One thing I'd highlight is that the mechanism the OP notices in all the actors is a low-cost way of reducing uncertainty.

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

I don't think the author read even the Wikipedia page on Napoleon's invasion of Russia? Napoleon _did_ have reasons for attacking Russia, he _did_ prepare logistics. His motives, rationale, and actions are well-documented and widely studied.

> 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*.

I kind of feel like people know how to human, and how the humans around them human, but someone they've never met but only heard about or seen on TV or in meme posts? No clue at all.

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.

Something I've learned is that in a certain social strata when people do audaciously stupid, its rarely because they lack the common sense to have covered their tracks. Its because they've learned they don't have to. No one is working hard to try and catch them, and even if by some miracle someone does (and people believe them), no government or regulatory body is really interested in punishing them anyway.

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.

Poor article.

The people the author is attacking haven't lost. It might appear to be dumb shit to the author, but it's working.

Also the Napoleon stuff is false equivalence.

The challenge with the world is that it requires nuance, ad hoc thinking, and effortful thinking. The human brain doesn't like putting effort into thinking. It's uncomfortable. It's easier for us to just have one rule, one heuristic, that we can simply apply to many similar situations. This is why ideology exists and is so powerful. You can always find people chanting the same phrase or slogan, over and over, regardless of the circumstance. Because it's easier for them to do that than it is for them to treat every situation as unique and to reason through it from first principles. Hell, sometimes that's just not feasible.

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.

I think the age of social media has made the problem much worse. People are much more focused on how to gain fame and glory, but they can easily distance themselves from taking responsibility for the consequences.

And sometimes people put out hit pieces about companies they don't like, while objectively much worse companies in the same industry are beloved. Who knows why people do things!

Sometimes?

For my mental model how White House politics work, this article was very influential: https://www.thewrap.com/obama-aides-say-veep-accurate-west-w...

> “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."

I would actualy give the not so benefit of the doubt even to powerful people. Everyone does stupid shit all the time.

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.

I disagree with the parts about Trump: he does know what he is doing. Not because it's a well crafted plan of 4D chess, but because he's deeply anxious/insecure and "lie with grandiosity" is a learned survival mechanism to protect his feelings from reality.

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.

I related to this. I think the 4D chess crowd are, like the "I did my own research" crowd projecting a dominance view in the moment, not actually providing a rebuttal.

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

"The Wire" TV show portrays these things well. In it, the powerful people often have the least clue about anything. They are just playing the game and often winning by sheer luck. They also often do fuck up, but because they are powerful, are able to get other people to take the hit for them or build a narrative that hides the fuck up.

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.

We ALL do dumb shit. The shit from powerful people just has more impact.

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

Elons robot obsession is probably more 4d chess / hidden plan theory. At a time when Tesla sales are flagging in Europe despite an enormous surge in overall EV sales due to yet another energy crisis, he's turning Tesla factories into humanoid robot factories to make a robot that doesn't yet work that nobody asked for. I'm sure lots of Tesla fan boys will pay 20k for a robot butler, but an EV fills a need for the average family and an incompetent bipedal Roomba really does not. They should be focused on PR, it's such a short step from where they are now back to being on top of the EV market.

> But none of that stopped him from making one of the dumbest decisions any leader has ever made, because he was arrogant, because he’d gotten away with so much for so long that he confused his luck for a system

Hitler did not start as a particularly religious politician. But after escaping multiple assassination attempts by sheer luck, he was more and more convinced that he was actually chosen by God.

> There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value, and you’ve met them. I am absolutely sure of it. They show up in every comment section and reply thread where someone powerful does something that looks, on its face, like a mistake - and their argument always runs the same way: you don’t understand, this is actually part of a larger plan, there’s a strategy here that you and I can’t see because we’re not operating at that annointed and elevated level…

This kind of thinking becomes a major problem if it creeps into the mind of the powerful person's advisors.

Better title: Sometimes people do dumb shit, even powerful people

The post cleverly and preemptively disparages people who "show up in a thread and claim that everything is part of a larger plan". Posting a picture of Napoleon is cute, but does not prove anything. Those were different times.

- 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.

That is the entire basis of the TV show - "The boys" - and the entire reason for no kings in America.

And how does the price Musk paid for Twitter look now? Sure, maybe it was really a dumb move and he just got lucky. But he's been lucky a hell of a lot.