It's probably smart to wear a suit to a formal occasion but IMO it's quite silly to interpret casual emails as disrespectful. As long as the email respects your time with efficient communication, that should be enough, and will save everyone busywork in the long run.

The founders said it was very 'senior' of him and laughed about it. But it's also kind of indicative of seniority because senior people aren't wasting time looking up the correct spelling of a company name - they get the email out with the salient details with the right amount of time invested into it. You want to be dialed in but also if you're doing lots of stuff at scale it doesn't really matter what the name of the startup is. Ideally you did the right diligence before the decision to invest was made but then at that point only a few key things matter and are worth keeping in hot memory any more - things like where the founders went to college (in case it helps with a future connection), what the market is (in case it helps with a future connection), what they need help with (in case it can be brought up with a connection), etc...

And corruption of power is the cause, I suspect. It has poisoned human minds in all places and times; none of us are immune (which is why we design governments that limit individual power). An early lesson in being in charge was that, having nobody to whom I reported, who would see my work and compel me to a high standard, I let things slip.

Reportees rarely help you: Often they don't know what you do; when they do see it, they assume it's acceptable - you know what you want, and you set the standard of quality and establish the norms. Generally they have obvious disincentives against disapproving of you, and not just as some political tactic but for personal comfort: days are much more pleasant if your boss is friendly. They will give positive or at least non-negative responses to most substandard boss work.

I had to learn to think of it in two ways: First, would I accept this work from someone reporting to me? Second, I internalized the medium- and long-term consequences of substandard leadership and management: once your organization has caught that disease, once that's your reputation, it's very hard to change.

I see all these example emails and such and my first thought is "oh, so how many of my relatives write emails and text messages then".

It reminds me of the whole "scammers use bad English to find easy marks" concept. Yeah, maybe some do. But again, it feels like people giving them way too much credit for what could easily have been an accidental situation.

Like, you suck at writing English because it's not your first language and you've got no professional reason to do so, and try scamming someone on the other side of the world with those skills. If the recipent is smart or internet savvy, they'll ignore your message. If they're not smart/are overly greedy/aren't internet savvy in general they'll fall for it.

So, why would you try and improve your English skills in that situation? As far as you know, they're good enough to get you money from gullible folks elsewhere. You're succeeding at what you want to suceed at, so you don't really think twice about it.

You can certainly try and find some psychology related reason behind every random disrepetency and questionable decision, or assume that people are often pretty dumb and do pretty dumb things, and that they won't stop doing those things unless they've given a reason to.

Or at the very least, the things we tell ourselves are meritorious are not what actually what causes people to rise to the top of our society.

By the way I'm also astonished by their lack of taste. The Epstein properties give off a sinister vibe as one would expect, but watching -- for instance -- Architectural Digest videos you get the impression that either the property has been professionally staged with pottery barn/cb2 esthetic or it was decorated with painting-of-dogs-playing-poker levels of sophistication.

Not surprising I guess but you'd think someone with essentially unlimited budget who has complete dominion over their own time wouldn't end up living in an enormous, expensive, alienating ugg boot.

It is bunk. Nobody who has even a modicum of critical thinking ability thinks that Donald Trump or Elon Musk are geniuses.

Luck and circumstance are an immense part of success.

Competence in a senior position is a threat to an incompetocracy. It's more important you be stupid and loyal than be good.

You can’t really understand Trump’s decisions unless you understand that despite all evidence to the contrary, Trump himself truly believes he is the smartest person in the room, regardless of who else is in it; and he will not suffer anyone who dares to contradict him.

I actually believe he has a crippling inferiority complex, which is why he leans so hard into bluster and bravado, why he surrounds himself with incompetent sycophants, and also why he's so vicious at even a hint of being slighted.

I think he probably knows, deep down, that he's mid at best and his most deep-seated fear is being perceived as insufficiently masculine, intelligent, powerful, wealthy, etc.

Ive worked in organizations like that where EVERYBODY knew something was a bad idea but upper management wanted to do it anyway. At some point you get frozen out if you dissent and nobody gives two halfs of a fuck about when it turns out you were right. Conformity is all that matters.

Even so a few people do publicly dissent.

If the delta is simply "cognitive load" then we're back to the theory I already posted.

Gotta be really incredibly efficient while planning your time on Epstein Island doing Epstein Class things to Epstein girls.

These world changing guys clearly have no spare time on their hands at all.

If your theory is correct and the global elite really isn't significantly smarter than the average population then the next question is, how are they maintaining their spots against smarter competitors?

This question is only difficult to answer if we believe that our system operates on merit. A system that operates on power, connections, and backroom favors happily maintains the status of mediocre people.

I recommend you read "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" (Piketty) for the full argument, but tldr version: capitalism naturally tends toward extreme inequality because the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth.

Reminds me how I double and triple check the emails I sent out to the higher ups in the company to make sure spelling and language tone was good, while in his emails Epstein was like "wazzup retards, kiddie fiddling party at my place" and getting replies from 3 world leaders and 5 CEOs. Then him and Israel's' former PM were both struggling to spell PALANTIR over the phone. It's a big club and you're not in it.

but spelling and grammar still isn't a good indicator for expertise, intelligence or anything like that even in an academic context

Mainly:

1. Dyslexia doesn't make you dump, just likely to misspell and a less likely to notice your misspelling.

2. When speaking about neurodivergence people mainly think about Autism or ADHD but sometimes just mean that your brain thinks in very different patters, this can make grammar hard. Especially if it's not your native language.

3. Sometimes people had shitty situations earlier in their live, leading to incorrectly learning parts of languages. This is hard to fix. But isn't really representative in any way for their expertise in any topic which isn't the given languages grammar.

4. English grammar and pronunciation to spelling mapping aren't exactly well designed. People not wanting to bother with it is not really related to intelligence, or excellence in other topics.

5. Some kinds of expertise are unrelated to general intelligence, expertise, education. So even if spelling and grammar where related to intelligence, it wouldn't be meaningful to judge expertise.

I worked with a tech founder at one point in my life, and I once happened to get a glance at his undergrad college transcripts which were, for reasons unknown, just sitting out on his desk. It was all Ds and Cs. He barely graduated! Yet his networth was more than the combined net worth of all of his employees.

But my diploma still says "UC Berkeley" on it, just like the guys with the 3.9 GPA. And when I hang out with PhD friends' PhD friends, they just assume I'm a PhD too.

So what I'm saying is that sometimes smart people don't put a lot of effort into school.

I can't tell my kid with a straight face, "Work hard, study, get good grades in school, and focus on a good career" when I know it's fucking bullshit. And what I should be saying is "Sorry that I'm not rich and well connected--since that would have been the outsized predictor of your life success."

This isn't a defense of this people at all.

It is just also not an argument against their intellect either.

Just look at what they nonsense they say all the time, and how they arguments and reasoning is commonly full of hols and messy entangled problems often stump them.

Similar for many cases where it's publicly visible its very clear that their success story commonly highly relies on stuff like knowing the right people and luck of having the right think at the right time with the right supporter.

But it would be a mistake to assume that non of them are very intelligent (or that non are quite dump), that would run at risk of underestimating how dangerous they can be. Both in "clever dangerous" and "idiotic dangerous" ways.

The reason I care about this is because if you ignore the US for a moment in a lot of places the same kind of "all connections often little substance" elite exist, just with having bothered to learn to use "extra" eloquent language to the as arrogant if not even more arrogant look down on people.

Which brings us to another reason why it isn't a good indicator: In the same way that "elites" use eloquent language to differentiate them self form common people do the "elites" around the trump camp differentiate them-self by explicitly not using it.