> Mark Zuckerburg's superpower is being like Jack Sparrow at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean: he steps off one boat just as it's sinking onto another, and he has the humility to not really give a damn which ship he's on. (I say "humility" even as someone frustrated by his net impact on society.)
That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.
The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.
A reference to Larry Ellison as a lawnmower, perhaps? [0]
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
Generally this is relevant advice for thinking about important people. We know little about them, almost all of it is projection that reflects more of my perspective than any reality of the object’s psychology.
Humans love to think we know why someone behaves the way they do. We love to diagnose disorders in strangers based on a very very tiny bit of information.
It is best to treat the decisions as black boxes, or else we are just projecting. I think it’s called the fundamental attribution bias?
No, the takeaway from that talk isn't that we shouldn't judge Ellison's intentions. Quite the opposite, actually. Bryan Cantrill states that Ellison's motives are simple. It's only about money and no other human emotions are involved.
There are so many quotes indicating this:
"What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle."
"This company is very straightforward in its defense. It's about one man, his alter ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity! That's it!"
"If you were to about ask Oracle, 'Oracle what are you about? Larry, what are you about? Why Oracle? Tell me about Oracle.' 'Make money.' ' Okay, yeah yeah I get it.' 'Make money. Make money. Make money. That's what we do. Make money.'"
I have to disagree with your interpretation. “Inflict”, for example, is a very loaded word that speaks to intent or at least the mindset.
I think we all feel like we know who movie stars and celebrities really are. When, in reality, not only do we not know their motivation - often we don’t even know our own.
I mean you can personally disagree with the talk, but what's being said is pretty clear here. The quotes in my previous comment alone make what's unambiguously a judgement about Ellison, and there's so much more from the original talk. Bryan Cantrill even likens Ellison to Nazis in a number of his other talks btw, so it can't get any clearer than that.
Me personally, I think it's fair to judge people by their actions. When a person is amassing billions in wealth at the expense of everyone else, there's nothing more meaningless than wasting time imagining about how that person might possibly be kind and well-meaning deep down.
When you own 98% of Lanai, have a net worth equivalent to the annual gross product of a mid-sized American metropolitan area, and still feel the need to lay off thousands of people to increase your net worth at age 80, that's not a very, very tiny bit of information.
That's a person being presented with the knowledge that his choices will have a very clear set of consequences for society and proceeding with them anyways. Know the "if you press the button, you'll become a millionaire, but someone you don't know will die" thought experiment?
Larry has, multiple times, been told that if he presses the button, he'll get millions of dollars at the extreme expense of people he doesn't know, and done it. I think it's fair to say that at least one person has died from it; mass layoffs result in one additional suicide per 4200 male employees and one per 7100 female employees [0]
It would be, but individual businesses (particularly those with the resources of Oracle) don't like paying the taxes necessary to offer that sort of social safety net past a certain point.
Interesting how helpless voters (and those who could vote but don't) are portrayed, especially in the age of instant access to information in everyone's pocket.
> The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.
Isn't that behavior massively rewarded in the current system of VC-driven capitalism as a general rule? Such founders/companies leach off the society, leave it worse and are given huge valuations and riches. Infact the incentives mean we will see more of such people rise to the top in a ever-worsening feedback cycle until the society puts some checks on them. Which is a extra difficult in this deliberately fragmented environment. Same old loop we can't break out of.
That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.
The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.