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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32384 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.

The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years. The news has been doing this forever. Everything else Hanania writes is not a full representation of facts, but a partisan slant to make you dislike Elon (eg, no proof that cutting Department of Ed employees will reduce the longterm collection of debt in any way that it deserves a moment’s thought; no entertaining the notion that he did not cut those specific employees; no entertaining the notion that “build fast and break things” may be the overall utilitarian strategy which simply looks worse when you write a slanted list of all the bad things; etc)

The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years.

Punching a specific person that has been punching you for years is fair game.

Punching people more generally because you were punched for a while isn't remotely the same, and is usually rather frowned upon.

All is fair in existential infowar.

This is one of the big classical problems with democracy.

I’m not sure what you mean. In a democracy filled with uninformed and incompetent voters, if one side lies all the time, the other side must lie in turn in order to compete, let alone win. This is actually the very basis of newspapers in the American democratic tradition. X is not a newspaper, no, but it has taken on the same role. If the American voter wishes to learn about the facts and only the facts, they have to read papers and bills and data, and not Reddit or X or Bluesky. And yet they continue to use these services, at once proving that they are incompetent judges of the most obvious fact that the media lies. To quote Thomas Jefferson,

It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them

It's not irrational to delegate some amount of legal or political understanding to a trusted intermediate. One should still be open to whether they lied/erred and check their work from time to time, but expecting everyone everywhere to be deep subject-matter experts in this stuff is foolish.

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