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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32370 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.

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