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Excellent summary. It's not just Musk that doesn't understand empathy — it's ALL the tech bros.
I remember talking to a coworker at a tech startup once. He was leaving to go work for some like military intelligence spy company. I was like, "But what if they have you work on something fucked up, like spying on innocent people, or sending drones to kill people?" He was like, big shrug, the pay is good.
Some people just don't care about other people. He was nice to people he knew, when it didn't really cost him anything.
Our society isn't really set up to discourage that kind of worldview. That kind of selfish person typically thrives.
It's all powerful people. Many studies show that social power affects the brain, suppressing empathy centers.
As you get more wealth, status or fame, your brain becomes less capable of empathy and closer to the brain of a psychopath.
As long as we have hierarchies, we will be ruled by villains.
Apparently a ton of the tech bros are part of cults in SF that practice rationalism. Some offshoots of rationalism attempt to "jailbreak" the mind into psychopathy. They quite literally teach that psychopathy is a net benefit for the individual and they strive to become psychopathic as a tool for success.
It’s a lot of people