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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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'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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