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Comment by mayneack | Hacker News Reader

That may or may not be true in aggregate, but for extreme outliers it's impossible to separate from survivorship bias. Are Musk and Andreeson really the most skilled entrepreneurs in the world or are they just good enough for luck to propel them to stratospheric success?

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They found luck and success and continue to compound that. However it's easy to make so much money when you have that much already. Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset. The risk they take now is very low.

I feel like they will never suffer the consequences of their actions in any negative way should they get it wrong.

Rarely do we see billionaires not become billionaires because they know how the game is played because they shaped the game so they only ever fail upwards.

> Just promise the world or invest in companies that do and ride unicorns with private investments into the sunset.

Yes, which is why the ranks of the very wealthy are filled with lucky grifters. They got rich by luck, then expanded that wealth with some combination of fanciful statements, lies, and outright fraud.

They’re just the most ruthless

If you look at the entire entirety of understood history of biology:

The most ruthless always wins

That is to say if I go into a village and kill all the adults and teenagers and steal all the kids who are scared to be killed by me, then I will win in the probably two successive generations that I’ve been able to successfully brainwashing into thinking I’m some kind of God.

That is until somebody kills me and then takes over the structure. For example there are no dictatorships that last past the third generation

That is literally and unambiguously how all life operates

There are intermediary cooperation periods. But if you look at the aggregate time periods including how galaxies form it’s all straight up brute force consumption

That's not how humans came to populate areas that previously were dominated by predators who would be obviously deadly to individual humans. Cooperation and planning are what made physically weak humans dominant. That cooperation and planning developed and flourished without authoritarian structures.

Tribal chiefs are not authoritarians? Because basically every Stone Age village has one.

A brief look at certain native American tribes might show quite a lot of talking and consensus building, like if some war chief wants a war he needs to drum up support for that. Hours of talking ensue! Not to say that ancient tribes didn't have the worst of what modern corporations have to offer as far as leadership goes, but a claim "basically every village" is basically wrong, or "bascially" is carrying a heck of a lot of weight.

All Native tribes have been thoroughly dominated and decimated into being constrained to reservations by waves of brutal colonists, that were, as I said, the most ruthless.

So again, the most ruthless win

Except where the lucky win, or the most ruthless actually suck at winning wars (Bret Devereaux has some interesting observations here, and a study of the various "unbeatable" and of course ruthless empires may also be educational), or where various species cooperate in various ways, or where nobody cries when Mr. Ruthless mutters "rosebud" then dies. "Well, it couldn't have happened to a better chap", said the butler.

Cooperation and Competition are typically temporal periods but only one is extractive irrespective of externalities where cooperation can be mutual but with devastating externalities (ecological collapse)

So unfortunately it’s insufficient to simply be cooperative and the fact that macro level cooperation appears to be rare in the universe

Further, the existing examples of mutual cooperative organizations are so rare as to be non-existent. Humans seem to prefer (or are biologically limited to preferring) competition based social and economic structures.

Read some Charles Mann. Tribal leaders if they can really be described as leaders had to work with consensus and cooperation. Modern society is much more coercive.

Among the Cherokee councils--which included both men and women--unanimous agreement was required for any group decision.

In their society, and in so many others who have been crushed by the forces of empire over the eons, the leaders of the people did not get there by murdering their way to the top. They were respected persons who were elevated to that position by the people.

Tradition tells us the Cherokee did once have a heriditary priestly class, who were called the Ani-kutani, or Nicotani. The people long suffered under their arrogance until one of them went too far, raping a woman while her husband was away. Her husband then amassed an uprising of the people and they killed out the Nicotani to the last man.

(An existence proof that it can be done, if nothing else.)

And how much operational power does the Cherokee nation have compared to their neighbors in the United States?

Oh none?

Is that because their peaceful means were so successful in not being dominated by a massive group of unencumbered rapists and Pillagers?

What precisely is the argument you’re making here because all you’re doing is proving my point

I promise there are thousands to millions of people just as ruthless. Most of them just end up as petty criminals.

No doubt

Placement almost perfectly dictates whether high level psychopaths wind up in jail or the boardroom

"A petty thief is put in jail. A great brigand becomes a ruler of a nation."

- Chuang Zhu (late 4th century B.C.)

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