This one gave me a proper chuckle

https://www.rxjourney.net/trapped-in-the-matrix

I didn't read the whole article, but it's a great question.

On my religious journey, I have read things like this:

"You cannot serve God and money".

Ultimately, the smartest people, if they are Christian, will actually get rid of their money.

I asked God about it and he told me this:

"There's not enough money for everyone. A truly good person lets everybody else have the money, and just lives on charity".

It shocked me, but Jesus told me this:

"You can get more done without money than with it".

He pointed out the queen of england will never know her true friends, as everybody acts like it.

But if you are poor, you have that knowledge, and can thus live a healthier life.

Ultimately money is based of terror. It is literally based on the terror that if you counterfeit it you go to jail.

So I think that good people would not want to use a medium that requires terror to function.

This may sound crazy, but I think, as a programmer, it is the truth!

But maybe I'm wrong?

he's ignoring individual preferences. In the context of a career setting, making a lot of money is conditional on passing the screening and interviews, which are indirectly IQ filters. So people who are smart and whose preferences are aligned towards wealth accumulation are at an advantage. You don't get into Jane Street unless you're smart.

The book itself has more than a few apt / sobering observations like this, concluding at 12:13, somewhat abruptly after a sort of 'case study' on the futility of life without God.

Wikipedia: "According to Sperling, Sidis's sister Helena told him that an unnamed examiner had estimated Sidis's intelligence in this range, but no documentation has ever been found to support this claim. Modern psychologists and historians of intelligence testing have noted several problems with such extreme IQ estimates: IQ tests in the early 1900s were not standardized or reliable enough to produce meaningful scores above 200. The concept of IQ as measured by modern tests did not exist during Sidis's childhood. Extreme scores often result from extrapolation errors rather than actual measurement. Contemporary accounts focused on Sidis's specific abilities rather than general intelligence measures."

This level of sloppiness about a simple fact-checkable claim means I can't trust the article about anything else. (To say nothing of the claims that aren't quantified at all.)

Also, I feel that it's a bit misleading not to mention that Sidis was "estranged from everyone" in large part because he was a socialist during the First Red Scare.

Having pattern recognised and extrapolated to my perception of the wealth-happiness curve, it seems that when your wants are met by your current wage, wanting more money is paradoxical -- it requires either time or stress that take away from the many other richnesses of life.

A little ambition (and savings) is good -- you can't recline too far back into the comfort zone -- but wealth never struck me as a particularly important measure of a person.

The simple fact is, the world we live in today is disadvantaged, and its been made that way by purposeful intent through money-printing, and it will continue to become worse until it can't function anymore; that's what history has to say on that. You have delusional people making choices that can't be undone for short-term profit, neglecting that when the value of money disappears, so does all that profit.

Merit doesn't really matter in such environments, and the market isn't a real market in such either. It lacks core requirements for price discovery, and adversarial independent decision-making (i.e. the major market players can't cooperate, but that is what they do when the money printer tells them do this or we'll call your loans due).

Non-reserve debt is money-printing. Lots of history that goes into where that ends (as a positive feedback system that runs away unable to stop itself until catastrophe).

It’s easy to get rich if you’re willing to screw a bunch of people to do it. A better question might be to ask someone like Bill Gates if you’re such a good person why weren’t you a good person when you were getting rich? He headed Microsoft when it was behaving like a big bully, crushing competition behaving badly, heck, they invented FUD. If he was any good he’d have been good along the way and he wouldn’t be as rich. (Probably still pretty rich though).

Warren Buffett is a great example. Pretty nice rich guy right? Got his start buying up American textile companies, wringing the last remaining value out of them, laying off the workers and selling off the assets. If he’s so great why is he responsible for destroying the livelihoods of tens of thousands of fellow Americans? Getting rich usually amounts to taking more than your fair share. (I had a ceo who got rich while screwing me out of my shares) If you realize that and care about doing the right thing you won’t do it.

If you’re so smart why hasn’t that occurred to you yet? Surely you realized in high school that career choices that benefit humanity don’t pay well? Surely you made a conscious choice at that time to either take care of yourself or take care of others. Surely you’ve seen opportunities for wealth at the cost of taking advantage of others and not taken them?

i highly disrespect someone "making an ask" one asks a question, or makes a request.

whichever styleguide inspired such butchering of our fair tongue should crawl back under the rock it came from.