The scary thing is, I think a lot of people on the industry actually believe their own BS...
Whether it's true or not, it's a useful illusion. People who believe that it's all meaningless tend to sit on message boards and shit on others instead.
I'd rather take an honest, measured view of these companies. Many have the potential to change our lives, for both good and ill. Buying into the BS is a great way to short circuit healthy skepticism.
Selling the BS is a fantastic smokescreen.
This is something I've wrestled with a lot in my personal life: you can have an accurate self-image and never really accomplish anything, or you can have an inflated self-image and achievements that probably don't quite justify it but come a lot closer than the achievements of the people with accurate self-images. Empirically, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground, except for a few rare folks who seemingly have no self-image (they just don't think about it much). That sort of delusional megalomania seems to be a necessary motive force for tackling hard, risky problems. And if you don't have it, then some other delusional megalomaniac will be the one who actually attempts it, and gets resources simply because he's the only one trying.
The self-image comes into play when you're trying to act in a certain accordance with what's in your head. If you think you're bound for great things, you'll look for great things to tackle and you won't be satisfied until you're at whatever version of success you have in your head. If your self-image is happy & settled-down, you'll similarly stress over this. Eventually though, you'll probably get what you wanted because the law of attraction is quite real.
When you talk about accomplishment, it's a relative term though I understand you mean money in this case. Self-image is self-directed, and typically comes from a desire, which naturally comes from a lack. You will see many buy into the trap that money = happiness, and they will thus imagine themselves as some rich, successful tech CEO. After that, self-image has to match up with real-world, so work. The ones who truly believe they are will eventually succeed, and the ones with little willpower will fail. This goes for every facet of life.
That's why it's good to ponder "who am I?" because it's actually a step after "what do I want?" If you can see it, you can be it. Some will call it megalomania and others will call it dedication. Without knowing the person intimately, it's hard to understand which it is, but I'm an optimist and lean on the side of most successful people got there through a lot of hard work -- where their self-image was tested again & again.
The truth is nobody can tell you that you are or aren't successful. Ultimately, it's a personal decision and comes down to if your ideal version of yourself is staring back at you in the mirror.
People who find success often become delusional megalomaniacs after achieving that success, when they see their success as evidence of their own greatness, not before. The idea that it's the megalomania (or a black turtleneck) that makes you successful, or even makes you brave enough to attempt the things that might make you successful, is an illusion.
A defining commonality of delusional megalomaniacs is their destructiveness and their danger to the people around them and themselves. Worse, they tend to attract followers who both amplify the reach of that destructiveness and who create an echo chamber that reflects back and amplifies the megalomania that attracted them, making the situation worse.
> That sort of delusional megalomania seems to be a necessary motive force for tackling hard, risky problems.
There's no evidence of this. Everything difficult was not solved by assholes, and Zuckerberg didn't solve anything difficult.
(i <3 u 'idlewords)
I very much agree with the first sentence.
But I don't know if I agree with the second. People who believe that something is meaningless, or hard to do, are at least not doing any damage, while saviors of the world have done plenty of damage. We humans seem to have an inherent bias for powerful persons, in that we tend to like them even if they're a terrible influence.
I think you mean "easier to get convince others to work 80-hour weeks for illusory stock options".
Just remember we're not just getting free lithium, aluminum and copper from another dimension to build all those cars, and when we're done with the cars, they're not just going to biodegrade back into forrests and coral reefs. Mining those minerals can have a pretty serious environmental impact.
There is some cognitive dissonance going here, we see a solution to climate change, but we don't want to observe the other side of the coin.
Yes, mining has an environmental impact, but 1 ton of aluminum used in a car does not necessarily mean 1 ton of aluminum was mined for it.
But hey, let's not get that get in the way of a great response, right?
And why would Lithium no longer be required? In some hypothetical future that doesn't exist? It's needed now, and that's all that's important. Moreover, its great performance in batteries is directly related to fundamental physics and the position of Li on the periodic table, and that's not going to change.
>But hey, let's not get that get in the way of a great response, right?
Let what get in the way of a great response? Your nonsensical predictions?
I.e., his solution to employment issues caused by automation is to merge with machines as opposed to addressing it on a social, political, economic, etc., level.
More and more I find this approach detrimental to society and likely to amplify all existing problems.
If you ask me, for a lot of these tech companies, this is a false dichotomy: they're outwardly preachy and inwardly cynical. How better to justify bad behaviour than to dress it up in grandiosity?
The grandiose self-vision is annoying PR, but at least some of the companies have a fair amount to back it up with. Facebook is just the next iteration of Microsoft in my opinion -- they took a huge early lead with a superior product in a new industry, but now they're kind of evil and they will ride their market share for many decades.
And even then, it was only because Friendster was crippled by scaling problems and MySpace was snowed under with self-promotion that Facebook even had a path out of the university populations to which they initially restricted themselves.