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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32637 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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I don't precisely know where Elon lands in the Motte's situation evaluation of the Culture War at present, but I think I've got an example than can be used as a lense beyond The MuskATeer himself.

This is a very recent (x)weet from Elon. If you really, carefully parse it with your far less powerful brain (than Elon's, that is) you might be able to understand that - this is just basic macroeconomic understanding. Holy shit this is fucking Econ 101

But, as I've said before, Elon has adopted just enough PodCaster Bro aesthetics to know that slight rephrasings of 1+1=2 obvious insights, combined with "thoughtful" pauses and idiosyncratic speech patterns can make you look deep to the midwits. I am convinced this is also 90% of Sam Altman's playbook.

Business-eese and consulting speaking get a lot of flak for being made up pseudo-languages that exist to further unearned vibes of authority and experience on the part of the speaker. It's fun to point and laugh that it's all either nonsense or very obvious truths dressed up in jargon.

I think the cycle is repeating itself with many different sides of the AI wars. Connor Leahy is even more egregious than Musk, and also triples down by trying (and mostly failing) to pin people down with gotcha hypotheticals that are worded to sounded apocalyptic in their profundity.

I think a good heuristic for valid expertise in a subject is the degree to which it gets a little boring. Scott Alexander's posts often veer into "holy shit, get to the point, dude!" territory. Many posts related to SCOTUS here on The Motte (of which I am thankful for, please keep them going!) often get just a little tedious - not because of jargony pablum, but because the authors generally really know what they're talking about and go multiple layers deep in reference and citation.

I'm someone who's been in the Tech industry (or, maybe more accurately, technology focused parts of several industries) for my entire career. At least at the start, "tech" was looked at as a weird subculture - the bosses knew they needed it, but it wasn't the show. In the middle 2010s, that started to change as the FAANGs became the largest and richest companies on the planet. Now that we are at peak AI hullabaloo, not only do you see people with zero technical capability presenting themselves as experts, you have an entire aesthetic-cultural superstructure. I think Musk is not only part of it, but one of those who built it. Altman as well. If you peer into their backgrounds, their techincal bonafides are questionable at best. Musk seems like a hacker level dev who brute forced his way into PayPal (and was then brute forced out). His claims about being deeply involved in engineering to this day have to be impossible (SpaceX, Tesla, and Xwitter couldn't run if so much was contingent on him). It's more likely he injects himself into meetings and initiatives here and there and mostly serves as a slight derailing force to otherwise normal activities. Altman seems to have zero background and is perhaps the poster boy for weird SF striver life.

I seek the opinions of the Mottizen community.

Scott Alexander's posts often veer into "holy shit, get to the point, dude!" territory

They do?

Musk is pretty intelligent. I’m sure there are many people here who are higher IQ. Of course, that isn’t really the main ingredient for making huge amounts of money beyond a certain threshold. The average billionaire is probably 98th or 99th percentile, but their percentile intelligence certainly doesn’t equal their percentile wealth.

It's also just absolutely pathetic to go through life with such smug pride in talent level that hasn't actually been expressed with any particular accomplishments to be proud of. Gloating about having a higher IQ or more academic credentials than Musk is the equivalent of someone saying they have a higher VO2max than the Tour de France champion. OK, good for you when you look at the number on your phone, but Tadej Pogacar is a multimillionaire cycling champion with a beautiful girlfriend and you're proud that you can consume a lot of oxygen. I don't even like Musk, but he's obviously just done more than almost every single human being alive.

I don't even like Musk, but he's obviously just done more than almost every single human being alive.

When you're used to discounting building companies because that requires investment of money and/or people being willing to follow you (as opposed to personal physical/mental labor), this is not obvious. The intuitive response to "look at how much Musk built" is "he didn't build all 'at".

The intuitive response to "look at how much Musk built" is "he didn't build all 'at".

How many of the projects he's working on would exist without him? Yeah, the natural resources and people would still exist and presumably be put towards some kind of productive goal but consider the positive and negative effects of his competitors on the world. On the one end, you have things that are objectively bad like gambling. I would say Elon's current projects are pretty close to the polar opposite; that is to say, objectively good. Curing paralysis, colonizing the solar system, the HUGE push towards making electric vehicles the norm and more recently, major advances in AI.

And that’s just silly. Building companies are crazy hard. Which is why it is so well remunerated. Musk shows an almost unparalleled ability to build companies.

Ehhhhhh. Building companies is hard, and building companies is well remunerated, but being hard is not why building companies is well remunerated.

Building companies is well remunerated because capital enjoys systemic leverage over labour and is able to claim more of the rewards from their cooperation for itself. When capital and labour work together both parties are better off (otherwise they wouldn't do it), but capital gets more of the reward because unemployed capital is much less miserable than unemployed labour. So the worker is paid in wages, while the investor is paid in profits.

If building companies was easy, then there would be a lot more people doing it. If there were a lot more people doing it, then the labor they provide (ie in the form of equity) would be much smaller compared to the amount of equity that capital takes.

Market history suggests the dear thing isn’t capital but skill in building large scalable companies. Capital is common and cheap in comparison.

Completely, I don’t think it’s really a useful way of ranking yourself or others. Still, I wouldn’t take lessons on macroeconomics from Musk, whereas I might read what Scott has to say, even if he’s wrong, because he’s smarter.

Is he smarter? Are you sure? Scott has said some really dumb things. Hasn’t really accomplished a lot outside of becoming somewhat internet famous.

Tons of smart people believe very dumb things, certainly if you’re a conservative (most of the very smartest people in the west are pretty mainstream neolibs). I think Scott is pretty smart based on his writing ability and skill at synthesising information in his reviews etc, which I think correlates highly with intelligence.

But that doesn’t mean “he is smarter than Musk.”

Sure building a company isn’t solely based on IQ. But building technically difficult companies across multiple domains suggests some pretty strong intelligence, especially compared to someone who is basically a glorified essayist.

Do you realize that Elon Musk has absolute domain expertise in several, unrelated engineering disciplines (aerospace, rocket engine design, electric vehicle design and integration, and manufacturing for all of these), and that before he got started in his current arc he had domain expertise in several other unrelated engineering and regulatory disciples (software and banking regulation)?

Nerd wrangling is a specific skill. There are common patterns for failure for large engineering teams. Being able to recognize these and correct them is important.

Human behaviour inevitably means that organizations will be run by ambitions and internal alliances unless something stops it. Managers want to build their resumes by running ambitious projects. They often like or dislike ideas based on how much they like the individual who brought it up.

A tech leader needs to be able to bust things up a bit when they aren't functioning. That's why Musk is often described as being unstable and disruptive by existing management in the company. It's also why he has such a strong history of success at coming in as a new CEO.

Musk isn't deeply involved in developing tech, but when he gets a message from an employee about a problem and a response from the higher ups, he can tell if the higher ups are bullshitting him.

For that he does need significant tech skills, but doesn't need to be a specialist in any of the products.

Altman seems similar to me.

As for the tweet, general political commentary on twitter doesn't usually involve deep thoughts. He's stating a clear rebuttal that midwit followers can use in political discussions in their daily lives. The fact that a statement from the VP running for President can be rebutted with econ 101 says more about the state of the country than Musk.

Yeah. Musk’s job is to basically decide who gets resources and how to remove roadblocks. He has shown an uncanny talent for both. To do that well, he needs to know enough (even if not an expert level) to cut through normal corporate BS.

Reddit commenters and other slave moralists love to sneer at Elon because they have no idea what leadership is (and if they did, they're repelled by it). Leadership, in their heads, is mindlessly executing the agenda of the secret kings like them, which so happen to coincidentally align with a progressive agenda. Softheaded wannabe intelligentsia and open source communists who want the world to be run like a university.

Fuck them.

All the certificates and university degrees and soy can't make up for a lack of vision and a absence of testicles. If you gave a billion dollars to one hundred Silicon Valley alumni, ninety-nine of them would be overrun instantly by blaqq kweens and transsexual gooners because guileless, naive autists have no social defenses against San Francisco grifters.

Musk isn't perfect. But he has a spine, and he has vision, and in our degenerate age that makes him stand a giant in an era of dwarfs. No amount of technical ability can protect you from the culture war, just ask Stallman.

Contra @Amadan and @100ProofTollBooth, I'll say that I pretty much agree with the core of this post and I don't think it's content-free. The invective is obviously way too far over the top for this forum, but yeah, there really is a serious problem with the HRization of everything under the sun from people that have absolutely no experience with ever building anything, leading anything, or even producing anything that people would purchase of their own free will. We can see this everywhere from politics to corporations, where people earnestly believe that the relevant criteria for rising ranks is checking a bunch of boxes for titles held, HR style, rather than having actually accomplished anything of note. Having people that have never risked a penny of their own money rise to the top of the power structure isn't just accepted, it's outright lauded by people that see their own personal failures as indications of good moral character.

Sohrab Ahmari, a guy that a lot of people on the right respect as an intellectual, believes things like this:

Thinking of Galbraith’s line about how painful it is that men who made a few good financial bets are assumed to know what they’re talking about on everything else.

And how their wealth means the rest of us can’t avoid their inane views.

The absolute conceit that people who have accomplished so much less than a guy like Musk to just blithely refer to building empires of productivity and innovation as "a few good financial bets" demonstrates to me that these guys have absolutely no concept of what it takes to build a company. They're pampered, spoiled brats that truly believe that their academic credentials and journalistic output aren't just as good as actually creating value, they're better. They have fastidiously avoided taking any meaningful personal risks and have managed to imbue that cowardice with an air of smug superiority because they didn't make their money doing something as vulgar as making "a few good financial bets".

I would be forced to agree as well. Leadership is a skill set. And it takes an intuitive understanding of a whole system of psychology and power-wielding and strategy and understanding how to work with incomplete information. I think of running a company being a lot like a combination of poker and chess. Chess because it’s a game of strategy using your pieces to work to attack and defend. Poker because you actually don’t know where the other side is on the board. You can’t play a standard set of moves because you can be attacked by a piece you don’t even know you need to defend against.

Contra @Amadan and @100ProofTollBooth, I'll say that I pretty much agree with the core of this post and I don't think it's content-free.

I can't deny that this video of Kara Swisher writing off Elon for moral reasons before being reminded that Elon actually does try to build things that matter to actual people immediately came to my mind reading that post. It's definitely a thing, though the level of generalization and invective may be against Motte rules.

Contra @Amadan and @100ProofTollBooth, I'll say that I pretty much agree with the core of this post and I don't think it's content-free. The invective is obviously way too far over the top for this forum, but yeah, there really is a serious problem with the HRization of everything under the sun from people that have absolutely no experience with ever building anything, leading anything, or even producing anything that people would purchase of their own free will.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with your post expressing that idea.

Rewritten without all the "fuck you" snarling at gooners and blaqq keweens and soy autists, he could have said what you did. Some people just can't express themselves without spraying spittle and loogies, and this place isn't for that.

Yeah, to be clear, I'm not arguing with the ban, just the assessment that there wasn't any underlying content. There is an argument embedded in there! Frankly, I even agree with the level of contempt expressed for the commentariat and academic classes, but also agree that it's just not appropriate here.

The absolute conceit that people who have accomplished so much less than a guy like Musk to just blithely refer to building empires of productivity and innovation as "a few good financial bets" demonstrates to me that these guys have absolutely no concept of what it takes to build a company.

They don't, but that's not the point. The distinction is just friend and enemy, as usual. They'll absolutely gush over Warren Buffett who is a lot closer to having made his money through "a few financial bets" than Musk (though to give the devil his due, it's still quite unfair to Buffett). Or Bill Gates, who for all his sins did build Microsoft. Because they're friends and will push for lefty policies, and Musk is an enemy who won't.

No amount of technical ability can protect you from the culture war, just ask Stallman.

I mean, you're not wrong. Stallman got ousted from MIT after the progressive/techno-libertarian split of the mid 2010s, it was only a matter of time.

But he ended up back on the board of the FSF. I think you're also ignoring that it's entirely possible to create parallel institutions that are resistant to this stuff. Especially for weird nerds with technical ability

I find your post to be low content, low effort, and mostly a screed against your preferred outgroups. I do not see how it adds anything of substance to this conversation.

This is a distilled snarl at everyone you hate, conveying no argument or information or anything to engage with. It's just a free-form stream of invective and buzzwords cribbed from your favorite alt-right shitposters, and it's pure culture warring.

It's been a while since your last ban, but when you get wound up, you really get wound up. Banned for three days.

You can still ban the poster, but there was clearly an argument. You even accepted as much when you responded to Walter that the problem was the sneering. We should try to be precise in our wording.

Musk surely isn't doing huge chunks of the engineering by himself. But he clearly is good at hiring the right people. You can only do that if you can tell whether someone knows what they're doing or not. He also seems to have a special talent at making those people work harder, motivating people. Based on the biography I read he has strong engineering skills and takes important high-level decisions about how the companies should move forward.

I suspect that Altman is similar. He may not be the greatest coder in the world but he's clearly a master schemer, outmaneuvering the OpenAI board and tapping Microsoft's nigh-limitless resources on generous terms.

I think a lot of it is getting middle management out of the way to allow the doers to do.

I don't really understand. It may be an obvious econ 51 point, but it clearly needs to be stated when the current regime is talking about imposing price controls on food, opening state-run grocery stores because the private ones have been driven out of business, and all kinds of absurd (power-seeking) economic policies.

Musk fits an extremely profitable niche of being competent enough in different areas to coordinate investors with management with engineers.
Again, this may seem like a simple "business 101" thing, but you just have to look at his competitors like Boeing to see how neglecting it causes horrifically embarrassing failures again and again.
The ongoing Starliner Titanic disaster with astronauts stranded on the space station couldn't be a better example. It's not that Boeing engineers are retarded, and it's not that they've been given an impossible task. It's not even that the Boeing CEO is a mad scientist imprisoning people in space to torture them with terrible movies: it's that basic management practices are being ignored.

Most of the dysfunction in this country is due to neglecting very, very basic truths, and the people in charge clearly aren't capable of acknowledging them, let alone dealing with them.
Musk and the rest of the PayPal mafia somehow can see what needs to be done and do it, which is apparently a superpower in this world of Pump Six (and other stories)

The ongoing Starliner Titanic disaster with astronauts stranded on the space station couldn't be a better example.

That one's been pretty fun to watch. I'm pretty anti-Elon, and follow some amount of anti-Elon accounts, and when that thing launched you could watch them going from "wooow, look at them making a rocket on their first attempt, without blowing anything up through 'iterative design'", to "so what it sprung a few leaks?", to getting awfully quiet as the magnitude of the disaster unfolded. Props to the people running the simulation, I couldn't write a better story.

Most of the dysfunction in this country is due to neglecting very, very basic truths, and the people in charge clearly aren't capable of acknowledging them, let alone dealing with them.

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

Explaining fucking econ 101 to the hoi polloi seems like an entirely appropriate thing to do in an environment where the Leaders of the Free World are attempting to invoke various mumbo-jumbo and/or voodoo to explain why their pumping of the money supply while simultaneously outlawing demand for the produce of about half of the economy is totally not responsible for the inflation we've all been experiencing?

I agree with you, jkf

At the risk of being rude, I kinda wonder if 100P is thinking about things in terms of status games in a way that doesn't make sense.

The majority of people don't understand economics and finance and wouldn't be able to if you tried.

I really, really wish I was wrong about that. But when you have a practicing medical doctor having to wrestle with money management, you start to realize really quickly that there's a broad spread of intelligence types and not everyone is good at everything.

Which is why explaining the basic concepts in an authoritative way that is easy for anyone to understand has value!

I’ve met some very high verbal IQ people who are terrible at math and I’m extremely unconvinced it’s actually genetic or unchangeable. I think it’s usually that they displayed great verbal ability at a young age, didn’t care about math, then never really cared to learn because they could always coast on their writing/verbal ability. If they truly needed it they could probably quickly become competent with a few hours a day of high-intensity tutoring for a short period.

I think it’s usually that they displayed great verbal ability at a young age, didn’t care about math, then never really cared to learn because they could always coast on their writing/verbal ability.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

For real life math applications - probably less than a day. Learn to know exponential functions, positive and negative feedback, some statistics and probability theory - that's it. All of those take one or two hours to grok at basic level. And with them you will be able to build useful mental model of almost anything.

While I think some people are limited in some fashion, I also think basic math is just taught in a horrible fashion.

The contrast between my econ and finance courses and the math courses I was required to take were like night and day.

Kevin Durant is an all time great NBA player. He's a multi time NBA MVP, has won NBA championships and came a shoe size from another. He's worth $170mm, and he's in Paris surrounded by hot athletic people. He just starred in an all time great Olympic basketball game, coming back from 15 points down in the fourth against Serbia (a game which proved American racism!) and he's going to star in the gold medal game against France tomorrow.

And he was up at 5am Paris time shit posting against his haters on Twitter. He's got things to do, and if he didn't he could eat at any restaurant or go to any theater or get tickets to any Olympic event or find a groupie or hire the highest end prostitute. But there he is, fighting on Twitter.

Durant, and musk, and bill ackman, prove that shit posting is one of life's great joys. It is something Foucault would have written about (the way he wrote about fisting) as a truly new modern form of joy. And even when you're rich and important and famous you can't resist it. It's too fun. Isn't it magical that we can all access this kind of joy that Elon, who can do whatever he wants, still finds irresistible?

Elon on Twitter is just another guy on Twitter. And for the most part his tweets should be treated as though he's a JAG. That means both not giving him too much extra credibility, and also giving him grace. We're all wrong on here all the time, but nobody cares. And we all love to do 101 econ or history or bio. Give the man the same mercy, that's the level he's playing at.

all time great Olympic basketball game, coming back from 15 points down in the fourth against Serbia (a game which proved American racism!)

One of the amusing quirks of history is the breakup of Yugoslavia allowing greater pro-black propaganda by way of US basketball.

For example, a hypothetical Yugoslavia team this Olympics would have featured Doncic alongside Jokic, and Yugoslavia would have had the two best players between it and the US (especially with Embiid ill? injured? not that Embiid should be playing for the US instead of France, or more like Cameroon).

But yes, Durant is an all-time great NBA player, whose reputation was unfortunately tarnished by getting caught Tweeting on burner accounts, e.g., “KD can’t win a championship with those cats.” And the whole GSW Hardest Road situation. Then Brooklyn, then Phoenix.

Much of the intersection between US basketball simps and Durant-haters begrudgingly admits that Durant is likely the greatest basketball Olympian of all time.

Embiid is not one of the best players in the world in this context, no regular season. Doncic unquestionably would be worth the deficit.

Durant will always be better than he is beloved? The opposite of a Derek Jeter or a Nick foles.

Count me as doubtful to whether Yugoslavia would beat the US. It's very unclear if a Doncic/Jokic combo is better than Jokic alone.

Anyone would acknowledge that the US has far better talent than Serbia. Yet the game was close. So basketball isn't about simply adding talent on top of talent. You need to have team chemistry as well. Doncic is a bit of a team killer who would likely make Jokic worse. On the US side, Embiid is similarly a black hole with negative intangibles.

On the other hand, players like Lebron, Curry, and Jokic make their teammates better and that's what makes them all-time greats.

Durant, and musk, and bill ackman, prove that shit posting is one of life's great joys.

I actually think it is less one of life's great joys more than a modern drug; and like most drugs you build up a tolerance the more you use it and it will turn you into a real bastard and husk of a man if you let it.

If you really, carefully parse it with your far less powerful brain (than Elon's, that is) you might be able to understand that - this is just basic macroeconomic understanding. Holy shit this is fucking Econ 101

Elon has 200 000 000 followers. How many of them didn't take econ 101? And this is especially in the context of chasing price gouging where it doesn't exist promised from presidential candidate (also she is literally vice president now - why is she not bringing prices down now if she knows how). Not saying that government shouldn't mess with prices but do it the right way - either destroy demand or increase supply or both. The program of paying farmers not to produce on their land to stabilize the price of wheat and the government rations of gasoline (on which secondary market was allowed - so it put some income in the families that didn't drive) are the two programs that I think yielded good results.

Government bringing the price down of good in demand is one of the bad ideas. Its problem is that it is unobvious bad idea for a lot of people. Even though wherever it has been tried - from NYC rents trough soviet car industry all the way to Zimbabwe supermarkets it has failed miserably. So probably a good chunk of Elon's audience actually doesn't know it is a bad idea. There is nothing wrong in people from time to time to explain the basics again.

His claims about being deeply involved in engineering to this day have to be impossible (SpaceX, Tesla, and Xwitter couldn't run if so much was contingent on him). It's more likely he injects himself into meetings and initiatives here and there and mostly serves as a slight derailing force to otherwise normal activities.

I have been in tech also all my life. I never felt good deep in the theory, but I always exceled at jury rigging very innovative solutions out of existing stuff. I think that Elon has similar talent - he knows the stuff that his companies do well enough and the tech there, but his real talent is to have instinctive knack where the limits are and to push the people that really dig deep to them.

I don't understand aerospace much - but the fact that we react to falcon boosters landing the same way Lila from futurama reacted to going to the moon - says quite a lot that the guy knows how to assemble amazing engineering teams and is enough of an engineer to be able to work with them and steer them.

Not saying that government shouldn't mess with prices but do it the right way - either destroy demand or increase supply or both. The program of paying farmers not to produce on their land to stabilize the price of wheat ... yielded good results.

This program is destroying supply.

Yes. There was overproduction of grain at the time and the prices were collapsing. So the government needed to bump them up a bit IIRC

There was general deflation at the time. The program was nonsensical, as was usual for a lot of New Deal programs.

But, as I've said before, Elon has adopted just enough PodCaster Bro aesthetics to know that slight rephrasings of 1+1=2 obvious insights, combined with "thoughtful" pauses and idiosyncratic speech patterns can make you look deep to the midwits.

I don't get that impression from Elon's tweet. There's nothing deep or novel there, you're right -- he's regurgitating standard economic dogma. But stating something that is both true and obvious is not, at least in my worldview, somehow a knock against the person saying it -- particularly when it actually is a controversial statement among laymen: something like half the country supports rent control (varies from poll to poll). Maybe if he was phrasing it as if he was some kind of gigabrain genius and these were wholly original thoughts, I'd have a more negative reaction, but I didn't parse it that way.

I think I'm probably more pro-Elon than most people here, though I'm quite bearish on Tesla in particular wrt. their ability to deliver on their self-driving promises, SpaceX is just so impressive it kind of washes away those sins. Rocket companies are hard, Carmack couldn't build one, Bezos' Blue Origin is far from competitive, ULA is basically a joke, etc. I mean just look at this graph: https://x.com/FutureJurvetson/status/1792672666316665198/photo/1

Now, how much of SpaceX's success is due to Musk is a totally reasonable discussion to have, but even in the most cynical case, he at least hired the best people and set strategic objectives that led directly to capturing the overwhelming majority of the launch market and drove costs down an order of magnitude. And this is before Starship.

X/Twitter might be circling the drain and have no clear path to sustainability (let alone profitability) but some of my favorite poasters have been unbanned and I think you could argue his acquisition dragged the Overton window to the right, so I'm giving him a pass there as well. And there's something ironic about the legacy media claiming it's dead/dying when Biden announced his resignation on X/Twitter first.

With regards to Altman, he comes across as basically a grifter and technically unsophisticated, no disagreements there. I am not at all impressed by his leadership.

Can't stop laughing that twitter is glitching so badly I can't see the graph of his other company's performance

(Edit: now I can for five seconds until the page reloads with "something went wrong, don't worry it's not your fault")

Probably something in your browser settings (i.e. it is your fault); I get the same thing, but Nitter works fine which implies Twitter is working properly.

No, something went very weird for about 20 minutes: everyone was posting about it. Cleared up though.

No, something went very weird for about 20 minutes

I wonder if things blowing up take ~20-30 minutes to work their way through whatever cache system twitter has in place (ok, really more of a CDN system with multiple places all over the globe, but still). A throttling system were if something is throttled for 15 minutes, it starts getting replicated seems like an 80/20 solution to the kind of traffic spikes twitter gets.

It is ALWAYS DNS, always.

I mean just look at this graph:

Wow. The launch industry divides pretty evenly 9 ways now, huh? There's "everybody else in the world combined", there's China, then there's "SpaceX on Sundays", "SpaceX on Mondays", and so on.

X/Twitter might be circling the drain and have no clear path to sustainability (let alone profitability)

You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... sixty years.

I’ll certainly agree with you in one place: Elon Musk, along with essentially everyone else expressing an opinion on inflation, has a lot of unearned confidence. Macroeconomics, and inflation specifically, is an area that brings out a lot of people fitting lines to past data and absolutely sure of causality. In reality, there is a wide range of opinions in macroeconomics on the relationship between fiscal and monetary theory and price levels, all held by PhDs genuinely trying to figure out what's going on. All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong. See Figure 1 here, where traders with money on the line completely missed their bets on CPI paths.

I’ll take a moment to share my personal hobby horse, John Cochrane’s fiscal theory of the price level. It predicts that inflation is caused when people expect the government to repay its debt by printing money in the future instead of responsibly running a fiscal surplus. Deficits in response to crisis are fine as long as you can credibly pay them back, but our recent government has shown absolutely no plans to do so. Regarding valid expertise, Cochrane pleasantly obliges by providing media anywhere from engaging (Podcasts! Sound effects!) to unintelligible without an econ degree (Calculus¡ Terrifying¡).

At least on this topic, I don’t think Musk is worse than anyone else. Everybody (including me) wants to say they have a handle of what causes inflation; we probably don’t, and will get to partake in the classic human experience of being completely wrong about the future of the macroeconomy.

All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong.

Smart people are best able to rationalize away their personal biases, or cloak their disingenuous wishcasting in plausible-sounding theoreticals. Assuming good faith in all cases is naive, as is assuming that good faith isn't polluted by, e.g. political incentives.

On the other hand he's talking about monetary incentive. These people thought interest rates were going to drop by 2023 and staked their money on it.

Bad faith would have been talking publicly about how inflation is temporary/imaginary while dumping overpriced 5yr bonds, like the Vox staff stockpiling n95 masks.

(Actually I'm terrible with bonds, what's the strategy for profiting on rising rates with them? Treasury futures? Can you exploit a too-low TIPS spread when rates are rising? I have no clue)

In reality, there is a wide range of opinions in macroeconomics on the relationship between fiscal and monetary theory and price levels, all held by PhDs genuinely trying to figure out what's going on. All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong.

Between the end of 2019 and the end of 2023, the money supply M2 grew 40%. The economy grew 19%. There was no reason to believe there was some long-term change in the velocity of money. Just from these numbers alone you can expect about 18% inflation. And, sure enough, the price level increased by about 20%.

You can repeat this for other countries. The UK money supply M2 grew 24%. The economy did not grow at all. Expectation: 24% increase in price level. Reality: 24% increase in price level.

Denying that increasing the money supply as was done in 2020 would cause inflation, or that it would be "transitory", comes from the same motivated reasoning that applied to the entire era of covid policy. Criticizing a heavy-handed response made you persona non grata in professional circles, so you didn't. As for placing bets on it to make money, the risk is not the existing consequences of government policy, but that you're betting on how deranged your local government is. Inflation is not the only consideration in such a circumstance, so it's no surprise that even people putting their money where there mouth is were bad sources of predictions.

I think there's a bit of a talking-past-each-other thing with "transitory" inflation. The pro-transitory argument is we pumped a ton of money into the system during covid, but then we stopped pumping money in at that elevated rate, so once all the price gains from that bump in the money supply bubble through the economy we go back to the same moderate inflation rate we had before. And that case is basically true and has been borne out.

The anti-transitory argument is hey we got this massive jump in prices and then the prices never went back down. Which is also true. Of course, that's not strictly speaking an inflation problem anymore. Now it's a cost of living issue.

The assumption that once the price rises slowed down everyone would be happy again was the problem. Absolute levels matter as well as the rate of change!

To be clear we aren’t back to normal. We have hovered about a fifty percent above the recent norm.

Yeah that's fair. I'll concede the point, I guess I was forgetting how strong the "transitory" claims were.

One set of people got the non-transitory nature right without using any sophisticated modeling or "genuinely trying to figure out what's going on". The other set got it wrong while using sophisticated modeling and "genuinely trying to figure out what's going on". This did not lead me to conclude that causes of inflation post-2020 were hopelessly complex, but that people exercised motivated reasoning and recruited a bunch of pointless complexity rather than just acknowledge the obvious conclusion in front of them.

The whole thing feels like the midwit meme brought to life.

You're claiming that the traders mentioned in the previous post were giving away money? If so, could you elaborate on what you think the cause of error was, since I rather like it when non-me people distribute free cash.

The error is motivated reasoning due to being unwilling to criticize heavy-handed covid-excused policy. The downside is that this is hard to cash in on because it's not a bet on just inflation, but also on how deranged the government is - predicting higher inflation also means predicting a more insane government, which reduces the value of any rewards of predicting correctly.

For the sake of example to illustrate that government insanity matters for economic bets, consider 2 people betting on whether the government will rob them and take half their money. The actual chance of this happening is 50%. But if the bet is even, the payoff matrix looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/HQ1PibN.png. Therefore it's actually beneficial to bet that the government will do nothing.

Edit: It now occurs to me that this might be a novel contribution to game theory and therefore is a bit too much of a reach to be a point of evidence here.

Edit: It now occurs to me that this might be a novel contribution to game theor

Maybe to economics or betting but surely not game theory

In Physics 101, there's a class of problems where there are multiple ways to figure out the answer. One is through difficult integration of force and velocity equations. The other is noting that energy is conserved and you can figure it out through simple algebra that way. There's another class of problems where one thing absolutely dominates -- one hard SF author posed the problem in a short story about a spaceship moving through the solar system at 0.25g constant acceleration. Yes, it's a ridiculously multi-body problem, but you can basically ignore all the smaller influences because 0.25g swamps them.

These economic questions tend to be like those problems. Yes, there's a way to make it complicated, but there's also a simple "energy" (money supply/spending) argument. And yes, there's a bunch of other factors, but when you throw around trillions of dollars, they're swamped.

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