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Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 23, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What do you think motivates Elon Musk to do some of the weird things he does? He has a lot of tweets that feel like /r/iamverysmart material, like saying chess is a simple game and now that we have computers games like Polytopia are way better. Or how he tried to buy twitter, then back out of it after already signing a contract saying he would leading twitter to sue him to force him to buy. Or offering his analysis of the Ukraine-Russian war on twitter, which even if you would agree the broad strokes of his suggestion were good, Twitter's really not a good platform to share nuanced geopolitical analysis to try to encourage peace.

Is he just doing stuff for attention? Does he think he's genuinely making a world a better place with those actions? Does he have some sort of social media manager planning this stuff to keep his name in the news and stock price high? Is he just bored and tweeting/making impulse purchases to pass the time, like what everyone else does just on a much larger scale? For the life of me I don't know why he does what he does.

I think seeing someone do some enormously talented and exceptionally dumb things makes people try to collapse them down into someone whose stupid moves are all 4D chess maneuvers or whose smart moves are all dumb luck. The reality is probably just that someone can be very intelligent in some areas and inept in others.