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Here's a theory I've been toying with - let me start with an analogy, though.
Is it good for me, as a random American citizen, for the Chinese government to become more efficient, effective, capable, and trusted by its residents, to the point where such residents are willing to sacrifice personal things for some greater common good? Should I applaud any such efforts, or even figure out how to participate in various international organizations that could somehow encourage such things?
I think it's obviously that the answer isn't trivially "yes", because I have no reason to assume that an effective Chinese government actually has my values and concerns and best interest in mind. In fact, it's fairly likely that their values and goals might have some very zero sum consequences for me and my loved ones. The more effective the Chinese government is, the worse for me... at least possibly. This is not a crazy thing to think. And indeed, every empire that has leaned on divide et impera seems to have a similar view, because they very frequently find ways to keep their competitors divided and low trust to prevent exactly that kind of efficiency.
One of the consequences of the Reagan revolution is that it cemented a certain kind of public rhetoric about the American Federal government in relation to citizens. We've been habituated to that rhetoric being what it means to be conservative. "Of course we need good government, of course we have a shared common good... but the problem is waste. The problem is corruption. The problem is big government is too distant from local communities. The problem is that do-gooder liberals have real difficulty understanding second order consequences, and they often don't understand economics at all. Let's shrink government and make it better, let's get of waste, let's give taxes back to responsible taxpayers who work and raise families and follow the law and participate in the military."
But that rhetoric, successful as it was, still pushed the idea that there was a shared, consensus common good, and that an effective central government simply needed to be pointed correctly in the direction of the revised common good. It needed to be pruned, it needed to be tended. But that rhetoric intentionally papered over a lot serious fissures. This is especially true if you pay more attention to the kinds of people who might be labeled paleocons in their inclination. If you read about the history of forced busing in the seventies, for example, you might personally read it as a story of good intentions not being enough to achieve a desirable outcome - the right thing was done the wrong way. That's a very public Reagan conservative way to talk about it. But for a LOT of people who lived through it, they actually experienced it as the government and its utopian bureaucrats, as external tyrannical forces, actively ethnic cleansing them. For people who experienced it that way, having the government be more effective or efficient, and having it cut waste, is arguably a worse outcome, not a better one. Destroying the capacity of the government to function, if that's your view of things, is a feature, not a bug.
I'm not exactly saying Musk believes something like this in relation to either the Federal government or international institutions. But I am saying that this issue - whether or not the Federal government is intrinsically a foe, or if it can be a friend - seems much more live on the Right in positions of actual power these days than it ever has been in my lifetime. All my years growing up, seeing the government as an outside, malign force of extreme power was a really widely held position by the adults around me, but they were accustomed to getting lip service from their politicians about the issue but never any actual movement. And the issue is that all the adults around me were like the ones who were on the receiving end of forced busing and other similar liberal projects. They did not experience the Federal Government as a solution to a problem, but more like a God like Zeus at his worse - it had to be placated and otherwise avoided as much as possible.
Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying, if there is interest in wrecking government, then it's absolutely possible for public rhetoric that involves conspicuously lazy fact checking, repeated at very high volume and frequency, to be a feature, not a bug. Because anything that bolsters public trust in shared public discussion helps build trust in shared public institutions. And anything that pollutes the media environment and invites skepticism reduces that kind of shared public resource. This is part of why the high profile failures of Federal institutions during 2020 and Covid were much more damaging for pro-centralizing, pro-institution progressives; they need public trust for public authority to gain the power they want and to achieve their goals in a way that some other political strands simply don't. It's likewise why the public radicalization of so many professors and prestige journalists, spewing all their misinformed, polarized, clickbait political opinions on twitter for the last 15 years, was probably a mistake of historical proportions for the legitimacy of the American academy and legacy press - I'm supposed to implicitly trust well-credentialed voices in a way that I don't trust Alex Jones, but it turns out a lot of "smart" people sound about as epistemically rigorous as Alex Jones when you get them away from the very narrow slices of knowledge where they actually maintain rigor, and it turns out that a lot of them have very different values from me, and are deep in a Schmittian friend-foe distinction that they used to be able to hide much better, maybe even from themselves. Elon Musk being exactly as epistemically lazy as those other voices doesn't redeem them; instead, arguably it just reinforces my skepticism. There are serious asymmetries at play here about the consequences of public distrust. I'm thinking very specifically here, too, of the 2016 Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalisation, by the way, which makes a very specific argument that established political forces under Putin in Russia had mastered a form of flooding the media environment with conflicting sensational garbage to get people to become very skeptical and disengage from political engagement more broadly.
As I say, I have no idea how Musk actually fits in in all of this. But it's a theory.
I find this post to be generating a sentiment I generally agree with, and I also would point to there being a very important sub-portion of government that the split between liberals and conservatives seem to be fracturing around: Education.
If you are a conservative and went to public schools, you generally think a minority of your teachers were good and fair. If you are a progressive, the opposite is generally true. From 1st -12th grade I had 2 teachers total I would put in the category of good and fair. The vast majority were either unfair or bad, and a solid 70%+ were both.
This is all while I am a solid A student for all these years. I did not think these teachers were bad or unfair because they gave me bad grades, they were bad and unfair based on my other judgements. Usually how they treated other students, or how they expected ridiculous things from me like constantly pairing me in group projects with dumb/violent kids. Progressive kids I think generally like teachers. I think a lot of that is that they got good grades. Whence we are seeing the large M/F gap in both college attendance and partisanship. Girls keep getting good grades that are unearned in K-12, boys consistently over-perform on standardized tests now. Girls are getting more progressive, boys less so. Boys are seeing this unfairness more and more. On both ends. The 4.0 boy and the 2.0 boy are both being massively discriminated against in the most public facing institution in our government, the schools. And that is being reflected in poll results.
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While there’s definitely people in the Trump coalition who would be happy to see declining federal state capacity- I guess I’m technically one of them- I’m pretty sure Musk doesn’t qualify. He wants the federal government to be on his side, not for it to be a polite suggestion.
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This strain of thought definitely exists, and I think you need to expand it to consider priorities when cutting. If your goal is to undermine public faith in government and feed new calls for new cuts in a future perpetual cycle, you want your cuts to be maximally destructive, deleterious, crippling, and you want to target visible things that people like and that benefit actual citizens.
If I were running Ford and trying to destroy Ford, I wouldn't start by cutting the cars everyone doesn't like. I would start by ending Mustang production, screwing up the engine and bed on the F150, and leaving shit like the Escape that no one likes anyway alone. Then even if the board manages to get me out of office and try to reverse the decline, the damage will be done in consumer sentiment.
To turn people against the government, make interacting with the government more unpleasant, make the headline things that people like such as national parks and the NOAA work more poorly, undermine morale and security throughout the entire federal workforce. That will turn people further against the federal government, feeding bigger cuts.
Ford doesn't have a monopoly on violence though; in the government analogy, they just make everyone drive Escapes -- which makes people hate the Forderlords but it's not like they can go buy a Camaro instead.
Whereas if they quit making Escapes and nobody cares, it's a viable argument that Ford is wasting a lot of resources on things nobody likes, and further cuts should be NBD. (of course the plan breaks down when all the CUV engineers start writing articles about how many puppies will die if they are laid off)
I think, to torture the metaphor to death, the argument would be that if you quit wasting money on crap nobody likes, but retain the positive image of the company as a whole, the company will rebound. Ford made the Edsel, and it was a flop, but Ford survived and made the Mustang and as a result would go on to waste money on the Escape and the Edge and the Flex and whatever else.
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The weird thing is that this is how some government departments have reacted to cuts in the past. They cut the things that are most visible in order to drive public support to reverse the cuts.
This is an obvious tactic, it even has a recognized name if I remember. “Washington monument syndrome”, from the act of closing a high visibility and popular attraction to affect maximum outrage.
High level bureaucrats get to where they get by knowing how to play the game and defend their turf. Cutting their budgets is a direct threat to their power, so instead of trimming the fat they immediately cut into muscle and bone to cause maximum observable negative effects.
If you’re a librarian, instead of cutting unpopular programs or reorganizing for a leaner institution you cut staff hours at the front desk, maximizing wait times, then blame it on the mean old politicians who just hate children and reading. Same thing with national parks, I rolled my eyes when I saw they cut that locksmith and shut down the bathrooms, it was so transparently designed to be maximally disruptive and silly.
But this is just politics 101, its easy to see if you’ve ever interacted with any of these people.
Sinecures for the politically connected? Untouched. Programs and initiatives that play to the party faithful of radical activists? Reshuffled, renamed, hidden from view.
Beloved symbols that are popular with a huge swathe of the public? Tragically closed, so sad, so avoidable if mean old republicans and townies just learned their place.
Utterly predictable.
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I doubt it. Perhaps I am naive, but I think it would be more valuable to Musk to have Musk's own mass media with non-government-affiliated Community Notes known reliable when old Blue government-affiliated media is unreliable. If you are picturing a future without trust in current public institutions because they include your "outgroup" ... Firstly, you still would need institutions for your in-group, and I doubt it is your outgroup who is relying on X Community Notes in the first place.
Mainstream media, at least their bias is directionally predictable, and they seldom invent untruths easily refuted as untruths as Zelensky's approval ratings. Musk's takes are becoming increasingly unpredictable.
Alternative hypothesis: Good fact checking when Musk has started habitually retweeting untruths is embarrassing to Musk. Like many self-appointed strong leaders before him, Musk reacts badly when embarrassed. Thus, his underlings will rather cave in than insist on reporting the truth, and Musk embraces stories that fit in his mental headspace. The principal benefit of this hypothesis is that it is common human behavior since untold generations, and requires no convoluted plots.
Only issue to explain is how come he has been leading successful engineering companies until recently, as physics won't lie. One possibility is that this is a recent development, and we will see increasing amount of SpaceX and Tesla failures from increasingly deranged management. Other possibility is that it is not a new personality trait, only its magnitude has increased lately: Musk has had a documented habit of pushing not exactly reality based visions when he has been able to get away with it (launching "Full Self Driving" when it was not full self-driving, giving timelines in "Elon time" that never held, the kids in the cave episode). Perhaps rockets exploding when physics disagreed was what kept Musk the SpaceX CEO in a productive development loop with the reality, but the social environment of politics won't provide equally direct and brutal feedback to Musk the Politician.
I think this is correct. Musk can simultaneously be a narcissistic bullshitter and a highly capable manufacturing CEO. Delusional overconfidence can be a benefit in certain endeavors because even if you fall short of unrealistic expectations you may still exceed what was conventionally thought possible and you may stick with projects when less
dementeddetermined people would have called it quits. On the other hand, it can also lead you to throw away time, money, and effort on unrealistic projects that go nowhere because no amount of force of will can overcome the technical problems.It can also lead you to repeatedly fall for obvious nonsense because you think you're too smart to be wrong, and none of your retinue dares correct you.
This was basically Bad Blood's take on how Theranos happened. Young, demented girl looks out at all her SV heroes faking it till they make it. Wants to do the same thing but is too young and demented to realize it's one thing to say that for a digital widget and another to apply it to a much more unforgiving domain.
It has come to mind before with Elon, like when I heard him talking about cutting $2 trillion.
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I also think there can be a malign feedback loop here, where if you start being right more often than not you start disregarding advice and overfitting being correct most of the time to being correct 100% of the time and if you start doing this and it pays off (because you're smart) then soon you can get into a sort of death spiral where you just double down on anything and never update your "I am literally never wrong" priors because you had a good run in an area where you are genuinely talented.
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I've noticed that the best salesmen I know are often the people most easily sold. My friends who are exceedingly talented medical device or insurance salesmen are the same guys getting talked into timeshares or undercoats or whatever.
I agree.
I once had a salesman friend get into my industry and arrange a meeting with me to spruik a very average product that I knew was very average. I couldn't believe how strongly he seemed to believe in the product. I'd known this guy for about 20 years since childhood. He absolutely believed the bullshit that he was spouting about the peddled garbage being the best in the field.
spruik, what a useful word! I'd never heard that one before.
You're right it is. It has real low brow used car salesman or carnival barker vibes.
Man, the Chaser takes me back a bit. There are a lot of good teenage memories watching those guys.
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Sure, because often those are the people who believe in themselves the most, and that means both believing (in fate) and believing in themselves, which both make falling for scams more likely.
Exactly. The quality of belief is the common thing.
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I have friend who worked at Twitter - he recently quit because Elon just wouldn’t listen to any feedback regarding improvements to processes he was supervising and so he felt it wasn’t worth wasting his time.
I get the feeling that Elon doesn’t listen to feedback in general so that can be helpful in areas he has savant level skill (rocket engine manufacturing) and not helpful where he his instincts steer him wrong (running an ad supported social media company).
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Great post. As someone that leans more libertarian, it does seem like government programs do more harm than good, especially w.r.t. second order effects and longer term unintended consequences (ie: nanny and welfare state slowly destroying the family unit, esp in poorer communities).
So yes, Musk, Trump et al. acting brash, irrational, and abusing power might be a great thing, if it reduces the government loving progressive caucus’ trust in the whole apparatus.
Why on Earth would it do that? When the opposition party makes it clear their plan is overt sabotage, you're not going to think "the system is broken, better hand even more power to people like Musk." You're going to think "we have a problem with saboteurs."
Obviously not 100% of people will be convinced but this does a lot to discredit the legitimacy and even constitutionality of our current government. If the government is only legit when progressives win, well it’s not legit about half the time. So you’re halfway there.
To correct for this, some will want to rig elections so that their side can’t lose. Well doesn’t that make it even less legit for everyone else?
Finally, there are other forms of government or organization that are not extremely top-down federal level OR full corporatocracy. State, local level? The Federal level is fucked and a money grab, we can all see this.
Can we? State and local government often makes the Feds look efficient and honest. Some of the most high-impact bad policy is attributable to decisions made at the state and local level. It's rent seeking all the way down, and half the time "local autonomy" just local elites stamping the boot on the necks of local out group members.
Again, this makes no sense. Accelerationism rarely plays out the way you expect. If you start corruption and abuse-maxing, the most likely reaction is tightening accountability and proceduralism such that officials have less discretion to abuse. It also raises the risk of authoritarianism as the power abusers you enthroned to destroy state legitimacy abuse their power to hang onto to power. Bad faith participation may make sense of your goal is to literally wreck the country, but that's just a different form of shooting yourself in the dick.
Like, how do you see this playing out? Trump abuses executive discretion, therefore we're going to abolish social security?
Sure, but at least states have competition. If some state has bad policy, people will leave to a better managed one. I strongly believe in competition and some sort of free market here, where bad states fail, good ones succeed and grow, and then regimes will change and improve in bad states.
Not even about social security, what about all this immoral shit that the government does, or corporations use government to do? Like regime changes, war mongering (and how fucking profitable war is), immunity for vaccine manufacturers, all this is shady as fuck and the right seems bent on tearing it down and stopping left-wing grifts. When the left gets in power, I’d love to see them reveal and tear down right wing grifts (there are many) and after a few cycles of this, government is dramatically smaller, less grifty, and more moral.
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