Frankly, if the Vice article is true (and it seems plausible given the rambling style of this one) he sounds pretty unhinged. Is this the effect of feeding only on Soylent?
It's possible, is there lead content in soylent? Like lots of lead?
The guy sounds dis-associated from reality. A lot of the "everything is fake news" crowd is disjointed...I'm not sure of Soylent is the cause or not, or if they have investors/advisors if so, I'd be having a conversation about moving him out of the company and maybe into a psych ward for observation.
To me, this shows radical leadership, and that he is very unattached to societal norms. Radical leadership meaning that this is kind of the antithesis of a follower mentality. I think it's a kind of genius, but also a personal failing. I really appreciate people who are willing to "question everything", because there are a lot of things we take for granted without thinking about why.
The failures I think this comes from are a form of ignorance and arrogance, and possibly a lack of empathy about how they're perceived. I personally know someone like this that is very intelligent, and thinks that they have all the right answers. There seems to be a mentality of, I have this information facts, given these facts, and that as a goal, *this* is the solution.
With the person I know, a significant problem with their reasoning is that they have important gaps in their knowledge (ignorance). They believe other people just aren't as enlightened as they are (arrogance), and if they were, they would have come to the same conclusion.
For my acquaintance, I believe that the mentality comes from a history of often being right, but also a prolonged social isolation that allowed them to build a myth in their head that they are always right.
The main failing he has, which is clearly on display in the article, is that he utterly ignores all externalities. It is almost as if things don't happen or don't matter if he isn't personally observing them, perhaps it is a type of solipsism or extreme egocentrism.
In his mind, he's not wasting water because he never does laundry, while he totally ignores the environmental impact of having his clothes producing in China and shipped to him.
He refuses to cook and is genuinely offended when the apartment he is looking at has a kitchen, because why would they assume he would want to cook? He finds cooking horrible, bordering on torture, so surely that must be the Correct and Rational way to be.
He seems to think he can just figure out everything from first principles by doing a few web searches and reading through a bit of literature and extrapolating from there.
Every article from (and by) him is an absolutely fascinating and genuinely horrifying look into a mind that is just fundamentally out of whack, but has never faced enough adversity in life to properly recognize that.
My favorite portmanteau for this was "errorgance": "errorgant means to be twice as certain as someone who is merely arrogant while possessing only one-tenth the requisite facts."
