> What I can say for certain is no executive in her position ever willingly resigns to pursue different passions/spend more time with their family/enjoy retirement or whatever else.
Do you think that's because executives are so exceedingly ambitious, or because pursuing different passions is for some reason less attractive?
It’s because they can’t imagine themselves doing it so they imagine that everyone must be like that. It’s part hubris and part lack of creativity/empathy.
Think about if you’ve ever known someone you’ve been envious of for whatever reason who did something that just perplexed you. “They dumped their gorgeous partner, how could they do that?” “They quit a dream job, how could they do that?” “They moved out of that awesome apartment, how could they do that?” “They dropped out of that elite school, how could they do that?”
Very easily actually.
You’re seeing only part of the picture. Beautiful people are just as annoying as everybody else. Every dream job has a part that sucks.
If you can’t imagine that, you’re not trying hard enough.
You can see this in action in a lot of ways. One good one is the Ultimatum Game:
Most people will end up thinking that they have an ironclad logical strategy but if you ask them about it, it’ll end up that their strategy is treating the other player as a carbon copy of themselves.
I would say that reaching this type of position requires exceeding amount of ambition, drive and craving in the first place, and all and any steps during the process of getting there solidify that by giving the dopamine hits to be addicted to such success, so it is not a case where you can just stop and decide "I'll chill now".
Dopamine hits... I wonder if this explains why the OpenAI folks tweet a lot...
It's kind of weird right, to tweet a lot?
But all these tweets from lower level execs as well.
I mean I love Machine Learning twitter hot takes because it exposes me to interesting ideas (and maybe that is why people tweet) but it seems more about status seeking/marketing than anything else. And really as I learn more, you see that the literature is iterating/optimizing the current fashion.
But maybe no weirder than commenting here I guess though.. maybe this is weird.
Have we all collectively asked ourselves, why do we comment here? It's gotta be
the dopamine.
Do you think that's because executives are so exceedingly ambitious, or because pursuing different passions is for some reason less attractive?