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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  5d ago (greyenlightenment.com)   912 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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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.

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