Those people own a yacht, a big house, all that stuff. I don't know how they do it. Is it incompetence, is it unwillingness? are they retarded? we'll never know...

They are too dumb to not be confident. Plenty of confident dumb people are poor and try get rich quick schemes. Occasionally some of them work, and now you have a dumb business owner.

If you're 10/10 smart, you're getting a 7 figure sign on bonus to go work at Meta as an AI researcher.

If you're 6-9/10 smart, you're probably miserable somewhere.

If you're 4-5/10 smart, you are one of these people.

This is largely my experience as well. The Bay Area wannabe startup crowd is brimming with idiots, people dumber than your dumbest colleague at work. Unbelievable amounts of Dunning-Kruger.

The actual grind filters out most of them, of course, but if you concede that some businesses are basically luck then some number of those idiots will make it.

People who don't have those types of things in mind can only be so smart in my book.

Having access to capital is much more important than smarts, which is why so many people starting businesses have generational money propping them up, or as a safety net. Even smart people are usually reliant on that family capital. Bill Gates’ parents were millionaires, Musk and his dad’s emerald mine, Thiel started his first hedge fund with a million dollars raised from “friends and family”.

confidence man

With some notable exceptions, this describes almost every business owner I've worked with.

Probably more under-developed that psychotic.

ie not really using their adult thinking any more

- It's nearly always poorly written because dummies also usually can barely write

- It's poorly packaged (some random comments section, not a polished slide deck)

- It's biased in predictable ways (when you do know who wrote it, their self-interested takes are predictable).

Enter "AI" - it writes mechanically well (even though it overuses several tropes, it doesn't make grammatical errors). AI packages its output as exactly what you ask it to (e.g. finished coding projects, outlines, essays, etc.) And not being a person, it's not guaranteed to have a certain bias, but it does echo and validate all your own biases.

Given all this, people think AI sounds exactly like what they assume an oracle would sound like.

But people at the higher abstraction levels have a problem because they often never had (or lose) the ability to zoom in anywhere. And even the ones that can don't have time to learn to zoom in everywhere so they have to learn how to trust others, aka recognizing shibboleths. AI is great at sounding trustworthy and making reasonable looking output. In so doing, however, it's undermining the utility of shibboleths for large scale thinkers! That is the powerful are now deluding themselves that they have access to infinite reliable experts, and have gained the ability to zoom in everywhere, for only the cost of a data center. In a sense programmer experts like us are lucky because we have objective verification as a feedback loop to temper the exuberance. They do not.

If this is true, the kinds of error modes we'll see will be novel and catastrophic to a large fraction of businesses. If the feedback loops for correction are damaged or destroyed, we'll see firms gleefully, optimistically and energetically committing obvious mistakes until they die.

After the IC-level, each level filters less for the duties of the higher role. Even PMs seem surprisingly par at product ideation, vision, insight amongst their cross functional project team members. So many products fail, so many startups fail, so many projects are late, but those things don't seem to be what dictate promotions or investment even when they are specifically that role's role.

This is a bit dated, but I think the message out of UW is right.

To your point on bosses: Turns out, you can very much bullshit a bullshitter.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

Lots of little claims I disagree with there but the overall thesis has felt prescient these days

It's as if his training had centered so much on 3d modeling and tangible tweaking as you go, that he hadn't learned to simulate anything with his thoughts before starting. He had to start building it to figure out what he meant. Incredibly creative person, out of the box thinker and big picture visionary, but with difficulty translating his ideas to verbal concrete steps. But nobody realized this, which resulted in a lot of frustration both ways:

"Why didn't you build what I said?" "I did. This is exactly what you said." "No it's not! I said x y z" "Yes you said x y z, this IS x y z" Silence. "Then that's not what I meant"

I deal with this all the time these days. If I ask for some clarification on scope, I usually get these ambiguous answers with fantastical ideas usually concerning some dreamed up impossible to implement tool that people assume is now possible because of AI, because everything is possible to them now!

No, that's just disrespectful and entitled behavior from someone in power toward someone without power. I'm sure the person (business owner) felt pleased with themselves for saving so much time and mental effort in the interaction, with additional points for "authenticity" and "honesty" because they didn't hide the fact that they used an LLM. It damaged the relationship slightly but only time will tell if that was meaningful (and the harsh truth is that it probably isn't given the short lifespans of companies).

Garbage Invoker, Garbage Output

Maybe that was his rationale, "to educate" by example.

Absolutely nuts to treat employees this way, sending ChatGPT chats around.