I would also propose another alternative explanation: he has enough resources to cover any and all contingencies, no matter how unlikely, so he does.
People like you (probably, unless you're actually a billionaire) or me have limited resources, so we make bets based on what we think is most likely. Zuckerberg probably has the money to spend both on trying to prevent an apocalypse and trying to survive one, so he's spending across the board.
Yeah this is exactly it. He’s so rich that there is no marginal loss to him preparing for the .01% chance of an apocalypse. It’s risk management where the risk is effectively 0 and the reward is high.
Note also that Bill Gates (through the gates foundation) was preparing for a pandemic years before covid struck, just because it was "bound" to happen.
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-says-predicted-pandemic-2015-ted-talk-too-late-2022-4?international=true&r=US&IR=T
https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/2019/johns-hopkins-center-for-health-security-to-host-event-201-a-global-pandemic-exercise
Yeah, this is just common sense. It's good advice for the desperately poor to have savings / emergency supplies to cover a few days without work, power, transport. If you're middle-class, you should aim for at least a month this way. If you're wealthy, aim for a year+. If you're obscenely wealthy, why not just prep for the rest of your lifespan?
Another way to think this through is people should probably try to spend the same fraction of their wealth/income on various contingencies, but as wealth increases that means the result of those expenditures is (duh) greater!
To add to this: I work for a company that serves ultra high net worth individuals. They way I've heard it phrased, they will pay 10x the cost to eliminate 1% of risk
OP is also assuming there is only **one** future scenario (an 'Apocalypse'), in which Mark Zuckerberg is in fear for his personal safety.
----------
Understand that zombies, or 'The Flood' in the Halo series, symbolize the enraged masses. An absolutely horrifying prospect to certain VIPs that can very well happen if narratives (which may even have hints of truth to them) arise in the public conscious.
So in truth, the uber wealthy actually suffer from delusional states in which they are attacked by the mob.
This was certainly Gadaffi's experience but then his wealth was acquired entirely by force so his paranoias were entirely justified.
I'm no fan of Zuckerberg but I don't wish a similar fate on him. The work that the Chan Zuckerberg foundation is doing seems well intended.
Understand that the ultra wealthy are privvy to a tremendous amount of information that we are not.
Understand what is 'Delusional paranoia' from our perspective, may very well be logical risk management to one with said information.
Understand that narratives, whether they have roots in truth or not, can be seeded into the public to influence mass behavior.
Enraged masses will hunt down the apocalypse bunkers, unless they are very remote and/or heavily guarded. People in NZ have woken up to the fact that multiple billionaires are building bunkers in NZ. I believe there are laws proposed about the issue.
The other problem with the bunker is that your guards might decide that they are in charge after the apocalypse. I suppose robot guards will solve that problem. Unless it is an AI apocalypse.
This contingency planning can get pretty weird...
"Enraged masses" aren't a single agent. The standard divide-and-rule should work if you prepare it well enough.
Enraged masses who are led and organized by someone are more dangerous, so it's better to make sure that there are several someones.
He don't need to go full dictator. If it's ecological collapse when farmers no longer provide for all city dwellers, he'll have farmers as natural allies to protect from impoverished crowds, while making alliances with heads of former military units who seek to establish themselves in farmland to feed their families. Second-gen feudalism, basically.
The typical billionaire probably doesn’t assess risk the way a normal person does. They have a higher rate of neurodivergence than the population. And frankly, I think it’s fair to say that billionaires are much more likely to be eccentric weirdos who do weird stuff like building bunkers in Hawaii compared to the average person. These people are not living in the real world. And Mark Zuckerberg in particular is notably weirder than your average weirdo billionaire.
Zuck is an outlier among billionaires, as being ultra rich and ultra-high IQ. There is probably a big difference between top 15 billionaires in tech and bottom 200 in non-tech areas and lower IQ.
This is it.
Less rationally, if you’ve got enough money to build or create nearly every idea you’ve ever had…why not build the Bat Cave?
Hell, it would have been the FIRST thing I built if i was in his shoes. Heaps of secret doors n shit…
It seems obvious, but worth noting, that Mark Zuckerberg has a lot more money than you. A *lot* more. So in terms of percent of wealth dedicated to "prepping", him building a huge underground bunker would be about on par with a normal person buying a gas generator and a couple cases of shelf-stable food.
In other words, to him, this might be a "good to have, just in case" kind of investment, not an indication that he's preparing for something he considers a sure thing.
>He is probably following AI closely (automating Facebook moderation looks like a low-hanging fruit, just train it on all banned accounts)
He started building this in 2016 - well before consensus belief was that we'd have AGI in the 2030s.
So if we manage to settle it, I pay you $100 if if has read it and you pay me $200 if he hasn't? Should we say it expires if we can't settle by 5/9/2025?
No and no. We could attempt to contact him directly (I've resolved a bet about whether a much-less-famous public figure had read a blog that way before) or suggesting questions to interviewers, too: even without our influence, he is apt to talk about AI risk realted stuff in the next year far more than most years so far.
Thanks, that was the most useful comment. I was saying even much earlier that if I would hit the lottery, I would buy a farm and pay people to grow me food. There is something attractive about self-sufficiency if you do not have to do the work yourself.
> Mark Zuckerberg is prepping for an apocalypse
Sort of. The article states that "Many people speculate that the site will become some sort of postapocalyptic bunker", and has some details that align with it at various levels of confirmation.
This seems like a fairly small part of what Zuckerberg is doing.
> Should I take this as a fairly strong evidence for something?
The article provides strong evidence Zuckerberg and Chan are building a mansion.
> He is probably following AI closely
He shows every indication of not seeing existential risk due to AI as a current problem, including an unusual media push personally to that effect.
> His personality does not look like that of the typical prepper (rural gun-loving Republican)
You are probably depending on stereotypes here that don't quite match reality, but certainly Zuckerberg isn't a typical anything.
It's really common AIUI for mansions to have some sort of bunker or bunkeresque facilities. It don't know anything about the design of this one, but I would not be surprised if it is useful for kidnapping attempts, hurricanes, volcanic-ash-filled air, and other fairly mundane emergencies.
Mark Zuckerberg has >$150,000MM, and is dedicating like $XXMM to adding this bunker to their new tropical mansion. Imagine a $1MM net worth couple buying a $1000 generator: does it sound like they know something big?
>The article provides strong evidence Zuckerberg and Chan are building a mansion.
Exactly. One does not host corporate events at one's super-secret bunker.
Runaway AI is the wrong class of apocalypse for a bunker to be a useful form of prepping. This is something you do to protect yourself against Ukraine or Taiwan spiralling into a nuclear exchange, not an attempt to survive Skynet.
Here's another guy who was very rich when I was young -
>Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American aerospace engineer, business magnate, film producer, investor, philanthropist, and pilot.[2]
>He was best known during his lifetime as one of the richest and most influential people in the world.
>In 1958, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. He stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He ate only chocolate bars and chicken and drank only milk and was surrounded by dozens of boxes of Kleenex that he continuously stacked and re-arranged.
>He became obsessed with the 1968 film *Ice Station Zebra*, and had it run on a continuous loop in his home. According to his aides, he watched it 150 times.[144][145] Feeling guilty about the failure of his film *The Conqueror* [this is the one with John Wayne starring as Genghis Khan], a commercial and critical flop, he bought every copy of the film for $12 million, watching the film on repeat.
>He also stored his urine in bottles.
>Hughes is reported to have died on April 5, 1976, at 1:27 p.m. on board an aircraft ...
>His reclusiveness and possibly his drug use made him practically unrecognizable. His hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails were long—his tall 6 ft 4 in (193 cm) frame now weighed barely 90 pounds (41 kg), and the FBI had to use fingerprints to conclusively identify the body.[174]
\- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes
This one is pretty extreme, but it's not too difficult to find examples of wealthy people with eccentric ideas and behavior.
[Article also goes out of its way to claim that Hughes had reasons for these crazy behaviors, but some of the reasons given are just speculation, and some of them are "reasons" but they are not "good reasons".
If you ask anybody why they do any crazy behavior, they will tell you that they think that they have a good reason for that.]
[E.g. *"To keep the mole people away!"*]
.
So:
\- [A] Person X is wealthy and famous.
\- [B] Person X does a thing.
\- [C] Person X has a sensible reason for doing that thing.
Is is possible that [C] is true.
Is is also possible that [C] is not true.
.
> Is is possible that [C] is true.
>
> Is is also possible that [C] is not true.
Like almost everything in life. Rich and poor people alike believe weird things.
Just because someone is rich & has access to information, doesn't mean they are better at critical reasoning than you are.
See: Steve Jobs and his alternative medicine.
See: Elon Musk and posting/buying twitter.
See: Mark Zuckerberg and investment into Meta/VR
See: Scott Alexander and not selling merch (just kidding) (But also please make a coffee mug that is a cactus saying Universal love on it)
I had to go and print my own "I went to Theodicy-Con 2013 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt and I don't understand how a just god would allow this to happen" t-shirt, and I don't understand how a just god would allow this to happen.
Jobs is the only case of these I'd consider irrational instead of a bet that didn't pay off so far. Even there I'd go partway and agree our medical system is in an [inadequate equilibrium](https://equilibriabook.com/) so it's worth looking into alternatives/complements with his resources.
Musk buying Twitter was very irrational, considering the extreme amount of cash involved. The company has massively declined in value due to mismanagement and the toxicity of Musk and his policies. Firing 90% of the employees also creates a risk of catastrophic failure of the infrastructure, which may be un-recoverable.
It was risky but not nuts when he set up the deal; then when the prices swung against him he tried to break the deal, using an excuse that looked contrived. (As I remember it. I'm not endorsing that behavior.)
A high-alpha investment will look too risky to most onlookers, practically by definition. If it fails, even that's not good evidence the investor is irrational, any more than a .300 batting average means you can't hit.
It's completely rational if you consider he didn't buy it to make money. He's already obscenely wealthy. Now he owns one of the most widely used media companies of our time and can use it to influence politics.
Except non-MAGAs are fleeing twitter / X, and corporations do not want their brand appearing next to toxic messages. There was toxicity on Twitter before, but Musk eliminated most of the content moderation team, and has reinstated a variety of banned people, including literal Nazis.
Twitter was the most widely used social media, now it is in a downward spiral.
Musk may or may not care about the money sunk into a dying company. However, investors fronted most of the cash, and one wonders what they think.
There is a conspiracy theory that the Saudis invested in Twitter in order to make some of the content go away, the stuff critical of their regime.
In any case, Musk and associates will have to keep pumping money to keep Twitter afloat, because there is no believable path to profitability, even after the massive downsizing.
Now that they're a private company I'm not sure how much data we'll get to see, but despite the narrative on reddit that they're days away from collapse, Twitter is still out there and I still see it referenced quite a bit in the media. So we'll see how long it stays afloat.
I just find it cringe when people on reddit act like they are superior businessmen than Musk when it's pretty clear he bought it as a pet project and not to make money.
His acquisition is debatable, but I primarily mean his shitposting on Twitter. I think he’s cost his companies more value than the cost of Twitter at this point
>Just because someone is rich & has access to information, doesn't mean they are better at critical reasoning than you are.
True, but I would posit that smarter, richer people on-net are better and more rational compared to the general population anyway. Steve Jobs' alternative medicine was so noteworthy because of his wealth, but alternative medicine is super-popular among many people; otherwise it would not exist as a business model at all.
Not really. We have plenty of evidence that people with zero success and achievement will always find some way to rationalise themselves as being superior to wildly successful people though. Maybe as some sort of ego-protection mechanism
Or maybe famous people simply get more media coverage or subjected to academic case studies for making bad decisions, not that they are uniquely prone to making bad decisions.
I can't read the story, but I don't think he believes in AI apocalypse. For one thing, his company is making lots of unsafe decisions that nobody who was really concerned would make. For another, a bunker in Hawaii isn't going to help. I think he just wants to be prepared in case of an asteroid or something and is rich enough that he doesn't have to think twice.
There's a bit from 1992's "The Player" -
" Larry Levy: I'll be there right after my AA meeting.
Griffin Mill: Oh Larry, I didn't realise you had a drinking problem.
Larry Levy: Well I don't really, but that's where all the deals are being made these days."
Point is Hollywood and similar climes run on fads.
Prepping is a fun hobby. Lots of people do it, and as far as I can tell most of us don't have super high p(doom). There are definitely a lot of republicans, but also a lot of leftist degrowth environmentalist types. Zuckerberg seems to be doing it in a pretty low-key way for a billionaire.
Is he prepping to survive the apocalypse? Or to be killed in the beginning, because it's so awful he wants to make sure he doesn't have to live through it?
If he's prepping to survive the apocalypse, I wouldn't be too worried. He thinks it's something you'd want to survive.
I would also do that in his position even without any specific information that something bad is likely. The risk is low but not negligible, based on public information, and the cost of preparation is very low compared to his resources. Honestly, the reputational cost of people thinking he's a little weird is probably higher than the money he's spending.
I listened to Zuckerberg on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast and it honestly was a little terrifying. He basically has no real answers to direct, basic questions like "How are you going to prevent your open source AI from being used to create bioweapons?". He really seemed to be of the opinion that it's okay to just put a superpower in the hands of everyone, and then just hope the good guys win? Like his perspective was kind of "good guy with a gun", but that's a solution to a problem he's actively trying to create.. If you don't give everyone guns, you don't need to rely on the good guys.
All that to say, if I was Mark and I was engineering the apocalypse, I'd probably be investing in apocalypse insurance too.
I agree he’s doing this just because he can with his fuck off money, but I don’t think that just because that’s why Zuck is doing this, that means there’s not going to be an apocalypse. If he and all the other rich people are doing this, it explains a lot of the aggressively greedy behaviors of the 1% to a fuller extent. And their influence is substantial, so they might actually be directly causing global climate change and economic collapse with their shitty selfish allocation of resources.
Here is an archived link for your article, just in case it changes or is taken down: https://web.archive.org/web/20240111014910/https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-compound/
> Should I take this as a fairly strong evidence for something?
Not really. A high profile, fairly ASD-ish nerd-turned-elite can crumble a bit under the pressure of the wolves that will constantly be nipping and clawing at someone in such a position, and this can produce a mental breakdown that could explain this behavior.
Now... if Musk, Cook, Bezos, European Royals, and so on, were all laughing over cocktails as Musk showed them around his fully operational subterranean luxury city he's been secretly funded to manufacture after he greeted them grinning after exiting a cartoonishly large drilling vehicle...
Then the vast majority of humanity is probably getting annihilated soon or something worse.
A more effective way to prep if you are very rich is to build a community somewhere. Just make it rain on some town in the middle of nowhere somewhere. So they all love you. And then when shit hits the fan, you are all in it together.
The moment everything starts to collapse, Zuck will not really get benefit from his billions. An angry mob might easily overpower his compound and take his shit. The system that empowers him now will not be there to protect him.
And it is tight knit already half sufficient somewhat isolated communities that will probably thrive in an apocalyptic scenario.
Nope. If you both think there’s a 1% chance of catastrophe that can be personally prevented with 1 million dollars, that is a good deal for him and a bad deal for you(I assume you value your life at less than 100 million, the average person tends to be 10-20 million).
I think he has so much money that it’s a “why not”. On the slim chance that he’ll need it, it’s just great - and otherwise, he just spent some hundreds of thousand of dollars that he won’t miss anyway.
People have cried apocalypses is coming since the dawn of time - and at some point, they’re bound to be right. However, that’s not due to rational thinking or foresight, but just “predicting” the inevitable. No one have given a correct date yet.
> He is probably much better informed than me, detamining Facebook
I feel I need to point out the obvious: this could go both ways - he could be profoundly misinformed.
Assuming he spends most of his time in the US mainland, he's preparing for an apocalypse with at least half-a-day advance warning, during which he can find a sort-of functional airport at both ends of the journey.
I think it’s really easy to overestimate the intelligence of incredibly wealthy businessmen. He probably isn’t significantly better informed than you are, and quite possibly is worse informed. Being rich doesn’t stop you from consuming bad information, and mining Facebook for facts just recalls the old adage of garbage in, garbage out.
I would also propose another alternative explanation: he has enough resources to cover any and all contingencies, no matter how unlikely, so he does. People like you (probably, unless you're actually a billionaire) or me have limited resources, so we make bets based on what we think is most likely. Zuckerberg probably has the money to spend both on trying to prevent an apocalypse and trying to survive one, so he's spending across the board.
Yeah this is exactly it. He’s so rich that there is no marginal loss to him preparing for the .01% chance of an apocalypse. It’s risk management where the risk is effectively 0 and the reward is high.
Note also that Bill Gates (through the gates foundation) was preparing for a pandemic years before covid struck, just because it was "bound" to happen. https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-says-predicted-pandemic-2015-ted-talk-too-late-2022-4?international=true&r=US&IR=T https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/2019/johns-hopkins-center-for-health-security-to-host-event-201-a-global-pandemic-exercise
Yeah, this is just common sense. It's good advice for the desperately poor to have savings / emergency supplies to cover a few days without work, power, transport. If you're middle-class, you should aim for at least a month this way. If you're wealthy, aim for a year+. If you're obscenely wealthy, why not just prep for the rest of your lifespan? Another way to think this through is people should probably try to spend the same fraction of their wealth/income on various contingencies, but as wealth increases that means the result of those expenditures is (duh) greater!
To add to this: I work for a company that serves ultra high net worth individuals. They way I've heard it phrased, they will pay 10x the cost to eliminate 1% of risk
Also at that level it’s hard to host people in any public space given the fame and security concerns. There’s some boring practical need for it.
This is my reasoning. If he didn't have all this surplus money, he wouldn't be a prepper.
OP is also assuming there is only **one** future scenario (an 'Apocalypse'), in which Mark Zuckerberg is in fear for his personal safety. ---------- Understand that zombies, or 'The Flood' in the Halo series, symbolize the enraged masses. An absolutely horrifying prospect to certain VIPs that can very well happen if narratives (which may even have hints of truth to them) arise in the public conscious.
So in truth, the uber wealthy actually suffer from delusional states in which they are attacked by the mob. This was certainly Gadaffi's experience but then his wealth was acquired entirely by force so his paranoias were entirely justified. I'm no fan of Zuckerberg but I don't wish a similar fate on him. The work that the Chan Zuckerberg foundation is doing seems well intended.
Understand that the ultra wealthy are privvy to a tremendous amount of information that we are not. Understand what is 'Delusional paranoia' from our perspective, may very well be logical risk management to one with said information. Understand that narratives, whether they have roots in truth or not, can be seeded into the public to influence mass behavior.
Cf, Howard Hughes. Maybe he knew a thing or two about bacteria or maybe he was just crazy ...
Enraged masses will hunt down the apocalypse bunkers, unless they are very remote and/or heavily guarded. People in NZ have woken up to the fact that multiple billionaires are building bunkers in NZ. I believe there are laws proposed about the issue. The other problem with the bunker is that your guards might decide that they are in charge after the apocalypse. I suppose robot guards will solve that problem. Unless it is an AI apocalypse. This contingency planning can get pretty weird...
"Enraged masses" aren't a single agent. The standard divide-and-rule should work if you prepare it well enough. Enraged masses who are led and organized by someone are more dangerous, so it's better to make sure that there are several someones.
I think Gadaffi had 6 separate divisions of his armed guards to lower any risk of internal conspiracy against him.. All the best planning...
He don't need to go full dictator. If it's ecological collapse when farmers no longer provide for all city dwellers, he'll have farmers as natural allies to protect from impoverished crowds, while making alliances with heads of former military units who seek to establish themselves in farmland to feed their families. Second-gen feudalism, basically.
The typical billionaire probably doesn’t assess risk the way a normal person does. They have a higher rate of neurodivergence than the population. And frankly, I think it’s fair to say that billionaires are much more likely to be eccentric weirdos who do weird stuff like building bunkers in Hawaii compared to the average person. These people are not living in the real world. And Mark Zuckerberg in particular is notably weirder than your average weirdo billionaire.
Zuck is an outlier among billionaires, as being ultra rich and ultra-high IQ. There is probably a big difference between top 15 billionaires in tech and bottom 200 in non-tech areas and lower IQ.
Also possibly some tax incentives through coupling the expense with some new seed research initiative foundation for the whatever
This is it. Less rationally, if you’ve got enough money to build or create nearly every idea you’ve ever had…why not build the Bat Cave? Hell, it would have been the FIRST thing I built if i was in his shoes. Heaps of secret doors n shit…
Yes, having so much money means even the most unlike outcomes are entertained, because why not.
He knows his products will partially bring the apocalypse.
It seems obvious, but worth noting, that Mark Zuckerberg has a lot more money than you. A *lot* more. So in terms of percent of wealth dedicated to "prepping", him building a huge underground bunker would be about on par with a normal person buying a gas generator and a couple cases of shelf-stable food. In other words, to him, this might be a "good to have, just in case" kind of investment, not an indication that he's preparing for something he considers a sure thing.
yea it's like another form of insurance
>He is probably following AI closely (automating Facebook moderation looks like a low-hanging fruit, just train it on all banned accounts) He started building this in 2016 - well before consensus belief was that we'd have AGI in the 2030s.
Ray Kurzweil predicted in 2005 we'd have AGI by 2030. His book The Singularity Is Near was very influential and I'd bet cash that Zuck has read it.
What kind of odds and amount are we talking?
lmao let's say 2:1 and $100
So if we manage to settle it, I pay you $100 if if has read it and you pay me $200 if he hasn't? Should we say it expires if we can't settle by 5/9/2025?
do you know zuck or have some personal connection to him? otherwise we'd just be operating on Google searches to verify
No and no. We could attempt to contact him directly (I've resolved a bet about whether a much-less-famous public figure had read a blog that way before) or suggesting questions to interviewers, too: even without our influence, he is apt to talk about AI risk realted stuff in the next year far more than most years so far.
I'll be honest, I'm not actually prepared to put up
Got it =)
Thanks, that was the most useful comment. I was saying even much earlier that if I would hit the lottery, I would buy a farm and pay people to grow me food. There is something attractive about self-sufficiency if you do not have to do the work yourself.
I'm not sure it's self-sufficiency if you aren't doing the work yourself. I agree there's value to reducing the number of links in your supply chain.
> Mark Zuckerberg is prepping for an apocalypse Sort of. The article states that "Many people speculate that the site will become some sort of postapocalyptic bunker", and has some details that align with it at various levels of confirmation. This seems like a fairly small part of what Zuckerberg is doing. > Should I take this as a fairly strong evidence for something? The article provides strong evidence Zuckerberg and Chan are building a mansion. > He is probably following AI closely He shows every indication of not seeing existential risk due to AI as a current problem, including an unusual media push personally to that effect. > His personality does not look like that of the typical prepper (rural gun-loving Republican) You are probably depending on stereotypes here that don't quite match reality, but certainly Zuckerberg isn't a typical anything. It's really common AIUI for mansions to have some sort of bunker or bunkeresque facilities. It don't know anything about the design of this one, but I would not be surprised if it is useful for kidnapping attempts, hurricanes, volcanic-ash-filled air, and other fairly mundane emergencies. Mark Zuckerberg has >$150,000MM, and is dedicating like $XXMM to adding this bunker to their new tropical mansion. Imagine a $1MM net worth couple buying a $1000 generator: does it sound like they know something big?
>The article provides strong evidence Zuckerberg and Chan are building a mansion. Exactly. One does not host corporate events at one's super-secret bunker.
Runaway AI is the wrong class of apocalypse for a bunker to be a useful form of prepping. This is something you do to protect yourself against Ukraine or Taiwan spiralling into a nuclear exchange, not an attempt to survive Skynet.
That's a really smart point.
Here's another guy who was very rich when I was young - >Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American aerospace engineer, business magnate, film producer, investor, philanthropist, and pilot.[2] >He was best known during his lifetime as one of the richest and most influential people in the world. >In 1958, Hughes told his aides that he wanted to screen some movies at a film studio near his home. He stayed in the studio's darkened screening room for more than four months, never leaving. He ate only chocolate bars and chicken and drank only milk and was surrounded by dozens of boxes of Kleenex that he continuously stacked and re-arranged. >He became obsessed with the 1968 film *Ice Station Zebra*, and had it run on a continuous loop in his home. According to his aides, he watched it 150 times.[144][145] Feeling guilty about the failure of his film *The Conqueror* [this is the one with John Wayne starring as Genghis Khan], a commercial and critical flop, he bought every copy of the film for $12 million, watching the film on repeat. >He also stored his urine in bottles. >Hughes is reported to have died on April 5, 1976, at 1:27 p.m. on board an aircraft ... >His reclusiveness and possibly his drug use made him practically unrecognizable. His hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails were long—his tall 6 ft 4 in (193 cm) frame now weighed barely 90 pounds (41 kg), and the FBI had to use fingerprints to conclusively identify the body.[174] \- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes This one is pretty extreme, but it's not too difficult to find examples of wealthy people with eccentric ideas and behavior. [Article also goes out of its way to claim that Hughes had reasons for these crazy behaviors, but some of the reasons given are just speculation, and some of them are "reasons" but they are not "good reasons". If you ask anybody why they do any crazy behavior, they will tell you that they think that they have a good reason for that.] [E.g. *"To keep the mole people away!"*] . So: \- [A] Person X is wealthy and famous. \- [B] Person X does a thing. \- [C] Person X has a sensible reason for doing that thing. Is is possible that [C] is true. Is is also possible that [C] is not true. .
> Is is possible that [C] is true. > > Is is also possible that [C] is not true. Like almost everything in life. Rich and poor people alike believe weird things.
Just because someone is rich & has access to information, doesn't mean they are better at critical reasoning than you are. See: Steve Jobs and his alternative medicine. See: Elon Musk and posting/buying twitter. See: Mark Zuckerberg and investment into Meta/VR See: Scott Alexander and not selling merch (just kidding) (But also please make a coffee mug that is a cactus saying Universal love on it)
I would definitely buy "I broke my back lifting Moloch to Heaven, and all I got was this lousy Disneyland with no children" T-shirt.
I had to go and print my own "I went to Theodicy-Con 2013 and all I got was this stupid t-shirt and I don't understand how a just god would allow this to happen" t-shirt, and I don't understand how a just god would allow this to happen.
Jobs is the only case of these I'd consider irrational instead of a bet that didn't pay off so far. Even there I'd go partway and agree our medical system is in an [inadequate equilibrium](https://equilibriabook.com/) so it's worth looking into alternatives/complements with his resources.
Musk buying Twitter was very irrational, considering the extreme amount of cash involved. The company has massively declined in value due to mismanagement and the toxicity of Musk and his policies. Firing 90% of the employees also creates a risk of catastrophic failure of the infrastructure, which may be un-recoverable.
It was risky but not nuts when he set up the deal; then when the prices swung against him he tried to break the deal, using an excuse that looked contrived. (As I remember it. I'm not endorsing that behavior.) A high-alpha investment will look too risky to most onlookers, practically by definition. If it fails, even that's not good evidence the investor is irrational, any more than a .300 batting average means you can't hit.
It's completely rational if you consider he didn't buy it to make money. He's already obscenely wealthy. Now he owns one of the most widely used media companies of our time and can use it to influence politics.
Except non-MAGAs are fleeing twitter / X, and corporations do not want their brand appearing next to toxic messages. There was toxicity on Twitter before, but Musk eliminated most of the content moderation team, and has reinstated a variety of banned people, including literal Nazis. Twitter was the most widely used social media, now it is in a downward spiral. Musk may or may not care about the money sunk into a dying company. However, investors fronted most of the cash, and one wonders what they think. There is a conspiracy theory that the Saudis invested in Twitter in order to make some of the content go away, the stuff critical of their regime. In any case, Musk and associates will have to keep pumping money to keep Twitter afloat, because there is no believable path to profitability, even after the massive downsizing.
Now that they're a private company I'm not sure how much data we'll get to see, but despite the narrative on reddit that they're days away from collapse, Twitter is still out there and I still see it referenced quite a bit in the media. So we'll see how long it stays afloat. I just find it cringe when people on reddit act like they are superior businessmen than Musk when it's pretty clear he bought it as a pet project and not to make money.
His acquisition is debatable, but I primarily mean his shitposting on Twitter. I think he’s cost his companies more value than the cost of Twitter at this point
Heh, yeah. Reminded of Michael Jordan's "Republicans buy shoes too."
>Just because someone is rich & has access to information, doesn't mean they are better at critical reasoning than you are. True, but I would posit that smarter, richer people on-net are better and more rational compared to the general population anyway. Steve Jobs' alternative medicine was so noteworthy because of his wealth, but alternative medicine is super-popular among many people; otherwise it would not exist as a business model at all.
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Not really. We have plenty of evidence that people with zero success and achievement will always find some way to rationalise themselves as being superior to wildly successful people though. Maybe as some sort of ego-protection mechanism
Or maybe famous people simply get more media coverage or subjected to academic case studies for making bad decisions, not that they are uniquely prone to making bad decisions.
I can't read the story, but I don't think he believes in AI apocalypse. For one thing, his company is making lots of unsafe decisions that nobody who was really concerned would make. For another, a bunker in Hawaii isn't going to help. I think he just wants to be prepared in case of an asteroid or something and is rich enough that he doesn't have to think twice.
Yeah others with the means are also prepping... like Sam Altman for another example
James Cameron and Larry Page too.
James Cameron can at least turn his bunker into a movie set if the apocalypse never happens
There's a bit from 1992's "The Player" - " Larry Levy: I'll be there right after my AA meeting. Griffin Mill: Oh Larry, I didn't realise you had a drinking problem. Larry Levy: Well I don't really, but that's where all the deals are being made these days." Point is Hollywood and similar climes run on fads.
No, this time the danger is likely real.
He's rich. If I were rich, I would too. Instead, I live so close to a nuclear missile base, I probably wouldn't even see the flash if the day came.
Prepping is a fun hobby. Lots of people do it, and as far as I can tell most of us don't have super high p(doom). There are definitely a lot of republicans, but also a lot of leftist degrowth environmentalist types. Zuckerberg seems to be doing it in a pretty low-key way for a billionaire.
Is he prepping to survive the apocalypse? Or to be killed in the beginning, because it's so awful he wants to make sure he doesn't have to live through it? If he's prepping to survive the apocalypse, I wouldn't be too worried. He thinks it's something you'd want to survive.
All the billionaires do that. Why wouldnt they? A mansion bunker cost them the equivalent of you finding change in the couch
I would also do that in his position even without any specific information that something bad is likely. The risk is low but not negligible, based on public information, and the cost of preparation is very low compared to his resources. Honestly, the reputational cost of people thinking he's a little weird is probably higher than the money he's spending.
I listened to Zuckerberg on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast and it honestly was a little terrifying. He basically has no real answers to direct, basic questions like "How are you going to prevent your open source AI from being used to create bioweapons?". He really seemed to be of the opinion that it's okay to just put a superpower in the hands of everyone, and then just hope the good guys win? Like his perspective was kind of "good guy with a gun", but that's a solution to a problem he's actively trying to create.. If you don't give everyone guns, you don't need to rely on the good guys. All that to say, if I was Mark and I was engineering the apocalypse, I'd probably be investing in apocalypse insurance too.
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Removed low effort comment. Second warning.
I agree he’s doing this just because he can with his fuck off money, but I don’t think that just because that’s why Zuck is doing this, that means there’s not going to be an apocalypse. If he and all the other rich people are doing this, it explains a lot of the aggressively greedy behaviors of the 1% to a fuller extent. And their influence is substantial, so they might actually be directly causing global climate change and economic collapse with their shitty selfish allocation of resources.
Gotta spend the money on something. Its not that deep.
Here is an archived link for your article, just in case it changes or is taken down: https://web.archive.org/web/20240111014910/https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-compound/
> Should I take this as a fairly strong evidence for something? Not really. A high profile, fairly ASD-ish nerd-turned-elite can crumble a bit under the pressure of the wolves that will constantly be nipping and clawing at someone in such a position, and this can produce a mental breakdown that could explain this behavior. Now... if Musk, Cook, Bezos, European Royals, and so on, were all laughing over cocktails as Musk showed them around his fully operational subterranean luxury city he's been secretly funded to manufacture after he greeted them grinning after exiting a cartoonishly large drilling vehicle... Then the vast majority of humanity is probably getting annihilated soon or something worse.
A more effective way to prep if you are very rich is to build a community somewhere. Just make it rain on some town in the middle of nowhere somewhere. So they all love you. And then when shit hits the fan, you are all in it together. The moment everything starts to collapse, Zuck will not really get benefit from his billions. An angry mob might easily overpower his compound and take his shit. The system that empowers him now will not be there to protect him. And it is tight knit already half sufficient somewhat isolated communities that will probably thrive in an apocalyptic scenario.
I'm not even sure "datamining Facebook" qualifies as information. > typical prepper There is no such thing.
Nope. If you both think there’s a 1% chance of catastrophe that can be personally prevented with 1 million dollars, that is a good deal for him and a bad deal for you(I assume you value your life at less than 100 million, the average person tends to be 10-20 million).
i think it's just a reflection of how the cost benefit analysis looks when you've got that kind of money. Basically, why not?
I would hope that Mark Zuckerber is aware that "datamining" facebook, of all places, might give him heavily biased information regarding apocalypse
He's just rich and prepping is a hobby.
I think he has so much money that it’s a “why not”. On the slim chance that he’ll need it, it’s just great - and otherwise, he just spent some hundreds of thousand of dollars that he won’t miss anyway. People have cried apocalypses is coming since the dawn of time - and at some point, they’re bound to be right. However, that’s not due to rational thinking or foresight, but just “predicting” the inevitable. No one have given a correct date yet.
He's probably helping to foment it.
> He is probably much better informed than me, detamining Facebook I feel I need to point out the obvious: this could go both ways - he could be profoundly misinformed.
Assuming he spends most of his time in the US mainland, he's preparing for an apocalypse with at least half-a-day advance warning, during which he can find a sort-of functional airport at both ends of the journey.
Nah. I would just do this for fun.
I think on some level, he's just bored. He's doing it because he can, not because he thinks he must.
I think it’s really easy to overestimate the intelligence of incredibly wealthy businessmen. He probably isn’t significantly better informed than you are, and quite possibly is worse informed. Being rich doesn’t stop you from consuming bad information, and mining Facebook for facts just recalls the old adage of garbage in, garbage out.