[HN Gopher] A Theory of Grift
___________________________________________________________________
A Theory of Grift
Author : mooreds
Score : 89 points
Date : 2024-01-16 15:54 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thediff.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thediff.co)
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Very interesting theory. Here's the key point:
|
| > Meanwhile, the growth of software corresponds to a drop in the
| number of required human touchpoints for a given transaction.
| When travel was booked by phone or in person, there was a direct
| financial reward to being a good conversationalist in the travel
| business; rhapsodizing about the beauty of a beach was a good way
| to upsell customers on a nicer hotel a bit closer to it, and
| sussing out whether someone was more interested in beaches,
| landmarks, or bars meant figuring out exactly what to pitch them.
| All this work is now silently and efficiently happening on the
| backend of the big online travel agencies, with no human
| interaction required.The pre-Internet white collar economy was
| basically a universal job guarantee for personable people. That's
| increasingly going away, to be replaced with a more neoliberal
| attention economy with a more extreme distribution of outcomes.
|
| My usual theory for the increasing around of grift, particularly
| in politics, is that various disintermediation efforts which were
| in theory supposed to make government more democratic actually
| mean there is less incentive than ever for working hard to fix
| anything, but big rewards for torching the commons for your own
| gain.
|
| I don't think this runs contrary to the article's thesis but
| actually works hand-in-hand together with it to explain why so
| much public life-- politics, obviously, but also academia and
| public intellectualism-- consists mostly of charismatic
| psychopaths insisting we have to "burn it all down and click here
| to donate to my campaign or subscribe to my Substack)" instead of
| offering any useful advice.
| netbioserror wrote:
| IMO widespread grift seems to directly correlate with money
| printing and suppressed interest rates, which create a
| financialized economy that lives and breathes based on monthly
| Fed minutes. If you can make lots of money doing nothing, you can
| swindle lots of money doing nothing.
| from-nibly wrote:
| This right here. Here's hoping for an economic crash that
| corrects this kind of stuff.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's not exactly the kind of grift the article is talking
| about, but grift is very common in the poorest countries
| where "free" money and low interest rates were never a thing
| because there's few other opportunities. Far from removing
| grift, I'd expect an economic crash to dramatically increase
| the amount of grift as everyone tries to extract whatever
| dollars they can.
|
| That also points to the uniting factor between the grift the
| article talks about and the traditional definition of the
| word: grifts are the strategies you use when other avenues of
| making money are difficult, say because your investors are
| demanding increasing returns from a saturated market.
| username332211 wrote:
| I don't have statistics, but I strongly suspect monetary
| ...maneuvers are in fact more common in developing, rather
| than in developed economies. It a fairly common reason why
| developing countries stay "developing".
|
| As for making money becoming difficult, without monetary
| and interest rate manipulations it would be rare for
| capital to exist while the opportunities to employ
| profitably are reduced. Capital is supposed to be created
| trough the act of saving, and income is normally saved with
| the idea of funding larger consumption in the future (or
| maintaining the same consumption with less labor).
|
| That plan for future consumption is, in and of itself, an
| opportunity for profit to those that can satisfy it.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >an economic crash that corrects this kind of stuff
|
| This is exactly how Bernie Madoff was caught.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| And many crypto bros like SBF
| redavni wrote:
| The real estate and banking industry with a host of grifters
| caused 2007-2008 crash....then we elected a direct
| representative of this group as president 10 years later. The
| problem is deeper than poor economic policy.
| WallyFunk wrote:
| > Buy The Change You Wish to See in the World
|
| Isn't this 'Vote with your wallet'? I know I vote with my wallet.
| Everything I buy is a vote for how I want the world to be, and
| what products I want to see flourish and prosper. I also
| evangelize these products to others so they get on board too,
| because I alone will not make much of a dent, unless I recruit
| others to purchase it too.
| IngoBlechschmid wrote:
| I disagree strongly with this position:
|
| * No amount of personal spending decisions can advance systemic
| changes like better public transport or more careful military
| funding. These require governmental action.
|
| * With our wallet, we can only choose between those
| alternatives which are offered. In many cases, we can only
| choose between bad options.
|
| * Voting with our wallet requires immunity against professional
| PR campaigns, time (for researching on what to buy), money (to
| afford options which are better according to personal views but
| more expensive), friends who appreciate instead of belittle our
| purchasing decisions, ...
|
| In the end, I believe the story "vote with your wallet"
| internalizes a form of victim blaming: The consumers are blamed
| for their irresponsible purchasing decisions, but the
| responsibility really is with the companies and governments.
|
| Of course, not spending consciously is also not a solution. But
| we obtain greater leverage by using our influence on society.
| Only few of us are editor-in-chiefs of important newspapers or
| important politicians, but most of us can engage in visually
| powerful protests which are also able to generate political
| wind.
| wharvle wrote:
| > With our wallet, we can only choose between those
| alternatives which are offered. In many cases, we can only
| choose between bad options.
|
| One weird thing markets do is make unusual alternatives far
| more expensive than the difference in cost of manufacture
| between them and more-common options. The market "chooses"
| the $80 option because the one that costs $5 more to make but
| is _way better_ retails for $200.
|
| You also see whole markets (effectively) collude to make
| cheap upgrades expensive to buy. There are several very-cheap
| upgrades that make a refrigerator much nicer, but are only
| available on expensive refrigerators. Think, things like
| making the drawers open and close much more smoothly. There
| is no low-end-except-for-$30-in-upgrades option. The car
| market does some similar things.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| From a voter's perspective, voting with a wallet seems not
| too dissimilar from voting in elections. Both are necessary,
| but insufficient to "advance systemic changes."
| randomdata wrote:
| Voting in an election isn't generally necessary for most
| people. It is rare to see a candidate show up who is
| incapable of doing the job.
|
| What _is_ necessary is to stay in regular communication
| with whoever you hired. If they never hear from you, they
| can 't represent you, which questions why bother to hire an
| employee to represent you in the first place if you are not
| going to use their services?
| digging wrote:
| I "vote with my wallet" as a form feel-goodism. It has almost
| no impact, but it helps me feel satisfied with myself. This
| is similar to donating a small amount to a charity that works
| on issues I personally feel connected to, even if they're
| relatively low-impact. While the majority of my donations go
| to charities that I understand (to the best of my ability) to
| have the greatest impact on human flourishing.
|
| In the same vein, I can't stop at voting with my wallet; as
| you say, I'm choosing between the options given to me and
| their artificial costs. If I care about a particular outcome,
| I have to give extra effort beyond my purchasing decisions.
| There's no amount of inconvenient train rides I can take in
| my city that will convince it build new train lines; I have
| to go around the city and tell people that trains and density
| are more effective for the outcomes we want.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> These require governmental action._
|
| While there are some dictatorships out there, in the
| democratic world the people voting with their wallets and the
| people in charge of government are the _exact same people_.
| Which means that any governmental change comes by what is
| ultimately the same mechanism.
|
| _> we can only choose between those alternatives which are
| offered._
|
| Only in the short-term, though. The wallet can also
| communicate what one wants in the future, and that is only
| limited by what is fundamentally possible. Of course, often
| people don't actually want anything better, even if they say
| they do. Talk is cheap. The neat thing about the wallet is
| that it proves what people actually want.
| stvltvs wrote:
| There are lots of things that the government will do when
| individual market participants don't have market
| incentives. In the US, the Interstate Highway System and
| rural electrification are two examples. Even the
| Transcontinental Railroad required the government to
| incentivize its development through land grants and so on.
| Governments and markets operate by different mechanisms.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Governments and markets operate by different
| mechanisms._
|
| They do, indeed. While not all mechanisms are the same,
| the particular mechanism we are talking about is
| ultimately the same.
| User23 wrote:
| Reading this, one concept just keeps ringing in my ears:
| learned helplessness[1]. As it happens you really do have a
| fair bit of control over your life. How you choose to live
| it, what you buy and what you don't, and whether you submit
| to the persuasion trickery that calls itself news and
| entertainment--that's all up to you. Your choices really do
| matter. I can't promise you that they'll drive the kind of
| macro change you might like to see, but I can assure you
| beyond all doubt that waiting for companies, governments, and
| established propagandists to do it for you certainly won't.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Is this your unironic stance?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| "Vote with your wallet" should only ever mean paying a lobby
| and an election campaign to influence your elected politicians.
|
| You choosing to buy from Apple instead of Samsung will sure
| have an impact on the world, but probably not how you think it
| will, not what will be marketed, and more in the line of which
| lobby Apple chooses to pay with your money down the line.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Grift is nothing new, it's existed throughout human history. See
| for example Herman Melville, "The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade"
| (1857), which is a catalogue of various kinds of grift common in
| that era.
|
| If anything has changed much recently, it's that grifters have
| taken control of the entire system of government and economic
| activity - they're no longer just a pack of con artists preying
| on riverboat travellers, but have infiltrated all the branches of
| government and business and academia in the USA.
|
| Today's most successful grifters are not isolated criminals like
| SBF, but rather the leading politicians and media talking heads
| and government bureaucrats and corporate executives who sit at
| the top of the American Empire - it's a nice example of the
| systemic institutional corruption seen at the ends of previous
| Empires, from the Roman to the Byzantine to the French, British
| and Soviet collapses, and appears to be heading towards the same
| conclusion.
| soco wrote:
| Ironically this is what conspiracists call "global government"
| - in reality a network of mafia-like operations kept together
| by the same interests, spread internationally because the world
| became so small.
| dingnuts wrote:
| I don't know how you can start out a comment by saying,
| essentially, that there's nothing new under the sun and then
| immediately contradict it by saying
|
| "grifters have taken control of the entire system of government
| and economic activity.. Today's most successful grifters are
| not isolated criminals like SBF, but rather the leading
| politicians and media talking heads and government bureaucrats
| and corporate executives who sit at the top of the American
| Empire"
|
| Yawn. Cynicism masquerading as insight; all claims and no
| evidence. An adequate rebuttal to something with so little of a
| foundation might be "nuh uh"
|
| >it's a nice example of the systemic institutional corruption
| seen at the ends of previous Empires, from the Roman to the
| Byzantine to the French
|
| oh my gawd the Roman Empire took 1000 years to fall from the
| death of Caesar and had been around for 500 years when he was
| assassinated. If you want to demonstrate complete historical
| ignorance, definitely reach for the "Fall of the Roman Empire"
| as part of your fear campaign when describing the world today.
| There is very little that the US has in common to the singular
| Classical civilization that your high school history class
| covered.
| vpribish wrote:
| it is so obvious that it is a globe-spanning conspiracy by all
| the leaders, educators, and heads that talk!! you have cracked
| the case wide open for anyone to see!! how could we have been
| so blind? do you think also that the sports-celebrities are in
| on it?
| anjel wrote:
| Grift is as old as prostitution, but this makes me wonder how
| long the history of disruptive forces being brought to bear on
| Moral hazard is as well.
| mandmandam wrote:
| People seem to be missing a hugely important fact here:
|
| The level of grift seen in American society today is not normal.
|
| It's worse than what I've seen in other Western countries _by a
| lot_.
|
| Do I have hard data to support this? No. But anecdotally,
| everyone - _everyone_ - I know who visits America has noticed
| this.
|
| "The people over there are like wolves". "They're shameless".
| "They're all so focused on money". "That whole culture is just
| scams on scams on scams". "Christ, they're all so fake!" - All
| actual quotes, with emphatic expletives removed.
|
| I know it's not a common topic of conversation for Americans, but
| the world _hates_ us now. We 're the number one threat to peace
| and stability since 2003, and only getting worse. Yes, I am
| ashamed of us. We had so much potential.
|
| Presidents are grifters now. The military industrial complex is a
| grift. College is a grift. Healthcare is a grift - to an absurd
| and horrifying level. Banking is a grift that hurts the poorest
| the most, far worse than in other countries. The news is a grift.
| The legal system is stuffed to the brim with grift right up to
| the Supreme Court and right down to the police on the street.
|
| It's been normalized to an extreme degree, at every level of
| American society. "I'm a hustler". "Don't hate the player".
| "Looking out for number one", etc. These are not normal phrases
| in other countries! This is seen as the sign of a very sick
| culture, one where to survive you need to fuck over other people;
| one where fucking people over to "get your bag" is seen as _a
| necessity_ rather than as an abhorrence.
|
| Again - this isn't normal in other countries. We've always had
| caveat emptor, but the idea that it's fine and normal to get 8
| spam phone calls a day would be absurd in any other wealthy
| country.
|
| This is, imo, fallout from the relentless attacks on anything
| that could be construed as socialist or taking care of people -
| itself a massive grift.
|
| The war on terror was a grift - one that has resulted in
| trillions of wasted dollars - and it resulted in absolutely no
| consequences for anyone except the whistleblowers who exposed
| atrocities, war crimes, and global surveillance.
| slily wrote:
| I doubt you've lived in other countries long enough to compare
| those systems based on what you're saying about banking,
| there's virtually no difference anywhere I've been and I still
| have a number of foreign bank accounts. Every time I see
| someone criticize US banking it's based on the assumption that
| poor people are too stupid to understand that interest is
| charged on loans or that withdrawing money you don't have
| incurs a fee. I agree with college and health care being
| ridiculous in the US and arguably mainstream news too (no
| wonder they're losing influence to podcasts). Everything else
| is either nowhere near unique to the US or exaggerated to the
| level of caricature.
| js8 wrote:
| I am Czech, but was about to say something similar. Our country
| looks up to US a lot, and the rightwing here promotes
| neoliberal policies since the 90s.
|
| And we also suffer from lots of grift, which became normalized
| in the 90s. I think it comes from certain hardcore libertarian
| interpretation (which became popular with the rise of
| neoliberalism), according to which, making money at someone's
| expense is perfectly acceptable.
|
| So for example, if someone sells some BS to a 70 year old
| grandma with shady practices, it is considered her problem, and
| government can't (and shouldn't) do anything about it. At best,
| it can "educate".
|
| From what I hear, other Eastern-European countries suffer from
| this malaise as well.
| wharvle wrote:
| For all the treatment of markets as "natural" I've noticed
| the particular kind of ethics you mention are _very much not_
| natural.
|
| Two places this is evident:
|
| 1) It is very, very common for small business owners to be
| "under-pricing". They price what seems fair & just for what
| they're doing, which has a tendency to be (sometimes far)
| under the greed-is-good price that the market could bear.
| They're often resistant to raising prices on ethical grounds.
|
| 2) Children quite consistently have notions about fair
| pricing that are directly in-line with #1, starting just
| about as soon as they learn about commerce and tending to
| persist until someone "corrects" them.
|
| This "natural" feature of capitalism that "can't" be got rid
| of because it's in our "nature" generally has to be _taught_.
| bluGill wrote:
| Capitalism was a strawman Marx came up with to attack. The
| full of human behavior is far more complex than any simple
| model can capture.
| dcotter wrote:
| In my experience, small businesses often charge more than
| larger businesses, perhaps because they don't benefit from
| an economy of scale or increased negotiating leverage with
| suppliers. For example, compare Wal-Mart to a small general
| store or Home Depot to a small hardware store. It's much
| more common that the big box stores charge less for the
| same products.
|
| Also, from what I remember of microeconomics, the free
| market model assumes a number of things that are not always
| true in reality, at least not all at the same time: robust
| competition among suppliers, perfect knowledge among
| consumers, rational decision-making behavior. Like any
| model, the more reality differs from the assumptions, the
| worse the model is at prediction, but the basic laws of
| supply and demand, where the price of a good is where the
| supply and demand curves meet, still hold.
| ericmcer wrote:
| I don't think this is due to anti-socialist propaganda, if
| anything progressive social policies are more popular than ever
| before.
|
| If anything this is due to social media amplifying and
| glamorizing people that loudly demonstrate how fit, rich, happy
| or whatever they are so they can sell their method of getting
| fit, rich, happy, etc.
|
| The USA has always been an individualistic society compared to
| most, the entire point of capitalism is to leverage individuals
| greed. That spurs them to create more value for society than
| leveraging their sense of duty.
|
| The problem we have right now is that the governmental agencies
| that are supposed to curb bad actors are not performing well.
| The FCC should have ended robo spam calls years ago.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| > We're the number one threat to peace and stability since
| 2003, and only getting worse.
|
| As a non-American, I can't believe someone is so self-loathing
| to think this...yeah sure, America is the biggest threat to
| peace and stability, not Russia, not Iran, not Hamas...it's
| definitely America.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Think of it more in terms of military power + trigger
| happiness and less in terms of ideology (good guys and bad
| guys). Then it might become clearer to you.
| bluGill wrote:
| While we clearly have the most potential, history suggests
| that we are not abusing it (well too much). Note that many
| of those who complain the most are hiding behind the US -
| when you are in NATO you can sign an anti-landmine treaty
| with confidence that should they be needed in your country
| the US will step in and put them down for you. (and if you
| look at Ukraine today you see why the US doesn't sign those
| treaties - aweful as they are, in war they work)
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Thanks I guffawed.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| The US is literally the reason why many countries haven't
| fallen into disrepair (Israel, the UAE, Saudi, Ukraine,
| etc.). It's the reason why global trade flourishes in the
| Western world but, sure, because they've done bad things in
| the past, some people can't just help but say they're the
| worst, and it's oddly always self-loathing Americans..
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I've always wanted to become an honorary American.
| l0b0 wrote:
| Which one of those has killed the most civilians since 2003?
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| The correct question is not this, but the counterfactual:
| "How many more civilians around the world would have been
| killed _without_ this country 's influence?"
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > I know it's not a common topic of conversation for Americans,
| but the world hates us now. We're the number one threat to
| peace and stability since 2003, and only getting worse. Yes, I
| am ashamed of us. We had so much potential.
|
| Okay maybe calm down with the Saint/Devil complex. (I'm not an
| American.) The way a European might have perceived America in
| the 90's would have been through Hollywood. And the same person
| in 2005- would have perceived America through fast and
| ubiquitous Internet. (Thanks American State Research?)
|
| The perception moved from pure fiction to meme-filtered,
| sensationalized reality. So even if America _itself_ hadn't
| changed in that time (but I guess it did) the outsider
| perception of it would still have changed.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > Okay maybe calm down with the Saint/Devil complex.
|
| No. If you don't want people pointing out devilish deeds,
| don't do the deeds.
|
| Global opinion on this isn't due to a "complex", but a very
| natural reaction to the events of the last couple decades. I
| know it's hard to accept. Most Americans I mention this fact
| to _literally_ can 't accept it as true. They get quite upset
| if they ask for evidence, and then receive exactly that.
| There's loads of evidence. All the polls broadly agree, and
| people state the reasons why - in a nutshell, psychotic
| foreign policy, an easily led populace, and greed.
|
| > The way a European might have perceived America in the 90's
| would have been through Hollywood
|
| Opinion didn't change because 'Friends' ran its course. It
| changed because in 2003 America's leaders chose to lie to
| America and the world, condemning millions to death for the
| sake of cheaper resources (yet again).
|
| > The perception moved from pure fiction to meme-filtered,
| sensationalized reality.
|
| This is how you disregard the opinion of 8 billion people?
| Memes?
|
| Hollywood and the Internet have roles in all this, sure, but
| don't get it twisted. It was the war crimes. The murders,
| bombings and assassinations. The systematic torture of people
| who never had a trial. The displacement of tens of millions,
| the support of genocidal regimes, the murderous sanctions.
|
| Flippantly dismissing all this is the American Way. Sure, it
| feels good to be blissfully ignorant of how detested we've
| become, and how far we have fallen in the eyes of the world.
| How unfathomably low the floor has become. But from the
| outside, it's clearly just sticking your head in the sand.
| The gleeful and flagrant disregard of the rest of the world's
| opinion is really old at this point.
|
| > So even if America itself hadn't changed in that time (but
| I guess it did)
|
| America and the world has changed, and so have perceptions.
| But the perception that America is an existential threat to
| peace and stability hasn't. It rocketed in Iraq, and has
| continued ever since.
|
| It probably dipped a bit when the US helped defend Ukraine,
| but the Gaza thing has quite reversed that.
|
| I think it's important that we talk about these very real
| problems. But it's so much easier to con people, than show
| them they've been conned.
| pohl wrote:
| > Presidents are grifters
|
| This really doesn't need to be expressed in plural. We have one
| notable example of someone who entered the race as a grift and
| was arguably surprised to have won. We've had plenty of
| candidates in it for the grift before, but only one such
| victor. Maybe it was only a matter of time, though.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the
| new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices;
| one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good
| credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics,
| has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal
| foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally
| bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of
| authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-
| scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable
| elevation of process over program -- the point where identity
| politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in
| favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the
| wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and
| wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway.
|
| https://solidarity-us.org/pdfs/cadreschool/reed3.pdf
| pohl wrote:
| Help me understand the intended relevancy of that passage.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| > There's an ongoing debate over whether or not people skills are
| undervalued, and perhaps for many people they are, but it's hard
| to deny that there are many, many more ways for someone who
| doesn't like social interaction much to get rich. If ads and
| sales are on the same continuum, then the world's best
| salespeople are engineers, data scientists, and product managers.
|
| This seems completely wrong to me. If you look at who is the top
| 0.1% it's either inherited wealth, a few professionals (lawyers,
| certain medical specialties, etc.) who own their own practices,
| or people who've managed large groups of people (i.e. business
| executives). The third group is overwhelmingly full of people
| with good social skills, and skilled professionals are almost
| always personable too.
| neutralino1 wrote:
| I wouldn't go as far as to say business executives have good
| social skills. They are often ruthless, cunning, and deceiving,
| which makes them successful. If by good social skills you mean
| the ability to convince (read deceive) a lot of people, then
| sure they have good social skills. But who wants to have a beer
| with their CEO, VP of Sales, or other top exec? They are often
| depicted as wolves or sharks for a reason. It is true that they
| are good at networking with other people like them, but not
| really good at empathizing, helping, or caring for others.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| Is there some research that would suggest % of ruthless,
| cunning, and deceiving people among execs is statistically
| different from any other professions?
| digging wrote:
| Yes, there is some research suggesting that CEOs exhibit
| "dark triad" traits more then the general population.
| naasking wrote:
| Not just CEOs, all people in leadership positions tend to
| express dark triad traits more strongly, including
| politicians and the president.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| "Ruthless, cunning, deceiving" are very different from
| "machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy" of the dark
| triad. And are we saying that _definitive_ driver of
| execs success is due to having all these traits?
|
| I am not trying to nitpick, and this is totally offtopic
| from the rest of the thread, but suggesting that huge
| group of people is more "successful" due to being evil,
| narcissistic, deceiving, [insert any other trait] seems
| to be a major bias in itself. Especially if the root
| cause is having strong emotions due to that group's role
| in modern society.
|
| OP even jumps from averages and statistics down to making
| personalised conclusions ("who wants to have a beer with
| their CEO?"), which is textbook confirmation bias[0].
|
| Unfortunately, I see this kind of argument often here on
| hacker news.
|
| 0 - https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/confirmation-bias
| digging wrote:
| > "Ruthless, cunning, deceiving" are very different from
| "machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy"
|
| That doesn't sound true to me at all, though. How are you
| defining these terms that there's no overlap between the
| first set and the second?
|
| > And are we saying that _definitive_ driver of execs
| success is due to having all these traits?
|
| Mmm no, that's not what I'm asserting. I can't speak for
| the other poster.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| I assume OP means social skill in the sense of "skill with
| society as the instrument/playground" rather than "skills
| that benefit social bond". Same way as a 10x dev at a
| nonprofit and a Russian hacker can both have "computer
| skills" while doing vastly different things with their
| skills.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| They're _persuasive_ , which is probably the most important
| social skill. Having a beer may be a means to that end, but
| it usually isn't.
|
| Politics, law, finance, the arts, advertising, religion, and
| the media all rely on persuasion. And because narcissists and
| sociopaths are so much more credible and charming than
| introverts and tech nerds, these professions are full of
| people who make a living selling stories - about themselves,
| others, and related brands and products.
|
| This is why we have such problems with the constraints of
| physical or social reality. These people _believe_ their
| stories. They experience any suggestion they 're objectively
| wrong as an unreasonable threat to their status and self-
| image.
|
| They feel the same way about any suggestion that other
| people's stories matter. To them, they don't. If they did
| matter they'd show some hesitation and nuance, and the
| persuasion magic would evaporate.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _narcissists and sociopaths are so much more credible and
| charming than introverts and tech nerds_
|
| A big part of this comes down to practice. Anyone who
| practices chitchat (or "persuasion") all day gets pretty
| good at it, at least in a narrow niche. Those "tech nerds"
| who spend a lot of time going to parties can also get good
| at it; however, many of the introverted tech nerds would
| rather be writing code or reading a book or whatever, and
| end up not practicing these skills starting from a young
| age, and by the time they reach adulthood are far behind.
| (In just the same way that someone who never spends time
| exercising ends up far behind in playing sports, or someone
| who never spends time solving technical problems ends up
| far behind in technical skill/expertise, etc.)
|
| Beyond that, if the main goal incentivized is just to "make
| the sale", the methods used aren't going to necessarily
| ethical. There's a reason that pick-up artists, used car
| salesmen, carnival barkers, and social-climber middle
| managers use deception and burn people in the process of
| getting ahead: it works. If you have a system that selects
| for "what works" and doesn't negatively select away "causes
| collateral damage", then you end up (a) making ethical
| people play with a huge handicap, and (b) chasing them out
| of the field.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > If by good social skills you mean the ability to convince
| (read deceive) a lot of people
|
| In a thread about people being rich or not, yes, of course he
| meant that. There isn't any alternative way to define this.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| Not to mention that pretty much all ad sales are managed not by
| engineers, but by that third business exec group.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _> There 's an ongoing debate over whether or not people skills
| are undervalued_
|
| For the banks and credit unions where customer service is a key
| advantage, operations people with good people skills are super
| important. But because of industry culture, these people are
| pretty much sh1t upon. It shows in their pay, and in the
| rapidity with which they are laid off.
|
| I bet there's tons of places where this happens.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Being born into the first two groups gives you a lot more
| opportunity to learn the social skills that might also land you
| in that third group. Especially in societies that have some
| kind of class system (even if that system is 'informal').
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > The third group is overwhelmingly full of people with good
| social skills, and skilled professionals are almost always
| personable too.
|
| All of my fifty closest underlings laugh at my jokes. What more
| social proof do I need?
| bluGill wrote:
| Don't look at the top .1%. Look at the top 5% and you find some
| very rich people who are "self made". They didn't inherit. Even
| in the top .1% you find the likes of Bill Gates who started out
| pretty average (there is a lot of luck in his story or course)
| jacobolus wrote:
| Bill Gates' grandpa was a national bank president, and his
| father was a wealthy lawyer, president of the state bar
| association. As a child Gates was deliberately trained by his
| parents to make everything into a contest. He went to the
| best private prep school in Washington State, and among high
| school students worldwide, he ended up with something like
| top 0.01% access to computers at the time. There's nothing
| "pretty average" about his story; he was part of the top <1%
| by wealth, prestige, and support right from the get-go.
| [Which is not to say that Gates didn't work like hell,
| including making heaps of unethical choices, to end up as a
| billionaire.]
|
| > _Look at the top 5% and you find some very rich people
| [...]_
|
| The top 5% does not predominately consist of "very rich
| people". The 95th percentile is "upper middle class", people
| like relatively ordinary white-collar professionals and
| successful small-business owners including tradespeople who
| run their own shops, etc. We're talking about "own a nice
| house, take vacations, and can afford to retire comfortably"
| money, not "fleet of servants" money.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Even in the top 0.1% many are self made. My comment wasn't
| about whether they are self-made or not (and many people who
| got a head start in life have done very impressive things,
| one of the surgeons who pioneered transplant surgery was from
| a very wealthy midwestern family who made their money from
| the railroad industry). My comment was about Byrne's
| assertion that there are more ways to become rich that don't
| require social skills than ones that do. That doesn't seem
| true to me.
| codeflo wrote:
| > If ads and sales are on the same continuum, then the world's
| best salespeople are engineers, data scientists, and product
| managers.
|
| I stumbled over that sentence. I genuinely don't understand
| what this means in context. Can someone explain the metaphor
| and/or the point that's being made here?
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| I think he is saying that since digital advertising generates
| so much revenue the best sales and marketing professionals
| (by revenue generated) are the engineers, data scientists,
| and PMs who develop the ad-tech that enables those things. I
| don't agree with him, but I think that's his argument.
| latchkey wrote:
| > Block Trading--Block trades create a massive temptation to leak
| information, and once this becomes a habit, it's a very bad look.
|
| Funny you should mention Block Trading... this Matt Levine just
| dropped...
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-01-16/morgan...
| hristov wrote:
| I am going to say something that will earn me a lot of
| downgrades, but it needs to be said because it is the truth and
| it is important. Grifting in our society went sky high when Trump
| started doing it and he was not punished for it but rewarded.
|
| To be fair, Hillary Clinton was also a liar and a grifter but she
| did kind of get punished and publicly humiliated for many of her
| lies.
|
| Generally speaking if someone behaves badly in public and is not
| punished, it creates a great incentive for millions of others to
| do the same thing. Some people are moral by nature and will
| behave morally even if evil and amorality is all around them.
| Those are the heroes and saints. The people that will help slaves
| escape in slave societies the ones that will help safe victim
| populations when their own government is openly encouraging
| genocide. These people are great, but very few.
|
| There are also the almost criminals, people that are always
| thinking in the backs of their minds of doing something awful,
| and it is only the possibility of punishment that is keeping
| them. Well when someone engages in bad behavior openly and
| publicly, and is not punished, even rewarded, those people will
| rush into bad behavior themselves.
|
| So there you have it.
|
| P.S.: To be fair Elon Musk deserves honorable mention for openly
| and publicly engaging in amoral behavior and getting away with
| it.
| pphysch wrote:
| _The Art of the Deal_ was published in 1987, before Bill
| Clinton was even president. Trump has been grifting for a long
| time at a fairly steady pace.
|
| The reason "grifting went sky high" is because of the profit
| model of Internet media. Engagements = ad revenue. This
| strongly incentivizes grifter behavior, from Trump and Alex
| Jones to Oprah and Rachel Maddow. Also, grifting became a lot
| more accessible with social media. Anyone can grift, you don't
| need radio or television deals.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Let me guess, Rachel Maddow is grifting by...promoting her
| books?
|
| That's a far cry from shilling colloidal silver and gold bars
| to elderly shutins.
| pphysch wrote:
| Maddow incessantly spreads loony conspiracy theories about
| her (editors') political opponents. Maybe not poisoning
| bodies like Alex Jones (I don't keep track of every product
| she promotes), but definitely poisoning minds; she is one
| of the largest individual contributors to our political
| polarization and dysfunction.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| So she's a grifter of...ideas? minds? Not sure how you
| get "grifter" out of that.
|
| On "poisoning," there's a long and rich tradition of
| comparing an entire nation to a human body, and labeling
| enemies or ideas as "poison," "cancer," "disease," or
| some other infectious or damaging agent. It's not a great
| analogy, even setting aside who else has used that
| rhetoric against whom.
| metabagel wrote:
| > To be fair, Hillary Clinton was also a liar and a grifter but
| she did kind of get punished and publicly humiliated for many
| of her lies.
|
| Citation needed
| Galacta7 wrote:
| Yeah, that's a pretty bold claim. I almost stopped reading
| their otherwise valid post when I saw that.
| pohl wrote:
| I read it -- possibly misread it -- as an instinctive
| reflex to balance out the negative assessment of Trump so
| as not to completely lose half the audience.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > Generally speaking if someone behaves badly in public and is
| not punished, it creates a great incentive for millions of
| others to do the same thing.
|
| Oh give me a break. People like Trump and Clinton are the
| _creme de la creme_ of deranged narcissistic sociopaths--part
| of the reason why they have gotten "so far". Yet you are
| worrying about relatively harmless average Joes and Janes
| looking up to these people? Very weird priorities considering
| that people like Trump just have very few or no built-in stops.
| Unlike _most_ people. A normal person can't just live like a
| sociopath and also be able to sleep at night.
|
| You see these people ruining everything and you think to
| yourself: you know the problem here is that _hypothetically_
| someone might be inspired to steal my television if I leave the
| door unlocked.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| >> Generally speaking if someone behaves badly in public and
| is not punished, it creates a great incentive for millions of
| others to do the same thing.
|
| > Oh give me a break. People like Trump and Clinton are the
| creme de la creme of deranged narcissistic sociopaths--part
| of the reason why they have gotten "so far".
|
| Wait, you can both be right!
|
| The main thing is there's always a ruthless fight to get to
| the very top of (civilized/hierarchical/capitalist/whatever)
| society. But when the people doing that fighting can put an
| honest and democratic face to it, they will cause mid-level
| folks to behave better and oppositely, when the fighting gets
| out-of-hand, those on lower levels with aspirations start
| thinking they can use "bad" behaviors to attain them.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > But when the people doing that fighting can put an honest
| and democratic face to it, they will cause mid-level folks
| to behave better and oppositely, when the fighting gets
| out-of-hand, those on lower levels with aspirations start
| thinking they can use "bad" behaviors to attain them.
|
| Yeah! Like when pre-Trump the norm was that all powerful
| and well-known people were magnanimous, self-sacrificing,
| and _good_ people that the "mid-level" and below looked up
| to. But after Trump (grunts) that just changed on a dime.
|
| Except the opposite of that.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It worse than that, because a lot of people react to the
| unfairness of society rewarding dishonesty by becoming
| dishonest as a revenge.
|
| Those people weren't thinking into doing bad things before. But
| now they are.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| The word grift has been diminished to polarized meaninglessness.
| The linked piece defines it as-
|
| "So the heart of a grift is that you get something that, in a
| technical sense, is what you paid for, but that is also not worth
| what you paid for it."
|
| This arguably makes literally every transaction a grift through
| some lens.
|
| And none of this is new.
| jprete wrote:
| Not all transactions are grifts, because frequently something
| for sale will have different values to the buyer and seller.
| Things aren't strictly worth what you can sell them for, unless
| the only thing you want to do with the thing is to sell it.
| bluGill wrote:
| The reason for matching gifts is because charities run into
| problems if they only have a few donors - the IRS starts to
| assume they are not a real charity instead they are a tax dodge
| for the rich. It is easy to setup a charity that really exists to
| put a tiny amount of money into some cause while spending most of
| the money on things that help donors. One sign the IRS looks for
| (because this is easy to look for) is total number of donors.
| While you can fool a few people, they assume if there are a lot
| of small donors most of them are not fool - instead they believe
| in the mission of the charity.
|
| Thus if you are a rich person trying to donate a lot of money to
| a truly good cause the charity will sometimes be forced to refuse
| your money despite needing it - just to keep the IRS away. To get
| around this they will match, thus ensuring that plenty of little
| donors to keep the IRS away from the charity while allowing them
| to make the large donation they were planning on making. These
| are always structured with the hope to give the full amount, so
| if you are planning on a small donation it is to your advantage
| to donate during a match since otherwise your charity might not
| get as much from the rich person.
|
| Note that none of the above applies to politics where there are
| laws in place limiting total donations per person that a match
| cannot get around.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| This is why Bill Gates spends so much time fundraising for the
| Bill and Melinda Gates foundation - He's providing the social
| proof to the IRS that it's not simply his pet projects or
| marketing arm. He provides much if not most funding, but he
| gets assent and agreement from other wealthy donors.
|
| (My opinion is that it's nearly all bullshit - A ton of what
| the foundation does is provide incentives for both government
| and NGO aid-services to stay locked into Microsoft products,
| but I don't think it's at the level of charity fraud)
| takinola wrote:
| > Thus if you are a rich person trying to donate a lot of money
| to a truly good cause the charity will sometimes be forced to
| refuse your money despite needing it - just to keep the IRS
| away.
|
| I would be very surprised if this is true for most legit
| charities. I am pretty involved with a couple of 501c3s and I
| do not think any of them would turn away a valid donation from
| a reputable individual out of fear of the IRS.
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