This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Is there anything more singularly obnoxious than a Reddit thread of smug shots at Elon Musk? According to them, apparently he doesn't know electricity and servers cost money. And firing most of the worthless staff at Twitter was the worst self-inflicted wound anybody could have ever made!
You ask why this causes bafflement, but do you really think these idiots know something he doesn't? That they have a better grasp of tech and its funding than the man who has a history with payment processors, cybercars, rockets, and now social media - and Elon is just bumblefucking his way to success? I'll grant that he is human and more error-prone than his godly 4d troll image would have some believe. But give any one of his businesses to a chump in that thread (or a group of them) and watch it go belly-up or taken away from them under their noses.
Maybe Musks's single qualification over these people is that he doesn't post on Reddit. A lot of Musk criticism clearly comes from a type who thinks they could do the same job he does even better if only the world had been more fair and gave them the opportunity to do so. It's laughable and contemptible in equal measure.
A Hacker News thread of smug shots at Elon Musk? Not that HN isn't just another subreddit, of course, but it's a bit worse since a more tech-industry-focused version should naturally be full of people who should know better yet the threads are exactly the same.
More options
Context Copy link
I think you’re describing Reddit in general. If you read a general news discussion on almost any topic, they’re smugly wrong most of the time. They don’t know how the things they’re discussing actually work, don’t understand the power dynamics of politics at all, and still think that they can run whatever it is better than people who have decades of experience doing that thing.
Of course I think that’s to be expected when most of the user base are college students with minimal work experience and post graduates who have yet to build a solid career. Almost everyone thinks they know how to run things at 18-25 because they are taught all the theoretical stuff about the subject and have never dealt with trying to actually build something.
Elon does draw this more than most because he loves to troll and get attention for himself and put on a show. If he did the same stuff but without the fanfare and trolling, I don’t think most people follow business pages well enough to know about how other CEOs are making very similar decisions.
I definitely am discussing Reddit in general. The hot takes and easy karma shown in that thread appear any time Elon or any minimally right-coded figure pops up as a topic nearly anywhere on the site. You'll be browsing a sub for a video game or show you like and then one day there's a "DAE see similarities between Musk and the Dark Lord?" post sitting up top with 6 gold and thrice the upvotes relative to anything else.
Few are immune to smug convictions. But there is something stupefying about the particular thing they are convinced of. I'd frankly find it more tolerable if they accused him of being a grifter, a conman, a snake, or even evil. But dumb and incompetent? It's this reflexive tic among leftitsts where surely your opponents are just straight-up retarded; as opposed to you, brilliant cat man shooting for the 6 figures with your journalism and poli-sci courses (assuming they're even taking those and not just posing). And it's not just Reddit. I dont think a week goes by where I don't get fed an article about how Musk is doing something crazy or inscrutable. Just this morning I was reading about his digs at Wikipedia, and the article hintingly framed this as mental instability.
This started to feel tryhard with Trump, and it's doubly so with Musk.
I think the forward in your face way that both Trump and Musk do things matters a lot here. There are thousands of tech companies out there doing very similar work to what Musk does. There were certainly hybrid and I think electric cars made by other companies that don’t get the same attention Tesla does. Even outside of tech, lots of companies have moved plants to locations with less regulation. There have been companies that have had massive layoffs and major retooling that don’t get the same attention that Musk gets, and that’s in part because he’s doing these things in very loud public ways.
Trump was the same way. If you’d have put his actual agenda up against any Republican of the last generation, he’s not that unusual. If you took him back to 1992, he’s a democrat. The difference again tends to be that he’s loud, proud and extremely in your face abouT what he’s doing.
I think there are a lot of reasons that that style is seen as stupid. Most people have been taught by culture to see thinkers as quiet unassuming people who don’t have emotions and don’t really market themselves or their ideas. The persona of Spock is the archetypal “deep thinker” in American culture. Trump and Musk are not like that. I don’t think it’s grifting in the normal sense of things. They actually believe in the things they say, but they also understand that a persona full of confidence and a bit of showmanship are needed to make the changes they need to make. But if you’re used to thinking of quiet stoic people being smart, showmen aren’t going to come off as smart. Then add in that they’ve been in university where they’ve been taught that smart people are the ones with the right opinions and thus once Musk starts saying the wrong opinions he gets seen as obviously stupid because if he were smart he’d agree with the phds in the university.
Not only am I used to thinking of quiet stoic people being smart, I'm used to thinking of loud confident people being full of shit.
More options
Context Copy link
It doesn't help that Musk has actually got stupider as he got more famous. Everyone who worked with him at early-stage Tesla or SpaceX said he was scary because he understood the technical aspects of your job better than you did. But since he was normie-famous he has mostly been signal-boosting right-coded midwit conventional wisdom.
You can tell this by looking at what experts in his fields think of him. The car and rocket people all had the initial reaction of "This is a longshot, but it could work, and I want it to work." People who know anything about civil engineering's reaction to Hyperloop and The Boring Company was "Musk doesn't even understand why the last N people who tried this failed, so he is going to repeat those mistakes." And people who know about AI tend to think that Tesla is well behind Waymo and Cruze in autonomous driving.
My guess is that the underlying cause is some combination of drug abuse, long-term effects of lack of sleep, and no longer feeling the need to do his homework before running his mouth.
Or maybe he knows more about physics than other topics he’s tweeting about. Most people have a single or at best a set of very closely related domains that they really truly understand on a deep level. Musk is really scary good at technical stuff, he knows a lot about mechanical and software engineering. He knows less about politics and whatever conventual wisdom he’s tweeting about.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the Onion article was correct, he just wants to be liked. Right-coded midwits are desperate for some really well-known person to like them, so they are easy to cater to this way, and Musk is one of the most famous men on the planet.
Which is one of the reasons I think we might see him, and his companies, faceplant soon-ish. There's no way someone in his position doesn't know these aren't the people you're supposed to court if you want to stay on the good side of the establishment. It's either "I gotta found someone to rally around me when the chickens come home to roost" or it (and here I mean everything he's doing with Twitter rather than just signal boosting the right) is a parting FU on his way down.
So 'roll hard right and die'?
It probably says something if this passes for "hard", but yeah.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is no damn way he had more than a surface level understanding of any of it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've spent many hours discussing this exact line of thought with several people, and no, they insist he's a "failson" who's just short of being literally retarded and his entire business model is a matter of burning daddy's money and causing unmitigated destruction in every field he's active in.
In other words, Musk Derangement Syndrome.
"But apartheid emerald mine." I think there's obvious criticism to be made about Musk. But instead nonsense like that is endlessly repeated.
More options
Context Copy link
The worst is that people are somehow convinced that Elon grew up rich when it's the furthest thing from the truth.
Elon grew up middle class with almost no connections to important people. More than that, his father was absent and abusive, often giving Elon's mother no money while she worked multiple jobs to support her family.
Elon is the embodiment of a self-made person. I think that's one reason that people have EDS (Elon Derangement Syndrome). They can't accept that their own failures are the result of cowardice and lack of effort. Therefore, anyone who succeeds must have had an unfair advantage.
There's more than that there. Musk is the equivalent of Michael Jordan; for every one of him, there's a hundred others that were just as brave and worked just as hard, but didn't win the genetic lottery or were unlucky.
More options
Context Copy link
My understanding is that Elon got a bit of money from his family as seed capital - but not a particularly large amount, and probably not that much more than the amount to open a restaurant or any other small business, which is done every year by thousands of people. In some ways he did have an advantage - if he came from total destitution, he might not have had the same success. But I think that's a little bit ungenerous. Lots of people in the US could scrape together 50k of seed capital, but most of them don't become megabillionaires.
I don't think that's even true. His dad, an abusive shithead, gave him $20k at one point but it had zero impact.
His Dad was somewhat wealthy at times but by the late 1980s the emerald business (which he bought for $50,000) had failed. Later, his father relied on Elon for handouts. After early childhood, Elon lived with his mother, who worked to take care of the family with little to no monetary assistance from his father.
Compared to a typical PMC class American, Elon was in fact quite disadvantaged, though never destitute.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No they dislike Elon because they see him as a traitor to the left.
Something happened to Elon in the Ukraine war situation. After helping out Ukraine greatly with Starlink he had some sort of bad encounter with the State Department / National Security types.
Despite being a loyal tech lefty for years none of his friends would do anything and he realized he needed friends on the right to balance things and protect himself.
That's what lead to his crusade for free speech and his Twitter purchase. Word went out on Reddit that he was a traitor and should no longer be trusted. People fell in line and started attacking him.
Should he buy Reddit as well, then?
More options
Context Copy link
The Starlink thing certainly didn't help, but leftists and liberals have hated Musk for years prior to the Ukraine invasion. See these Onion articles about him which predate the war:
"Fetid, Shit-Covered Elon Musk Announces Plan To Revolutionize Nation's Sewage System"
Speaking of once-great institutions, wtf happened to the Onion? They used to be genuinely funny, and apparently it's all just hate clapter stuff now.
They got bought by the owner of Telemundo around the time of the Trump VS Hilldawg election. It's been churning out unfunny democrat agitprop ever since. The old writers were absolute masters absurdist comedy.
More options
Context Copy link
A lot of it moved to clickhole, and then because most of the stuff left was politics, TDS slipped it a Mickey and had its way with it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are there any other tech CEOs that have been turned on to a similar degree? It seems like the others are mostly positive.
Gates(yes, I know he’s retired, but how many people can name his replacement), Bezos, and Zuckerberg are all widely disliked.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thai, not Taiwanese
For me personally, "Paedo guy" and "Funding secured" were enough to push me from "Hooray for the eccentric genius" to "This guy may be smart, but he is not a fit and proper person to be CEO of a strategically important company". That applies for different reasons whether he was on drugs at the time or not.
At the time, this combined with the obviously dishonest SolarCity deal and the rapid turnover of Tesla CFO's to make me suspect that Tesla was the next Enron. I'm happy to admit that I was wrong there.
At the end of the day, I have to ask why Musk was able to make loads of money off of Paypal, then Tesla, then Space X when these were all industries with established and extremely smart players and he went from the bottom of those barrels.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Huh? I’m pretty sure the mass Elon hate dates back to at least the early Tesla years. The blue/grey tribe tension isn’t unique to him, either. I don’t think “word on Reddit” made the difference.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wouldn't even go that far - I agree that Musk works insanely hard, but he's also really smart. It's not like the only reason I'm not as rich as Musk is that I don't work as hard as him.
Having now read his biography, I'd say he's smart but not genius level. He got a 1400 on his SAT, for example, which is average around these parts.
The main reason for his success seems to be an extreme appetite for risk and zero social desirability bias. That enables him to do things which are possible but which most people wouldn't even consider - such as firing 80% of the workers at Twitter for example.
That’s 1400 in the 1980s, when it was considerably more difficult.
1400 in the 1980s would be 1400-1480 in the late 1990s after the famous recentering. There's been another recent jump with the addition and removal of the
New CokeWriting portion, but even at the median it was tens of points, not hundreds. For an older SAT supposedly a 1400 correlates with a ~140IQ. His intelligence is at that 1-in-200 "got accepted into a STEM PhD program" level; his work habits are what are at the literally 1-in-a-million "sleep on the office couch while working hundred hour weeks, then after selling that company for tens of millions do it again with the next company ad infinitum" level. A "normal" workaholic would have relaxed a little after the first multi-millionaire payout, and probably would have ended up happier and saner but wouldn't have ended up a multi-billionaire.He's also been very lucky, but that's partly down to personality too: he's won a bunch of high-variance gambles that most people wouldn't have risked making in the first place.
I think that's a good deal closer to 1/10,000. Consider the work ethic of the average Navy SEAL for example, and then consider that there's a bunch of people with SEAL tier willpower that don't become SEALs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's still lower than a good chunk of the people here. It's not like a 1400 then was harder to get than a 1600 now
More options
Context Copy link
Fair enough. I'll concede that he's probably top 1% intelligence which puts him in the top 80 million smartest people in the world.
But Terrance Tao he is not.
Interesting side question. Are there any tycoons from history who are legit 175 IQ type outliers?
Jeff Bezos was at DE Shaw before he founded Amazon, and was successful there. DE Shaw are like Jane Street in that they recruit primarily for raw IQ and can afford to be extremely selective on it. 146 IQ (top 0.1%) doesn't cut it. 155 IQ (top 0.01%) probably does. Top 0.01% is also around the level where other smart people start using the word "genius" to describe you.
175 IQ is 1 in 3 million, and even the people who care about ultra-high IQs think that the distinction between very smart and very, very smart ceases to matter around the 1 in 1 million point. Re. the various comments on high SAT scores, the Prometheus Society considers 1560 on the old SAT to be 1 in 30,000 which corresponds to a 160 IQ on the current standard scale. There are no longer any publically available IQ tests which are accurate at that level.
SBF was above-average IQ for Jane Street, which also qualifies him as a legit genius.
If we treat "implausible polymathic success in a wide range of IQ-loaded fields" as a sign of genius-level IQ, then Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon are probably the smartest world leaders in history.
I really doubt either DE Shaw or Jane Street average 99.99th percentile intelligence for juniors. Their testing (any testing) isn’t that granular.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Bill gates is the obvious one. I’d probably point to John mcafee as the mentally ill version of the same thing, maybe some of the enron people, possibly Thomas Edison. Deeper in history you get into ‘who is a tycoon, really’, but the wealthiest men in history are I think Mansa musa and Francisco Pizarro, neither of whom seem likely to be geniuses. John Rockefeller strikes me as probably the smartest of the original robber barons, but probably not to genius level.
More options
Context Copy link
Only a handful who have extremely impressive academic performance, like Gates. Even for those who do, it's questionable - Zuck wasn't a highly impressive Harvard student even though he got a perfect 1600 on the SAT, which many more impressive students don't have. It's hard to say whether Rockefeller, Carnegie, or even modern tycoons like Larry Ellison are comparable.
More options
Context Copy link
Unsure if a “tychoon”, but the Renaissance Technology founder Jim Simmons. He isn’t Terrance Tap either, however.
Bill Gates is probably the go-to answer, but I also say Steve Ballmer. Unsure if either is at the 175 genius level, though.
harder to judge the older generations. Rockefeller had to be smart, but a lot of his success is hard work and ruthlessness. I guess pioneering new things that the government hates does take creativity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I also get the impression he has an unusual facility of being able to obsessively fixate on a specific topic or task for hours or days at a time, without getting distracted, breaking his concentration or seeing any significant fall-off in productivity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link