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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   31396 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Elon is a True Believer, and that's why he Backs Trump

https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-reentry-by-eric-berger

So there's been discussion of why Elon Musk put threw in so hard with Trump. What he gets out of owning twitter. I've long had a pretty simple and parsimonious explanation- he wants humanity to spread throughout the universe, and if democrats get in his way he will have to back republicans regardless of his other political opinions. Democrats got in the way.

This review of Reentry is, functionally, a better sourced argument for my intuition. I suppose as a religious fanatic myself I can recognize a fanatic of a different creed by instinct; I guess indifferent PMC types need to be reasoned into the conclusion. As an aside, this is why I'm less worried about woke than some of our other social conservative posters- I don't think I can point to it, but everything about them just screams 'these people sort of believe, in the sense that they don't really disagree, but not in the sense that they'll take licks for their ideology. Like, they're willing to ruin other people's lives over it, sure, but not their own'. Regardless, the actions of SpaceX point to being run by true believers:

when SpaceX is preparing to move their Falcon 9 rocket from its test stand to the launch site for the very first time, they hire “the second largest crane in Texas” to first stack the pieces of the rocket on top of each other, and then lower them onto a waiting trailer. Halfway through the operation, they realize it won’t work because of the wind and that they’ll have to assemble them on the ground. But the piece currently dangling from the crane and blowing like a sail in the wind isn’t designed to bear its own weight, so they literally can’t put it down.

The guy in charge of the operation joined the company a few weeks ago as a rocket engineer in California, and he is now watching the future of the company dangling in front of him from the second largest crane in Texas. Darkness is falling. What does he do? He does what he has to do: calls a few dozen welders to come the next morning, then stays up all night designing a custom “cradle” that the rocket can be lowered into while anxiously watching to make sure the crane doesn’t start leaking hydraulic fluid. He notes: “At Northrop [Grumann], building a custom cradle would have become its own mini-program with design reviews, taking months to build rather than hours.”

Once the rocket is down, they need to move it. To Florida. NASA and other rocket makers generally move their rockets by sea, but that’s slow and expensive. SpaceX doesn’t like to do things that are slow and expensive, so they decide to drive it there. Unfortunately, when lying down on its cradle, the rocket can’t fit under a standard freeway overpass. This is the point at which, if you did not follow the Haywood Algorithm, you would rent a barge and allow the rocket to arrive a few months late. But SpaceX always acts as if any delay at all will kill the company, so they instead set off on “the road trip from hell,” finding an absurd and tortuous route down backroads from Texas to Florida.

Their route has no overpasses, but it does have power lines and traffic lights. So some of the world’s best rocket scientists drive in front of the trailer with a flexible, 17-foot pole taped to the bumper of their car. Whenever it hits something, they jump out, use large sticks to lift the power line enough that the rocket can pass under, then jump back in their car and drive off the road and around the rocket (it’s too wide to pass) so they can intercept the next obstacle. The average speed of the trip is 10mph, and they drive continuously through the night, sleeping in shifts when they’re able to. They have a hard deadline of 5pm on November 24th, because Florida closes its roads to oversized loads for a week around Thanksgiving, and they roll into Cape Canaveral on November 24th, at 3:21pm, after ten days of continuous driving.

That's one example. It's also not just about SpaceX being lean and nimble. It's about being true believers. Elon Musk literally actually believes that humanity spreading through the entire universe is the most important thing... ever, with no exceptions. And he's managed to convince the company that that is correct. Obstacles to this will need to be overcome or removed, such as by sending a guy with a flexible pole to lift up overhead power lines when your rocket engine passes through backroads in the rural south because a barge would take too long. NASA would have accepted the cost. Why? At the end of the day, they believe in going to space, sure, but they're not, like, fanatics about it. SpaceX are fanatics.

And SpaceX just consistently decides not to cash out and take easy money for the rest of their lives. Instead they plow the profits from that easy money into moonshots that push the possibilities of space exploration forwards by developing new technology. Why? I'll quote the review again:

No! It’s actually very simple: remember all that stuff about how SpaceX is less of a company and more of a religious movement, with a goal of making life multi-planetary? Elon and SpaceX behave the way that they do because they believe that stuff very sincerely. A version of SpaceX that merely became worth trillions of dollars, but never enabled the colonization of Mars, would be a disastrous failure in Elon’s eyes.

It's actually pretty simple. He's not a perfectly rational money-maxxer because a perfectly rational money-maxxer would not be betting the entire company on moonshot technological progress no matter what the math says. People are risk averse when all they care about is purchasing power.

So how does this tie in with politics? Well, he bought twitter to back republicans because democrats were doing things like making him kidnap seals and record their emotional reactions to recordings of rocket launches, and other such stupid delays. It's extremely rational for Elon to conclude 1) a cooperative government will enable him to get to mars faster and 2) republicans will give him a cooperative government in exchange for support, democrats will never give him a cooperative government. Yes, he condemns woke, but a) woke doesn't have, like, an actual definition, so it can easily refer to the socialism-by-bureaucracy wing even if that's not totally standard b) I get the sense that a lot of the turn of opinion against him relies on woke-ish methods, with things like cancel culture allowing a corralling of left public opinion, and it's pretty reasonable to think he does too c) there's lots of wokeness or woke ideology involved in holding him back(especially with environmental stuff), and plenty of potential attacks on him from a woke perspective(I'm kind of surprised nobody's already tried to metoo him). Yes, he's conspicuously worried about birthrates, but space colonization essentially requires high human capital high tfr populations.

I wrote a post a few months ago about Gen Z not having enough grit, aggression and agency and willingness to go all in. In retrospect, I don't think it was my best work. Elon's plenty gritty. There's lots of lack of grit in modern society; the every-other-month-AAQC about how all marriages are gay marriages now is basically decrying that, because in modern marriages there's no going all in, doing whatever it takes, they're in concept similar to 'partnerships' among sexual minorities. I'm willing to make that argument but not making it here. Instead I wonder- is fanaticism a necessary component of grit? That certainly seems to be the difference between SpaceX and NASA. Is today's malaise just downstream of being unwilling to commit to things? The birthrate crisis, the military recruitment crisis- moderners just not wanting to burn their bridges and have no recourse but to see their commitment through?

I've rambled a lot here, but it seems convincing to me at least.

What I don’t understand about Elon is his push for Mars colonization, given his views on AI. AI is either going to kill us or greatly accelerate technological progress. If it kills us, it will find us on Mars. If it accelerates technology, it will make getting to Mars much easier than it is today. Given the likely progress of AI over the next 15 years, why is Elon bothering with trying to colonize Mars in the near future?

Yeah but based on the past two hundred years of human history, you will always have an easier time doing anything if you wait fifteen years. In fifteen years time the ai will be good at getting us to Mars, but if we wait another fifteen years on top of that the ai will be even better at getting to Mars! You can always find a reason to wait, the 'any delay is death' philosophy allows Musk to do things we didn't think possible.

Elon might be able to get humans to Mars before someone creates a computer superintelligence, but it seems very unlikely he could create a self-sustaining Martian colony before superintelligence is created.

Interesting that strong AI is now taken as consensus? I believe superintelligence is not possible. LLMs hitting a ceiling recently is one sign for that, but I don’t believe LLM can be intelligent anyway.

I believe superintelligence is not possible.

I see no reason to expect that humans are the most intelligent being possible.

I hope that AIs are nowhere close to that. LLM managing to succeed here would be just sad, being outcompeted by glorified Markov chains would be too much.

Strong AI (and strong AI hurtling towards humanity) has enjoyed a lot of general agreement on the Motte for years. So much so that the odd user here and there will express a sudden disinterest in the culture war, the result of a belief that AI will come soon and obliviate every modern-day political concern by turning Earth into a paradise or a hellscape mountain range of paperclips.

One user maybe a year ago posted a big departure comment saying that everyone here was stressing him out talking about AI so much, and how mind-blowingly fantastically utterly unrecognizable the world with AI will be. He couldn't handle it and took the grill pill. A good choice, I think.

To your point about LLMs and intelligence, it doesn't matter what theory of intelligence you use. If it can be programmed to talk, it can be programmed to laugh, or cry, or scream in pain; and then people are going to try to give it voting rights.

It does, but it's about the attitude. Necessity is the mother of invention you know? Behave as if you have no choice but to find a solution and you will likely find solutions that never occurred to anyone before. Ai might kill us in 15 years, or solve everything or hit a cap we didn't previously understand or anticipate. Elon wants to go to Mars now though, so that means throwing everything he can now at it.

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