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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27719 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Is Elon Musk a failure?

Men stick their necks out because it's in their nature to do so.

If we're going to go full armchair evolutionary biologist, risk-taking makes sense when most men don't reproduce and a few lucky ones have dozens of children. That was our ancestral environment. The risk-taking genes have been tempered from thousands of years of civilization. But they're still there.

I don't think that Musk is particularly a contrarian figure. He has drifted to a certain viewpoint and crowd - 'alt-lite', for the lack of a better word - and rarely seems to take an opinion that doesn't fit to that mold. (Indeed, he's already a meme for not taking a firm opinion on stuff where he seems to be doing so at all - "Interesting", "Looking into this" and so on.)

An actual contrarian in the sense that I'd mean would be someone like Michael Tracey, who has a tendency to drift into a certain crowd and instantly start taking viewpoints contrary to the ideas of that crowd, just to challenge them. Ie. when Tracey seems too close to the right he starts shitting on them, when Tracey got too appreciated by pro-Russians he started saying Russia is not right about everything, so on.

I think you're right that it's natural but I don't think Elon Musk is Elon Musk because he took "boutique contrarian opinions" to stand out. He is an asshole but, AFAICT, his crazy stances are driven by passion, an apparently justified belief in a hole in the market and a concern for outsized (even by his standards) rewards.

After he got one success like Paypal he no longer needed to make himself notable.

The sort of guy who takes a stance purely to distinguish themselves (to the point where they risk a real failure) seems like a more desperate thing, same with other such bold and risky moves (like the Hock)

I think this is why bare contrarianism is considered off-putting.

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