I take your points individually, but I don’t synthesize them in the way I think you might.
To start, the top 0.01% wealthiest people are far from a representative sample from the public. I would expect them to have statistically different personality traits and perceptions even before attaining massive wealth. There is a causal (albeit stochastic) connection between their drives and their outcomes.
Next — even if they were sampled in a representative way — the journey to reaching such a level changes people. Once there*, it affords opportunities of all kinds that are (a) unavailable to the 99.99% and (b) can be hidden or swept under the rug in various ways.
Path dependence matters! Humans are incredibly adaptable for better and worse. From one lens, we can certainly talk about core evolutionary drives, but the way the top 0.01% manifest these drives in their bubble can feel shocking to the rest of us.
* To be clear, I expect most people at that level continue to strive upwards. There is always someone more powerful, at least in some area, to compare oneself against.
I don’t think we disagree. To say a bit more about my thinking here, let’s take the very rich as one example of unusual people. The very rich mostly got where they are by being really exceptional in one area. Otherwise, they’re not that different from people you actually know. Probably, you know someone who’s got pretty similar psychology to them, absent one or two idiosyncratic traits/quirks e.g. Seymour Cray, who believed machine elves told them to build super computers and thought it was a good idea to listen to them. Probably, you know someone who has crazy supernatural beliefs like that, except their beliefs aren’t as adaptive nor are they that competent. The remaining differences can largely be attributed to the difference in contexts between Seymour Cray and that crazy person you know.
Like, what I’m getting at here is that an unusual person is just a relatively minor neurological variant on some guy you probably know, who was placed in a different context. If their positions were swapped, they’d behave more similarly than would be credited by people who believe the super rich are inhuman demons or whatever.
I take your points individually, but I don’t synthesize them in the way I think you might.
To start, the top 0.01% wealthiest people are far from a representative sample from the public. I would expect them to have statistically different personality traits and perceptions even before attaining massive wealth. There is a causal (albeit stochastic) connection between their drives and their outcomes.
Next — even if they were sampled in a representative way — the journey to reaching such a level changes people. Once there*, it affords opportunities of all kinds that are (a) unavailable to the 99.99% and (b) can be hidden or swept under the rug in various ways.
Path dependence matters! Humans are incredibly adaptable for better and worse. From one lens, we can certainly talk about core evolutionary drives, but the way the top 0.01% manifest these drives in their bubble can feel shocking to the rest of us.
* To be clear, I expect most people at that level continue to strive upwards. There is always someone more powerful, at least in some area, to compare oneself against.
I don’t think we disagree. To say a bit more about my thinking here, let’s take the very rich as one example of unusual people. The very rich mostly got where they are by being really exceptional in one area. Otherwise, they’re not that different from people you actually know. Probably, you know someone who’s got pretty similar psychology to them, absent one or two idiosyncratic traits/quirks e.g. Seymour Cray, who believed machine elves told them to build super computers and thought it was a good idea to listen to them. Probably, you know someone who has crazy supernatural beliefs like that, except their beliefs aren’t as adaptive nor are they that competent. The remaining differences can largely be attributed to the difference in contexts between Seymour Cray and that crazy person you know.
Like, what I’m getting at here is that an unusual person is just a relatively minor neurological variant on some guy you probably know, who was placed in a different context. If their positions were swapped, they’d behave more similarly than would be credited by people who believe the super rich are inhuman demons or whatever.