Why are so many billion dollar companies and billionaires drinking stupid-juice?

You've heard it happening, we've all heard it happening. But why billionaires and billion dollar companies? Did all the planets just start retrograding executively in a row this year?

Why are all these people who are supposed to be smart and successful acting so unbelievably stupid!?

Seriously, it's not even a rhetorical question!

Aside from Twitter, which is a bit of a special case even by corporate stupidity standards, what's generally happened is that the venture capital funds propping up all these companies have noticed that the popular "get big user numbers at any cost" business model is, unsurprisingly, not very profitable. So now that they've (they believe) locked in those users and made themselves difficult to get rid of, the nickel-and-diming has begun in earnest. The free ride is over, and things are only going to get worse.

How much money a person has does not always determine how smart they are. Most billionaires today didn't even earn their money, they've inherited it from family or friends and then try to convince the commonfolk that they've earned it because they were the "hardest" worker.

You have it fairly mistaken.
And I do mean fairly, as anyone would usually call these events the consequence of irrationality.

But they are actually the result of rationality.

Or rather, the model, ideal of human beings acting as rational agents who follow their own self interest. Simplified to the point of being compatible with numerical values (You can fit into an equation) and given "The Logic of The Markets" by which to operate from and fulfill themselves.

A lot of this goes back to before the Cold War, but theories on Nuclear Strategy were instrumental in the evolution from Boolean Logic to The Californian Ideology (Which is the guiding light of silicone valley).

The Problem still occurred as far back as the 50s, when John Nash attempted to prove the logic behind "Fuck You Buddy" on Secretaries at the RAND corporation:

Both players trusted each other, and would exchange the Diamond for the Cash.

What John Nash needed, was for one player to lie about where they buried their item, and to either keep it and lose nothing, or for the other player to not lie, and so lose what they had to the other player, who used the optimum strategy to maximize their own benefit.
(This is why the game was called Fuck You Buddy)

This was also around the same time that, while Leo Strauss watched Gunsmoke and Perry Mason to form his own political theory, Ayn Rand's writing (and her Character) was viciously criticized by a society of stakeholders who were employed by highly inefficient corporations that operated under a regulated capitalism watched over by a government in which the masses had their demands met through politicians that represented them, and were held accountable-

By stakeholders, I mean people who had a stake in the institution they had employment in.

By Inefficient, I mean paying high wages, offering comprehensive benefits, and actively supporting the immediate surrounding area beyond taxes, and contributing to the infrastructure and the communities they share that infrastructure with.

And as pedantic as it may seem that I described what politicians did,
it kind of serves to remind that it's not their current function.
Doesn't it?

Because I just described something that's not really conceivable in our modern context...

Did you know that Sigmund Freud found Democracy to be fundementally unworkable under Psychiatry? That he ultimately considered even Society to be untenable under his theory?
Or that Edward Bernays liberally reworked his uncle's writings on the human condition to better suit his project of guiding the masses by appealing to their desires?
And that the reason he called it Public Relations was because Propaganda had (and retains) a negative connotation?

Are you familiar with B.F. Skinner's book Walden Two? It's kind of like that post-9/11 sequel novel to Animal Farm, in it's way.
(It disregards the original and spits in the author's face)

Or the relationship that Cybernetics had with Ecosystem research?

I'll get to the point, either way.

The reality we live in, in which all our mainstream realities are subject to the laws of (even as it's all falling apart),

It is the byproduct of no one Conspiracy or Theory, and no one advancement in the fields of politics (which no longer applies to our lives), science, technology, business or medicine.

It is the result of individuals who, in the isolation of time, culture, field and background, contributed for over the period of a century toward the understanding of the human condition, and what the most optimal way to apply that understanding is:

That we are essentially computers operating from the instructions of our genetic programming toward the most efficient propagation of our code, by using the minima of energy toward the maxima of success. That all interactions are purely transactional and without genuine and selfless Altruism.

Alone, isolated, and with our only purpose in life being, again,

to act as Rational Agents toward our own Self Interest.

............................

Funniest thing, though?

There was a study some time back, as to who actually fits this purely Rational.

One was Economists.

The other was Psychopaths.

Which is where that little ray of optimism shines through, I hope.

The fact that there's an inherent dissonance between people (no matter how convincing some Logical assessments may be) and the world as it has currently been Made to function in the service of. By nihilists who thought they were working toward figuring out the human condition, as perfectly deterministic, instinctual creatures beholden to the same success strategies and survival mechanisms that see other animals act in ways I'm not going to describe.

The point is that this isn't nature.

It is something we made.

And just as easily as we made it suitable for the Jack Welches and Jerry Goldsmiths of the world, all of those Cooks, Zuckerbergs, Bezoses, all of those Markets, that hegemony, stability,

just as easily and unconsciously as we've started to make all of this a risk-free world for Money to live in?

I believe David Graebor:

We can still, just as easily, make it Different.

(not gonna lie I hope Musk's antics end up fundementally tearing the current fabric of the internet apart and ends the current system of content distribution)
(or that otherwise some other know-it-all causes a good half of our limbic / surveillance/ general unregulated laissez-faire capitalism to fall the hell apart already)

Prosperity has almost nothing to do with how smart someone seems. Experts at one thing make dumb decisions, too? Who knew?!

letforeverdieslow said:
*long text I actually read*

OK?

Complacency, nihilism, and greed.

favf said:
Because it works. Musk hasn't killed Twitter yet, Reddit is doing fine after the whole blackout thing, Tumblr survived the NSFW apocalypse. Generally even when these decisions go badly, the people responsible for making them fail upwards (I guess that's an example of the corporate stupidity you're asking about, but this example is not a new thing)

Tumblr hella didn't survive. We are still getting refugees to this day.

rainbow_dash said:
Tumblr hella didn't survive. We are still getting refugees to this day.

"It's evolution."

Soooo tempted to post a link to Pearl Jam's Evolution music video. Or that Korn one.

alphamule said:
"It's evolution."

Soooo tempted to post a link to Pearl Jam's Evolution music video. Or that Korn one.

....

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FcdOLKx2XG8

favf said:
Because it works. Musk hasn't killed Twitter yet, Reddit is doing fine after the whole blackout thing, Tumblr survived the NSFW apocalypse. Generally even when these decisions go badly, the people responsible for making them fail upwards (I guess that's an example of the corporate stupidity you're asking about, but this example is not a new thing)

That's kind of the thing about Pavlovian-centric business practices.

There's a bit of an Event Horizon where terminal conditioning is achieved and quality no longer factors into the product's demand.

By that point, the spell's only broken if it's perfectly and irreversibly denied access to by the user.

It stops existing, completely. More thoroughly than heroin or alcohol ever has.

letforeverdieslow said:
*~900 words*

you are way too overzealous with those line breaks, my dude, like, you put one in the middle of a sentence; this shit is so hard to parse... and you're not even making any assertions, you're just saying words, most of it just vague gesturing to random philosophers, psychologists, and authors. I read that whole thing and I'm not even fully confident which side you're on.

also, what is with the capitalization of random words?

letforeverdieslow said:
There's a bit of an Event Horizon where terminal conditioning is achieved and quality no longer factors into the product's demand.

I know this isn't really what the thread's about, but the first thing that sprang to mind was modern Pokémon games.

sipothac said:
you are way too overzealous with those line breaks, my dude, like, you put one in the middle of a sentence; this shit is so hard to parse... and you're not even making any assertions, you're just saying words, most of it just vague gesturing to random philosophers, psychologists, and authors. I read that whole thing and I'm not even fully confident which side you're on.

also, what is with the capitalization of random words?

There is no such thing as a free grammar checker? :P
Actually, it's a thing to do THAT just like I did with 'that'. Style guide writers would be turning over in their graves with modern Typographical (NOT written, and yes the T was example haha) English.

sipothac said:
this shit is so hard to parse... and you're not even making any assertions,

Language is a really clumsy, volatile, brittle, confusing and violent way to communicate feelings, concepts and ideas.

I've kind of adopted the same policy that David Lynch or Alan Watts had, that it's an uphill battle before you even open your mouth, that everything said before is a series of defenses one has to navigate around in and penetrate in order to be truly understood when you get to the point.

But alright,
I'll try to describe the big damn convoluted fuckball of spaghetti shit in the simplified language that allowed us all to get tangled up in it in the first place:

The idea that free will does not exist, democracy cannot function, collective action cannot be trusted, we are naturally selfish and driven by sexual impulses and animalistic desires, that society should be organized to manage and control these traits, that politicians cannot serve this simplified model of man, but the markets, the economy, corporate interests can fulfill our needs better than politicians can (because the masses can't function under democracy), only capitalism can efficiently administer the human condition, through a complex series of operant conditioning regimens and reward systems designed around meeting targets, quotas, metrics by which efficiency and stability can be calculated into a number to make bigger, that there is no spirit in man to diminish, we are already happiness machines to engage through addiction-causing techniques, all public outrage can be neutralized and exploited without making any changes to society, and all people who fail to serve that function simply don't have what it takes to succeed in within the parameters of an abject and amoral psychopath, which is the ideal way to engage in this world according to all the postmodern science and neoliberal economic theories that support it,

the idea that we can math & money our way into a rational world,
That is the reason so many inhuman individuals in all their seats of power seem delusional and take actions that bewilder and confuse the rest of us.
They are living in another, perfectly rational world that endorses their practices and encourages it to be imposed as though they are real and apply to the true nature of mankind.
It has been built up for them in such a way, for so long, that it is incontrovertible, unquestionable, and as beyond doubt as breathing air or drinking water.
They are that detached from the real world and the real consequences of their belief system on it.

(And we keep letting them because they convinced us, too)

letforeverdieslow said:
Language is a really clumsy, volatile, brittle, confusing and violent way to communicate feelings, concepts and ideas.

I've kind of adopted the same policy that David Lynch or Alan Watts had, that it's an uphill battle before you even open your mouth, that everything said before is a series of defenses one has to navigate around in and penetrate in order to be truly understood when you get to the point.

But alright,
I'll try to describe the big damn convoluted fuckball of spaghetti shit in the simplified language that allowed us all to get tangled up in it in the first place:

The idea that free will does not exist, democracy cannot function, collective action cannot be trusted, we are naturally selfish and driven by sexual impulses and animalistic desires, that society should be organized to manage and control these traits, that politicians cannot serve this simplified model of man, but the markets, the economy, corporate interests can fulfill our needs better than politicians can (because the masses can't function under democracy), only capitalism can efficiently administer the human condition, through a complex series of operant conditioning regimens and reward systems designed around meeting targets, quotas, metrics by which efficiency and stability can be calculated into a number to make bigger, that there is no spirit in man to diminish, we are already happiness machines to engage through addiction-causing techniques, all public outrage can be neutralized and exploited without making any changes to society, and all people who fail to serve that function simply don't have what it takes to succeed in within the parameters of an abject and amoral psychopath, which is the ideal way to engage in this world according to all the postmodern science and neoliberal economic theories that support it,

the idea that we can math & money our way into a rational world,
That is the reason so many inhuman individuals in all their seats of power seem delusional and take actions that bewilder and confuse the rest of us.
They are living in another, perfectly rational world that endorses their practices and encourages it to be imposed as though they are real and apply to the true nature of mankind.
It has been built up for them in such a way, for so long, that it is incontrovertible, unquestionable, and as beyond doubt as breathing air or drinking water.
They are that detached from the real world and the real consequences of their belief system on it.

(And we keep letting them because they convinced us, too)

Reminds me of Gulliver's Travels when the author makes fun of Britain (and Europe in general). Yeah, that's a far better summary than the first long post. Far more clearly and tersely written. For another example of this sort of thinking, look up Prosperity Gospel.

"spaghetti shit" <-- Ugh, now I'm thinking of that fluffy pony community and how hated it is.

https://iep.utm.edu/hobmeth/ Probably some good reading for a background into this sort of POV. First page of Google results for Hobbesian philosophy had this. It's neat that we can just look up a given writer and find tons of information on them.

nathmurr said:
Why are so many billion dollar companies and billionaires drinking stupid-juice?

You've heard it happening, we've all heard it happening. But why billionaires and billion dollar companies? Did all the planets just start retrograding executively in a row this year?

Why are all these people who are supposed to be smart and successful acting so unbelievably stupid!?

Seriously, it's not even a rhetorical question!

Two big factors.

One, corporations are beholden to shareholders, specifically shareholders choose who the CEO is. Unlike the CEO, loyal customers, or employees who all have a lot to lose if the company fails, the shareholders do not have significant risk if the business does poorly. The worst that can happen is they lose their investment in that particular company, normally not even that. Because they are less effected by risk, they're more likely to hire riskier CEOs and pressure companies to policies with short time preferences. This is even worse because if a company is doing something very profitable at the expense of it's future, shareholders can just sell their stock once the bill arrives. This is why you'll notice that privately owned companies like Steam are less crazy than publicly traded ones, even though they're smaller because they lack investment money.

The second big factor is that dividends (when a company pays money to it's shareholders directly) are taxed more than realized capital gains. (When a shareholder sells their stock at a higher price than what they bought it at.) Previously investors would look for companies with high dividends and if a company they were invested in stopped paying dividends it would need a good explanation. Because they're taxed more now, investors actually don't want any dividends now, and instead want companies to focus entirely on growth to maximize the amount of money they can make from capital gains. This allows unsustainable companies that aren't making a profit to be seen as successful and worth investing it. Particularly, this focus on capital gains has lead to the blitz scaling strategy, where a company operates at an insane loss and uses a constant stream of investment to cover it, with the promise that eventually they'll make a crazy amount of money because they have so many customers, ignoring that those customers are only there because they're getting goods/services cheaper than they're worth. That's a lot of what we're seeing now with corporate craziness, companies that were operating at a loss and depending on investors to foot the bill are in deep trouble now because they're running out of investment money.

They have too much money, and can afford to be stupid. It takes large amounts of money to be extremely stupid and still survive. This is the reason. Ability to make money is not limited by intelligence level.

hjfduitloxtrds said:
They have too much money, and can afford to be stupid. It takes large amounts of money to be extremely stupid and still survive. This is the reason. Ability to make money is not limited by intelligence level.

*Handshake sound*

There's scientific evidence that being overly "successful" makes people do stupid shit more often because they start being overconfident in their abilities, and that becoming more rich alienates and isolates people from the rest of the population causing them to be out of touch and being distrustful to the people around them.
Combine this with the fact that ultra rich people are just normal people that lucked into money (parents and their connections mostly) and then exploited the everloving fuck out of everyone and everything in their vicinity, and it's just average deluded people with enough money to be able to fuck up in above average ways.

Some light reading for the interested:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090303171451.htm
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/735482
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797616667721
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550616641472

notmenotyou said:
There's scientific evidence that being overly "successful" makes people do stupid shit more often because they start being overconfident in their abilities, and that becoming more rich alienates and isolates people from the rest of the population causing them to be out of touch and being distrustful to the people around them.
Combine this with the fact that ultra rich people are just normal people that lucked into money (parents and their connections mostly) and then exploited the everloving fuck out of everyone and everything in their vicinity, and it's just average deluded people with enough money to be able to fuck up in above average ways.

Some light reading for the interested:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090303171451.htm
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/735482
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797616667721
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550616641472

There was this old joke about the IQ needed to destroy the world dropping every year because of technology. We're no where near that level yet, but we can still make ourselves extinct. So no crashing the moon into the world just yet, haha!

I remember some fiction author noting that the epic battles are often an indication of incompetence, because the competent ones won without a fight. Basically, alternative means of diplomacy, Sun Tzu's AoW, etc. Said author was talking about wizards, though, if I remember right.

gamecube

gamecube said:
gamecube

Bold statement, I agree

Rich people probably only seem dumb because their mistakes are costlier and higher profile. They are afforded more opportunities to lose more than the average person, and are scrutinized more in general. And everyone loves a story that makes someone all high and mighty seem beneath them. It makes for a great narrative. Hence, constant doomsaying about various rich people's turbulent aspirations.

Plus, downfalls inherently make more interesting stories. You never hear a story about a guy who won the lottery and proceeded to use the money responsibly, because it's not interesting.

It's all just the rate of exposure to these ideas. Chinese robber fallacy. There are a lot of rich people- I mean, the 1% of 300 million... is 3 million. That's still a lot of people. Enough people to have plenty of examples to conclude you have solid proof of any generalizing thesis you could want to make about rich people. The idea that rich people are dumber or more prone to bad decisions than anyone else is silly.

nathmurr said:
Why are so many billion dollar companies and billionaires drinking stupid-juice?

LOL Wow. I have no idea what you are talking about. Instead of "drinking stupid-juice", how about saying what they are doing that is stupid?

milabue said:
LOL Wow. I have no idea what you are talking about. Instead of "drinking stupid-juice", how about saying what they are doing that is stupid?

Roblox making a literal dating game on a platform with mostly children on it. And to further solidify their idiocy, they made it 17 years and up as the age limit! I assure you, they will get sued, one way or the other, even if it isn't for this.

Elon Musk and his dumb idea with Twitter's new name (X), and then charging people to use the platform, which would likely lead to major disparity for people who've used the platform to promote charity for a very long time.

Pornhub letting minors be featured on their site practically for generations, as well as receiving a lawsuit for showing a minor getting molested on their platform.

And I don't even need to explain EA, Unity, or Twitch's stupidity. I'm sure your Google search engine is within arm's reach.

Speaking of which, Google has also been pretty corrupt lately, but as far as I'm concerned, instability and corruption are the same as stupidity in the bigger scheme of things.

nathmurr said:
Elon Musk
...
Google

Elon is autistic. That must be a big part of it.
Google? There is no excuse for how crappy a search engine it is. I have yet to find a good search engine. And I do not understand why. It has been super-easy to write a good query for decades, so why don't they parse queries correctly? Ok, yeah, that is drinking stupid-juice.

I know nothing about EA, Unity, or Twitch. Sorry.

milabue said:
Google? There is no excuse for how crappy a search engine it is. I have yet to find a good search engine. And I do not understand why. It has been super-easy to write a good query for decades, so why don't they parse queries correctly? Ok, yeah, that is drinking stupid-juice.

There's not much reason to make good search queries for google, is there? As long as it is good enough, it doesn't matter since they are the go-to search engine. The longer you're on google the more ads they can show.

lekkiyo said:
You never hear a story about a guy who won the lottery and proceeded to use the money responsibly, because it's not interesting.

Probably because a really responsible lottery winner doesn't publicize that fact until it is all invested away and she's surrounded by security measures, if at all. Talking to the press or anyone who would even post brainlessly to facebokk after coming into that much money is... not wise.

Asfaras the general subject, these folks have been begging for an economic downturn for like 5 months now. They are feeling their actionable wealth wither away with inflation. The only way to keep even is to rake in even more.

That, and the odd ideas of debt forgiveness that have been floated by the public which it turns out hollywood has been using for a few decades, to actually launder business expenses through shell corperations for every damn movie that can easily go bankrupt so royalties need not be paid....

Also, lemmie point something out.

sipothac said:
I'm not even fully confident which side you're on.

Since when has real life been written in binary code? Assume we're talking about the billionaires, and they have algorithms to think for them. They buy up all the media in this country, and social media becomes a journalist's best friend to fly a little solo. 7 companies own 95% of newspapers, high 80s% of cable news and online article writing. They should have won in that regard, but the fact that the haves took the have-nots for 7 billion dollars over the course of the pandemic still got out. The fact that the financial experts have been begging for a recession recently and all it took was stimulus checks and aggressive loan-rate hikes to stop the worst of this one so far, NOT bailouts of multi-million companies, which has rightfully now been called corporate wellfare, government picking winners and losers.

This is a multi-faceted reality that has coagulated around these raw wounds of people waking up to how much we all need unions.

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to agree with "it would be better if everyone believing the other side would just kindly disappear please," but in general 70% of Americans agree on certain basic policies that could certainly make for successful times.

Probably most y'all ain't Americans but just using examples I know, I was taught by that science-forsaken country's education system. I won't say places like France have that same underlying total foiling of the public will, but I'd be surprised if this rhetoric hasn't divided us as a species more than the underlying actual opinions deserve.