We live in the culture we live in, not the culture we want. It’s genuinely hard to understand our culture, or any culture. I’m not entirely sure there is such a thing as understanding a culture, at least beyond a level of vague generality.
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Still coming to grips with how different the culture I live in is from the one I thought I lived in.
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People like winners and Trump and Elon are the big winners of the last decade. I agree with you it’s been a rough thing to come to terms with and not at all a sentence I thought I would have ever written back in 2015.
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The gamer thing is also that many people have a preexisting relationship with “expert” gamers like Asmongold and Quinn69, and they have often played the games and know how much dedication and effort it takes to be truly high level. You need to live in a cave and eat meals over the keyboard. And guys like Quinn and Asmongold look up to the savant experts like Ben, Alkeizer, and Ruetoo.
Gamers don’t know what it takes to design cars or launch rockets or manage a government, but they know one mistake in 200 hours kills a hardcore character. They respect the accomplishments of someone who can do it, and know that some tryhards will take shortcuts. For Elon to out himself is something they understand in a domain where they have personal knowledge. Hell, King of Kong is a successful documentary for a reason.
I saw one POE comment that ranked the top POE players as 1) Ben, 2) Alkeizer, 3) the guy playing Elon’s account. It’s actually a lot like the social world of poker in like 2005, but there’s very little luck in ARPGs. Imagine if Zeejustin was wasn’t playing multiple accounts but had like 10 Chinese math experts or a computer playing for him. You play multiple accounts because you’re good, but you have others play for you when you aren’t good, so don’t pretend to be good.
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yeah that’s a pretty good description… many more people have some knowledge of video games.
it’s similar to when i see him post coding stuff and a lot of people have general ideas of what goes into coding and they are like- this guy is an idiot that has no idea what he’s doing.
like you said it’s just much smaller pool that can critique what he says about physics or rocket building so we see it less. but the video game nerds are very protective of their status and have fan bases that will watch and spread their expose videos unlike some random aerospace engineer
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Asmongold also made a comment that the only reason everyone didn’t know Elon was cheating at D4 is that the game is so bad you can’t tell the difference between a beginner and an expert. Also, over Christmas Quinn got a tattoo that says “D4 bad” with a Pepe the frog. Don’t try to pretend you know POE unless you can talk about the skill tree for an hour.
I never played Eldon Ring, but everyone good at that seems to be like, “yeah, we told you guys about this a while ago.” Thing is, ER doesn’t have, to my knowledge, competitive ladders. In POE it’s a scandal when someone copies a build without crediting the creator.
You’d think a long time pro poker player would be a lot better at bullshit detection but no. Like where have you been? he lies about all sorts of stuff.
but as noted, he’s a winner and people think all winners are geniuses for some reason.
In the way old days you could lie all you want you just moved to the next town when they figured it out and pull off the same scam on them rinse repeat.
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When we all were younger we were sold a lot of bullshit on who we really are, it’s been something to come to terms with that.
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I sort of get it. Level 1 thinking is why would Elon, one of the “greatest” minds ever, lie about being great at video games. It’s only when you actually watch him play or put a bit of analysis into what it actually takes to be an elite gamer that you realize it’s obviously bs.
Does anyone know how good Chinese billionaires are at video games? I have a bad feeling that Ma Huateng can kick ass at BurgerTime.
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I’m in the carpool line at school. There’s a huge sunlight reflection ahead and to the right that I’ve been avoiding. Finally looked over. Fucking cyber truck.
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I remember when my Harvester was clean seeing the reflection off it’s bumper on highway signs way far in front of me… I never thought what it would be doing to people’s mirrors…
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Harris doesn’t say, in the free part of that essay, whether or not Elon paid off. But The Elon is not a philanthropist.
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So they are a lot more like Elon than we realized
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lol, your average KSP player knows twice as much about designing rockets as Elon.
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Elon never paid. The full essay can be read on reddit at r/samharris
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I don’t even need to do further research to be 100% confident that he never paid
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No wonder Trump likes him… for now.