On 05/02/2026 09:42, Jeremy Bornstein via Silklist wrote:
I have at times been tempted to think along the same lines as sankarshan, that extreme wealth changes one's ecosystem so much that one begins operating according to constraints and incentives that are incomprehensible to people who have not ascended. But also I don't believe that that's the whole story, because after ascension, some people still understand and care about mostly normal humans and their relationships with them. I suspect becoming one of these extreme-wealth humans is probably more like boiling the proverbial frog than a snake changing its skin or a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.
I suspect part of the problem is the people around billionaires as much as them personally - they seem to end up surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear, jockeying for influence amongst each other, in the manner of a medieval court. So they end up somewhat isolated from the real world, being fed whatever version of reality their underlings think will best serve *their* career interests.
In my career in tech, I've met many "non-technical founders" - people whose main role is to give presentations to get funding - who have only a shaky grasp of the business they're selling, optimising their pitch for investor interest (or, further down the line, for potential customer or acquirer interest) rather than for "truth"; which is easy to do when the product is a prototype or an idea anyway. Nonetheless, they rely on portraying themselves as the genius behind it all, exuding an atmosphere of confidence, and wisdom hidden behind a smokescreen of impressive-sounding jargon, because that's what brings success - they're competing against other people doing the same thing. If their startup does succeed, they're not going to stop acting like that. Whether or not they actually believe themselves to be genius entrepreneurs or just accept it's a role they need to fill to make deals is kinda of beside the point, as long as they keep doing it... But they need to keep massaging the egos of the people whose money they want by telling them how clever THEY (the people up the ladder) are, while also telling them how clever THEY -
wait, this sentence is getting stupid in English, it would be much easier to say this in Lojban, let me try again:
These folks need to (a) sell themselves as geniuses in order to gain the confidence of people who might invest in them, and (b) suck up to the (potential) investors by telling them how clever they are and that they will be a magnificent partner in this business because they're so clever and wise. But they're just a rung in a ladder of investment distribution, both between and within businesses, all telling each other what stable geniuses they all are; and brushing any evidence otherwise (eg, the failures of their businesses) under the carpet one way or another.
This is not a society that encourages actual understanding of the actual world, and makes it easy to disregard outsiders as "plebs" in some form or another, even if they're the customers.
-- Alaric Snell-Pym (M0KTN neé M7KIT) http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
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