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There are absolutely people I agree with more often than Musk. There are some people online who I think are very wise and I agree with basically everything they say. Whereas I disagree with many things that Musk says, we clearly have different goals and understanding of the world. So there are people wiser than Musk.
But that doesn't mean they're smarter than Musk. If they're smarter, then why don't they simply implement their visions and smash every obstacle in their path? Musk wants to settle Mars, so he simply takes over the entire spaceflight market with SpaceX. The Democratic Party/decel culture gets in his way, so he moves to smash them with Twitter and Trump. AI coming up sooner than expected, looks like that's important? Why not simply start a frontier lab? Electric cars and robots as well!
These are impressive achievements! It is hard to create things, rather than merely performing a role for someone else like so many. Try starting your own business. It's hard on a wholly different level.
When Bieber demonstrates general-purpose creative ability (at maybe 10 or 100 times his net worth), as opposed to just being a one-trick pony in music/infatuating young women, then I'll defend his general ability. Taylor Swift does the same thing better than Bieber and has basically no political influence (her endorsement had minimal effect), Musk is on a totally different level.
The post you are replying to explained this. Intelligence does not straightforwardly equate to success like that - it is one of many correlates. Musk's wealth has multiple causes; a person of equal or greater intelligence might easily not be as successful.
Musk is rich and powerful, but that in itself does not show that Hanania is wrong, nor does it absolve Musk of any of his obvious faults.
Musk is not some baron or duke. His inheritance was by no means significant in him becoming wealthy.
'Personality type' is just a different way of saying intelligence in this context. 'I am smart but lazy' is an excuse, not an explanation. It doesn't matter at all if you're smart in some esoteric way that has no relevance in the real world. Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken.
Criticizing faults is fine but it is bizarre and question-begging for people who are in virtually every way less competent to criticize the ability of far more capable people.
I would say that one's personality may shape one's goals and priorities?
For example: I would say that Thomas Aquinas was devastatingly intelligent by any fair standard. He chose a path of life that committed him to both celibacy and poverty. By the standard you've given, though, he cannot be intelligent. He did not achieve worldly power, office, or glory.
I conclude therefore that your standard is a bad standard. It does not measure intelligence. There are extremely intelligent people who do not achieve "great effects on the world", at least in the sense that you've given. In Aquinas' case this seems to be a result of his choice not to seek that type of success. He sought something else.
Likewise "Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken" is a non sequitur. It is entirely conceivable that a person might have great effects on the world while having a brain that is, in some sense, broken. You just cannot get from "Musk has influenced the world" to "Musk has no significant faults". The claim is fallacious.
Thomas Aquinas was definitely intelligent, we are still talking about his books centuries after his death. He absolutely had impact and significance. Most of what he writes is basically nonsense but that's the nature of theology.
Maybe you can be intelligent and not do anything significant. But doing something significant requires intelligence. Given that we can't read minds and analyse them perfectly, we should assume that those who do great things have greater faculties than those who merely claim to be intelligent.
So I find it disgusting for a nobody like Hanania to go 'oh I listened to him on a podcast and read some tweets of this guy, so I can look down on his intelligence, his basic mental faculties'. That's what I'm upset with.
Furthermore, how is Hanania in a position to judge? Does he know anything of significance? What operations has he overseen? What high-performance organization has he built?
If you're down-rating Elon Musk's intelligence in favour of 'luck or arbitrary fortune', where is your reasoning that it's actually straightforward to build a rocket company or start a leading AI lab (which he did while Hanania thinks his brain was broken)? Is NASA too busy huffing airhorn gas to make cheap rockets? Is Meta AI full of dribbling retards? Did Jeff Bezos just roll bad dice with his space company? Obviously not! It's the special competence of this one man, with secrets that we don't understand regarding management, motivation and so on.
How is Musk broken if he achieves massive successes in science, engineering, business and politics?
I think it would make your argument vastly more succinct if you just said "Musk is more powerful", rather than arguing back and forth on the relative value of wisdom, smarts and factual accuracy, as well as whether Musk possesses all of those. Musk has power, Hanania doesn't, therefore Hanania's criticism is groundless and impotent. That appears to be the real gist of what you're saying.
But suppose Hanania really doesn't have the right to speak on Musk. In that case, why do you care enough to correct the public mottizen opinion on Hanania and urge people to not listen to him? Shouldn't his lack of influence be self-evident?
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I did say that I believe intelligence correlates with success. It just doesn't do so absolutely or reliably - there are successful idiots, and unsuccessful geniuses. I think Musk's business success is a data point in favour of his being clever, but it's not the only consideration, nor is it decisive in itself.
As it happens I do think Musk is reasonably clever. I don't go quite as far as Noah Smith, but I think Smith is directionally correct, and people who sneer and declare Musk a moron are being foolish.
Is Musk smarter than Hanania? I don't know. I think Hanania is evidently a reasonably smart person as well - his high standard of written expression and analytical ability show that, even if I do often think he's wrong - but I wouldn't make a general comparison. I don't know either of them in person in the kind of detail that I think I would need to in order to make a credible comparison. Fortunately "is Musk smarter than Hanania?" is the kind of question that never needs to be answered. It's a silly question - in practice, in any disagreement between Musk and Hanania, I have ample ways of resolving it without going down that rather pointless tangent.
What I find bizarre in your comments, though, is this:
I find this strangely defensive? You almost sound offended! Suppose for the sake of argument that Musk is in some objective sense smarter than Hanania. So what? Hanania is not a peasant bowing and scraping before his lord. People are allowed to criticise people smarter than them. If Person A has an IQ of 140 and Person B has an IQ of 150, it is still permissible for Person A to criticise Person B. Indeed, it is wholly conceivable that Person A might criticise Person B and be entirely correct in those criticisms, because IQ is not a measure of correctness, either factual or moral.
So even if for the sake of argument Musk is objectively more intelligent than Hanania, that would not make Hanania's argument incorrect. It would be a red herring.
This seems like an obvious case of proving too much to me. "People can never criticise their intellectual superiors" is a fake rule we never apply to anything else. Maybe Musk is much better at starting tech companies than Hanania. Bully for him. So what?
And I suppose as far as disgust or moral offense goes, for what it's worth I'm morally disgusted at the idea that the plebs should never criticise their supposed betters. There is nothing that Musk has done that confers on him a right to not be a target of criticism by others. Maybe Hanania's criticism of Musk is mistaken, but if so it's mistaken because of its actual merits, not because Hanania dared to lift his eyes to look upon the god-like mien of the shining Musk.
I'd assert that Musk's various achievements are in no way incompatible with him being pathological in some other respect.
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