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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:
Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth. Is Hanania running a viable AGI program? Is Hanania building huge rockets? Are Hanania's opinions relevant in world affairs, does he control key communications infrastructure used by armies? Is he doing anything of importance whatsoever? No. If anything he shot himself in the foot switching from 'I'm a smart tech-right policy guy' to 'let me sneer at all the right-wing retards who are now running the country and are in a position to implement policies'. He's the contrarian rat that jumps on board the sinking ship. What a fool!
Elon may indeed have lost some of his faculties, idk, I've never met the man. I doubt Hanania has either. Armchair psychoanalysis of extremely unusual people is basically just glorified name-calling.
Whatever Elon has lost, if anything, he still makes the rest of the world look like drooling retards. What did I get done in the last 3 years, since 2022? I certainly didn't start an AI company that's outperforming Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. I didn't build the biggest datacentre on the planet at record speed.
It's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree with Elon's choices or think he should do something else. I disagree with Elon about many things, including his whole concept of what a state is for. But if people want to go around calling him dumb or saying that his brain 'broke', then we'd better have some serious achievements to prove that we know what 'smart' or 'successful' is! Certainly something better than 'I wrote a book rehashing Mearsheimer (nobody cares about it) and blew up my political career' like Hanania.
Why should anyone care what Hanania thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it? He was pivoting away from Trump while Elon pivoted towards Trump... I think it's clear who has better political skills and like everything else between them, it's an orders of magnitude difference.
This is only relevant if we think that Twitter followers or personal wealth are proportional to intelligence.
There is no doubt some correlation between intelligence and success at one's endeavours. Some. But it is not total, and so if we consider why Hanania isn't fabulously wealthy and followed by a lot of people on the internet, we might consider the very many relevant factors other than intelligence. For instance, Hanania is younger than Musk, Hanania has different personal goals and priorities to Musk, Hanania has a different personality profile to Musk, Hanania wasn't born into wealth the way Musk was, and that's all well before we even get to considering luck or arbitrary fortune.
Maybe you think Hanania is dumb anyway, and sure, maybe he is.
But I'm willing to bet that there are lots of people with fewer than Musk's 219 million Twitter followers who you and I would agree are smarter or more reliable guides than Musk. I'm also willing to bet there are lots of people with less net wealth than Musk's 225 billion that you and I would agree are smarter than Musk.
Likewise for other celebrities. Justin Bieber has 109 million Twitter followers and a net worth of around 300 million. That's a lot more than most people. Are you prepared to become a Belieber?
Be serious. Hanania may well be dumb and wrong, but this kind of sneering "he doesn't have as much money as Musk" is worthless.
There are absolutely people I agree with more often than Musk. There are some people online who I think are very wise and I agree with basically everything they say. Whereas I disagree with many things that Musk says, we clearly have different goals and understanding of the world. So there are people wiser than Musk.
But that doesn't mean they're smarter than Musk. If they're smarter, then why don't they simply implement their visions and smash every obstacle in their path? Musk wants to settle Mars, so he simply takes over the entire spaceflight market with SpaceX. The Democratic Party/decel culture gets in his way, so he moves to smash them with Twitter and Trump. AI coming up sooner than expected, looks like that's important? Why not simply start a frontier lab? Electric cars and robots as well!
These are impressive achievements! It is hard to create things, rather than merely performing a role for someone else like so many. Try starting your own business. It's hard on a wholly different level.
When Bieber demonstrates general-purpose creative ability (at maybe 10 or 100 times his net worth), as opposed to just being a one-trick pony in music/infatuating young women, then I'll defend his general ability. Taylor Swift does the same thing better than Bieber and has basically no political influence (her endorsement had minimal effect), Musk is on a totally different level.
The post you are replying to explained this. Intelligence does not straightforwardly equate to success like that - it is one of many correlates. Musk's wealth has multiple causes; a person of equal or greater intelligence might easily not be as successful.
Musk is rich and powerful, but that in itself does not show that Hanania is wrong, nor does it absolve Musk of any of his obvious faults.
Musk is not some baron or duke. His inheritance was by no means significant in him becoming wealthy.
'Personality type' is just a different way of saying intelligence in this context. 'I am smart but lazy' is an excuse, not an explanation. It doesn't matter at all if you're smart in some esoteric way that has no relevance in the real world. Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken.
Criticizing faults is fine but it is bizarre and question-begging for people who are in virtually every way less competent to criticize the ability of far more capable people.
I would say that one's personality may shape one's goals and priorities?
For example: I would say that Thomas Aquinas was devastatingly intelligent by any fair standard. He chose a path of life that committed him to both celibacy and poverty. By the standard you've given, though, he cannot be intelligent. He did not achieve worldly power, office, or glory.
I conclude therefore that your standard is a bad standard. It does not measure intelligence. There are extremely intelligent people who do not achieve "great effects on the world", at least in the sense that you've given. In Aquinas' case this seems to be a result of his choice not to seek that type of success. He sought something else.
Likewise "Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken" is a non sequitur. It is entirely conceivable that a person might have great effects on the world while having a brain that is, in some sense, broken. You just cannot get from "Musk has influenced the world" to "Musk has no significant faults". The claim is fallacious.
Thomas Aquinas was definitely intelligent, we are still talking about his books centuries after his death. He absolutely had impact and significance. Most of what he writes is basically nonsense but that's the nature of theology.
Maybe you can be intelligent and not do anything significant. But doing something significant requires intelligence. Given that we can't read minds and analyse them perfectly, we should assume that those who do great things have greater faculties than those who merely claim to be intelligent.
So I find it disgusting for a nobody like Hanania to go 'oh I listened to him on a podcast and read some tweets of this guy, so I can look down on his intelligence, his basic mental faculties'. That's what I'm upset with.
Furthermore, how is Hanania in a position to judge? Does he know anything of significance? What operations has he overseen? What high-performance organization has he built?
If you're down-rating Elon Musk's intelligence in favour of 'luck or arbitrary fortune', where is your reasoning that it's actually straightforward to build a rocket company or start a leading AI lab (which he did while Hanania thinks his brain was broken)? Is NASA too busy huffing airhorn gas to make cheap rockets? Is Meta AI full of dribbling retards? Did Jeff Bezos just roll bad dice with his space company? Obviously not! It's the special competence of this one man, with secrets that we don't understand regarding management, motivation and so on.
How is Musk broken if he achieves massive successes in science, engineering, business and politics?
I did say that I believe intelligence correlates with success. It just doesn't do so absolutely or reliably - there are successful idiots, and unsuccessful geniuses. I think Musk's business success is a data point in favour of his being clever, but it's not the only consideration, nor is it decisive in itself.
As it happens I do think Musk is reasonably clever. I don't go quite as far as Noah Smith, but I think Smith is directionally correct, and people who sneer and declare Musk a moron are being foolish.
Is Musk smarter than Hanania? I don't know. I think Hanania is evidently a reasonably smart person as well - his high standard of written expression and analytical ability show that, even if I do often think he's wrong - but I wouldn't make a general comparison. I don't know either of them in person in the kind of detail that I think I would need to in order to make a credible comparison. Fortunately "is Musk smarter than Hanania?" is the kind of question that never needs to be answered. It's a silly question - in practice, in any disagreement between Musk and Hanania, I have ample ways of resolving it without going down that rather pointless tangent.
What I find bizarre in your comments, though, is this:
I find this strangely defensive? You almost sound offended! Suppose for the sake of argument that Musk is in some objective sense smarter than Hanania. So what? Hanania is not a peasant bowing and scraping before his lord. People are allowed to criticise people smarter than them. If Person A has an IQ of 140 and Person B has an IQ of 150, it is still permissible for Person A to criticise Person B. Indeed, it is wholly conceivable that Person A might criticise Person B and be entirely correct in those criticisms, because IQ is not a measure of correctness, either factual or moral.
So even if for the sake of argument Musk is objectively more intelligent than Hanania, that would not make Hanania's argument incorrect. It would be a red herring.
This seems like an obvious case of proving too much to me. "People can never criticise their intellectual superiors" is a fake rule we never apply to anything else. Maybe Musk is much better at starting tech companies than Hanania. Bully for him. So what?
And I suppose as far as disgust or moral offense goes, for what it's worth I'm morally disgusted at the idea that the plebs should never criticise their supposed betters. There is nothing that Musk has done that confers on him a right to not be a target of criticism by others. Maybe Hanania's criticism of Musk is mistaken, but if so it's mistaken because of its actual merits, not because Hanania dared to lift his eyes to look upon the god-like mien of the shining Musk.
I'd assert that Musk's various achievements are in no way incompatible with him being pathological in some other respect.
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