• floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know anything about this guy, so take my pet theories with a pinch of salt, but…

    1. In my experience, people who think of themselves as entrepreneurs are often simply bad at perceiving risk. They start out with a certain hubris that is a product of this deficiency in assessing risk. Many of them will be taken down by this, but others will get lucky.

    2. When they get lucky, these people tend not to notice the element of luck but ascribe their success wholly to their smarts and hard work. This can lead to an inflated sense of how good one’s judgement is.

    3. It can also lead to a lack of humility. It takes both good judgement and humility to know when to defer to someone else’s judgement. These people had hubris to start with, and their success can compound this to the point where they consider themselves the best judge of everything. Then they stop listening to people who may know better than them.

    4. They also have the power to surround themselves with yes-men, so they are challenged less and less as time goes on.

    Maybe this guy wasn’t like that, but his comments about safety measures being a waste, his disregard for safety standards in constructing this submarine, and the way he fired the employee who complained that the sub was unsafe, suggest he may have been in this mold.