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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Notes -
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.
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