Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers | Hacker News Reader

Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers

persuasion.community

58 pointssupermatou81 comments

A few comments:

Another reason that elites often feel like losers is that they are at the very tail end of the bell curve when it comes to whatever skill or talent they are elite at. At the end of the bell curve you have a huge variance between people, in a way that you do not in the middle of the bell curve. So the chances are very good that you are in close proximity/competition to someone who is not just better than you at something you are supposed to be good at, but much, much better/smarter/faster/etc. I experienced this phenomena in college and grad school.

As for what is to be done, the best thing I can think to do is to produce more elite slots by devolving our increasingly consolidated world to more local control. This will produce more elite slots at the cost of some efficiency, but that's probably the right trade off for "loser" elites, as well as for non-elites for whom the elites would become more accessible/more closely aligned.

Exactly. It’s like prof Lambeau character from Good Will Hunting - he’s at the top of his field (Fields medalist) and then he sees someone like Will and it just destroys his self worth. Most “regular” people who interact with Will probably dont even realize what he’s capable of

That is a fictional movie and not based in reality.

Next you gonna tell me he also didn’t get stranded on Mars?

At the end of the bell curve you have higher variance between people? Aren't two people at close points of the curve by definition similarly skilled? In fact, for two close x-values of two people at the tail end of the curve the y-values (skill levels) are much closer than those of two people closer to (but somewhat off from) the median, where the slope is steeper.

Let's do a simple experiment. Say skill is normally distributed. Let's take 1000000 people and draw their skill levels from a standard normal, and sort them by the skill levels. What is the difference in level between the 500000th person, and the person 1000 spot above them? 0.00252225 (in this simulation). What's the difference in skill levels between the 1000000th person and the person 1000 spots below? 1.596959. The 1000-person gap is 633 times larger at the top than the middle.

    skill_levels <- rnorm(1000000) %>% sort()

    skill_levels[501000] - skill_levels[500000]
    skill_levels[1000000] - skill_levels[999000]

Yeah the wording was not completely accurate but I assume he means that the tails are long.

This reminds me of Brian Scalabrine — nba bench warmer who could destroy pretty much any rec:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Scalabrine#Fan_support

“In 2013 in response to criticism over him being in a bench role throughout his career and to claims that many would beat him 1-on-1 Scalabrine stated "I'm closer to LeBron than you are to me", suggesting that there is a huge difference between any (active or retired) NBA player and the majority of those outside the league. In an event organized by The Toucher and Rich Show selected volunteers had the chance to play 1-on-1 against Scalabrine (until 11 points with a margin of 2). The format was called the "Scallange" and Scalabrine played four games (one against each of the voluntary contenders). Scalabrine won every game with a combined score of 44-6. In an additional game Scalabrine played against the three hosts of the show and won 11-1.”

Yeah people seriously underestimate how skilled professional competitors of all kinds are. You're used to seeing them compete against others at their level, which makes it seem reasonable. In most sports the worst professional would dust the best amateur without even warming up, as in that example.

My favorite story was from a former coworker of mine.

He was 6’2” and a former high school basketball player. His girlfriend was about 5’7” or so and was a starting point guard for a women’s pro basketball team in Turkey.

They would play make-it-take-it to 21, he would start with the ball, and she would spot him 19 points!

He said he beat her once, and that was basically due to two lucky shots from the perimeter.

Being anything in high school is pretty meaningless, since they accept everyone regardless of skill. So being a 6'2" HS basketball player is just about as much a qualifier as 'reasonably athletic young random dude that's above average height'.

So no wonder someone like that would lose to a pro player (male or female)

In fact that's exactly what high school activities are for - skill discovery with low stakes.

This is patently untrue. Are you American? When someone says they played in high school, they usually mean varsity sports, which can be fiercely competitive and high level depending on the school. But regardless, it’s a competitive process to make the team.

They're probably speaking on behalf of the overwhelming majority of the world (not America) where this is true.

I've seen this at my local indoor soccer place. There is a former NWSL (womens pro soccer) player that plays on a team in the top Men's division and she just shreds these guys, some of them former college players. It's even worse when she plays in co-ed leagues because the 2-point per female goal rule.

On the other hand:

https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...

And like the above posters former coworker, even he got lucky once. Though Id be more inclined to believe that the boys were far more invested in winning then a team that was experimenting with new players and formations/tactics etc —- as they do in the down year after the olympics when they have no major tournaments for 2 years.

This is really not the same as is being discussed and reads as some weird insecurity from reading about an ex pro female dominating a local neighborhood men’s recreation soccer league.

Honesty, it’s probably the only league she can get any competition these days as it would just be unfair for her to play in the womens divisions. I saw it once when she subbed into a top level womens game after one of my co-ed games she destroyed us in — it was not pretty. Second half she resigned herself to defense only in the back 3rd

This effect is also well known by people who play in minor or collegiate level sports, who then move up into professional or major leagues. The distribution of good players becomes way more concentrated, for each team is now composed of all of the best players from the lower leagues, and many rookies suddenly have to achieve new levels of excellence. Many don't. Talk to most semi-pro or collegiate athletes and many of them will readily admit that they have no chance of making the professional leagues, even if they are better than everyone else on their team. The skill differential between the leagues isn't linear, it's exponential. Pro players are not just better than amateur players, they're 10x better.

It’s hard to localize when the Internet exists. That’s the root of the problem IMO. All of a sudden you’re competing on the global stage for everything and Internet scale and distribution creates winner take all effects for everything that can be expressed in text, audio, and video

And so we have reached the point of discussing makers on Etsy and people with OF accounts in an article about elites.

The article muddles together being "elite" and trying to earn a living through creating art. There's a correlation -- it's quite difficult to spend four years getting a liberal arts degree without some sort of privilege thinking that this is a good idea and footing the bill -- but it's not exactly 1:1, and many Etsy/OF types did not go down this path.

"Elite overproduction" deliberately muddles together "elite" with "people scraping together a living making trinkets on etsy" because "elite" carries quite a negative connotation and the richer and more powerful the 1% get, the more they hate being singled out.

Have you read Turchin? He defines the term rigorously to refer to a particular social-economic class

Yes.

https://archive.is/XWiGM

Here he is bemoaning the glut of decidedly non elite law graduates under a title of "elite overproduction".

If he rigorously defined billionaire to mean anybody earning over $100k it would hardly be more ridiculous.

Three thoughts:

First, elites feel like losers because they define themselves as elite. "Elite" is a comparative description - better than almost everyone else. But that's a game where you can't win; you can only lose. If you're in the top 10%, you know someone who's in the top 1%. If you're in the top 1%, you know someone who's in the top 0.1%. If you're in the top 0.1%, you know someone who's in the top 1000 worldwide. And even if you're in the top 1000, you still lose as you compare yourself to others: "He's better at law. She's better at mathematics. He's got better connections." If you define your worth by comparison to others, all you can do is lose, because there's always someone to whom you lose.

Second, it's both a rigged game and a stupid one. The elites have created a game of competing to see who's elite. And they wrote the rules, and they wrote the rules so that they win. That means that you get to lose. But it's a stupid game anyway. Take social status, for instance. If you crack into the 400 who rule New York society, then you get to attend a bunch of social events so you can feel like an insider. That's great, I guess, but... if you don't accept the premise of the game, then it becomes very difficult to explain why you should care about playing. It's like Santa Claus. Once you don't believe, people have a really hard time convincing you that you should believe.

And third, part of this may be because many people think they're elite when they're not. They've been given participation trophies, and told that they're special, but in terms of elite competition, they're not. Then they get out of college and run into real elites with 30 years of experience.

Your third point is quite solid. People support capitalism for only one reason—they actually really do believe they are temporarily embarrassed capitalists, just one job away from some Prince Charming mentor figure discovering their talent being “wasted” at the bottom and lifting them into the C-suite. In truth, of course, the system sees them as being right where they belong.

This “overproduction” crisis is a war between the outer capitalist party and the inner one, the former being a powerless but once comfortable buffer class the real elite has decided it wants to try living without.

Technological changes and globalization have led the actual economic elite to decide they no longer need a large middle class (outer party). This is not about overproduction. Supply isn’t changing. It’s demand going to zero that is creating the problem.

> People support capitalism for only one reason—they actually really do believe they are temporarily embarrassed capitalists

That's not true. I support capitalism because it objectively produces more wealth than competing systems.

(But I also think that capitalism needs to be regulated. Capitalism is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used both constructively and destructively.)

People care about social status because it brings about opportunities in the same way that wealth or natural talent do.

You can also choose to live like a hermit, but then if you ever need do anything that requires the involvement of others, you'll find it harder to pull that off.

And beyond that, people derive their happiness and satisfaction from social fulfillment to some extent, and again here social status plays a role.

Oddly enough I've never met an elite who defined themselves as elite. In fact the only time I've heard that term is when it's used as a term of derision, typically by populists who are themselves, elites.

You've never met an elite who has called themselves an elite in your presence.

I promise you many of them define themselves as elite.

That's true, but we don't even call ourselves elites when gathering with one another. Literally the only time I've seen the word used, is as a dog whistle.

Just 1 thought:

Elites feel like losers, because they set high standards for themselves. High standards come with respective advantages, but also drawbacks. The end.

The rest of details can be filled in by individual experience and standing. Some people keep raising their standards, and are never content. This means that even as their skill rises, they still feel like losers, because they keep moving the goalposts.

I think everyone should aspire to high standards, but also find a reasonable stopping point.

That's a very plebian take on elite social dynamics. The truth is, if you ever feel like some social signalling is pointless, you've reached the limit of what you know about the social situation. True, most people at the top of the social hierarchy have very ego-motivated my-way-or-the-highway mindsets but most of these people are still pressed down by someone else that owns them for some thing or other. There's always someone on a higher rung ready to scoff at your progress. People that do reach the "top" often do it do the detriment of their own original goals and end up getting eaten by the process of reaching the top and either become spiders weaving social webs endlessly to some arcane end or get toppled off. Only the plebs have the luxury of relaxing without a care in the world.

Also, doesn't help that tech is so advanced that assaulting our senses is now a question of "how often" and not "how".

Of course, there's about ten different definitions of "elite" ITT and the article's muddy writing doesn't help either.

... and tonight, I put out my post about (among other things): Reverse Imposter Syndrome!

Regular "imposter syndrome" is people who find themselves in elite company, and "suffer" from the nagging feeling that they're not good enough.

Reverse Imposter Syndrome is when you think you're good enough to be at an elite institution, but you're really not. cf. Google, Apple, Meta.

Don't forget Recursive Imposter Syndrome: Look at all those people, suffering from Imposter Syndrome. They're not like me, the real imposter.

In order to have imposter syndrome, you can’t know that you have imposter syndrome.

Are you even good enough to have impostor syndrome?

And the even more important: pointer to Recursive Imposter Syndrome

Reminds me of the (all too often cited nowadays) Dunning Kruger effect [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

I do mention D-K, actually.

It's out. Getting 2 upvotes on /newest, as usual.

Make it 3. Enjoyed the write-up.

Then there’s also the imposter syndrome that all the imposter syndrome talk makes you feel guilty about not actually feeling like an imposter. You begin to suspect that maybe you really are an imposter, because if you weren’t then you certainly ought to be feeling like one.

Do you think this happens often? What about people with "Reverse Imposter Syndrome" who eventually get into the elite company?

This applies to the ones who are already in.

I do mention how they got in, in the first place.

The word is overconfidence. We don't need to use 3 words to explain one.

I think that it's wonderful that we live in a world where people can actually aspire to being an "elite", rather than the feudal world mentioned briefly in the article in which there is no glut. It's unfortunate that supply in the "elite" labor market takes many years to respond to actual market conditions, since the pipelines here are inherently longer, but I see this as a side effect of living in a world where those pipelines exist. Demand control is a hard subject, and the graduates of law school who don't get into Sullivan and Cromwell will probably find some other relatively decent job.

When I pay for one artist’s output, there likely were nine others who tried and failed in a similar style.

It’s like how drug companies have to try nine different drugs (actually many more) before the stars align around one which is safe and effective. For the business model to work, someone has to pay for those other nine.

In pharma, it is the patients (through high prices on successful drugs). In creative industries, it is the failed artists who put in a huge amount of work with essentially no compensation. It was totally their choice, but I can understand the frustration.

I do wonder about the moral culpability of art schools, though…

You bring up art schools, and you’re right. The influence economy is the same way. You don’t win by trying to become elite. The actual winning strat is to sell other people a fantasy of becoming elite. Hence overproduction of markers that were once elite but have been debased and diluted to oblivion.

Probably a variation on selling shovels and pick axes to miners rather than going to prospect for gold yourself. And there's probably actually a variant of that with the influencer economy. The ad-supported sites, microphone and camera manufacturers, etc. have almost certainly made more money than the "influencers" themselves.

Part of what complicates all of this is rent seeking problems, excessive licensing, monopoly abuses, protectionist overregulation, and so forth. I think There's slightly different issues going on in different areas.

TLDR: "The concept of “elite overproduction” has attracted a lot of attention in the past several years, and it’s not hard to see why. Most associated with Peter Turchin, a researcher who has attempted to develop models that describe and predict the flow of history, elite overproduction refers to periods during which societies generate more members of elite classes than the society can grant elite privileges. Turchin argues that these periods often produce social unrest, as the resentful elites jostle for the advantages to which they believe they’re entitled."

"Can grant privileges" should be "will grant privileges" or "do grant privileges". I think this is a critical distinction. Part of the phenomenon, I think, is that there are more qualified individuals than positions or roles, which lays bare the lack of justification for the elite status of those positions to begin with. The unrest is due to a sense that the restriction is artificial — you could turn it on its head and say the unrest is as much about the old elites having a sense of entitlement to their positions even when they're no longer elite, as it is about the new elites believing they should have the same benefits.

You just quoted the first paragraph of the article. What is this adding?

IMO I think an example of this is all the hardcore activists you see coming out of liberal universities.

People who are always talking about being oppressed, despite being in the top 10% socioeconomically on effectively any metric you can find.

These people are smart, hard working, qualified... But not enough to get the kind of $$ and respect in society they believe they deserve, so they begin to act like the game is rigged and try to break the game so it can be restarted from zero.

What is this site? The domain name makes it sound like a pickup-artist forum.

the about page explains it it's a proudly neoliberal online magazine completely focused on the cancel culture moral panic.

> Our community includes Thomas Chatterton-Williams and Garry Kasparov, David French and Emily Yoffe, Elif Shafak and Francis Fukuyama

should tell you all you need to know one way or another if you recognize any of those names from the last few years.

Even if you disagree, attack the content, not the source.

I thought I was neutral enough to avoid a scolding but you can never be careful enough for that I guess!

Anyway to a meaningful extent the source is the content when discussing an organization formed around a certain ideology for a certain goal and so I will attack both if I feel like it thanks.

Ah, I never found the about page since their email collection nag took up the whole page, I didn't realize there was anything behind it.

It’s hard to know what to do. Seems to be the nature of the upper middle class rat race; everyone is looking for a leg up, competition is fierce and there’s no end in sight.

It feels depressing to toil for years and end up mid.

On social media all we see are people living extraordinary lives, traveling, looking gorgeous, spending money, being successful entrepreneurs, etc.

Must really suck to think that’s all possible for you but somehow it’s always out of reach.

Does this all just come down to comparative self-worth?

What if you judged yourself not against others, but rather against your own (perceived) potential? I may not reach the same levels as some others, but I may be reaching a higher percentage of what's realistically achievable with my means. Add to add to that that the axis I'm applying myself has some meaningful value to society, and there's not much room to recognize oneself as a loser.

You’re more well adjusted than most, but I think you’re rare. In the past at least people had religion to backstop them.

I get the point the author is trying to make (which is mostly about saturation in skilled employment) but the choice of words left me with a very strong vibe of the author having a lot of bitterness and unresolved personal complexes projected into the text.

Then I spotted the url and realised I was probably right :p

"Elite overproduction" is a neat semantic trick.

When the word "elite" expands from "toxic billionaire" to "everybody with a liberal arts degree working at Starbucks", a target is taken off the backs of those toxic billionaires.

In this case, it's not the Starbucks baristas calling themselves elite. It's actual toxic elites (via media they control - national review, bloomberg, etc.) calling Starbucks baristas "elites". Implying that they are perhaps a little too entitled - wanting typical elite stuff like affordable healthcare, housing, education, etc.

It parallels the way that people earning $600,000 / year call themselves "middle class".

Or the wonderfully named "baumol's cost disease", which is what some consider to be a frankly disgusting tendency of wages to go up in more productive societies.

I am not sure where you are from but 600k a year is not that much. That's a staff engineer at a well capitalized unicorn. You can reach there within or under a decade. In places like Cali, half of your money goes to taxes. Unless that 600k is in dividends/capital gains, you get diminishing returns the more you make. It's solidly upper middle class, but the elite class ceiling is very high when you have founders making 9 figure exits in low interest rate environments.

(Downvoters can go suck on their sour grapes, if you aren't negotiating a total compensation in line with the value you are creating, that's not my problem. You are in an industry that generates disproportionately large returns per individual contributor and the fact that you don't know how to capture the value of your own labor is entirely on you. Spend less time practicing leetcode and more time on learning business).

Everyone wants to call themselves middle class. $60,000 a year? Middle class. $600,000 a year? Upper middle class.

Where is the lower class? Where is the upper class?

I swear people on this site making >$500,000 a year act poorer than my family members making $90,000.

The post tax amount is only slightly more than twice what your family members make, especially if they live in low tax states. It doesn't go very far in expensive states. A slightly nicer car, a somewhat bigger house, and perhaps a few years earlier retirement. It hardly qualifies as elite by any means of the word.

Brother, all of the numbers are pre-tax. People making $90,000 a year pay tax too. It's going to be more than 3 times the take home.

I didn't say it makes them elite. Nowhere did I even use the word. But these two salaries don't fall into the same bucket called "middle class". The elites aren't working jobs for money.

I’m under the impression that “middle class” vs “working class” and “upper class” was conventionally more about labor relations.

If you derive your income from ownership, you are upper class. If you derive it from the value of your work work, you are working class. In between we have a class of people with high-value professions and/or assets such that they are basically able to make their own employment decisions without any real discomfort. Merchants I think were the go-to historical example, I’d put highly paid contractors in that class nowadays. This class is literally the class in between the of the other two, aka the middle class.

If you own a company that employs people, you are upper class.

If the boss (maybe the person contracting you) asks you to do something unethical or dangerous and you tell them to get bent with 0 worry as to your next paycheck, you are middle class.

If the former scenario happens and you consider doing the bad thing because you’d rather not be homeless, you are working class and should probably think about forming a union or something.

Depending on your expenses, you could be middle class at 90k and working class at 600k, but if I was working class at 600k… I’d look into getting my expenses under control…

Often in the US we say “middle class” when we actually mean “median income.” It isn’t great.

While I like the distinction between working and owning class, i think your given distinction for upper class is really bad.

"If you own a company that employs people, you are upper class."

Tons of people own companies where they employ people, but still put in 50 hour work weeks and bring home less than $100,000 a year (or worse) without growing the company's value. In this discussion's context, I would put the staff engineer making $600,000 way ahead.

Owning cash is still asset ownership. Owning a failing business is not necessary better than owning hundreds of thousands of dollars. Plus, owning stock is still business ownership.

The quantity of ownership is important, otherwise any American with an invested 401k is part of the owning class.

I prefer the distinction of: "If you need to work to live, you are the working class". Though even that falls apart when talking strictly about income, as different people use their money differently. One person may turn $200,000 salary into early retirement while another lives paycheck to paycheck until death.

Hmm, yeah I take it that the description is not perfect there.

That said, I’m not sure how to fix it. The point really is that it isn’t a better vs worse score or something. Hypothetically the staff engineer could be blowing that $600k on… I dunno, I can’t imagine how to waste $600k a year, boats I guess, and not end up with the assets.

It is definitely an extreme case, though.

and what percentage of software developers are "staff engineers at well capitalized unicorns"?

0.01% of all developers?

Whatever the number is, that is firmly in the "elite" side of the distribution

I think you will find the downvotes aren't envy, but incredulity that you think $600k is anything but wealthy.

https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...

What is considered a middle class income?

In 2022, middle class encompasses household income from $35,090.50 to $140,362.00. This measure of middle class uses the range from half of median household income to twice the median household income.

600K is the amount a redneck can pull working in the oil field in upper management. It is by no means "wealthy" unless you are in the Midwest or working as a white collar paper pusher in a field that doesn't pay well. It is high compared to a Starbucks barista perhaps but go to places like New York and Boston and the Bay Area level of salaries hardly stand out.

You can make 600k a year running small businesses like online tutoring too. Too many people (especially in tech) get overly caught up with hype and passion projects and refuse to put in the effort to remain dynamic and keep up with advances in their industry. If LLMs are the latest thing, go learn how the engineering and science side of language models work before launching yet another side project without doing any market research. Sure it's an empirical field, but you can learn a lot from simply replicating paper results. Drop that React tutorial and learn how variational learning works. Train and fine-tune a model yourself. Don't just blindly call an API and build products on undifferentiated factors like prompt engineering.

The writing's on the wall right now that machine learning engineering is what the industry will be embracing in the next 3 years. It may be partly hype, but it is obvious that there is immense value to be captured.

> upper management

I other words, elite. Nothing to do with the middle.

Making over 600k is great but you are probably not wealthy.

First, once you make over like 150k, your federal tax bracket goes into 30%+ and closer to 40%. And you probably live in NY or CA so it's more like 50% with state and local. So it may look like someone makes 200k more than you do (or whatever) but half of that difference right away goes to taxes.

Second, making that much money generally allows you to live in a nicer area but not not have an extravagant life in that area. Case in point, a small 4 bedroom house in the suburbs of NY is like 1.5 mil nowadays. The same house in a suburb of Cleveland might be like 250k. 6x difference in housing cost. So it doesn't make sense to compare the 600k to the 140k and say "wow that's so much above the average middle class" because they don't face the same costs.

And by the way you end up paying like 35k in taxes on that house in NY.

Don't get me wrong, 600k is a great income for a household and especially an individual. Just that most people who make that still live what looks like a middle class life just slightly nicer, in a better area and hopefully with some savings.

“It’s people like you what causes unrest”

Yes - that's the rhetorical foundation of this piece of nonsense.

It's not that you can't have a career in the arts - it's that you can't even have a career in the arts. Or a successful boutique online small business.

So you should definitely lower your expectations.

There's nothing wrong with steering some people towards the trades instead. But if even 50% of the people in the Social Media long tail decided to become a plumber, roofer, or builder, what does the author think would happen to their hourly rate?

Meanwhile the real elites are buying huge companies, firing thousands of people on a whim, and running those companies into the ground like drunken frat boys - but without any noticeable difference to their living standard or opportunities.

They're also saying "As a CEO and/or investor mistakes were made, so - thanks, but bye. Well now I feel so terrible, but never mind, I'm sure I'll get over it somehow."

Not a surprise to find the author is a Musk apologist and Twitter sceptic but also a professional critic of progressive politics.

The distinctive characteristic of the upper class is not working (or at least not needing to work). If you work for a living, you are middle class.

Top two comments here either didn't read the article, or may as well not have.

The article is pretty trash, honestly. It is one paragraph stretched to fifteen.

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