What are super rich men who pretend, perhaps even to themselves, to be good at things doing, and why?

Andrew Gelman puzzles over this in the context of the Bill Ackman tennis farce we discussed a few weeks ago (Short version: Ackman, 59-year-old financier who apparently was a mediocre high school tennis player 40+ years ago played an actual ATP match with two actual ATP pros and a recently retired pro, who was top ten in the world just a few years ago. He then made a bunch of cringey excuses as to why he lost badly. In fact the pros were playing in first gear and Ackman wouldn’t have returned a single shot if they had been trying. The pros’ failure to give an honest effort in an official match is a huge violation of the sport’s rules because of gambling scandals etc). Imagine competing at something you’re just OK at against somebody who is one of the best 200 people in the world at that thing. Ludicrous mismatch doesn’t begin to describe it in other words.

Gelman throws out some possibilities in regard to why people end up acting like this.

(1) Genuine delusional ideation — always a distinct possibility among hereditary monarchs, billionaires, Harvard professors, and other megalomaniacs.

(2) The person knows he’s lying to himself and others about his abilities, but can’t stop lying, either out of sheer embarrassment, or because of some deeper rationalization that he would be that good if he just put his mind to it, because he’s just that talented of a person, but he’s too busy with other things. Like Gelman, I suspect the latter frame of mind is Elon Musk’s attitude toward his imaginary gaming skills, not that I know anything about gaming.

Why did Elon Musk cheat on video games? I don’t know. My guess is that he was going around telling people what an awesome player he was, people were (correctly) skeptical of his claim, so he decided to make up evidence. In his mind, perhaps he really is awesome, and he’s just too busy to actually play the games, so his fake is just a way to demonstrate a higher truth. Similar to how that tough-guy psychology professor from Harvard misrepresented his data: he knew his theory was true, and if his actually monkey videos didn’t show it, then, well, he’d have to dissolve his dataset and elect another.

Why did that speedrunner cheat at Minecraft? I don’t know. My guess is that he was going around telling people he was the best Minecraft player in the world [I don’t actually know what that would entail. — ed.], people were (correctly) skeptical of his claim, so he decided to make up evidence. In his mind, perhaps he really is awesome, etc. Maybe he thinks that everyone else is cheating too, I dunno. Or maybe there’s a financial incentive here, that if he’s the world’s best player he can make some money from endorsements?

What about that cheating triathlete? I don’t know. My guess is that she was going around telling people she was an awesome athlete–or maybe she just had the ambition to rule at the triathlon but couldn’t quite hack it. In any case, if she’d already told her friends how amazing she was, or even if she’d just told herself this, then by cheating she doesn’t have to give up the story. Sure, she knows she didn’t complete that race as claimed, but she can still get the respect of others.

Gelman realizes that the reaction of a lot of people will be “who cares?” and indeed a couple of his commenters respond that way immediately, even though his post has a good answer to that question:

The other thing is that not everyone thinks about these things in the way that Paul Campos, Andy Roddick (“This was the biggest joke I’ve ever watched in professional tennis”), and I do. From my perspective, the tennis match was an embarrassment which was only exceeded by Ackman’s later statements on the topic. But I guess that a lot of people don’t really care about the truth; rather, they see life as some sort of grand struggle of will, and they admire a rich guy who will get out there and never back down. As a social scientist, it’s important for me to try to understand this attitude, even though it repulses me. Hence this post.

I do think that this kind of unapologetic total dishonesty is one of the things many people perversely admire about Donald Trump, and it’s both disturbing and disgusting.

This topic also gives me a chance to link to quite possibly my own personal favorite all-time LGM post, which is also about fleeting and fraudulent fame.