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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   32572 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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Elon Musk is too guileless. He says exactly what he thinks is true with little regard for how others will react.

This is wrong. Musk has been consistently serving slop to the masses on twitter. Things he could not possibly believe but that were yet flattering the average 110 IQ twitter user.

I propose that Musk is not guileless, he has guile but is also erratic.

Things he could not possibly believe

I'm not sure about this. Sam Harris' account of his bet with Elon indicated that he's way higher on his own supply than I thought.

He included a link to a page on the CDC website, indicating that Covid was not even among the top 100 causes of death in the United States. This was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic. ...Elon and I didn’t converge on a common view of epidemiology over the course of those two hours, but we hit upon a fun compromise: A wager. Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila ($1000) that we wouldn’t see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (cases, not deaths).

And it also showed how that happens:

5.A few weeks later, when the CDC website finally reported 35,000 deaths from Covid in the U.S. and 600,000 cases, I sent Elon the following text:

Is (35,000 deaths + 600,000 cases) > 35,000 cases?

6.This text appears to have ended our friendship. Elon never responded, and it was not long before he began maligning me on Twitter for a variety of imaginary offenses. For my part, I eventually started complaining about the startling erosion of his integrity on my podcast, without providing any detail about what had transpired between us.

Thing is, this seems to have happened in private (at first). So it wasn't purely a matter of grandstanding for his proles.

Whatever his problems, Harris will at least tell you what he thinks. You start behaving like this with Twitter "friends" and you end up surrounded by Ian Miles Cheong types sucking your nuts and then all of the epistemic brakes are gone.

What do you mean? Example? I think Musk is politically naive, or guileless, he will tell directly what his plans are. There is no subtext, no reading between the lines, no scheming behind the scenes.

I muted him on twitter in disgust months ago. It wasn't really outright lies or manipulation, but basically he was pushing stupid ideas that were generally aligned with what he wants, but were obviously unworkable and yet a person with an IQ somewhere around 140 thought 'fine, I'll post this'. I like the guy for his contributions to space but he is just like his dad. Shameless when it suits him.

There is no subtext, no reading between the lines, no scheming behind the scenes.

That you know of.

Musk also routinely drives traffic to various random X posts by posting one-liners like "Interesting" or "100%" in response to them. Which, while not any sort of heinous deceptiveness, nonetheless is clearly just a way to put his finger on the scales of what gets amplified without having to literally manipulate the algorithms. It's not the kind of action that a pure guileless engineering-minded person would take, I would think.

I also find it a bit hard to believe that Musk would get $300 billion without having some understanding of Machiavellians. In our society, pure brilliant engineer-types tend to max out at a net worth of a few tens of millions, don't they? To get more than that people generally need to have a lot of business acumen, and it's a bit hard for me to imagine having that level of business acumen without understanding how to deal with Machiavellians.

I do think that the overall notion of Musk as being more of an autist type and Trump more of a Machiavellian type seems correct to me, but I quibble with some of the details of Davon Eriksen's purported explanation.

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