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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32371 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Richard Hanania continues his criticism of Musk, as a guest author for UnHerd. (Sidenote: On his own website, he wrote "I never thought I would write an article for Sohrab Ahmari, as we disagree on a lot and I’ve regrettably insulted him a few times, but he reached out after my recent piece on Musk and asked if I would like to write something for UnHerd.") It's a combination of criticism of Musk as an intellectual, criticism of DOGE, and contrasting the intellectual traits adaptive for business and non-business success. The closing paragraphs are interesting:

To be sure, this analysis doesn’t explain everything about Musk’s recent behaviour. There may be other dimensions. I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022, whether it was from drug use, social-media addiction, a combination of both, or something else. It’s possible that all his business ventures begin to fail from now, which would indicate a more general decline in his cognition and ability to regulate his emotions. Much reporting has been done on Musk’s drug use, which has been serious enough to worry many around him.

Yet if Musk continues to succeed as a businessman while being this dumb about everything related to public policy, he will end up having given us what was by far history’s greatest demonstration of the non-transferability of insight and skill across domains where wise leadership is necessary for human flourishing.

I think that the truth is perhaps much simpler. Musk has not "deteriorated" intellectually so much as he has transitioned from being a darling of progressives and blue/grey-tribe technocrats due to his elecric cars, to being an enemy due to his politics.

Elon has always been erratic and eccentric, (just look at his kids' names) but nobody really cared until he aligned himself with the Tea-Party/Maga right.

It was published in 2019, and it's been a few years since I read it, but I'm trying to think back to examples from Ed Niedermeyer's "Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors," to see if they indicate a trend. Musk's MO was very much fake-it-till-you-make-it, even when that included commiting outright fraud (so much fraud...), but he cared enough about reality to admit (eventually) that certain decisions had been wrong (e.g., the Model X was overly complex and achieving mass-production for the Model 3 by reinventing the assembly line in an unclear way that required "building the machine that builds the machine"). On the other hand, Tesla has removed RADAR from its sensor suite, for pure monocular computer vision (they have multiple forward-facing cameras, but they're different fields of view, not stereoscopic).

I was recently listening to something on the early days of the airline industry and was struck by how much their description of Donald Douglas was giving me Elon Musk vibes.

A sort of "you need to be at least this mad to truly revolutionize an industry", reasonable men need not apply.

Now read about Howard Hughes.

While his kid's names are weird, they're not erratic.

L X Æ A-Xii, 4 Exa Dark Sideræl, Techno Mechanicus aren’t erratic sounding names?

They all sound science fictional. He doesn’t jump from sci-fi name to ghetto name to fundy name- he stays in the same land of strange names.

My guess is that he just mostly lets the mothers name the children. The ones with the weirdest names are the ones with Grimes.

This is not remotely tenable. His achievements at SpaceX were, in every sense of the word, extraordinary.

Meanwhile DOGE is going to end up being simply ineffective at achieving even its most basic goals.

DOGE is a suicide mission (unless a meaningless blue ribbon commission, which is what I expected) and it's a serious demerit against Musk's intelligence/perceptiveness that he actually took it seriously. The executive has relatively limited means to actually do anything about the budget. That has to come from Congress, and the GOP has been anywhere from useless (W. Bush administration oversaw the biggest increase in healthcare spending since LBJ; Obamacare just locked it in and socialized some of it) to merely OK (second-term Obama GOP House did see some deficit reduction) on the budget since Gingrich, who was frankly playing on easy mode (post cold war peace dividend plus the peak earning years of the Boomers coinciding with a small generation retiring and good economic growth) compared to what any House is dealing with now.

Last I checked, the GOP House since taking over in '23 has done nothing but pass continuations of Biden/Pelosi's budgets.

Last I checked, the GOP House since taking over in '23 has done nothing but pass continuations of Biden/Pelosi's budgets.

Because the GOP majority is not a monolith, they have to find something that bridges the freedom caucus folks and the blue state folks and the western-GOP folks.

It's a serious demerit against Musk's intelligence/perceptiveness that he actually took it seriously

It's a demerit against the theory of infinite-transferability of ability, and against him that he didn't realize that.

Will it? What exactly do you think those goals are?

DOGE is arguably being fairly effective in its core goal of providing propaganda to justify tax cuts while convincing the base forward rather than backward progress is being made on government spending.

I agree that this is the most parsimonious explanation. Even someone as public as Musk spends a majority of his time outside the spotlight, so few people, if any, have enough contact with him to make a call like his mind breaking. Sometimes it's obvious, as in the case of people like Kanye or Biden, but in those cases, generally even the people who support them can't deny it, not without massive help from powerful media companies, anyway. This criticism of Musk appears to come almost entirely from people who already disliked Musk and Trump, and the people who currently like Musk don't seem to have noticed this, so my conclusion is that people claiming that evidence points to Musk's mind breaking are characterizing his apparent shift in politics away from them as that, and then honestly believing it (well, I wonder if Hanania believes it, if he's as smart as I think he is; from my following his Twitter account, he seems to optimize around heat and not light, in a way that presents himself as a wise right-wing contrarian, so I'm not sure if he believes in anything these days). If there were some significant population of people who are cheering on what Musk is doing these days who think his mind is broken, that would lend credence to the theory, but outside of that, it's hard to conclude anything other than partisan bias. Which is the correct explanation for roughly 99.9% of all questions in the realm of politics, by my estimation.

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