Venkatesh Rao

When obviously intelligent people seem to spend every last ounce of their advantages to further boringly legible selfish motives (maximizing some weighted sum of sex/money/power for example, and piously devoting small fraction to charity), it makes me wonder wtf happened to them.

Are you really THAT boring/unimaginative? Or that insecure about your talents in those departments that you have to prop up self-esteem by getting the highest measurable rewards available? Life as an extension of 4.0 GPA pursuit?

Still puzzling over the implications of my morning thread. I get the messed up childhood that made horned-shaman guy who he is, but what turns a Josh Hawley into who he is? (obviously smart, Stanford, law clerk etc, but somehow, this is the game he has chosen).

Seems to me, the principal component of the cause breaks down as: Insecurity: 60% Lack of imagination: 30% Psychopathy/Sociopathy: 10% Some other Congressperson called Hawley a psychopath.

I’m sure everybody’s motives (including mine) can be cast in a selfish light, but what makes people interesting to me is self-illegibility. A poet is not necessarily more or less selfish than a banker, but it’s harder to penetrate to the underlying self-interest in writing poetry

Re: my earlier thread, one hypothesis I like is that it takes uncertainty to eat uncertainty (a variant of Ashby’s law that variety eats variety). So if the world seems level 11 uncertain to you, pursue motives that are at least level 11 uncertain to your best introspection.