Sure, we know the hotshot CEO of COMPANY_NAME_HERE has to put on his pants one leg at a time, but the similarity ends there. They're different, they won't fall for the stupid tricks we fall for. They don't have trouble getting out of bed or ever worry about what their kids are up to. They have CEO spouses that don't ask them to take out the trash or think about which yogurt to buy.

On the flip side, if they do something bad, that's because they're evil. A deep dark evil totally unlike the banal lameness of the people around us. They don't do stupid shit when someone jerks their chain and they get all worked up. Why would they, they're surrounded by money and other powerful people and have servants feeding them brilliant insights all day long. Everything they do is planned and calculated and they think through the damage they're doing to people in excruciating detail.

There's only one species of humans on Earth, and we're all dumb as shit.

> watching an unchecked megalomaniac march 685,000 soldiers into a Russian winter without a fur coat in sight

Napoleon famously crossed the Neman River in *June*.

This broadly goes for non-criminal acts too. Sometimes powerful people do seemingly dumb things because they are only dumb in the context of the incentive structures if one of us tried to do it. In their context, it would be stupid not to egregiously take advantage.

In this situation, yeah, sometimes powerful people do dumb shit. And ideologues come by and say, "You just don't understand the 4d chess!"

But also, sometimes it's the opposite! And the powerful person does something smart, but that's unclear or unfamiliar to the average person without massive wealth/access/power. And ideologues from the peanut gallery come by and say, "Another powerful person doing stupid stuff!"

And of course, the right (but alas more effortful) approach is to evaluate each situation individually, and reason through the factors, and also to wait to see how it turns out, before evaluating.

For example, the author evaluations Elon's purchase of Twitter as an irredeemably stupid decision. And I agree, many things about how that went down seem very stupid. But at the same time, dude has launched an AI lab that's gotten tons of press and exposure thanks in large part to X, combined it with his other companies, and is about to IPO for $1.5T+. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe I don't like it. Maybe there's lots to complain about here, but it's difficult to describe this as a "stupid" move.

Does that mean he was playing 4D chess? Also, maybe not! Maybe he just lucked into this situation. Maybe he didn't foresee it initially, but figured it out later. Or maybe, much more reasonably, he figured that he has tons of optionality and tons of leeway, so even if he doesn't have a good plan to begin with, he'll likely figure it out. Who knows.

It's tough to be a speculator judging from the sidelines with incomplete knowledge. And it's even tougher to avoid allowing our biases and ideologies to compel us to simply shout our beliefs rather than being objective and analytical.

The Russians did intend to fight, and set up redoubts several times close to the invading army, but would always retreat when the Grande Armée approached. The military leadership in Russia was very indecisive, caught up in internal rivalries and disagreements. It didn't help that a large part of their military leadership was German. Aside from small skirmishes, they only gave battle once they were practically standing at the doorstep of Moscow, in the battle of Borodino.

The 400,000 dead soldiers died mostly to disease. Recent studies have found evidence of Borrelia Recurrentis which causes a form of relapsing fever. The western soldiers wouldn't have had any exposure to this bacteria before, so they were particularly weak to it. It was also exceptionally hot during the summer while they were invading (when the majority of soldiers died), which contributed to spread of disease and exhausting the horses. Disease and dying horses did way more damage to the Grande Armée than the Russian military did.

The campaign was a military disaster (though the people at home might not be aware, due to slow information flow and propaganda), but it was not without aim, and it was not obvious to anyone that 70% of the army would die to disease before a single major battle.

I appreciate that you at least didn't propagate the myth that Napoleon invaded in the winter, or that he lost because Kutuzov "outsmarted" him by giving him free passage to Moscow and burning it down.

> There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value

I would hope that the majority of readers here are taking the story with a huge pinch of salt. Napoleon's invasion of Russia is one of the most misunderstood events in modern history. Maybe that's why it's so popular to use it as an anecdote - because it can be molded to mean whatever you like, and people probably won't question you.

It's easy to look at Musk and say, he's done some dumb shit when his dumb shit makes news. But very few of us have the same type of scrutiny that powerful people have. He's done dumb shit, but he's done a lot of pretty good shit across his lifetime.

Nobody is infallible.

> “The funny thing about ‘Veep’ is, we as people who worked in the White House always get asked, okay, what’s the most real? Is it ‘House of Cards? Is it ‘West Wing’? And the answer is, it’s ‘Veep.’ Because you guys nail the fragility of the egos, and the, like, day-to-day idiocy of the decision-making,” Vietor said.

Same vibe as "conspiracy theorists are optimists because they believe there is a great plan."

Via Edward Tufte

"Probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn, this map by Charles Joseph Minard portrays the losses suffered by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band, which is tied to temperature and time scales."

At each step, what does it cost to admit uncertainty or error vs what is gained from doing so? For a powerful person, appearing decisive often has a lower immediate cost than being indecisive. For a committed supporter, doubting the figure they've invested in has social, psychological and identity costs that outweigh any benefit of changing their beliefs.

When the local cost of uncertainty is higher than the perceived benefit of being right, people resolve toward certainty.

So the phenomenon could be seen as a cost-minimizing collapse where beliefs and actions settle on whatever preserves stability, even if it means denying something real.

So: Benefit(belief update) < Cost(belief update) => certainty collapse -> people believe weird shit

And the more you leverage, the more you get.

A lot of current powerful people got lucky at one key moment (often involving imaginary money and hype applied to the stock market). And once they got their big level up, they suddenly became visionaries. That includes some of the more outspoken people that many HN readers idolize.

Many of those people believe their own bullshit, partly because they naturally are insulated within a group of sycophants (who are either groupies or usually looking for a lift up to a level of stature they don’t deserve).

I worry this fate will become more common. Everyone can hit up an artificial sycophant at will who they've been told is super intelligent and yet claims their ideas are full of deep insight.

2. Rich/successful people have a bias for big bets because big bets are how they got this far.

3. People get less sharp as they get older but are more confident because of the successes of their youth.

The "trick" is that cunning powerful people fail forward, so they keep on doing dumb shit with even more impact.

The older I get, the more I think that this TV show is actually the most realistic portrayal of how the real world works there is.

There is however a significant difference in how the fallout of this dumb shit affects people. Powerful people may do dumb shit and then due to the power sweep the consequences away from themselves. While everyone else would have had to face these consequences.

And thats the fundamental issue. Too much power allows dumb decisions to stand unchallenged, and removes the possibility for self correction (due to consequences). Which is fundamentally why the power of singular people needs to be limited.

Musk bought Twitter. And then he succeeded - Trump became elected and he became his right hand. Is it, for Musk, a failure?

Sure, it is not 4D chess. It is just "some people lie as a tool to get their goals".

The same way when politicians introduce surveillance to "protect children" and it makes children less, it is not a failure. It is a win - more control, and more fuel for further campaigns.

It's the deux ex machina of our times. How can Elon be wrong about invading Moscow. You don't understand but I do

It's like expecting a fish to stop swimming - it feels like it's suffocating, it's going to panic and do everything it can to get back into the water, get moving again. The fish isn't playing 4d chess, it's just flipping all over the place until it feels safe again, and then probably forget all of the chaos minutes later.

How much this is applicable to the other examples - Musk, Napoleon - unclear. But saying they do "stupid" things without looking at why they might do stupid things is reductionist/overly simple/can PROBABLY be answered with psychology in most cases.

Powerful people operate on unchecked egos and surround themselves with sycophants.

We should be able to hold 2 things in mind at the same time.: a leader (i.e. Elon Musk) can be extremally charismaric (in his specific nerdy way), can have a great talent in filtering ideas that people pitch to him - optimizing for coolness factor. He can even be able to speak about these ideas for hours in captivating maner. A skill in deal-making, getting financed, inspiring people is also real.

At the same time such person can be extremally narcissistic and impulsive + clearly addicted to public drama focused on him or her.

And these character tratis seem to control him, so this person will always choose the 'more power, more news, more controversy' path even when it clearly doesn't make sense.

Add to it a society with a strong cult of personality (a feature of US culture) and some of the lucky reckless charismatic people will get very powerful eventually and also get rewarded for doubling down on their worse decisions.

They are highly cynical and show an immense confidence in their own predictions despite not being in the thick of it. And usually it follows the same format: the ideology is that the elites are stupid and completely irrational, evil as well as extremely powerful (they can’t see the contradiction in this). So they attempt to “balance the narrative” by showing the other side.

In the past year or so I heard multiple things about A.I.:

I was kept being told that the AI bubble will crash any time soon. Still didn’t happen.

I was told ChatGPT is not here to stay. It’s one of the most downloaded apps in the world.

I was told that Elon firing 80% of staff will cause twitter to crash. It didn’t. It’s running perfectly fine.

The modus operandi seems to be that you may just be cynical about everything because civilisationally important discoveries happen only once a while

- The Iran attack plans go back a long way. Netanyahu tried the same during the Obama administration and was rejected. There are Brookings Institute papers that outline all countries that need to fall before attacking Iran. The last one was Syria that fell in 2024.

- As is evident now, Trump is not MAGA. Vance was an anti-Trumper in 2016 and is the deepest of deep state via his Thiel sponsor. They are just executing the plans.

- The "pro-Russia" sentiment of Vance and Trump appears to be a ruse. They want to make the EU pay more but continue the Ukraine war.

- Vance's "support" for Orban was fake and achieved the intended goal: people voted for the opposite and $90 billion for Ukraine of EU money is unblocked.

- Vance deliberately torpedoed the Pakistan peace talks.

- Democrat protests are weak. Hillary Clinton only criticizes the (ostensible) lack of a plan.

The plan is to weaken Russia, China and the EU. The latter two are targeted by high energy prices and increased US dependencies in the case of the EU.

The problem is not lone commentators pointing all this out. The problem is that there is a concerted effort to blame all of this on Trump and Israel. Blaming Israel was forbidden prior to the Iran war, now it is a mainstream excuse promoted by mainstream media, left and right wing podcasts and almost all Internet commenters.

That is a deliberate strategy to distract from long term goals.