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Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

My guess would be - there is way more primitive explanation than setting an example etc (which is also a good reason, from their point of view). It is just plain ego and pettiness - we see it everywhere, even from a manager who has 3 people reporting to him. Why else would Zuck cheat on a board game, of all things? That too in private?

It might just be as primitive as "I have more money than God, therefore I am better than everyone else, nobody dare to challenge/disrespect me even in the slightest". Blind rage can make people do things that they themselves can't understand

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> It is just plain ago and pettiness […] Why else would Zuck cheat on a board game

Recently I felt somewhat enlightened on this point, specifically in regards to Trump cheating at golf and some of his bald-faced lies, but I’d speculate it applies here too. Others pointed out to me that while it might look petty and ridiculous to normal people, it’s a social power move to get away with things, and serves the purpose of testing what can be gotten away with, and practicing or exercising the push dynamic. It may have little to do with winning a board game, and a lot to do with seeing what people will tolerate and what the thresholds are for being called out; it’s a test of one’s intimidation factor. It may be somewhat important that the cheating is visible. It can also be social signaling to see who comes to their defense when called out, which is an effect that has been playing out on the national stage with obvious lies being repeated, defended, or excused. It’s not about what’s true, but about people showing the rule breaker who’s on their side, and giving them the power to break rules.

This, BTW, to me is a depressing and pessimistic view of power and politics and humanity, and I don’t think these kinds of power moves are something to aspire to, nor do they always work. But as a framework I have to admit it has a lot of explanatory power.

This is a good observation, because this tactic is a hallmark of Putin and authoritarianism in general. What he does just lie about something where he knows it's a lie and the audience knows it's a lie, and he knows that the audience knows that he's lying, but the audience is powerless to correct him, so it is his way of demonstrating his power over the audience. He is saying to them that he is so powerful and dominating that he is in charge of their reality.

Masha Gessen has written a fair bit about this.

This is called "Fuckery:" I tell you a lie. You know it's a lie. I know you know it's a lie. But you have to pretend that you believe it because of the power I have over you.

The Fuckery is a demonstration of that power.

Yes. It serves to identify the people who will go along with lies and bullshit and who won't speak out

It's a test of loyalty via a show of power

It is called sycophancy. That's how the powerful and the wealthy are enabled by underlings.

I think that there is a difference between someone that really believes they are all that and their sycophants clap, and the person in power knowingly making their underlings agree that the bright thing in the sky at noon is the moon.

Brazen lying.

Like how the government operated during covid.

It can be seen the opposite way.

If you don't call out my lie, you are just a bootlicker who cannot be trusted for anything requiring initiative.

If you do, then you can be a real partner.

There is still a subtlety. You have to call me out without making me lose face. If you can call out my lie and deflect the blame away from me, that's the best.

I don't know how much this applies to cheating at Catan. Regardless of social standing, few people are going to stop you from cheating at Catan because it helps everyone's goal - to be done with the game of Catan. Although perhaps repeatedly making people play Catan is itself that social power move.

> everyone's goal - to be done with the game of Catan

Is it possible you're confusing Catan with Monopoly or Pictionary or any party game ever?

Boardgames catching strays

Nah, Catan's among those. It's very common for an initial set-up to leave 1-2 players with no realistic path to victory by turn 2 or so, even if they've made the best choices available to them. Once you learn to spot it, the game kinda sucks. It's not fun to play a game as one of those players, and it's not fun to play a game where some of the other people at the table are just filling space less than 25% of the way through the game. It's not as bad as some others for early player elimination (as world-domination-mode Risk is infamous for) but it also doesn't officially eliminate them, which is arguably even worse.

Spot on. I think I tried playing it with a 1d12 a few times, but that merely fixed the most glaring part of the problem and wasn't enough to redeem inevitable-slow-loss dynamic. Perhaps some expansions give more breathing room and different dynamics to specialize in.

Catan is Monopoly for those who want to look a little smarter. Lots of party games are much better than Catan.

I think most people who like board games would choose pictionary over it. At least that can fulfill a quick warmup role to move on to something better.

What you are describing is Narcissistic Personality Disorder behavior. It is psychological abuse.

Liars like to lie, and you often see them express what's called "duper's delight" at fooling people. Dark triad types (narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths) will often lie about petty things just to get off on their ability to mislead people.

It's also a form of gaslighting. It makes people doubt their sanity, because nobody would lie about such a thing. It creates an aura of reality distortion around such people and inside that aura they can define reality as they see fit.

Until we learn to see through this stuff and stop elevating such people to positions of extreme power, we deserve what we get.

Unfortunately there’s a pretty large number of people who actually think we need people like this to “do things.” It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. If you stack the ranks of power with dark triad types, then of course that’s the only kind of person who can work in that world. You create a world where only toxic people can get things done and then are surprised that only toxic people can get things done.

> It may have little to do with winning a board game, and a lot to do with seeing what people will tolerate and what the thresholds are for being called out; it’s a test of one’s intimidation factor.

It’s one of the most famous scenes in The Wire: when Marlo steals a lollipop.

Whilst make outrageous claims to assert power is definitely a thing, I think the null hypothesis is less that they're playing 4D chess and more that people who constantly get away with stuff and constantly get told they're geniuses like spoiled children end up behaving like spoiled children. It's like for every "van Halen wants the brown M&Ms removed to audit the venue staff's attention to detail" anecdote there are 100 stars making extravagant demands who are just divas.

Zuck cheating at board games me of Elon buying a claim to being a great Path of Exile and Diablo player. Nobody believes he is, and nobody is loyalty tested into praising his ability at computer games, not even people who work at his companies. He gets mocked for it on his own website. The few people that would actually be impressed by a claim of being good at Path of Exile and Diablo know exactly how bad he is at it and find it pitiful; ironically it actually dents his reputation with a demographic disproportionately likely to be impressed by other things about him. Other people aren't inclined to think highly of him for playing those games in the first place, never mind paying others to boost his account. The reality is simply that when he's interested in a game he can't abide the idea of not being really good at it, and cheating and getting others to do stuff for you is the easiest way to appear really good at it. Especially when you're used to ignoring people calling you out...

> playing 4D chess

Also, narcissists don't need 4D chess levels of awareness and discipline to behave that way. It just emerges naturally from their base motivations.

I doubt it's as calculated as that. Trump literally has no concept of truth, so he doesn't lie for strategic reasons. He says whatever makes him feel best about himself moment to moment.

This is textbook narcissism - confusing to those who expect some kind of object constancy who can't deliver it, but predictable from the syndrome.

He also intimidates and threatens more directly, but that doesn't get reported on the news.

Zuckerberg seems similarly fragile, but in a less overt way.

When you have insane levels of wealth your world revolves around your self-image and your desires, your peers are all at similar levels of dysfunction, no one else is likely to challenge you for obvious reasons, so you become socially unmoored and drift into Wealth Induced Psychosis.

> Zuckerberg seems similarly fragile, but in a less overt way.

Give him time. He's only 42. Trump at 42 had more "charm"/"charisma" in his pinky finger than Zuck has in his entire being.

This is really common at his company btw, this shit trickles down from leadership.

For example, a director wrote a post internally solely with AI, didn't review it at all, directly plagiarized a bunch of stuff that other people wrote, and left a bunch of typos like [[link]]. It was just a post about why we need to use more AI or some bullshit like that.

I had a direct manager who did shit way worse than this on a regular basis. Once people just learn to expect constant psycho head games and shit testing 24/7, the lost good will is not recoverable.

I think the weird thing with meta is that this type of weird bullshit is a company-wide phenomenon. Like them turning around and forcing 8k people to do data labeling work. A lot of the victims were super late in their careers and highly specialized. And the same guy who forced this thing on everyone (the CTO) has now turned around and publicly criticized MZ for messing up morale.

Funnily enough, my manager did a lot of the same thing, maliciously creating a problem and then trying to blame it on someone else. A lot of these little games trickle down. As a company, they tend to select for people like Elizabeth Holmes

Nobody calls them out? Not even jokingly?

Oh no, they totally do, everyone makes fun of them.

It's bizarre because there's this culture of really brazen leadership, but everyone is constantly criticizing them and laugh emoji reacting to their posts. But I think it's quieted down a bit before half year perf cycle

I'm pleased to hear that.

Mark Zuckerberg will go down in history as the first man to upload his mind to a corporation.

Like Marlo with the security guard.

I agree. Most people go mad when they receive that kind of power. Aristocracy was trained to rule at some point because you really easily become just a tyrand instead of a ruler. Zuckerberg was just a nerd when it started, then within a few years he turned into an icon and basically later turned mad.

The only things this man and his companies produce are subpar software products, which I personally do not understand. How is that even possible for a company with that much money? Their best app is the one he bought, then filled with a TikTok copy.

For me, the surprising part is not just that he is obviously an evil piece of shit. It is that he is an evil, rather incompetent piece of shit. The amount of money he has thrown out the window just to promote cringe, nonsensical ideas like the Metaverse or their botched AI only confirms how surrounded he is by chronic yes men who keep approving his ridiculous ideas.

In some time he began to be caricature of it selves and make it all more even more bizzare.

Well... uh

'When it started' was 2003. The same year as his 'dumb fucks' quote or hacking reporters who were investigating him

That's not 'being a nerd [nice person] when it started'

My favorite (paraphrased) Cory Doctorow quote pays dividends here:

"Facebook started as a way to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard graduates, and it only got worse from there."

There was a brief period where Facebook was cool enough to give it public credibility, buoyed by the fact that nobody knew who Mark Zuckerberg really was yet. After that point Facebook was big enough to just buy more credibility by buying more successful competition.

Too similar to Goldfinger cheating at cards and golf to not make me chuckle.

Some times its just underling opportunists (which is basically zucks inner circle at this point) defending the empire. Keeping that stupid child emperor on the throne is in their interest.

For a bit more context the Belarusian activist built on the anti communist Polish Activist Waldemar "Major" Fydrych who in the 1980’s was arrested by the communist authorities in Poland for handing out female sanitary products.

As he said “The Western World will find out much more about the situation in Poland from hearing that I was put to jail for giving tampons to a woman, than from reading the books and articles written by other people from the opposition.”

The story about cheating at Scrabble bears a fairly close resemblance to the episode in the Tintin comic Flight 714 https://tintin.fandom.com/wiki/Flight_714 in which megarich industrialist Laszlo Carreidas cheats at Battleship while flying on his private jet https://www.reddit.com/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/comments/1i6cv... . If the Scrabble incident really did happen then it's uncomfortable how close it comes to a fictional detail deliberately written to make Carreidas look unscrupulous and a bit ridiculous.

Maybe it's the same thing with we see with many (but not all) sports stars. Getting fame and fortune at a young age ossifies any kind of personal development that happens in people after that point.

This applies to Elon's incredibly strange video game cheating scandal too.

It's pathetic and weird.

This all makes a lot more sense when you consider that Elon Musk is trying to dethrone/succeed Richard Branson, but can only manage a knockoff-grade impersonation at best. Cheating is about the feeling of defeating other people without the moral restrictions against cheating that obviously limit them, but cheaters aren’t attractive to non-cheaters; thus the sockpuppet account, to get that prized feeling of defeat without damaging the main caricature.

That was i think the most revealing thing about his character bar none because of how mundane it all was.

Anyone with a tiny bit of video game background called that out from miles away. It was so pathetic. Richest dude in world with spaceship company. Has nothing to prove. Cheats, lies, and gaslights when caught.

Has to be “number one” at a video game that has virtually zero skill where rank is almost entirely who grinds more. Eg time.

What a weird and sad thing to do. So unimaginably insecure.

Any billionaire you know the name of, is probably not too far off from this. There are alot of rich people who are secure with themselves. Zuck aint one if em.

Did he cheat at other games too? I knew of the Path of Exile 2 incident, but I'd hardly call that a zero-skill game.

It was d4 first and then poe2.

Agree with everything else but POE does have a high skill ceiling, it’s just more of a strategic game than tactical.

It was d4 first then poe he lied about. These games are more about minmaxing and gear grind. It is why it was even more weird to brag about it.

It wasnt like he was moggin the ladder in LoL where it is pure skill no grind up to end game.

The mask was off way way before this imo but I think you’re right that inanity of it is telling in a lot of ways.

Actually this is not specific to rich or US, this is behavior in most of western countries. This started with colonialism, where one consider superior than others in every aspect, so they can do whatever they please. Many are still blinded by this ego, which is the reason for current geopolitical stability. We should understand that sometimes we are the problem. Simon Sinek have great talk with historical example on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWEI9FDf-0g

Whether or not the emperor is aware of his New Clothes, the effect on his courtiers is the same

I missed the board game story!

Was it discussed here on Hacker News?

In general you don't become and stay a bilionare just by pure luck, you have to be very inteligent and ruthless, no moral qualms.

" Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuckerberg: Just ask

Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.

Zuckerberg: I don't know why.

Zuckerberg: They "trust me"

Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks "

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg

Lol. I would have said exactly the same thing at 20 years old and be just as disgusted by it at 30. People grow up.

Yea but you're not a billionaire running a giant social manipulation tool.

People may grow up or may not grow up.

If at 20, you don't act like that, then there is no question (and it is possible. In my 20's I was briefly a webmaster for a small org, and I noticed I had access of private info, and unlike Zuckerberg and you, I reported it to get it fixed. It does not mean you are a bad person, but it does mean that you should not consider that everyone would act like you did and that your way of acting was "normal").

If at 20, you act like that, there is a probability that you will grow up, and an even bigger probability that you will not grow up. It does not mean you should never be forgiven, but you have to own what you have done as a dumb kid, not just pretend it does not count, and provide elements to demonstrate that indeed you have changed.

In the case of Zuckerberg, his current actions demonstrate clearly he did not grow up.

Hallmarks of a sociopath. Trying to rationalize what he does in terms of normal ethics and motivations is a fool's errand.

This sums it up. I can’t understand how people think these people are anything but the world’s worst sociopaths. I cannot understand how so many people idolize and buy into them.

Or perhaps Zuck didn't cheat on the board game, and the claim that he did is one of the purported falsehoods Meta says the book contains. That would also explain it.

If he really doesn't cheat at board games, the power move would be to completely ignore the accuser.

I agree, but she also made other accusations that can't be so easily ignored. Meta can't really have no comment on someone who's going around saying that Sheryl Sandberg and Joel Kaplan both sexually harassed her on the job.

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