When will we get a vaccine against Billionaire Brain Disease?

Would anyone be surprised by this observation? Wealth and privilege mess up your head.

In 2011, a Berkeley grad student named Paul Piff conducted an experiment that has since become famous in the world of social psychology. Over the course of several weekends, Piff and his research team crouched behind bushes at the intersection of Interstate 80 and Lincoln Highway in Berkeley, California. When a vehicle passed, they would catalog it — “five” for a brand-new BMW, for instance; “one” for a beat-up Honda. Then the researchers would observe the behavior of the car’s driver.

For centuries, humans have studied and tried to understand our own hierarchies — how and why we arrange ourselves into tribes and nations and by what means certain groups and individuals rise to the top. But Piff had realized that we had little data on how wealth — a prime marker of power in our current times — affects the psychology of those who hold it. “In the U.S., we spend a lot of time pathologizing poverty and valorizing aspects of the rich,” he tells me. “I was really interested in the flip side of poverty: If poverty has these effects, then wealth must also, and let’s start to try to uncover what those are. There must be some pathologies there too, right?”

What Piff and his team found at that intersection is profound — and profoundly satisfying — in that it offers hard data to back up what intuition and millennia of wisdom (from Aristotle to Edith Wharton) would have us believe: Wealth tends to make people act like assholes, and the more wealth they have, the more of a jerk they tend to be.

At the intersection the researchers were monitoring, drivers of the most expensive cars were roughly four times more likely to cut others off and three times less likely to stop for pedestrians, even when controlling for factors like the driver’s perceived gender and amount of traffic at the time they were collecting data.

When someone from the research team posed as a pedestrian heading into the crosswalk, almost half of the grade-five cars failed to stop, as if they didn’t even see the person.

I’ve been doing a sloppy, half-assed version of this experiment for a while now — Morris only has two traffic lights on the main street, but all of the corners have crosswalks, and by law cars are expected to stop for pedestrians standing there. They don’t. I’ll step out into the street, not far enough that I’m in danger but far enough that drivers will have to notice my intent to cross, and then I count how many cars zip by before someone stops. Usually it’s not too many, but the ones who pretend I don’t exist are usually driving a monstrous huge shiny pickup truck, of the sort that MAGA like to buy to pretend they’re tough working class guys.

Even better is the corner with a traffic light, and a pedestrian signal to tell you when to cross. When I get the message to cross Atlantic avenue, the oncoming traffic gets a yellow light for a left turn. Many times I’ve started my legal crossing only to have someone in a big SUV decide to rush to make their left and turn right into me. A few times those drivers have been so annoyingly privileged that they honk at me to get out of their way.

You know this kind of behavior is going to have consequences…no, I take that back: it already has terrible consequences. Look at the people at the top of our government — all of them sociopaths. Not a single one I would object to seeing mowed down on main street by an oblivious Ford Super Duty F-450 driver.

…wealth-­related disengagement seems to not be so great for a species for which pro-social cooperation is programmed into our hunter-gatherer DNA. Clay Cockrell, a psychotherapist who caters to ultra-high-net-worth individuals, tells me he thinks of great wealth as subtractive: It doesn’t really add to one’s happiness, but it does take away struggles that can make someone unhappy. Yet it’s subtractive in a different sense, too — contributing to isolation, paranoia, grandiosity, and risk-taking behavior, as well as a pronounced lack of empathy. “As your wealth increases, your empathy decreases. Your ability to relate to other people who are not like you decreases.… It can be very toxic.”

Then in the middle of this article they bring up Darwin, only not Darwin, the bastardized version of evolution promoted by Herbert Spencer. Spencer is high on my long list of 19th century deplorables who invented various rationalizations for treating human beings horribly, justifying Gilded Age excesses and encouraging colonialism and various other kinds of exploitation.

Some of these men found such a justification in social Darwinism and the ideas of Herbert Spencer, a 19th-century psychologist and anthropologist who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” not to explain biological evolution but rather to legitimize social hierarchies: Rich and powerful people are rich and powerful because they have innate traits that make them superior. Never mind the effects of systemic oppression (Spencer was an unapologetic racist) or the fact that, in a functioning democracy, no billionaire is entirely “self-made” (where would Bezos be without taxpayers paving the roads his Amazon trucks clog?) — historians today see a direct line from the social Darwinism of the Gilded Age to DOGE. “[With] tech leadership nowadays, I think the arguments are a little different: They don’t make explicit appeals to survival of the fittest,” says Luke Winslow, author of Oligarchy in America. “But you get phrases like ‘make the world a better place’ and ‘move fast and break things.’ Well, that’s very Darwinian, because if you break things, if you have disruption, catastrophe, the hope is that the strong will survive. You don’t have this crutch of a government allowing the losers and the weaklings to survive; you’ll weed them out. And this idea is really big in Silicon Valley, this justification of the concentration of wealth and power based on this idea that they deserve it. How do you know they deserved it? Well, geez, look at how rich Elon Musk is.”

They aren’t worthy. They’re opportunistic parasites who have latched on to the capitalist system and are taking advantage of its weaknesses. They’re spoiled twits living in a fantasy land that panders to their delusion that they are the best, the smartest, the greatest people who deserve billions of dollars in their pockets, and that the little people are all there to serve them.

There is no clearer example of their stupid ideas than the tech broligarchy’s dream of colonizing Mars, which is not going to happen.

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

Then again, you don’t have to do a cursory examination of the facts of Mars if you believe tech is close to inventing a machine that can change the physical properties of the universe. In 2023, billionaire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman conceded that climate change was a huge problem, but brushed off its hugeness with the contention that super intelligent AI would soon be able to tell us how to make a lot of clean-energy facilities, how to amp up carbon capture, and how to do both of those things quickly and at scale. “What he said was, ‘A good way to solve global warming is to build a kind of machine without a clear definition that no one knows how to build, and then ask it for three wishes,’ ” Becker says with a sigh.

Sam Altman is notorious for his vapid echoing of the preconceptions of whoever he is talking to at the time. It would restore my faith in humanity a tiny bit if he were openly grifting, lying to get his next bolus of VC money, than that he actually believes in that nonsense about AI. I’m afraid I’m leaning more and more to the idea that these people are simply moronically stupid. And massively greedy and selfish.

The next edition of the DSM is going to have to include a long section on Billionaire Brain, the pathology of people given near unlimited access to everything they can dream of. It’s an ugly disease and it seems to be spreading to people who aren’t billionaires, but just dream of becoming billionaires.

Melinda Beck

Not in the market right now, but I’d consider it

I drive a 2011 Honda Fit. It’s an ultra-reliable car, running without a hitch for 14 years now, not even a hiccup. The labels on some of the buttons on the dashboard are wearing off, but that’s the only flaw so far. I feel like this might well be the last car I ever own.

Except…the next generation of Hondas might tempt me to upgrade.

It’s a three hour drive from my house to Minneapolis, and maybe a ballistic trajectory would make the trip quicker.

Also, not exploding is an important safety feature to me.

My purpose in life

I have been enlightened. I know exactly what my role on this Earth is.

Yesterday, my wife found a dead rabbit in the shrubbery in our yard. You couldn’t miss it — the odor was horrific. So of course she sent me out to dispose of it.

It had been disemboweled and left to rot for several days. I found spoor nearby, and I suspect the killer was a dog, since cats tend to be more fastidious and don’t leave large lumps of poop nearby. I scraped it into a garbage bag, and noticed that the entire body cavity was a writhing mass of maggots.

I did not take pictures of that, even if I was impressed. You can thank me for that.

I put the body in our garbage can. Fortunately, garbage pick up was the next day, that is, this morning. I figured I was done.

My wife interrupted me again this morning. She’d gone to bring the trash can into the garage this morning, only it wasn’t empty. She told me it was “insect related,” so it was my job.

The trash can was covered in maggots. They were in masses on the bottom, had crawled up the sides, were covering the lid, and were dripping off the container into the grass.

I will share a photo of the lid.

The rabbit was gone, and we’re talking tens of thousands of homeless maggots crawling everywhere. Everything was covered with maggots, which I guess explains why Mary hadn’t brought the garbage can in.

I used a garden hose to clean it up. There is now a patch of our yard that has been enriched with a wiggly mass of protein, I hope the birds appreciate it.

Jurassic spider tracks!

You need to include a scale with these images, Riley Black!

Finding fossils depends as much on light and time of day as search image. I’ve walked over this Jurassic sandstone sidewalk slab multiple times over 14 years but only today saw the spider tracks, those clusters of three dots. 🧪

I need to know how many tons a Jurassic spider weighed.

The army is fast-tracking corruption right into the officer corps

I have a son who is a major in the army — he worked his way up in the ranks, and he’s hoping to earn a promotion to lieutenant colonel sometime before he retires, but it gets harder and harder the farther up the ladder you climb. Next time I talk to him, I’ll have to tell him he’s been doing it all wrong. He’s about to be outranked.

The U.S. military recently announced that four executives from some of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley have joined the Army Reserve as direct-commissioned officers. The move is part of a push to speed up the adoption of technology in the military, but as the news outlet Task & Purpose points out, it’s pretty unusual.
The Army said in a press release that the four executives are Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, CTO at Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.

It’s not just that they’re being jumped up to high rank without earning it, but they also get a few special perks.

The four men are being commissioned at the high rank of lieutenant colonel as part of a program called Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps. As Task & Purpose notes, the men will get to skip the usual process of taking a Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and they won’t need to complete the Army Fitness Test.

They’re also only going to have to work for about 3 weeks a year, and they’re probably going to be doing everything remotely, so no real soldiers will have to salute them.

The new reservists will serve for about 120 hours a year, according to the Wall Street Journal, and will have a lot of flexibility to work remotely. They’ll work on helping the Army acquire more commercial tech, though it’s not clear how conflict-of-interest issues will be enforced, given the fact that the people all work for companies that would conceivably be selling their wares to the military. In theory, they won’t be sharing information with their companies or “participating in projects that could provide them or their companies with financial gain,” according to the Journal.

If they’re really patriotic, I say send them to bases in Kuwait to prepare for the invasion of Iran. Tip of the spear, baby.

I can’t believe I’m suddenly pro-Iran

I don’t like theocracies, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re the Islamic Iranian kind or the Christian American kind, but Iran has a right to exist, and they are the victims of a surprise attack by Israel (aided by an American distraction). Unfortunately, America is led by an idiot who is demanding unconditional surrender and is itching to get involved on the wrong side — we might find ourselves involved in another pointless war for regime change in the Middle East.

I think we need a debate, and I found one: one side takes the position that “This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism,” while the other side says “No It Won’t.”

A little problem, though, is that it’s the Onion. No one takes them seriously.

Another small problem is that debate is from 2003, and they’re arguing about the Iraq War.

You’d think we’d have learned our lesson…but deja vu, man, deja vu.

Minnesota has lost a thriving business

Are you in the market for a pillow? You could go to MyPillow.com and order one, along with lots of cheap Chinese-made products.

Not for much longer, though. He has been tried for defamation for the last few weeks, because he made false claims against a person at Dominion Voting Systems. He was put on the stand to defend himself, and he used the time to repeat his false claims with more vehemence. His performance has had consequences.

Coomer said during the two-week Lindell trial that his career and life were destroyed by the statements. His lawyers said Lindell either knew the statements were lies, or conveyed them recklessly without knowing if they were true.

Lindell’s lawyers denied the claims and said Frankspeech was not liable for statements made by others. The jury found that eight other statements made by Lindell and others appearing on Frankspeech were not.

Lindell said he went to trial to draw attention to the need to get rid of electronic voting machines that have been targeted in a web of conspiracy theories. He said he used to be worth about $60 million before he started speaking out about the 2020 election and is now $10 million in debt.

He lost the trial and has been fined $2.3 million dollars, a drop in the bucket compared to the $80 million he has thrown away. This is a man who is digging a hole and doesn’t know when to stop.

Run, if you see this in a car

Vance Boelter is cooked. You can see a detailed list of all the evidence he left in his wake, as he fled, and it’s overwhelming. This is going to be a short trial.

I was horrified at the glimpse of the contents of his car.

Who lives like this? If your car contains four (at least) rifles on your seats and stuffed loosely into plastic buckets, your life has taken a sad and desperate turn. When he set off on his shameful tour of legislators’ homes, he could have just looked to his right and seen that he was a wrong, fucked-up person.