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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.

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.

Give a guy unlimited money , a lot of free time, and the biggest platform in the world. It's like the plot of an Adam Sandler movie but real life sorta.

a lot of free time

This is the exact opposite of everything that gets reported about his work schedule. And in this context, you can't even count all his free time as "thinking up shit to say on Twitter" time, you have to subtract his social life too, after which point it's easy to see why his Twitter feed is a mess; there's barely enough time left for the "say on Twitter" and sadly not enough time for the "thinking".

A normal person would notice this and stop saying crazy shit, though, so the question "why doesn't Musk?" remains. I'd guess it's some combination of a manic personality (natural? seems like it's been going on too long to be drug-fueled?), foolish induction from extreme data (if everything you touch has been turning to gold, wouldn't you want to believe that's all because you have a Magic Touch, ignoring the power of dumb luck + vagaries of the market?), and ... well, not-so-foolish strategy. A guy who was just like Musk but did stop himself from doing crazy shit would have retired after cashing in on PayPal, he wouldn't have tried to revolutionize the auto industry and make the existing space industry obsolete, and then we'd never have even learned his name. The amount of suffering Musk incurs from crazy shit that backfires seems to be well outweighed by the benefit he's gotten from crazy shit that didn't, so it's not entirely unreasonable that he never learned to stop.

A normal person would notice this and stop saying crazy shit

You seem to be conflating the senses of normal that are "average person", "sensible person who is correct", and "person who follows social mores". But ... normal people in the first sense constantly say very dumb things on twitter (who do you think is liking and retweeting all the "culture war" stuff), smart correct people are often wrong and also sometimes go against the mainstream and are right, and should publicize that.

after which point it's easy to see why his Twitter feed is a mess; there's barely enough time left for the "say on Twitter" and sadly not enough time for the "thinking".

Musk's twitter rants aren't that much less coherent than the opinions of plenty of professional political commentators, thinkers, etc. Extremely intelligent people, mathematicians, physicists, artists - even those who spend a lot of time on politics - still usually have some variety of standard-ish political beliefs, whether that be republican, democrat, socialist, including many of the dumb parts. It's not obvious Musk's claims are any dumber than most peoples', or even many pundits' (though they are dumb) - when @TrumpJew2 says the same thing about ukraine, they just get 5k likes, instead of everyone dogpiling it for being dumb.