It's the tech delusion. I don't know a start-up that doesn't have some grandiose vision of themselves as the future saviors of humanity. Uber, Tesla, Facebook, Airbnb, you name it... it's all the same "save the world" rhetoric.
The scary thing is, I think a lot of people on the industry actually believe their own BS...
It's much easier to do hard or risky things (and convince others to do hard things) if you believe that doing so will save the world.
Whether it's true or not, it's a useful illusion. People who believe that it's all meaningless tend to sit on message boards and shit on others instead.
I'd rather take an honest, measured view of these companies. Many have the potential to change our lives, for both good and ill. Buying into the BS is a great way to short circuit healthy skepticism.
Who are the ones actually building the products that everybody else (and probably you, too) are using, though, and getting rich off it? They're the delusional folks who buy the BS.
This is something I've wrestled with a lot in my personal life: you can have an accurate self-image and never really accomplish anything, or you can have an inflated self-image and achievements that probably don't quite justify it but come a lot closer than the achievements of the people with accurate self-images. Empirically, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground, except for a few rare folks who seemingly have no self-image (they just don't think about it much). That sort of delusional megalomania seems to be a necessary motive force for tackling hard, risky problems. And if you don't have it, then some other delusional megalomaniac will be the one who actually attempts it, and gets resources simply because he's the only one trying.
Second-order survivorship bias. The vast majority of delusional megalomaniacs are abject failures (at least when compared to their own ambitions), and the number of them who live in the gutter and eat out of trashcans is at least four orders of magnitude higher than the number who find success.
People who find success often become delusional megalomaniacs after achieving that success, when they see their success as evidence of their own greatness, not before. The idea that it's the megalomania (or a black turtleneck) that makes you successful, or even makes you brave enough to attempt the things that might make you successful, is an illusion.
A defining commonality of delusional megalomaniacs is their destructiveness and their danger to the people around them and themselves. Worse, they tend to attract followers who both amplify the reach of that destructiveness and who create an echo chamber that reflects back and amplifies the megalomania that attracted them, making the situation worse.
> That sort of delusional megalomania seems to be a necessary motive force for tackling hard, risky problems.
There's no evidence of this. Everything difficult was not solved by assholes, and Zuckerberg didn't solve anything difficult.
I think reality is much much much more complicated (we humans don't even know enough collectively to make such statements with any accuracy), and there certainly is a middle ground. I think people with inflated self worth are more likely to "succeed" because they will run right over others and maybe not even stop to justify the horror they just committed to improve their own lot in life, due to their sense of entitlement complex (which I guess you did allude to a little). Either way, I like your comment, it made me think.
Great comment. I just want to point out the obvious you can believe you're great & be a nice, humble person.
The self-image comes into play when you're trying to act in a certain accordance with what's in your head. If you think you're bound for great things, you'll look for great things to tackle and you won't be satisfied until you're at whatever version of success you have in your head. If your self-image is happy & settled-down, you'll similarly stress over this. Eventually though, you'll probably get what you wanted because the law of attraction is quite real.
When you talk about accomplishment, it's a relative term though I understand you mean money in this case. Self-image is self-directed, and typically comes from a desire, which naturally comes from a lack. You will see many buy into the trap that money = happiness, and they will thus imagine themselves as some rich, successful tech CEO. After that, self-image has to match up with real-world, so work. The ones who truly believe they are will eventually succeed, and the ones with little willpower will fail. This goes for every facet of life.
That's why it's good to ponder "who am I?" because it's actually a step after "what do I want?" If you can see it, you can be it. Some will call it megalomania and others will call it dedication. Without knowing the person intimately, it's hard to understand which it is, but I'm an optimist and lean on the side of most successful people got there through a lot of hard work -- where their self-image was tested again & again.
The truth is nobody can tell you that you are or aren't successful. Ultimately, it's a personal decision and comes down to if your ideal version of yourself is staring back at you in the mirror.
But I don't know if I agree with the second. People who believe that something is meaningless, or hard to do, are at least not doing any damage, while saviors of the world have done plenty of damage. We humans seem to have an inherent bias for powerful persons, in that we tend to like them even if they're a terrible influence.
Hey, some people sit on messages boards and shit on others AND manage to build successful businesses that let them live the lives they want. I'd rather choose them as models than the douchebags drinking kombucha in their Tesla.
I think there's truth in what you're saying, it's just a bit dubious when that illusion is also used to generate billions in personal wealth. It raises the cynic in some observers.
Why leave out the option that some things are meaningless and some things are not? Why divide the world into conquering self-deluded bullshit artists and lazy cynical moaners?
I like to remain skeptical about Elon's vision, he seems like a great guy, but he is still a business man, maybe he isn't able to see that for himself.
Just remember we're not just getting free lithium, aluminum and copper from another dimension to build all those cars, and when we're done with the cars, they're not just going to biodegrade back into forrests and coral reefs. Mining those minerals can have a pretty serious environmental impact.
There is some cognitive dissonance going here, we see a solution to climate change, but we don't want to observe the other side of the coin.
Oh come on. You do realize "recycling" exists, right? Cars don't just go into a landfill when they reach the end of their useful life. They're salvaged for parts, and once all the useful parts are removed the rest is used for scrap metal. Lead-acid batteries have been recycled for decades now, with extremely high efficiency. Lithium is much more valuable than anything in a lead-acid battery, so of course it's going to be recycled as well.
Yes, mining has an environmental impact, but 1 ton of aluminum used in a car does not necessarily mean 1 ton of aluminum was mined for it.
Try not to forget it often takes energy to recycle things, and what do we do with a huge surplus of Lithium when its no longer required, we don't exactly have free energy either.
But hey, let's not get that get in the way of a great response, right?
What in the hell are you talking about? The energy needed to recycle almost anything is usually orders of magnitude less than that needed to mine it and refine it in the first place, not to mention not having to transport it halfway across the planet from some remote place in Bolivia or wherever.
And why would Lithium no longer be required? In some hypothetical future that doesn't exist? It's needed now, and that's all that's important. Moreover, its great performance in batteries is directly related to fundamental physics and the position of Li on the periodic table, and that's not going to change.
>But hey, let's not get that get in the way of a great response, right?
Let what get in the way of a great response? Your nonsensical predictions?
I think Elon means well somewhere down the line, but he seems to be completely blind to ethical/social effects as opposed to the purely technological ones.
I.e., his solution to employment issues caused by automation is to merge with machines as opposed to addressing it on a social, political, economic, etc., level.
More and more I find this approach detrimental to society and likely to amplify all existing problems.
Each of those companies has the potential to significantly impact the world. Whether that change is for better or worse depends on your values. But given that they will likely have a big impact on society, I'd rather have them thinking through the ethical implications of what they do even superficially and grandiosely than not at all. A hypocritically preachy Facebook corporation is much better than an absolutely cynical one.
A hypocritically preachy Facebook corporation is much better than an absolutely cynical one.
If you ask me, for a lot of these tech companies, this is a false dichotomy: they're outwardly preachy and inwardly cynical. How better to justify bad behaviour than to dress it up in grandiosity?
Most of the ones I have been on the inside of (I am not currently inside of any of those) are fairly preachy internally and do discuss the ethics of what they are doing. Sure, that discussion is more "realist" than what their PR pushes out, but it is still not even close to absolute cynicism. They don't always pick the ethical choice when push comes to shove if there is a lot of money on doing the wrong thing, but it depends somewhat on the level of wrong (for the record, I am talking about perfectly legal actions here, just with possible ethical externalities). In as much as they justify things, they justify them to themselves too. You can argue that they are more cynical as you go closer to the center, but I have no evidence for it either way, and the ones actually designing and implementing the features are not in that center. I'd rather deal with someone who has to rationalize their unethical actions and thus at least consider the downsides than someone who just doesn't care. In my experience, S.V. companies are more often full of the former than the later.
One of those is not the like others (Facebook). Facebook is the only one that wasn't a huge next step in the progression of an established industry. It was an incremental improvement in a fledgling social network industry, and it's questionable how much value it actually adds to (or detracts from) society. Compare this to Google which is indeed a force of good (not just their main product, but the numerous free technologies they have given to society like Chrome, Golang, QUIC, Tensorflow, etc.) and Uber/Airbnb, which have made people 'freer' in the sense that it is much cheaper to travel and get out now, and then Tesla of course is ushering in an eco-friendly transportation revolution.
The grandiose self-vision is annoying PR, but at least some of the companies have a fair amount to back it up with. Facebook is just the next iteration of Microsoft in my opinion -- they took a huge early lead with a superior product in a new industry, but now they're kind of evil and they will ride their market share for many decades.
It was an incremental improvement in a fledgling social network industry
And even then, it was only because Friendster was crippled by scaling problems and MySpace was snowed under with self-promotion that Facebook even had a path out of the university populations to which they initially restricted themselves.
The scary thing is, I think a lot of people on the industry actually believe their own BS...