Conversation

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.
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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?
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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).
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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.
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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
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