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Steve Byrnes's avatar

I’m not sure I’m convinced that the story is “power changes people” rather than “lots of people were never really wedded to any principles in the first place, and just going with whatever so-called ‘beliefs’ feel right to them in the moment”. Like, right-wingers tended to be in favor of free trade, but then they liked Trump, and Trump said free trade is bad, so now they're against it. Likewise, the left-wing flipped on free trade in the opposite direction, along with the FBI and other things. Everybody flips on executive power and states rights all the time depending on who’s in office. Most of these changes are not examples of people changing their minds *upon personally gaining power*. Instead they’re about people responding to their microenvironment, including adopting the beliefs of people you admire, motivated reasoning, and so on.

I haven't read The Power Broker, but got a second-hand summary from my spouse. An interesting bit was: Supposedly, Robert Moses was a principled reformer before he had power, and super corrupt after. I was confused by this, and then it hit me! Before he had power, being a principled reformer was advantageous to him increasing power, so he motivated-reasoning'ed himself into believing in reform, or at least saying that. After he had power, being corrupt was advantageous to him increasing power, so he motivated-reasoning’ed himself into vice-versa.

My hunch is that Elon Musk is in that category too. Maybe Marc Andressen as well, but I haven’t been paying much attention to him.

IMO SBF had a personality disorder, of a type that’s generally anticorrelated with being a person of principle - https://www.spencergreenberg.com/2023/11/who-is-sam-bankman-fried-sbf-really-and-how-could-he-have-done-what-he-did-three-theories-and-a-lot-of-evidence/

Your example of Dustin Moskovitz calling Tesla the next Enron is I think Bulverism? Maybe he's right, beats me.

(When I saw the title I thought you were going to talk about psychedelics, which are IMO quite a high-stakes irreversible rolling of the dice with respect to your long-term values.)

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Patrick Delaney's avatar

Masterful and I don't know how you don't have more followers.

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