"They actually have a great contempt for expertise. They don't see it as necessary because they think that they're the smartest people who've ever lived, because they're the wealthiest people who've ever lived. If they were wrong about anything, then why would they have been so financially successful? This is also where you get the obsession with things like prediction markets. They believe that there are super predictors, that expertise is not necessary to understand or predict what's going to happen in the world, and that they themselves must be experts because they have enormous amounts of money.
"There's a Homer Simpson quote that I like for thinking about this. It's just something that Homer blurts out when someone's talking about someone who lived 150 years ago. He says, "If he's so smart, how come he's dead?" When faced with expertise, they'd be like, "Well, if he's so smart, how come he's poor?" They believe that everything can be quantified, like the utilitarian dream, the eugenicist's dream, a person's IQ, and that money is a good measure of how much someone is worth. So they must be the best and smartest and greatest people who have ever lived."
"Adam Becker: I've got a magnet on my fridge right now that says the heat death is coming. Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics. Others claim that their ideas are thermodynamically inevitable because they've misunderstood thermodynamics. But either way, they've got to grapple with it because it's the ultimate source of these limits. If nothing else stops you, thermodynamics will stop you because entropy is always going to increase."
The usual HN response to wealth inequality is "why do you care how much they have?" The answer is, of course, that money is power and the power that many of the wealthy are exercising is not to the benefit of most people.
Many years ago I heard a mathematician speaking about some open problem and he said, "Sure, it's possible that there is a simple solution to the problem using basic techniques that everyone has just missed so far. And if you find that solution, mathematics will pat you on the head and tell you to run off and play.
"Mathematics advances by solving problems using new techniques because those techniques open up new areas of mathematics."
The only confirmed example I know of is Harley-Davidson, roughly during the boom of cruiser motorcycles (1995-2010?): They only ran one shift, but the PR of waiting lists and extremely high instant resale prices made the choice appealing in the face of the capital costs.
The important part is at the end of the article: "For those interested in building a stronger foundation in logic, the Open Logic Project provides excellent free educational resources on propositional and predicate logic, formal proof systems, and other topics such as modal logic and set theory - all targetted towards a non-mathematical audience."
"I began to see TIs like Luca as a group of individuals who are caught between two competing narratives.... The second narrative – the TI narrative – is that if you’re having these sorts of experiences, nothing is wrong with your mind. Your perceptual and reasoning abilities are functioning exactly the way they’re designed to. Unfortunately, you are the victim of gang-stalking or electronic harassment. Despite your suffering, however, there is hope: you can band together with other TIs in a global movement to expose your attackers and dismantle their techniques."
This isn't a value-neutral belief. It has consequences and some of those aren't pretty.