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Comment by smoothjazz | Hacker News Reader

This rings true because as someone without a religious background, I definitely feel the opposite: that progress is inevitable and the people who are "in charge" while it progresses are a commodity. I also find the "deification" of leaders (like say Steve Jobs) to be damaging to culture, leading to arrogance, political fighting and empire building.

Trying to have a good life and be good to those around you, while riding on the one-way track of technological progress seems like a better strategy.

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Yep. Everyone praises the "great men," as the article mentions, and Western culture is heavily individualistic, so it stands to reason that we should deify the most visible leaders of things.

But they aren't that special.

Often, they're high-performing individuals with a somewhat-damaged attachment that they have found ways to channel productively. Their success and visibility feed more success and visibility. So we talk about them more and more, dissect their histories, daydream about what potential causes could be. But I can guarantee you there are plenty of people who did those same things whom we never hear about. There's certainly a luck component to it.

Once I realized that, I then had to question: why hold these people up on a pedestal at all? They don't need my help in maintaining their position, after all. I reject the idea that they're "higher value" individuals than I am, despite culture's insistence otherwise. If luck played such a role, why should I value them more?

(It's hard to talk about this without reeking of sour grapes.)

> Yep. Everyone praises the "great men," as the article mentions, and Western culture is heavily individualistic, so it stands to reason that we should deify the most visible leaders of things.

Sure, having kings, emperors, or prophets like the good old days was so much less individualistic.

Yes, it was. Individualism is the last thing you want if you want people to act as though their lives are worth less than the king's / emperor's / state. You don't want people valuing themselves and having legal and economic standing, free to make agreements between themselves. You want them to do what you want them to do.

you may as well claim everyone in the US believes their lives are less important than the presidents.

In truth, the president very rarely has any major effect on the lives of Americans, therefore they don't really care one way or the other.

Or to put it another way, that food needed to be harvested regardless of who was king, as long as said king didn't interfere with the food harvesting, people might have opinions but ultimately didn't care.

I can't find them anymore, but I've read interesting articles on attitudes of slaves and minorities. One of these wrote of certain slaves valuing themselves less than their owners. Then there's the research on black children preferring white dolls to black dolls.

Huge numbers of people have a status quo bias. Anytime the leadership changes you're dealing with fear impulses.

I'm familiar with the doll research, the children were asked which doll was prettier and chose the white doll.

That's not the same as preferring the white doll.

Possibly, but I'm referring to how large-scale decisions were made. You can wipe out inequality with a sustained attack on the wealthy[0], but if you value all lives, not just the lives of your group, then you shouldn't see that as an option. If you value your pilots' lives you cannot invent kamikaze planes, nor even cheap planes. You have to invent F16s and the like, that improve their pilots' survivability at significant cost. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror

> why hold these people up on a pedestal at all?

I think the premise is flawed. Everyone doesn't praise great men. In fact, one of the identifying features of a 21st century American is which "great" men they criticise.

I don't think this argument is all that great - most rational people have already internalized that luck plays a role for everyone in the world.

To start with there is the "i was born healthy, wasn't malnourished, wasn't in a war zone" kinda luck.

Then there is the "being at the right place at the right time" kinda luck - which is part luck, part perseverance and persistence. You won't be in the right place if you never try or want it.

Then there is the "my direct reports did all the work, but I took the credit" kinda luck - which is pretty much any manager in the world.

Then you come to the "i have the title & power to affect change, the high standards/insight to enforce certain ideas or create certain products, and the financial backing to work through failures" kinda luck, which is where everyone wants to be, and thinks they can execute better then the other guy - but they're almost always wrong. The person who got there was self-selected by the system, and fought their way to reach the spot. The kinda of personality traits, qualities and other attributes that got that person the job, are not simply borne out of luck. Its the combination of their life experience and working through difficult situations, taking a collection of people of varying ability, personalities, etc along for the journey and getting a a large chunk of people to agree with them, etc. Its not that easy to hand-wave this away. The seeming counter-examples of people who were just gifted the role through nepotism or what have you, are not really examples, because they don't have the respect and don't play in the same league.

This is essentially arguing that systems ultimately select for competence, given a long enough timespan. And I'd agree!

But I lack faith that the system produces people that I look up to. They did well at their game, I can respect that. It may not be my game, though.

I directly addressed what I thought was the main point you were making about luck. Who people "look up to" is a more complicated issue.

Except there is incredible luck and bias. Being born to rich or connected parents. Being white. Being male. Business culture has rarely been a meritocracy. Like the post above you said, there really isn't a lot going on here that millions others don't have. Its luck, failing upwards, and cultural biases and corrupt business culture making these people leaders.

Scientifically, the only trait we've found these people have in common is that they're all low empathy, dark triad types, sociopaths, etc. That is to say, to climb to the top, like in the royal courts of old, the system tends to choose not those with the most merit, but those who are the most ruthless and dishonest socially.

Steve Jobs was a ruthless bully and had a mess of a personal life. Apple workers accepted being screamed at him as part of the job. Elon Musk walks the floors of his factory and fires people on whims, then bought twitter to spread hate speech. Torvalds is a bully of the highest order and regularly has child-like tantrums over code suggestions. etc, etc.

The meritorious in our system tend to get locked down in skill worker positions, bullied out of jobs, burned out by being the hard worker to the 'idea guy' or the 'chummy country club guy' or the 'rich kid' or the 'bully' or the 'loud mouth political player', have their work and labor surplus stolen, etc. The game-playing sociopath is the one who ends up in the c-suite.

You do not live in a just universe. This is trivially provable.

You are presenting your own bias and opinions - which is fine, everyone is biased and has opinions, but you're smuggling them as objective moral truths about the universe. Sorry, it doesn't work like that. People absolutely do not agree on what objective moral truths there are, or even if they actually exist in the universe.

>Scientifically, the only trait we've found these people have in common is that they're all low empathy, dark triad types, sociopaths, etc. That is to say, to climb to the top, like in the royal courts of old, the system tends to choose not those with the most merit, but those who are the most ruthless and dishonest socially.

There is no "scientifically" here. It's peoples opinions and self-reported views. Cultural contexts, human experiences, personality traits, opinions, feelings, views are highly variable throughout the world are are nowhere near deterministic. Science is about determinism and discovering objective truths about the natural universe. Frankly this is not science, and is an abuse of the term.

Your third paragraph is like talking about Tiger Woods without mentioning a green jacket.

There’s an implicit moralizing in your stance. Why do you presume that the dark triad traits you assert “””these people””” have in common are unrelated to merit? That suggests a moral, not pragmatic, stance that valorizes “the hard worker” while denigrating things like charisma, vision, boldness, and ruthless drive which, to sample your phrasing, are “trivially provable” to be essential traits of merit in leadership.

I could have just fallen prey to exactly the flaw that you're describing, but if I look at Apple during the Sculley years and immediately prior to Jobs' coup vs afterwards, I think that the company changed direction and the subsequent progress was by no means pre-ordained in 1991-1997.

Likewise, Microsoft during the early Gates' years was not a lock to rise to the level it attained.

Or the Buffett Partnership and eventually Berkshire Hathaway under Buffett.

Maybe these are outliers (and by company size/outcome, they quite obviously are), but that seems to itself be a (perhaps circular) argument that leadership plays a significant role in directing the trajectory of the company.

I'm talking about a larger timescale than an individual product or company. Bronze age -> iron age -> industrial revolution -> information age...

There's going to be some noise when you zoom in but I firmly believe that human technology marches forward over time.

> "I definitely feel the opposite: that progress is inevitable and the people who are "in charge" while it progresses are a commodity."

This view is problematic too. It removes agency, accountability, participation. Leader worship is dangerous, I agree, but there's a strange emptiness to life when "someone's gonna do it, it's inevitable" takes root.

A person ought to believe they can do great things. Also that we're quit ridiculously irrelevant in the scheme of things. Also: we can do great things. Lovely things.

I like to think of the solo hero vs the group as more like the difference between men's and women's basketball. Men's is all about the individuals but women's is interesting because there aren't really heroes so much as team play, teamwork.

And whenever I say that, there are people who immediately tell me that men's basketball is better. To those folks: it's ok to have a different opinion. You could be right! I'm just trying to illustrate another way of people working together.

> A person ought to believe they can do great things.

I think there's pressure on us to think this, but I find that the older I get the happier I am moving away from this idea. I've accomplished a lot in my life and at the end of the day it doesn't bring me satisfaction. What brings me satisfaction is being able to sit quietly with peace of mind and be content with just being.

The desire to do "great things" is paired with an existential anxiety that I don't think is healthy. And not to be political, but often "great things" mean accomplishments that don't correctly model externalities like environmental damage and human exploitation.

I agree! The older I get the more i'm able to understand peace. It becomes the only thing truly valuable.

The paradox of holding both extremes is crucial i think. We're everything and nothing.

Progress isn't inevitable because the government can stop it sometimes. Nuclear power is regulated to be forty times safer than natural gas (the safest natural gas) (the factor of forty is ignoring the additional climate costs), and that's why we don't have abundant nuclear power.

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