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Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

Forget Billions or even 100s of millions. If I had a single digit million dollar fortune to my name, nobody will hear from me again. I'll go to a quiet corner and just read books or garden or whatever. If I can be of any help/use to those less fortunate than me, I will. If I can't do that, then I'll keep quiet and live out my life.

I cannot fathom going out of my way to create chaos, to be cruel, to make lives miserable for millions of people, and worst of all, call it "progress". I just don't understand how these people think. Maybe I am just too poor, too dumb...

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The personality defect that leads you to become powerful is the same defect that makes you want to become even more powerful.

It's the job of the rest of us to restructure the system to prevent this kind of pathological runaway power accumulation. It means new laws, but also a more enlightened culture.

Said defect is called *avarice". Left untempered, it's one of the most destructive of vices.

It may even mean a revolution, either the soft or hard type.

Yes!

This is the multi-polar (or Moloch) problem, where (ruthless) individual rationality leads to collective ruin.

Unless the system makes it unprofitable, ruthlessness will always out-perform good behavior. Players who make suboptimal (ethical) decisions will lose over time. Corruption will outperform unless the cost of that corruption outweighs the benefit of it. The root cause isn't a moral failing of the players.

If incentives are aligned so that the winnginest behavior is also the most desirable, it doesn't matter if there are defective or unscrupulous players. We can harness selfish ambition for the collective good.

E.g. CEO compensation and behavior differences between Japan/USA, Potlatch (wealth redistribution) festivals among the Pacific Northwest indigenous.

A lot of people do exactly that, but by definition, you don't hear from the people who nobody will hear from again.

What's left are the folks for whom power and influence is a game. If they were to fuck off to the sunset and live a quiet life which harms nobody, they'd be abandoning the game. And it's become such a part of their identity that they can't live without that anymore.

Ironically, these folks are the best argument for replacing human decision making with machines. Cold, logical, emotionless machines that don't have identities or a need to win the game. Then all the folks whose sole purpose in life is controlling others would either need to find another purpose or off themself.

> these folks are the best argument for replacing human decision making with machines.

So the best way forward is to succumb to the tech oligarchs' plan?

I strongly disagree. Machines aren't neutral nor fair. They exist to impose the will of the people operating them. Have you already forgotten what social media algorithms, that "cold, logical, emotionless machines" that you speak so highly of, did to our society?

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

That's where these optimists are incredibly naive. They forget that machines will always be controlled by people. And that those who already have control will never cede it voluntarily.

> Cold, logical, emotionless machines that don't have identities

is exactly how people described those who did the dirty work in the concentration camps

They have already taken part in every conceivable pleasure known to man that money can buy (legal and illegal). So much so that they have been desensitized to any stimuli barring extremes. And that's assuming these billionaires started out as ordinary folks in the first place (which is doubtful). All they got left is a God-complex to sustain them emotionally.

Let us be neighbours, so we can play a little bit Counter Strike or Q3A :-))

I would buy a small house near forrest & mountains.

Earning billions and being cruel are inseparable. It is simply not possible to lay hands on such astronomical amounts of wealth without massive exploitation, which is why billionaires have the character traits that you describe.

> I just don't understand how these people think.

A lot of it stems from EA (effective altruism) - paraphrased very roughly, it could argue that you are being immoral or selfish by not using the million dollars to invest and make a humanity changing discovery (FWIW I don't believe this, I'm explaining how they view things).

If they harm a billion people, but it benefits trillions in some theoretical glorious future, then it's the right thing to do. Of course it's all bullshit and they bake in a ton of assumptions at the core of their arguments that make the math of greed 'feel' okay, or at least palatable.

I find this not good Argument. We cannot predict the future and thinking about the good of people living in the future is therefore Not possible. We should think about the now and here and it's problems. Case: climate change, These people do Not waste any thought about that.

If they harm a billion people, but it benefits trillions in some theoretical glorious future, then it's the right thing to do

By the same logic, if harming one billionaire benefits million normal people, will they be okay with it? None of this makes any sense. Who gave them the right to decide all of this anyway?

I came across this satire recently, and I think it captures some of the pseudo-intellectual inanity.

https://morewrong.lol

Same. Non-sociopaths understand that with power comes responsibility and I don’t want to be responsible for everyone else so I don’t want power.

sociopaths also understand that to gain power, you need to step on many people heads, which brings its own risks.

So peacefully sitting on millions and not billions may be winning strategy even from sociopath's point of view. Those people who wants billions likely have some other mental differences (getting adrenaline rush from power they can't get from other activities, etc)

Eh, maybe. The ones I know that exhibit this type of behavior are either deeply unhappy or deeply insecure, or both.

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