to make room for more cows.
I think there's a pretty significant difference between criticizing somebody's lack of resources and criticizing somebody's allocation of resources. Both might be the result of choices they made, but the connection for the latter is much more obvious.
I blame the experts. It's their responsibility to explain things to the public and engage in forums that the public is paying attention to (e.g. podcasts). They don't have to bloviate about everything under the sub, but they do have to be able to break down and communicate their ideas to the non-expert public. Failure to do so creates a vacuum that is filled by the Marc Andreesens and Peter Thiels of the world.
If you go on Marc’s Twitter he spends most of his time subtweeting with emojis and one word responses. And he has millions of followers (for what reason?).
A scientist, aside from their day job, is now also supposed to spend time debunking whatever half baked topic of the day is?
The only world where that works is one in which MA’s reputation is built on not saying dumb stuff all the time, like a scientist’s reputation is. If his follower count dropped for example. But it’s not, and that’s not how it works. People like him will move on to the next thing tomorrow.
Absolutely not. That turns the experts into politicians and pundits. Experts should stay in their lane and provide accurate and trustworthy information.
Yes, it should be accessible and digestible, but should not be pushed.
VCs won't be expert level in every area, but they are in a unique position to have a deep knowledge about a lot of different things. It's necessary to be able to invest effectively.
Even if they were, they have absolutely no incentive to tell you their expert analysis. A16Z spent the cryptocurrency mania years pumping and dumping shitcoins. They weren't telling the world these scams were revolutionary because they had any inherent value, but because saying that made them the most money. They are just people with money trying to turn it into more money.
Most VCs I know are just people with too much money throwing it at anything and everything they can hoping to get that 1 unicorn that multiplies their investment by 100.
I'm sure there's plenty of very intelligent ones, but there's also plenty of morons who started life off with an advantage and have managed to keep it up
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. PayPal isn’t revolutionary and getting rich off of that doesn’t make you an expert on (for example) AI.