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Comment by cshimmin | Hacker News Reader

Yeah perhaps a better term for Loser is Abstainer. Because the Sociopaths also can certainly lose at the game of maximum capitalist profit. Loser/Abstainer just chooses not to play the game.

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The problem with these theories is that they fall apart as soon as you start adding or modifying the types. Because they aren't actually correct, just simple and flattering.

I think it'd be more accurate to say that in their neat essay form they are incorrect/incomplete, but that there's a kernel of truth to them.

Essays like this want to package an idea into a nice, easy to understand thing that has some punch to it. Reality is more complex.

Fully agreed. I think "Loser" is a misnomer. And indeed, going by the essay, the Sociopaths can also lose big... they are willing to risk it all for personal gain, but it can end very badly for them if they miss their window, their manipulations get exposed, or decide to do illegal things to get ahead (high profile cases in my mind: Enron, Epstein, etc).

The names come from a cartoon that predates Rao's essay. He simply reused them because they mostly work. Just like the Sociopaths are not all literal sociopaths, the Losers are not all literal losers.

Yes, I understand this. I was simply making this explicit, it was a good idea to clarify that neither Losers nor Sociopaths match the common definition of those terms.

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