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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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.
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