This is what I think of as a specific kind of ignorance that heavily affects young white guys who work in tech. It says “i don’t know about this, so I assume no one else does either.” It’s new to them, so it must be new to everybody!
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Very Trumpian at the same time: "People are recognizing it more and more ..." not only being ignorant of their own ignorance, but celebrating the most minute acquisition of (usually incorrect) knowledge outside their area (if they have one).
Anyone who works at a tech startup is familiar with the 24 yr old CS grad who, within his first week, decides that the entire stack needs to be written because everyone there before him is, obviously, an idiot. We’re also familiar with the years it takes to remove their shit code and recover.
The boundless confidence of a recently graduated white cishet trustfund brat. So criticality uninformed that they do think they can just walk in and "fix" it. They've never been told no before, why would they all of a sudden have any kind of reservations?
They've been told it's theirs for the taking
That being said I do believe there are many who understand quite well, and actually see the lack of legal recourse as a feature rather than a bug. They can overlook these so long as it enriches themselves and puts them above sovereign accountability
Dunning Kruger combined with individuals who have not had to overcome real adversity, personal tragedy or hardship and landed very good tech jobs. Intelligence without Wisdom.
I used to date an academic.
She proposed something or other in a paper.
It was rejected and she was invited to read one of the books she had written to educate herself.
They're unaware of the notion of people following defined procedures which have been refined to maximize compliance with the rules of the game. They don't do compliance, they disdain procedures.
Trump has been doing this forever. He states an obvious fact which he just learned a few minutes ago and then pontificates on it as if it is new information. And also points out that “nobody knows this” except for him and a few other smart people. A sign of a true moron.
It's not just young white boys and tech it's Gen Z at large. I see it every day as Gen Z is astounded by something that's existed for my entire life or has been established fact for hundreds of years.
And? The core difference between Gen Z and Gen X is the GenX actually shows up to vote in large numbers, GenX actually knows how things work beyond punching buttons on apps and crying on social media. You guys keep screaming into the internet void while we actually do the work.
That's literal bullshit fed to you by the media. 47% of GenX voters went for harris. 46% of Boomers went for Harris. GenZ and millennials went 51% for harris with low turn out. Boomers and X are slightly more conservative but the extremely low turn out of younger gens cost Harris the race.
Source:
I read the Elon biography published ~10yo when he was a Silicon darling, and this checks out. He likes to go and micromanage complex systems and problems and break everything until HE understands it.
Then he tells people to fix it and "explains how", but doesn't really give any new insights.
As IBM VP Strategy I hired a lot of top people over the yrs. My single worst hire was a guy with a BS in Comp Sci from MIT and a Harvard MBA. He was so filled with entitlement he was useless. Best was a woman from City College who was smart, scrappy, tough and ready to dive into anything.
This aligns seamlessly with “I’m really good at x niche thing so therefore I must be really smart about everything.” They have no concept that after primary school real expertise takes years to develop and you aren’t going to understand all the working parts of say oncology from a 5 minute GPT sesh.
yeah, i think there is a whole set of folks that get their high school diploma and are like "well, thats it for the concept of learning!" and they toss it in the bin
Anthropologists observed that hunter-gatherer tribes were typically centered around equity and recognized the dangers of hubris.
In some, young men found boasting would be mocked relentlessly until they got with the friggin program.
"We intrude into your lives with claims of higher knowledge of real estate, politics, journalism, constitutional law, medicine, and education despite having only cursory knowledge of each ."
tragically this affects young white guys far beyond tech too with damn near everything and is highly annoying but yeah in most cases at least it doesn't collapse the government. "have you ever heard—" yes I was like 20 when it came out
With the rise of the TEA Party, an old white guy who had never engaged in politics before asked me wide-eyed, "have you ever heard of Ayn Rand?" I'm like "yeah, freshman year of college"
He had clearly just encountered Atlas Shrugged through the tea Party and, like a 17 year old boy, decided that it answered all the questions of the world. LOL
I've had so many of these conversations where they just say, "Language evolves. Deal with it." (Most frustrating one was whether someone can call themselves a "professional musician" if they're really talented but have never been paid to work as a musician, and are not trying to get a paying job.)
Like, they seemed to have only ever heard "professional" in the sense of "really good at something," and had literally no clue that it had any relation to being paid for it, and completely rejected the idea that they just might not know the full context of the word.
I encountered that a lot when I worked in government. People didn’t know what I did so the assumed I did nothing. My role was cut from the budget because of citizen demand and a tea party takeover of council. Who could have foreseen the projects I worked on collapsed and have never been implemented?
Cf Trump’s amazement at how many countries or languages there are, and his need to share it as he’s convinced nobody knows this. It’s Dunning Kruger - they’re so dumb or lacking in basic knowledge they can’t judge just how ignorant they are.
It can often be helpful to approach new challenges with humility, to find out what others know and what has already failed.
I fear it’s not just their age: “Move fast & break things” is how they were taught, it’s the ethos not just of these guys but of an entire era. Going great so far.
Trump does this all the time. During his first administration, before he was elected he kept saying fixing health insurance was easy, despite everyone telling him otherwise. He gets into office, he starts saying that it's complicated, nobody knew how complicated it was.
I think the young guys know that the system is outdated and needs to be changed if they're to take it private which is, I believe, the goal. Also they're doing what they're told to do.
I’ll cape for white guys and say it’s youth in general. I was like this too, only chiding by seniors and learning from mistakes helped.
Rapid career advancement and job hopping in SV circles maybe keeps them from learning since they don’t stick around long enough for mistakes to catch up to them.
This comes from a culture where "I don't know" isn't an acceptable response because the theoretical ability to find out is right at our fingertips. Given enough time all the information I need to know as much as a physic PhD is out there. So why do I need to trust what a physicist says?
This is like the time my baby cousin went to college, came back for thanksgiving, and proceeded to “teach” me and my aunts how to play Texas Hold ‘Em. He was furious when we beat the pants off of him, because we “weren’t playing right.” Child. 🙄
Wish I could remember who said it but someone on socmed once called this the ‘conductor test.’ You can tell a lot about someone by asking what does an orchestra conductor actually do? Most probably cant explain but assume probably something. But some people will say “idk so they must do nothing”
"I have a test on The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, but I didn't want to read the book, so I found this thing called Cliff Notes that has analysis and a summary. I can't believe no one else ever thought of this!" is the mansplainer vibe.
Ask what exactly? What the US fuckin Treasury is? Who pays the bills for the US government? Again, I am reminded of the sheer genius of the Tesla board giving this simp 56B salary. Goddamn titan of industry running around DC like the goalie from Slap Shot "Who own de team?"
Never mind the fact that it's a ludicrously complex answer. "Where does the money go?" Ok dipshit do you have 16+ hours to discuss this with about 30 different experts? They're dumb questions, because no one person could possibly answer them it's why there's an agency doing the work instead of Phil
"Well, at least $100billion goes towards weapons manufacturing for the sole purpose of turning children in Gaza into skeletons. But let's start with the department of education..."
That part! My first real job was as an IBM consultant compiling the monthly and quarterly financial statements for USAID and USDA. It took me a whole year to understand what the hell I was doing.
These guys see a system where no one person knows and is in charge of everything and think that means it’s inefficient. These are the same guys who thinks Elon is designing rockets and satellites and car batteries because they buy the lies tech CEOs tell to justify their obscene salaries.
Not to play the generational grievance game, but that sort of ignorance affects the young more generally. I suspect a natural inclination to presume that "what is new to me must be new to all" became worse as generations were no longer required to labor-intensive research in secondary school.
You have misdiagnosed the agency in this scenario. The foot soldiers are not the ones making this happen. This is coming from the tech leaders of Silicon Valley who are all Gen X.
I tried assigning freshman college students light research projects that required using the library (with all kinds of instructions). Then 28 students out 35 dropped the class. That was in 2015.
I was really impressed when I saw that one of the history teachers at my old high school has the students do a project where they look at the old insurance (red-lining) maps for our town, compare those with census records, and write about what they learn.
As a genealogist, I'd looked at those sources before, and the maps are really interesting -- it's a small NJ town, with a tiny Black neighborhood dating back to the 1850s at least. The description is like, "These are nice enough houses, tree-lined streets, and a good school district...
...If anyone else were living here, it would be graded at least C, maybe even B, but since this neighborhood is mostly Black people, and the rest are Italians, it's got to be graded D." Several other neighborhoods were downgraded for allowing Jews.
This is not to say that this sort of ignorance doesn't plague older generations, but I suspect that in those cases it reflects unusual privilege and/or lack of curiosity. In the young, it's an unfortunate product of the digital age making research too easy to do and too hard to verify.
Studied a theory years ago in my Ed classes, that over time the amount a young generation needs to learn from elders is reducing; think 16th century apprenticeship v. modern code boot camp/YouTube. We know wisdom is important, but they haven't had to see yet why that has any value at all.
It's more that unlike the past it's possible to become wildly successful with very little knowledge, if it is on a specific topic. 🤷
Someone with the aptitude, can do a 10 week coding course, that gives them the skill to write a game that gets $1 Billion in sale before they're 20 (e.g. Angry Birds)
Exactly, but a game is a standalone thing. Mastering an app is so much simpler than figuring out how the code you write for any large entity impacts the whole. As a young employee I frequently thought I came up with a brilliant fix only to hear from experienced staff why "that won't work."
That makes sense. Is there also any thinking around the evolution in priorities toward teaching ways of discovering / deducing at the expense of teaching ways of researching / verifying?
I hope so, I was in school 35 years ago, but since then this trend has accelerated. Younger people I know go to YouTube/chatgpt/google for literally everything. Fine if you are trying to make an omelette, but it takes experience and humility to understand a complex system.
Side note: There's something unsettling to me in how Gen Z (and oldest Alphas) treat crowdsourcing on social media as researching from trustworthy sources. Questions are posted to social media as if they are search engine queries, and responses are accepted without a means to evaluate their value.
I saw Curtis Yarvin being interviewed, saying that academia is like Orwell's Ministry of Truth. Because people who study things in depth come to conclusions that he, an idiot, doesn't like and so it must be that they're dogmatic and lying, not that someone else could know more than him.
i call it "know nothing, but sure they know better"
they like to tear everything down, and pretend its unnecessary. then we all have to suffer through manually doing the things that the system used to do. which covers the butt of the one who insisted we tear it all down.
i guess their motivation to do this is that it's *hard* to improve an existing system. so rather than hunker down an LEARN, so they do something dramatic for attention.
and then they distort the metrics or get creative with the interpretation, to make it look like "improvement".
I recently learned that there's a term for this: Engineer Syndrome or Engineer's Disease. Specifically, people with technical skills thinking that problems in the humanities can be fixed by approaching it as a purely technical problem. "How hard can it be."
Not just young guys and not just tech - Trump pulls this shit all the time. "No one's ever heard of it before" while talking about something everyone learned in middle school.
There is definite value in asking dumb questions just to hear how other people would explain things.
But usually you're meant to have self-awareness that this is what you're doing and they probably know more than you....
This is why all engineering (and physics and math) majors should be required to dual major in something outside their field. Make them study humanities or social science as well.
Im aware some courses are required. I have an engineering degree. My point is, there should be a more systematic requirement than just taking a few random humanities courses.
Double STEM major. My experience was that the Sci and Eng classes were so heavy in terms of credits and schoolwork that students were directed to several specific classes that could count towards multiple general ed. requirements. These classes had nothing in common and were generally one-offs. 1/
Freshman level philosophy or something similar was discouraged, because it was considered an inefficient use of credits. I didn't really feel like I got a series of good classes to form a foundation until I decided to get a minor in a foreign language. Some of this is on the universities. /x
We had a fine arts requirement. The two ways that STEM people tended to fulfill that were either Art History (which also counted toward the "Foundations of Western Culture" req), or Music Theory, which was absurdly easy to get an A if you could already read music.
I was a Math major, Women's Studies minor. It tended to confuse other people in both departments. Math people would at least sometimes ask me what I was learning in Women's Studies classes. Women's Studies people were like, "Cool, we need more women in STEM! Glad you're doing it, so I don't have to"
Women's Studies was interdisciplinary, so there were just two required courses (intro and political theory), and the rest were courses offered by other departments. I took a few English classes, something like Women's Health Care in sociology, and Women in Jewish History, and a couple others.
My daughter is a mechanical engineering major.
Her school requires social science/humanities classes be taken every year.
She’s taken Science of Football,
Psych courses and writing classes. And she spent a year volunteering with a nonprofit
You can also contact your State's Attorney General and demand they file a lawsuit against musk for accessing your protected information. See the below link to find out who your State's Attorney General is and then take 5 minutes and make the call and demand action. https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/
It's like the early days when Leon bought Twitter and started flipping switches to see what they did. I recall Twitter going offline for 24 hours, and they didn't know what they did to make that happen.
I’m beginning to have a much deeper appreciation for the Greek myths that start with some fool saying “I can do this better than the gods” and I do not like it
The tale of hubris leading to downfall is as old as humanity itself across all cultures. From the illiads of the west to the mandate of heaven from the east. There is a reason pride is the first sin. Sadly we will always make this mistake be it 3,000 years in the past or 3,000 years in the future
For years as a young upstart software dev I use to tell people, “I’ll happily write you anything you want, as long as it doesn’t involve moving money around directly, I am not ready that yet.” That was a kind of no-take-backsy scenario I didn’t want to be involved with as a kid.
I spent 10 years running QA for a payment processing company. Probably the best job I ever had. Got me where I am today. That said, I did not realize the stress level I was constantly at until I was at a new non-payment-related job and realized that I wasn't meant to feel like that all the time.
In school we had a class where the prof showed us the case of some person who got a lethal dose of radiation treatment because the software on the machine wasn't debounced correctly. Which made me decide I didn't really want to be responsible for medical/life threatening code.
"I bet nobody ever thought to ask a very simple question that this one guy I worship *might* have asked (I'm not sure, it's not like he would acknowledge my existence), and that insane hypothetical is why he's a genius."
Sadly this is also the curse of getting all your info about government from people who hate the government (and know nothing about it) on social media because your attention span = that of a flea. It's like a game of telephone where all the whispers are prank calls from a preschool.
tbqh I wish it was a young-white-guys-only, tech-only thing but it's not. It's a misplaced confidence thing that I've encountered so much I even listed it on my "topics to dive into" but I'm kind of hoping someone smart + with a proper science/humanities background will write a book on it.
It’s narcissism. Trump does the same thing. Announces a generally known fact and says, “who knew?” They think they are smarter than everyone else so if they don’t know something, others can’t possibly know it.
It’s also why old white men are obsessed with ancient aliens. “I can’t imagine how this structure was possible, so people who lived 3000 years ago couldn’t either”
This was why I hated Six Sigma classes. It's the arrogance they'd teach you of just walking into a situation and changing things without any regard for why it's the way it is now.
I've had too many bosses who get in a job and start making shit decisions based on their own ignorance right away.
Dr. Lidia Morawska, PhD, who has spent a lifetime studying this stuff, was shouted down by an old white guy whose last science degree AFAICT was a BSc in the 1970s.
COVID infection during pregnancy is dangerous for the mother and the baby. But sloppy medical guidance doesn't recommend easy mitigations like N95s, because someone's medical ego told them they were experts in science.
I mean, sorry, what you say is true and I don't mean to dismiss it, but I have wearied of this exact thing from white middle-aged men in executive leadership in numerous IT roles over the decades.
See: my last company's CEO who first wanted to kill phone calls and then pivoted to trying to kill the concept of a website...one of which our users had to use to admin the product. He was then mystified that neither ever happened and hired Oprah's spirit advisor to send us motivational quotes.
This is true, there are almost no African Americans in IT. Who is crying about diversity? Musk knows, because he never hired an African American for an IT job. This is sad, diversity never took a job from the white person but they made a huge stink. I am white BTW, I worked in IT
Being babied and passed along instead of having to pass the grade and do the assignment had done these types no favors. Watching senior citizens throw tantrums is really disheartening.
Not one parent, grandparent, aunt/uncle, authority figure SAID NO!!! for how many decades.
"A lot of people don't know..." is his tell that he just learned something. I remember in 2015 he said it about Supreme Court justices having lifetime appointments, and it was so obvious he'd just learned that fact.
somehow I don't remember this one from getting a liberal arts public policy degree 15 yrs ago! (and I always wrote down the weird little metaphorical phrases)
Maybe it’s not as common as I thought! But you’re right, the principle is simple. It’s just often overlooked! This is a pretty good succinct explainer https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
yeah, we were absolutely trained to analyze the status quo option alongside any potential policy changes! But that sort of thing doesn't matter to a guy like Musk who's happy to "move fast and break things" that our entire society relies on to function
Agreed. Also, classic Data Processing education emphasized not moving a muscle until you knew stakeholders, business case, etc. and you modeled before coding. Then “Computer Science” came along and suggested you can hack your way to success.
I remember being a "gifted kid" and having the line of thought "I'm smart and can think of things better than my peers, so if I've just figured out or found out something, I'm going to assume that I'm ahead of everyone else on it." Thing is, I grew out of it. These guys haven't yet.
same, now i'm always like "someone must have figured this out and tried to do it right? right???" but still haven't really found anything like what i'm doing :S
idk if i'm just stupid or if nobody's tried it or it got buried in history or what
I remember solving a Rubik’s cube and thinking I was the smartest person alive because I’d never met anyone who’d done it. I had about 12 hours of unvetted ego until I found out my father had started it for me so it’d be easy to finish.
Exactly this. A lot of these people probably really were the smartest person in the room growing up. It takes a long time to learn that intelligence and knowledge are not the same thing. Some of us never do. I know I still struggle with it on occasion.
This common mindset of "if I don't understand it/know it, then it's not real/valid/known" contributes to a lot of the big problems this country has right now. It's the mindset of people who both wildly overestimate how smart they are while also being desperately intellectually insecure.
I see this constantly. Young white guys with STEM educational backgrounds. No history, art, philosophy, humanities studies. They think all human thought began with them.
Never underestimate the sheer arrogance of tech people to decide that they, and only they, know how the world should work and what users want - right up to and including calling everyone who disagrees an ID10T.
I'm consistently struck by how Thiel/PayPal dumped Elon because he fundamentally was incapable of understanding risk. And here we are .... just doubling down incessantly .... and the plumbing for the treasury payment system. He's such a rich dumbass loser.
They fired him because he was a nightmare to work with and was destroying the value of the brand they created their whole plan was to bypass AML laws until cemented in the system. Musk being erratic and doing dumb rebranding put things at risk.
Easiest way for a dictator to redistribute wealth from the people to himself, is to have them use a currency the dictator can print more of. If u have 0.01% of the money. And the dictator double the supply, u now only have 0.005%.
No dictator in the world can double the supply of bitcoins or his bitcoins. A dictator would have to mine, but mining does the opposite of taking wealth, it increase the value of everyone else's money.
No dictator can shut down a person from using accepting bitcoin. As such people do not have to
Markets fluctuate cyclically
You can’t set monetary policy with a forever fixed amt of BTC
China owns a shit ton of BTC
BTC would become deflationary
Currency is meant to be spent, not hoarded for hopes of $^
Wallets not being tied to ID legitimizes $ laundering
I'm a human being as evident from my posts.
Look at the site wtfhappenedin1971 dot com
That's what inflation leads to.
In a debt free currency deflation protects workingclass from being scammed n made poor.
Listen to honest economic J G Hulsmann on deflation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRSLVq-MjIc
Specifically, they desperately want bitcoin to work, and they're willing to destroy everything to create circumstances where it at least *looks* like it works.
No other nation will pin its currency to it, though.
To be honest, I think there's a LOT that they want, all of which requires or benefits from evening being destroyed, so they've convinced themselves that wrecking everything is worth it.
This is also just a story of a guy who ruins people’s good time. He sees people playing a game, destroys the dynamic of the game that makes it fun, then ends the game and leaves with everyone’s money so they can’t play anymore.
At that age, your head is full of newly acquired knowledge, so for a brief moment, you think you know everything until you start interacting with people who have long-term institutional knowledge. Then, if you have half a brain, you realize you still know, basically nothing.
Amazing how much fanfic they'll write about what's happening too. "I'll bet [insert verbal equivalent of AI-generated image of a swole Elon bench pressing the Fed]"
You perfectly captured the energy and 'intelligence' of the group, I can confirm. I work with them. It’s beyond nauseating, all fueled by the power and influence of their older 'trailblazer' colleagues. The things I’ve seen are scary.
It is the pinnacle of conservative analysis, too.
“I’m not ignorant. I know about important stuff. The problem is that others care too much about stuff that doesn’t matter (to me). And since my mind is unbothered by those meaningless details, I’m able to see things others can’t.”
The USAID budget is already public, and it's a tiny portion of govt spending overall. I'm not worried about USAID but would like to know more details about Elon's government contracts considering that he now has an obvious conflict of interest. https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/agency-for-international-development?fy=2025
The biggest government spending line items are things like the military, social security and Medicare, and what is Trump / Elon trying to get rid of? Meals on Wheels. Snap. Anything that actually helps people.
It’s more likely that he got to DC, asked where the money went, the answer was too long and complicated, so he went for a tactic that suited his feeble cunning.
I think it is more them thinking these are technical problems with technical solutions when it is a legal/political problem. They obviously haven't stepped away from the bytes to realize the real difficulty in software is the people not the algorithm.
They also seem to subscribe to the notion popularized by people like Trump and McConnell: unless something's specifically prohibited, it's implicitly allowed. A notion steeped in greed, self-absorption and disdain for the rules (unless they stand to benefit your side).
Having worked with these douchebros for 2 decades, can confirm this is the case.
The classic case would be that they would have some "groundbreaking" idea for the user interface for a product that was a concept so old that it was explored at length in the early 2000s.
We saw this at the beginning of the pandemic. I remember listening to an interview with one of the Instagram(I think) founders where he was being regarded as an epidemiologist because he knew what amounts to importing python data science libraries and revealing all these “insights”
LLM. Which other country's law are you wanting analyzed against USA law? Because that's what a LLM does. First, earn a law degree (JD) from a foreign country. Second, go to another country to earn a LLM. LLM does comparative law or law involving the two nations. Trying to figure out what you mean.
Oh, but that’s just where they *say* the money’s being spent, you can’t believe that! (I’m being sarcastic but if you showed this kid a budget spreadsheet, bet that’s what he’d say.)
“Asked where all the money was going and no one could answer” here meaning, “that’s such an oversimplified question that educating [Musk] on the subject enough to start asking intelligent questions would take a year”, of course.
It is also an inditement of our education system. A democracy needs educated citizens who understand how their government works and have developed critical thinking skills. We need fully funded schools that teach civics and history (American and World) and electives like speech and debate.
I have bad news about a lot of school administrators- they are exactly the same way. They’re more invested in having their egos stroked than in actually learning.
That's not necessary the advantage you might think it is.
People with money are able to have their sprogs educated without the inconvenient knowledge their parents don't want them to know - i.e. gay people exist. 🤷
"People dont realize that private schools are generally WORSE than public. Teachers don't need credentials. Curriculum doesn't follow state rules. Accommodating disabilities is nonexistent...."
This type of education has to start in elementary school, or middle school, at the latest. Kids have to begin developing the lifelong skills of critical thinking and careful analysis while being taught history, civics, geography, literature, math, science, etc.
The past 40 years was an active destruction of public education (ironically in the name of critical thinking) to intentionally create this outcome. They don't want people who think critically & they won't let teachers teach the skills.
But, most Americans went to public school. We need them to understand what is happening. If you've never studied fascism and don't have the critical thinking skills to connect the current dots, it is much easier to tune all of this out as "just politics" without understanding the threat.
Threat recognition and assessment is critical to successfully mobilizing the public. People have to "get" what is going on. If they don't realize that democracy is in peril then they won't effectively and collectively push back.
Comments
1) Musk/lackey asked each dept 'show every transaction you're spending federal money on'
2) answer is behind different layers of procurement in each dept
3) "is there one place all the checks get written >
4) yes, this Treasury throttle point
5) Do incredibly basic analysis there
The above breaks several laws, but also can't really work and is less accurate than looking down through descriptive layers of "what this project is"
It's a lot like waltzing into the capitol building through a broken door on 1/6 because 'nobody is stopping me right now, so it must be legal'
Going to find out.
They've been told it's theirs for the taking
Crypto requires a deep lack of understanding about how money works and many basic facts about our financial and legal systems
Was he enthusiastic about it?
I don't actually know what Gawker relates to.
She proposed something or other in a paper.
It was rejected and she was invited to read one of the books she had written to educate herself.
And ours is the generation that voted for Trump.
Source:
Then he tells people to fix it and "explains how", but doesn't really give any new insights.
In some, young men found boasting would be mocked relentlessly until they got with the friggin program.
"We intrude into your lives with claims of higher knowledge of real estate, politics, journalism, constitutional law, medicine, and education despite having only cursory knowledge of each ."
https://www.skeptocapital.com/p/repost-venture-capitalists-are-not
heavily affects young *people* who work in tech.
Anyone 40+: “Ok hotshot. You’re using ‘jump the shark’ like think you know what/where it means 🤦♀️. Prove it”
YWD: “Parkour man! Saw it on r/watchpeopledie.”
Everyone: “fuck you’re dumb. Shut up and go shower”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven
What do we call this phenomenon?
Did something say, "Look at your dollar bills, dumbass."
I fear it’s not just their age: “Move fast & break things” is how they were taught, it’s the ethos not just of these guys but of an entire era. Going great so far.
Literally failing to understand that safety features evolved over decades. 🤷
Rapid career advancement and job hopping in SV circles maybe keeps them from learning since they don’t stick around long enough for mistakes to catch up to them.
"Well, at least $100billion goes towards weapons manufacturing for the sole purpose of turning children in Gaza into skeletons. But let's start with the department of education..."
Fuck off Elon.
No, I won't.
We don't employ 5 yr olds for extremely good reasons. Part of which is understanding complex systems.
Weird!!
Muting you now.
https://bsky.app/profile/spectorhairday.bsky.social/post/3lhe7l3k26c2m
https://bsky.app/profile/riverofdiversity.bsky.social/post/3lheeff7gzk2x
Someone with the aptitude, can do a 10 week coding course, that gives them the skill to write a game that gets $1 Billion in sale before they're 20 (e.g. Angry Birds)
they like to tear everything down, and pretend its unnecessary. then we all have to suffer through manually doing the things that the system used to do. which covers the butt of the one who insisted we tear it all down.
and then they distort the metrics or get creative with the interpretation, to make it look like "improvement".
This is like when Elon bought Twitter and just randomly started unplugging servers to see if the system would break
@alttext.bsky.social
But usually you're meant to have self-awareness that this is what you're doing and they probably know more than you....
He pays real engineers, who spend half their time trying to keep him from meddling.
Problem is they're first on your chopping block when the workload overwhelms you
But also I probably would've taken it anyways, because I love classics.
Her school requires social science/humanities classes be taken every year.
She’s taken Science of Football,
Psych courses and writing classes. And she spent a year volunteering with a nonprofit
All STEM and no humanities
https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/
All the same type of him, at the top of the mountain until they fall. And it won't be pretty for them.
big domino: random open source JavaScript library author now owns fort knox
I've had too many bosses who get in a job and start making shit decisions based on their own ignorance right away.
It's exactly the same mindset.
For example, the world's top experts in bioaerosols and disease transmission told them COVID was airborne in 2020.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/
In a very real sense, the cost of the pandemic is the price a few bad MDs were willing to pay to avoid admitting a mistake.
https://bsky.app/profile/mark-ungrin.bsky.social/post/3lb6tsk5ijs2z
And that's the that dangerous part.
It's not just junk.
It's junk your kid's pediatrician *can't distinguish from actual science*.
https://bsky.app/profile/mark-ungrin.bsky.social/post/3led4mor5j22j
COVID infection during pregnancy is dangerous for the mother and the baby. But sloppy medical guidance doesn't recommend easy mitigations like N95s, because someone's medical ego told them they were experts in science.
https://bsky.app/profile/mark-ungrin.bsky.social/post/3lgtkkqzazc2f
They've convinced everyone you only have two choices: support them, or join the anti-vaxxers.
Science isn't on the menu.
https://bsky.app/profile/mark-ungrin.bsky.social/post/3lgsxl3wu6k2t
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA
Do they think there's a room with notes and coins?
Not one parent, grandparent, aunt/uncle, authority figure SAID NO!!! for how many decades.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
Nevertheless, the actual principle seems obvious... unless you have the goal of gutting the federal government like a Tauntaun.
Actually ASSHOLE, lots of people did know. They also knew you were a complete imbecile who was unteachable.
idk if i'm just stupid or if nobody's tried it or it got buried in history or what
The Janitor used to reset the boiler every morning to stop it overheating: Building burns down when it overheats without the janitor.
Farms and factories in swing states lose USAID income. Migration increases as recipients of aid are more desperate.
Bitcoin prevents that.
No dictator can shut down a person from using accepting bitcoin. As such people do not have to
It is a technology that defends against totalitarian regimes and dictatorship.
The anthropologist Natalie Smolenski talks about it.
Markets fluctuate cyclically
You can’t set monetary policy with a forever fixed amt of BTC
China owns a shit ton of BTC
BTC would become deflationary
Currency is meant to be spent, not hoarded for hopes of $^
Wallets not being tied to ID legitimizes $ laundering
Look at the site wtfhappenedin1971 dot com
That's what inflation leads to.
In a debt free currency deflation protects workingclass from being scammed n made poor.
Listen to honest economic J G Hulsmann on deflation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRSLVq-MjIc
No other nation will pin its currency to it, though.
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/elon-musk-and-the-infinite-rebuy
It's so deeply pathetic.
“I’m not ignorant. I know about important stuff. The problem is that others care too much about stuff that doesn’t matter (to me). And since my mind is unbothered by those meaningless details, I’m able to see things others can’t.”
Or anything about the potential problems around government spending and accountability?
https://www.nytimes.com/by/elizabeth-spiers
The classic case would be that they would have some "groundbreaking" idea for the user interface for a product that was a concept so old that it was explored at length in the early 2000s.
People with money are able to have their sprogs educated without the inconvenient knowledge their parents don't want them to know - i.e. gay people exist. 🤷
There are inconvenient laws for public schools that private institutions are not subject to. 🤷