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TheAncientGeek comments on A Dialogue On Doublethink - LessWrong
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Who gets laughed at...Bill Gates or Warren Buffet?
Neither, these days.
How many derogatory memes (in the internet sense, pictures with words on them) exist about Warren Buffet compared to Bill Gates?
You can't deny that one of the two is easier to laugh at. You might believe this to be morally wrong or undesirable for other reasons, but it seems to be obviously true.
Let's throw in another non-geek/geek pair: Justin Bieber and Mark Zuckerberg.
You can't deny that one of the two is easier to laugh at.
I suppose I must just not frequent the right corners of the internet, because I can't remember the last time I saw a derogatory internet-meme about either of them.
And the things I can recall Gates getting laughed at for are mostly geeky inside-baseball. For instance: "640K should be enough for anybody" -- he got laughed at for saying that (even though, so far as anyone can tell, he didn't ever actually say it) but mostly by other geeks. I've seen him admired for being very smart, admired for being a shrewd businessman and buliding a hugely valuable company, excoriated for giving the world a lot of bad software, hated for shady business tactics, laughed at for things other geeks find funny -- but I really can't think of any occasion I've witnessed where he's been laughed at for being geeky. Perhaps I just have friends and colleagues who are too geeky, and all these years the Normal People have been pointing and laughing at Bill Gates for being a geek?
I'm sure there's been a lot more said and done (positive and negative) about Gates than about Buffett, because Gates was founder and CEO of Microsoft -- a company whose products just about everyone in the Western world uses daily and many people have strong feelings about, and that engaged in sufficiently, ah, colourful business practices to get it into hot water with more than one large national government -- and Buffett, well, wasn't. Can you, off the top of your head, think of three things Microsoft has done that you feel strongly about? OK, now what about Berkshire Hathaway?
So, I dunno, maybe Gates is easier to laugh at because he's geekier, but it seems to me there are other more obvious explanations for any difference in laughed-at-ness.
The Simpsons comes to mind as mocking Gates for being geeky, and I'd suggest that Gates gets mocked more than Buffett (I struggle to think of anyone mocking Buffett except Bitcoiners recently after he criticized it); that said, Gates gets mocked a lot less these days than he did in the '90s, and your inability to think of many examples is due to the disappearance of '90s popular media, magazines, Usenet posts, ./ comments, etc, from consciousness.
I'm reminded of this Pinky and the Brain episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyGY8AuS7rU.
Yep. Note the mockery of Gates's monotone voice, arrogance, aversion to personal contact, overuse of computers...
Yes, very likely. (Recall that my original answer was: "Neither, these days." -- emphasis added.) I'm pretty sure I haven't seen the Simpsons episodes in which Gates is mocked, so of course I can't comment on them.
Again: if -- as is very likely the case -- Gates has been mocked much more than Buffett, it seems clear that there are plenty of explanations for this that have nothing to do with his being geekier. I don't see how Gates v Buffett can possibly be much use as an example of how geekiness is undesirable, given all the other factors in play there.
To be fare, I suspect a large number of the anti-Gates memes are by other geeks fighting the open/closed source holy war.
Geeks have most likely absorbed the "geeks are lesser, should be laughed at" meme to a certain extent as well.
Who's more prominent, Bill Gates or Warren Buffet? Yes, Bill Gates gets made fun of more, but he gets more attention in general.
If gets mocked more, he would get more attention.
Making fun of a high status person is a compensating action by low status people. Which person is made fun of depends more on the availability of trivia about that person than on their accomplishments (and geekiness surely is one such trivia). Also at the status high end the variance in any dimension is probably high.
Most trivia aren't funny. Simultaneous high and low status is funny. Dumb sports stars are another example.
(And even if it isn't you will tend to be well served by claiming that is what the behaviors mean. Because that is the side with the power.)
Which one do you mean, social power or structural power?
I'm not sure I agree with Yvain's post.
One issue, with the abortion example:
Well, there are laws limiting the ability of pro-life activists to protest outside abortion clinics. There are no analogous laws for Exxon Mobile.
His claim about how social power can't overcome structural power is dubious. Tell that to Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich or GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner. To be fair to Yvain both these incidents happened after the article was written and it appears he has at least moved in the direction of updating on them.
Also Yvain says:
This is pure BS. Structural power is very easy to notice, look at the org-chart. It is social power, as Yvain defines it, that is much harder to notice.
I mean power. The ability to significantly influence decision relevant outcomes without excessive cost to self. The statement doesn't care where the power is derived and it would sacrifice meaning to make either substitution.
If Bill Gates is mocked more than Warren Buffett, there are other, arguably more plausible reasons for this. Anecdotally, the most frequent cause I've encountered for criticizing or mocking Bill Gates is a dislike of his company, its products, practices, and prevalence.