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If you break things into 1. How much value you’ve created this far 2. How much control you have over societal resources 3. Life satisfaction Communism/fairness tries to uncorrelate 1&2, but all that matters is how you feel, so maybe we should care about equality of 3 instead

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i see lots of ppl who hating on billionaires failing to understand that wealth is less a reflection of "how much work you put in" and more a reflection of "how much value you create for others". Create a shitton of value, get a shitton of dollars, who cares about the labor part

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I think a lot of the frustration with capitalism is that clearly ability to create value isn’t equal between people. We want to capture that value but don’t want life quality to be 10000x between people (eg jealousy, resentment)

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To me it seems like the way to get the best of both worlds is to build better tools for changing emotions that make money’s affect on feelings seem small make sure everyone’s quality of life is great. This separates value creation from quality of life, brings jealous to zero

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I don’t want billionaires to have a 10000x better life than me, but I also want Elon controlling way more resources than I do bc he’s a way better allocator of them. I’m not jealous of Elon at all, because he seems miserable. Feelings are the only thing worth being jealous of

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I’m probably better at running companies than most people (did it for 10 years) but you could have given me the resources Elon had in 2004 and asked me to start SpaceX and 1000 tries to restart at every failure and I would have failed horrendously 1000 times

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In fact, if you’d given me his resources and 1000 attempts to create a business idea as good at SpaceX I couldn’t even have done that. I’ve seen a lot of the early plans for SpaceX describing its viability in incredible detail, they’re better than any planning I’ve done

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Nicholas Schiefer

Replying to

I'm fascinated by the SpaceX (and to a somewhat less extent, Tesla) business models, where you build thing A so that you have the resources to build thing B... [repeats] so that you can build thing Z, which is what you actually wanted.

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@idontwa86202030

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leverage to the extreme insane that musk managed to pull it off, even though there's certainly a healthy dose of spotted_plane.jpg at work here

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Nicholas Schiefer

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@idontwa86202030

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I agree that there's some survivorship bias here, but I don't fee like that explains Elon? If it happened once, sure, but again and again? Or maybe SMBC has it right 🙃 smbc-comics.com/comic/program-2

8:21 PM · Jul 25, 2021Twitter Web App

@idontwa86202030

Replying to

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sure, it doesn't *explain* him, both extreme competence and luck were necessary but not sufficient kind of comes with the territory he's operating in. he's *so* far outside the normal range depending on what narrative you like, emphasise one or the other

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Nicholas Schiefer

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@idontwa86202030

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I'm most interested in this from an operational perspective. Suppose you have a business that requires this kind of multi-step iteration to be viable. How do you make it happen "Elon-well"? I don't think it's "hope for good luck", but I don't know what the answer actually is.

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