I also think some very wealthy people simply aren't that bright. They genuinely believe their own meritocratic myths and fail to understand how things like public education make them money or keep them alive. They won't connect the dots until their nurse fails to read a pill bottle properly.
People are like "why would these supposedly pro business Republicans be cutting funding for public universities that are huge economic growth engines" and like look at how the richest states vote and how the poorest states vote. If you were a Republican would you want your state to become wealthier?
To add to it, the billionaires think everything they say is correct simply because they have a billion dollars. If they weren't right, they wouldn't be "successful" and they must be successful because they have a billion dollars. They can also do away with any opposition whether it's real or not.
I had a dispute about this at the weekend with a bunch of tech company GCs when I said AI is a scam and they said “a lot of smart people disagree” and I said that’s how you know it’s a scam.
And then: if they were so smart, how did they all fall for Theranos? “A lot of smart people believed in her.” Me: “yes, this is just more proof they’re not actually smart, you know.”
if only we could get more juiceros. juicero was a physical product that you could buy using money and it (mostly) did what it said it would do on the box. i realize this is the lowest possible bar that a product can clear, but i can't think of any new buzzwordy tech since maybe vr to manage that.
I have a friend who was the head lawyer for Lab 126 (Amazon’s hardware division) who put it this way: you can’t “move fast and break things” when they’re actual things, and the biggest problem in the Valley is that so few people ever have to deal with actual stuff.
This is actually why I dislike people putting VR in the same bucket as A/I and Cr/ypto, because while there are negative things about VR, there are some amazing games and fantastic experiences.
Whereas Cr/ypto is just a scam. It creates nothing of value outside of ill-gotten money.
If the people who back Theranos just spent an hour talking to someone from the pharmaceutical industry about assay development they would have quickly known it was all bullshit. Part of being smart is knowing what you don't know and finding someone who does.
Yeah, part of it is that for obvious scams people who understand what's going on look at it and say "scam" and move on, whereas the actual suckers or con artists are the one who stick around touting its praises. Disproving a scam takes a *ton* of effort.
These people have so much money that they fall for cons constantly but all they need to do is accidentally invest in a non scam every so often they still end up fine
It would however be the first time I’ve had a situation involving a potential fistfight with someone who’s not Canadian. (The other two: the Commissioner of the Canadian Football League, and Denis Dyack from Silicon Knights).
Oh, this was the actual subject of the conversation: “AI” legal tools. I was telling them how @kathryntewson.bsky.social demonstrated that DoNotPay was a huge scam and they didn’t appreciate it. Some investors and firms who had been involved were at the table with me.
“They didn’t intend to be partners.” Then maybe they should have taken an established form of corporate organization that would have ensured they weren’t. This shit isn’t hard.
I had completely missed that until the Line Goes Up doc from Folding Ideas and just. Man. The fact people treated all those scams as The Future is just incredibly bleak.
Like I’ve said, we created a very expensive machine to tell us what we want to hear and all of a sudden we’re geniuses. Confirmation bias is a helluva drug.
The issue with AI is that the field is not a scam, but companies do not have any way to sell to stakeholders than to sell it as a scam.
Like, if you are a C-suite, you do not understand AI, and try and think it is just KITT.
I often wonder what icons of 19th and 20th century business would've been revealed as complete idiots if social media existed at the time. Musk probably could've kept up the charade if we didn't have a 24/7 feed of his dumbest thoughts.
