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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  1mo ago (greyenlightenment.com)   1257 thread views

Why successful people often have bad opinions online

greyenlightenment.com

What is the deal with these people who are super-successful offline (e.g. Chamath, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk), but on social media have such mediocre, cringe, or bad opinions, getting easily-verifiable facts wrong or just repeating sale or boring stuff, or digging in when wrong? Why is there such a large disconnect between being so successful in one domain (e.g. creating companies) and the ability to produce good, well-informed opinions online?

My answer: People who are really successful offline tend to be specialists--they find something that works, and then scale or repeat it. People who have "good opinions about a broad range of topics" are generalists, but this does not necesailty lead to large wealth, which typically requires specialization.

Generalists tend to be higher IQ and get bored more easily, seeking novelty, but this comes at the cost mastery at a skill to become wealthy. Becoming a billionaire at running restaurants means knowing everything about the restaurant industry--perhaps not exactly intellectually simulating work--but necessary for success. Specialists can be really smart, but I would say generalists are smarter in the aggregate. There is no "industry person" who is as broadly read about history and other humanists topics as Moldbug, for example, as the ultimate generalist.

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In your post, and in some replies here, you're constantly sliding between different implied definitions of good/bad opinion. I think it'd help if you were more explicit.

"Person has factually incorrect beliefs about the world" is different from "person's claim about morality is unpersuasive to me" is different from "person articulated this thought poorly" is different from "person says things I find aesthetically distasteful" is different from "person's post got ratioed on twitter".

If you mean all of them, what do they have to do with each other? If you mean specific ones, which and why?

It's more about how the opinion is received, not the morality per se. Goebbels was immoral but was an effective propogandist. The "ratio score" is a clear and visible indicator of this. When something is "ratioed" it typically signifies a misfire (unless it's a poll/question), meaning misreading the value system of the audience. Getting basic facts wrong also tends to result in ratios. This makes for a bad opinion. Getting generally negative feedback without trying (e.g. trolling) is another indication.

The answer: because it's fun.

Empirically, shitposting is proven to be one of life's great joys. The richest man in the world and the most powerful man in the world have both purchased their own social media networks specifically to feed their massive shitposting habit. Kevin Durant is an all time great basketball player, the night after the USA beat Serbia he was an olympic medalist, immensely rich, in Paris with thousands of other super hot athletes, and what did he choose to do that night, exhausted from his effort on the floor? Shitpost on Twitter.

People who can do anything they want still choose shitposting on twitter all night.

Having half-informed opinions about things is one of the great joys of life. Whether you're in a dive bar in Reading, PA; you're a weirdo autist on themotte, or you're on your iphone on your private jet.

I think this applies to Elon Musk. He doesn't seem to take himself too seriously online. He posts memes and doesn't factcheck. It's a "take it or leave it approach". For Marc Andreessen or Chamath, it's harder to tell, and I think they are more serious, so their misfires reflect a combination of poor situational awareness or opinions that poorly calibrated for their audiences. The fact they defend themselves or double-down suggests it's not trolling, but rather their genuine belief, whereas Elon doesn't explain.

it's not trolling, but rather their genuine belief,

distinction without a difference. Having strong half-informed opinions and arguing about them is fun.

If he wanted to do a really good troll he would do something where it's not easy to disprove. A good troll post leaves enough ambiguity. For example, SBF when he said books are inferior to blog posts, which got a bunch of people riled up . https://www.yahoo.com/tech/sam-bankman-fried-once-said-110845327.html

It's not like this can be disproven, yet it's controversial, so it's a great troll. Or Richard Hanania saying that Shakespeare is overrated--again, this is subjective and was a great troll.

Marc's example was getting something basic wrong, doubling down , and looking dumber in the process in trying to dig himself out.

I think it’s because most modern founders are really not as grounded in day to day reality. It’s almost all abstracted to a degree that often makes a person think much to theoretically about issues that have a different reality when it’s not just numbers in a spreadsheet or other abstractions. They end up drawing a map and assuming the map is the territory.

Ironically I would point to both Elon and Trump as some of the few modern founders who really do seem to be "grounded in day to day reality" and to me a lot of the complaints I see about their alleged "bad opinions" read to me like the professor's complaints in this scene from Back To School.

I think so too to some extent. But this does not explain how the math/econ people cited in my post (and in general) have high status and good opinions despite their careers/interests dealing with abstractions.

Getting really really really megarich is generally more about risk tolerance, aggression and atleast a solid dollop of luck. I used to be in the Super highroller casino space and probably interacted with more 9-figs+ than most people.

Sort of person that has the personality that allows them to keep ramming their head against the wall like that tends to be pretty idiosyncratic and doesn't self-filter at all.

Chamath, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, are a subset of the successful population.

Other successful people have good opinions, and/or a small online presence. The bad ones get most publicity.

Steve Wozniak may be a latter example.

I feel like you are conflating your assessment of an opinion being "mediocre, cringe, or bad" with that opinion being wrong in some objectively measurable way.

Just how confident are you that you know better than Elon Musk? How do you justify that confidence?

Me? Not that confident. I think I fall more in the specialist category myself. But I am confident the likes of Tyler Cowen, Moldbug, Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, Richard Hanania, etc. are better informed about a wider range of issues and are better at articulating their positions. But if Elon was better at articulating his opinions or if he put more thought into what he says, he would be even more effective. Imagine if he wrote a 3000-word opinion piece demonstrating a interdisciplinary mastery of the issues. This would elevate the weight of his ideas and get the attention of intellectuals and other serious/influential people.

If you think that Richard Hanania or Curtis Yarvin wield even 1/1,000th of the power and influence that someone like Elon Musk or Joe Rogan does, I think that you are deluding yourself.

Why would anyone waste 3000 words trying to "elevate the weight" of their ideas when they can just implement those ideas directly?

Of course, Elon is more powerful. But look how Richard Hanania or Curtis Yarvin despite neither really having any special credentials or being CEOs or power brokers, rose to the highest pillars of punditry. Their views are widely shared. They built careers on this. This required mastery of words to cultivate intellectual credibility. Richard probably contributed non-trivially to the decline of wokeness in 2021-2023 (he wrote a book), but I know Yarvin's ideas have been appropriated to some degree in Washington (such as DOGE) and top policy people follow him (Vance probably).

But if Elon was better at articulating his opinions or if he put more thought into what he says, he would be even more effective

I mean more effective than being the richest person on the planet, owning one of the most popular social media platforms, having literally run US Government department, soon to have launched more stuff in space then the rest of humanity combined, having the ear of US President (even if they disagree sometimes), and plausibly soon leading the Mars landing project? How much more effective do you want him to be? Is he to gain prescience, merge with sand-trouts and become a Divine God-Emperor of the Universe, setting the humanity on the Golden Path?

We don't even need to cite those examples: tesla and space-x alone are more than a million people will ever accomplish. His reach is huge, no doubt.

But lot of people wonder, "How can someone so successful and smart be so shallow at politics? Why isn't there more of a skill transfer?" I would argue that this is asking too much--top verbalizers are rarer than top business people. Moldbug has often complained that Elon's views are pedestrian, and I'm like, "yes, compared to you , almost everyone is."

But to answer your question, I think he would be more effective if he tried, or at least ghostwrote, a college-level essay articulating his politics or "worldview". It would go viral and be read by important people and probably move the needle in ways a meme tweet cannot. This would not be a big time investment away from his businesses given he already spends a lot of time on twitter .

How can someone so successful and smart be so shallow at politics

I can get two answers here:

  1. Politics is not his main calling. It's like saying "how can he be so smart and yet playing cello so badly?!" or "how can he be so smart and be unable to make two three-point basket shots in a row?!". He's not a political pundit, that's just not what he does. I don't see why there should be a skill transfer to public policy. In fact, the public policy culture is horrendously bad about it right now - we're listening to actors, musicians, beauty queens, random teenagers with PR-obsessed parents, TV clowns, and so on, and regularly elect people with absolutely no transferrable skills at all to guide our policies. Sometimes it comes to complete idiocy, as requiring certain genetic makeup and genital set as the only requirement (can't be even called a "skill"!) for a public policy position. In this environment, I'd say Musk is way above the average on the quality of his skills.

  2. Maybe what you value as "effective skills" really isn't? I mean, sure, he never wrote a policy essay or a book. But why should we accept that the skills in writing an essay or a book (or, alternatively, skill in paying someone for writing it, which you readily accept) is something important for either Musk or the society to benefit from the genius of Musk? There are millions of books and probably hundreds of millions of college-level essays. What's the use of having one more, really?

Also, having considered the question of "what's the problem", I invite you to consider the question of "how would you fix it?", outlined here: https://www.themotte.org/post/183/alignment-problem

Two reasons: the first is that they're bright, but not brilliant. A lot of rich people have opinions that are pretty normal among their approximately 120 IQ striver peers. A 140 IQ person is a whole 20 points smarter than Elon Musk but might be a grad student instead of the richest web developer in the world. Some rich people are 140+ IQ but the intelligence-wealth correlation is only about 0.40 so someone in the top 0.01% of wealth will have an expected IQ of like 122. And this tracks with my personal experience, the reality is that most billionaires are just palpably upper-midwit. They all like to pretend otherwise and a lot of low wits buy into a wealth-intelligence correlation of ~1 because wealth is the only thing they value other than sex, but they like to imagine themselves as appreciating intelligence, and so all rich people must be geniuses etc and if most geniuses lack sex and money they must really be idiots but that doesn't make it reality. The second is that smart opinions do require some effort, so greedy people will have worse opinions than less greedy, equally energetic people at their own intelligence level, because the greedy people are always focused on profitable behaviors, which well-crafted political opinions are not.

I’m surprised Moldbug is your example of someone posting good, well-informed opinions online. I didn’t get the impression that his takes were any better informed than Musk’s, just because he uses pompous flowery prose instead of juvenile sex jokes and doge memes does not make the underlying ideas more rigorous.

I use him an example because, regardless of what you think of his politics, it's remarkable what he (and a handful of others ) has done over the past decade. With minimum promotion they created concepts and lingo ( e.g. cathedral, accelerationism, neo reaction) that have gained currency among the media, intelligentsia, and even the highest rungs of power, as well as implanting criticism of democracy as something to be taken seriously. Elon by comparison owns an entire social media platform hasn't really had nearly as much success implanting an idea or meme of similar popularity.

The fancy prose makes his ideas more memorable and taken more seriously by important people. Compare "free trade is bad for jobs" vs "great sucking sound." The latter is more memorable and memetic, and people continue to refer it after Perot's death.

If it were possible to increase Elon's verbal IQ by 1 sd at the cost of 1sd of wealth, he would probably be even more effective.

hasn't really had nearly as much success implanting an idea or meme of similar popularity.

I mean, DOGE? That's pretty popular (not the crypto thing), at least among the right crowd, but even the wrong crowd knows what it is (and they loathed and feared it). That's not nothing.

agree, doge was memetic and was Elon's idea originally

I also think that there's the problem of being too successful your whole life. You often are overly prideful and don't learn to humble yourself, learn to be wrong. You are far more confident than appropriate for the situation. You lose calibration to actual truth because everyone around you is sycophantic due to your status.

Why is there such a large disconnect between being so successful in one domain (e.g. creating companies) and the ability to produce good, well-informed opinions online?

This is IMO the strongest piece of evidence the leftists have for their thesis that “Billionaires aren’t skilful they’re just lucky”. Some captains of industry have opinions that are just SO bad, it’s impossible not to get a sort of anti-halo-effect about them and conclude that they must, indeed, be generally dumb, and so any success they have comes from rolling natural 20s at life rather than having a consistent pattern of beat-the-market intelligence.

That's an example of one of the most common fallacies in my experience. Not skillful - compared to whom? An ideal spherical genius in vacuum? Sure, you can imagine any genius you like, no real person can compare to that. Compared to other real people, yes, you have a lot of dumb opinions among billionaires. And also quite a lot of dumb opinions in academia (oh, so many!), Nobel prize laureates, celebrities (almost 100% coverage there), politicians (don't get me started), celebrated book authors, religious leaders, ..., anybody really. Having dumb opinions seems to be a baseline human condition, not a special disqualifying mark of a billionaire. Maybe, just maybe, they are skillful in something else than "never having a dumb opinion" and actually "never having a dumb opinion" has nothing to do with being successful in anything and is not required for anything?

they must, indeed, be generally dumb

I don't know about all millionaires but I have head from enough people working with persons like Musk or Zuckerberg to be pretty sure "generally dumb" is not something applicable to them. I mean if it makes you feel better, sure, find solace in that, but realistically it's not true. They are probably not only smart, but somewhere in the top of the distributions, and likely also have other skills. And luck too, because there are much more smart people than billionaires. But not only luck.

Part of the issue is, I feel, they've never really interacted with people that good. What they instead get is a long-line of nepo-hires that are minimally competent at their jobs and they extrapolate the assumption that everyone else is actually like that. I struggle to blame them, having had to deal with similar myself; When you have the goddamn Chief Financial Officer of a company loosing thier mind over why one months business is different from the previous about a product that is seasonal... well. When you keep stumbling across cases like that, it's easy enough to assume that people that are successful got thier through abusing/taking advantage of others or simply by being lucky.

It's kind of like situations where people try to downplay the role of leadership in a company/group, and that's mostly due to constantly stumbling across really bad leaders. But from personal experience, really good leaders can make things that should have broken long ago function really, really well.

So while I don't agree with them, I think I can understand where they're coming from.

But in the examples cited they are trying but fall short. Their opinions are not well received despite their business success. Marc Andreessen tries to be contrarian, and it blow up in his face because he gets basic stuff wrong and cannot bring himself to conceding the point. David Brooks and Tyler Cowen for example have consistently well received opinions despite neither of them being on the left. It's not just a matter of political bias. Elon Musk has the biggest platform in the world. If he wanted to write a thoughtful argument, I am sure he would get much more praise if he could write it better than how he normally writes. Swapping Elon's wealth for Moldbug's erudition would produce much more successful opinions on Elon's end. Moldbug would not get basic facts wrong even if his opinions mare controversial.

Both of those guys are basically on the left now. Cowen might be a centrists.

Elon Musks has superior academic credentials to both TC and Brookes. Though similar enough (TC weak undergrad).

Musks doesn’t optimize his writing to “people will like it” but towards “will get major goals accomplished” and at the latter he is extremely successful.

I don’t even know what good ideas on the internet are anymore. United the Right People had terrible opinions online for a decade….then 70%+ of the country adopted major parts of their opinions.

A lot of people have bad opinions online. It's just I never hear about most of them, and never want to. If Sam Wilkinson from Sticks, Iowa says something dumb online, I'd never know about it. If a famous billionaire says something dumb online, I'll likely hear about it because a millions people will repeat it. Even the smartest people are prone to occasionally saying (or doing) dumb things. The most wise don't do it online, so nobody but a very narrow circle of their friends and relatives know it. But that number is becoming smaller every day.

But "Sam Wilkinson from Sticks" isn't an industry leader. I would argue , on net , the smartest people are less susceptible to bad opinions , even if everyone has bad opinions. Good opinions is downstream from high verbal IQ, which is the most "g loaded" of the IQ subtests.

I'd also like to present you with this quote:

The darkest days in my life after the war, after the war, was when I discovered that the … most of the members and commanders of the Einsatz group that were doing the killings, not even in gas chambers, but killing with machine guns, had college degrees from German universities and PhD’s and MD’s. Couldn’t believe it. What do you mean? I thought that culture and education are the shield. An educated person cannot do certain things and, and be educated, you cannot, and there they were, killing children day after day and what happened to them?

Interview with Elie Wiesel, December 10, 2004. Interviewer is Professor Georg Klein.

I think if these high-IQ people could fail the test of "don't participate in the actual Holocaust", some other high-IQ people failing the test of "don't post dump shit online" would be much less surprising.

For one, the Nazi party membership was effectively compulsory, especially higher up. There was no such thing as being a conscientious objector . Morality is not the same as the good vs bad opinions aspect.

Sure, but there's formal membership and there's an active and enthusiastic participation. I'm sure you could survive even in Nazi Germany without being a commander of Einsatzgruppe. And morality has a connection to it - if high IQ does not prevent you from being the worst kind of bad that everybody brings up when they need the obvious example of bad, why would it prevent you from lesser bad things?

It's not a morality thing. It's about crafting a message that appeals to intended recipients ,and this is deceptively hard, even when trying to preach to choir.

the smartest people are less susceptible to bad opinions

I'm not sure that's actually true. I mean, there are a lot of very smart people that hold outrageously bad opinions. Chomsky would probably be a towering example, but taking a wider look at the academia, you probably can toss a stone in a random direction on any academic campus and hit a high-IQ individual with a completely bonkers opinion. In fact, if you stick to campuses, you probably would have tough chance of finding a high-IQ individual who doesn't hold some bonkers opinions, and that rare individual is probably commonly known by his peers as a "square".

"Good" in this sense means how it's received by others and expectations vs reality. Chomsky, if he had a twitter account, would expect his tweets to elicit controversy and pushback. The bad opinion is more like in the case of Marc Andreessen, where he's not expecting pushback because he believed his opinion was universal, self-evident, or correct, whereas someone like Chomsky presumably is expecting controversy and resistance.

I'm not sure how "I am going to post this vile thing and I know people are going to be repulsed and hate me for it, but fuck them" is any better than "I am going to post this thing and hopefully everybody would agree with me".

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