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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   15576 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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So Musk polled his followers. Asking whether he should as CEO of Twitter. They said no and he said he'd abide by their vote.

My sense is that Elon didn't really want to buy Twitter after thinking it through, this was likely his real reason behind the "Twitter are hiding the amount of fake accounts/bots" argument. When that didn't come through, he ended up with the platform anyway. But being the CEO of Twitter is little more than a highly paid janitor function. You don't have any real power and your primary function is to act as a piñata for vested and powerful interests. It's no fun.

The main challenge for him now is to not lose any money, but it appears to be a long-shot from where I stand. What are the lessons? Tech CEOs don't have much political power despite having loads of money. Even tech owners are surprisingly weak. It may be fun belittling government bureaucrats as do-nothing wordcels but the Twitter saga has conclusively proven they hold the whip hand when the chips are down.

While it may make more sense for most people to go for a STEM career over a humanities, this episode should serve as a warning sign to conservatives who have spent decades dismissing humanities are irrelevant (long before the "woke" era). The SJW campus liberals may be annoying, and perhaps even ridiculous, but ultimately they have more power than you in society. And that power can be leveraged even in STEM areas.

On Elon Musk

I am sure Elon Musk is a really smart guy. But it's evident to me in the realm of playing social/PR games, he is not as savvy. He went from being one of the most liked public figures to one of the most hated in a short span of time. And I think most of that is his fault; that is no small feat.

Twitter is a multi-billion dollar company. I think it's retarded to say the least, that its leader should be chosen based on a public poll. Musk's ideas of governance and political theory are sophomoric, as evidenced by his inconsistent actions on "freedom of speech" and his attempts to be democratic about everything, leaving big decisions to polls.

Or maybe he is just playing 4-d chess and a non-billionaire like me can't even see the multidimensional moves he is making.

On Humanities vs STEM

You are falling for a variation of the apex fallacy. Assuming (the right tail of) two different distributions are congruent.

The most influential/powerful people in society tend to have a humanities background. But that doesn't imply that the average humanities careers have more money/power/influence that the average stem practitioner.

He didn't say he would appoint the next CEO via a poll. He only said that he would step down. There are still another 8 billion people for him to choose from.

I don’t think he is the most hated. That is just in your bubble. He went from being generally liked to be polarizing. There is a difference from being universally hated.

The most influential/powerful people in society tend to have a humanities background. But that doesn't imply that the average humanities careers have more money/power/influence that the average stem practitioner.

I think I adressed this point in OP, namely that for most people a STEM career would be more lucrative. I was making a broader political point, which should be seen in a collective group ID sense.

it's evident to me in the realm of playing social/PR games, he is not as savvy

His companies have been built through his ability to obtain large amounts of investment funds on the basis of hype and hope, rather than solid deliverable product, and several have prospered primarily through his ability to worm his way into lucrative federal grants and contracts. None of these things can be done without a LOT of savvy in social/PR games.

Selling sizzle to investors and bureaucrats requires a slightly different set of skills than selling yourself to tastemakers and the general public.

True. But not entirely unrelated. I'm not contesting that Musk missteps, or that he has done so recently. But he's not incompetent.

And I think most of that is his fault; that is no small feat.

He publicly went against the moral spiral consensus in several different ways, which nowadays consists of standing still whilst Cthulhu swims left.

I remember being confused about the emphasis on “pull” in Ayn Rand’s novels; was public opinion really such a divisive and powerful force in the 30’s-60’s? But I had grown up in the 80’s and 90’s, when pull was on the wane, or rather when it was somewhat balanced; it came roaring back in the 10’s with vengeance, and now I see how nothing big can be done without the moral approval of pull. And I realized just how privileged the 90’s were compared to the rest of history.

But being the CEO of Twitter is little more than a highly paid janitor function. You don't have any real power and your primary function is to act as a piñata for vested and powerful interests. It's no fun.

not sure...he can algorithmically suppress certain content/accounts. This can make a difference on the margins for affecting elections. He can also just outright ban anyone, like he did with the elonjet account and then create some adhoc justification for doing so.

You don't have any real power and your primary function is to act as a piñata for vested and powerful interests. It's no fun.

Tech CEOs don't have much political power despite having loads of money. Even tech owners are surprisingly weak.

What does it mean to have real power anyway. In the US it would seem hardly anyone has true, unalloyed power. We saw this during Covid, in which the US health authorities and experts could only make easily-ignored recommendations, unlike in China, in which people were forced to comply. Same for Europe overall. Given that politicians, the executive branch, and Congress have arguably lost power over the past decade, it means that tech companies and tech CEOs may have more relative power. Regulators complain about tech companies violating privacy or are engaging uncompetitive practices, but there isn't much they can do about it. The last time any serious action was taken was in 1998.

The SJW campus liberals may be annoying, and perhaps even ridiculous, but ultimately they have more power than you in society.

Agree. When people talk about how 'useless degrees' don't pay well or jokes about basket weaving, maybe people have preferences that are not aligned with the accumulation of just money, but rather things like 'social influence', which is surprisingly hard to buy. Compare the candidacies of Bloomberg, who spent $500 million and got nowhere, compared to Obama. How are these pitiful basket weavers beating you then in government or DEI if their degrees are so worthless, huh?

he can algorithmically suppress certain content/accounts

Can he do so without enough backlash to make it counterproductive though? I think the main power behind being able to nudge opinion like that relies on doing so unnoticeably. Making it overt can make it actively counterproductive due to the Streisand effect, as the fact of what you're suppressing itself becomes news.

Musk has been bringing up the degree to which that was going on behind the scenes at twitter prior to his takeover (eg. publicising the twitter files). However I don't think he's in a good position to do so himself - he can't just directly press a button and tweak the algorithm: he needs a technical team to make those knobs available, which could be a big issue. First, he's much more likely to get noticed / caught doing so: one twitter insider leaking those details is all it takes, and I think there are going to be more willing to do so than when those tweaks aligned with the politics of the average twitter employee. Second, the fact that he's spoken against this leaves him open to charges of hypocrisy when he does it, and again, the mismatch in politics is going to make the push-back more severe.

When people talk about how 'useless degrees' don't pay well or jokes about basket weaving, maybe people have preferences that are not aligned with the accumulation of just money, but rather things like 'social influence', which is surprisingly hard to buy.

Bingo. You nailed what I tried to get at.

Compare the candidacies of Bloomberg, who spent $500 million and got nowhere, compared to Obama. How are these pitiful basket weavers beating you then in government or DEI if their degrees are so worthless, huh?

Regulatory favors are often crucial for business to operate, and a price for that is to get on the side of the bureaucrats' preferred politics.Savvy businessmen like Jeff Bezos understand that and is compliant. Musk is more of a maverick, but will learn with beatings the hard way.

We saw this during Covid, in which the US health authorities and experts could only make easily-ignored recommendations, unlike in China, in which people were forced to comply. Same for Europe overall.

I think the American experience with covid rules was quite different to Europe where many of the covid rules were not easily ignored. In Ireland I remember police checkpoints at the city limits enforcing the 5km rule.

In Ireland I remember police checkpoints at the city limits enforcing the 5km rule.

The Irish had to social distance at 5km?

In England it was 1m?!

While it may make more sense for most people to go for a STEM career over a humanities, this episode should serve as a warning sign to conservatives who have spent decades dismissing humanities are irrelevant. [...] The SJW campus liberals may be annoying, and perhaps even ridiculous, but ultimately they have more power than you in society.

I don't really think this follows, or at least not without a whole lot of caveats. Learning the humanities does not really appear to make these people more effective and their influence is definitely not uniformly distributed. If STEM grads decided to spend all their time advocating for policy instead of getting real things done I'd hazard that STEM grads per capita would be significantly more effective at advocating for policies. What Conservative STEM lovers need are more people willing to do activism for no or little pay, not a better appreciation for mid 1600s era poetry.

The lesson, if any, conservatives should take from campus SJWs is to be as active as possible and be absolutely unwilling to allow any nuance. I hope they don't take that lesson to heart.

If STEM grads decided to spend all their time advocating for policy instead of getting real things done I'd hazard that STEM grads per capita would be significantly more effective at advocating for policies

I wholeheartedly agree, but sadly STEM grads seem very uninterested in engaging in the broader culture aside from business regulations. Musk is an outlier in this regard, which is why he enrages the established powers.

What Conservative STEM lovers need are more people willing to do activism for no or little pay, not a better appreciation for mid 1600s era poetry.

People who are into 1600s era poetry already display a low preference for monetary rewards, which is why they are good at slogging through thankless tasks like low-pay activism. I suspect these two are correlated.

The lesson, if any, conservatives should take from campus SJWs is to be as active as possible and be absolutely unwilling to allow any nuance. I hope they don't take that lesson to heart.

I don't think lack of nuance is the secret behind the success of the wordcels so much as them caring. Dogged determination always beats a shrug of the shoulder. It's a hard problem to solve because for most people, disengaging with culture cars and just focusing on doing your thing is the more rational life decision. It's certainly the advice I would give most people. Yet cumulatively, it also allows the loud and shrill minority to dominate the cultural space. People over time get influenced by the zeitgeist and thus the Overton window has shifted. Not an easy puzzle to solve.

What Conservative STEM lovers need are more people willing to do activism for no or little pay,

Note that the Progressives do "pay" their activists- with social prestige, kickbacks (DIE positions), and pardons. As other paths to social success close (or are closed- this is arguably the entire point of degrowth if not a major consequence), that pay gets higher and higher- that's generally why people do it.

The other way to success like that is generally kulakdom, but that requires ability and effort; parasitism is an evolutionary adaptation same as any other.

I’m not sure what the connection with STEM vs humanities is here?

Why are we deciding the government beauracrats and non stem majors have the power? I think Musks has show twitter has had some ability to tell the fbi to fuck off.

Musks issue is he does weird and unilateral stuff.

My sense is that Elon didn't really want to buy Twitter after thinking it through

He tried to get out of it, presumably because he woke up one morning and realized he'd agreed to buy a white elephant at a price that was well above its arguably inflated share price.

What are the lessons? Tech CEOs don't have much political power despite having loads of money. Even tech owners are surprisingly weak. It may be fun belittling government bureaucrats as do-nothing wordcels but the Twitter saga has conclusively proven they hold the whip hand when the chips are down.

The main lesson here is don't start believing your own bullshit. Musk came in and made a bunch of unforced errors, seemingly under the impression that he'd be able to 'fix' Twitter through sheer personal brilliance and force of will. The reality is that he seemingly has no idea what he is doing and has been governing twitter in an impulsive, personalistic, and reactive manner.

Or, for that matter, maybe it will pan out and Musk will come out looking like an unstable genius. So far Twitter doesn't seem to have had any critical technical failures despite sacking 2/3rds of its staffing. Now, there seems to be a shoe waiting to drop on legal/financial issues, but it is entirely possible that Musk will manage to radically slash prices, weather the storm of financial and legal troubles, and come out the other side with a functioning social media platform. Of course, scuttlebutt says he's trying to flog it off on Middle Eastern oil barons, so maybe not.

this episode should serve as a warning sign to conservatives who have spent decades dismissing humanities are irrelevant (long before the "woke" era). The SJW campus liberals may be annoying, and perhaps even ridiculous, but ultimately they have more power than you in society. And that power can be leveraged even in STEM areas.

I'm not sure why this is the takeaway. It's probably a good lesson for conservatives, but not for anything to do with this particular episode. In this particular parable hubris it is the market playing the role of Zeus, not SJWs.

So far Twitter doesn't seem to have had any critical technical failures despite sacking 2/3rds of its staffing

Regarding this specifically, I think it's incredibly funny how many of the fired employees claimed this. I understand when it's a journalist thinking websites are like some kind of mechanical clock and if there is no one there to crank it every moring it will stop. It's incredible that engineers would say "yep, the system we built is such a massive pile of shit that the moment we turn away it will fall over, shatter in a billion small pieces and no one will be able to even restart it".

A truly amazing endorsement of your own work. Much like walking around with a t-shirt that says "I have a small penis", even if it's true it should be divulged on a strict need-to-know basis.

t's incredible that engineers would say "yep, the system we built is such a massive pile of shit that the moment we turn away it will fall over, shatter in a billion small pieces and no one will be able to even restart it".

A system that doesn't need you is a system that puts you of a job. The best (for you) is a system that doesn't need you but you tell everyone that it needs you badly.

Eh, as a dev eventually if no one was at the wheel some bad data condition or external change would eventually break something that only someone familiar with the code can fix in a timely manner. Especially when you're doing new development constantly things break all the time. I wasn't really willing to weigh in on either side of whether things would break. If the firings included everyone who knows how a particular system works and that system goes down for some reason, maybe some certificate goes out of date and no one can access the functional account that has sole management rights over that certificate you could see some big pain. It's possible the core platform really is so robust that you could leave it running without touching it for years but it'd be the first such application I've heard of.

What errors has Musk made?

a) bought Twitter at an inflated price with borrowed money (remember that Twitter is not a profitable company) b) annoyed advertisers with erratic behavior like the poorly thought out "verification" system c) annoys users (especially content creators) with capricious moderation policies that are walked back a short while later.

Ok thanks. Seems mostly like annoying people, but I am not sure that many of them wouldn't have been annoyed no matter what he did.

The inflated price is an error, depending on what the assesment of the value is (I don't think markets fundamentally price things well here, as the power of twitter to shape discourse, or even the info dumpe din the "twitter files" are completely unacocunted for when purchasing individual shares in a way that purchasng them all doesn't.

What errors has Musk made?

By taking a capricious approach to addressing content moderation. While I like that he has been transparent about the process, it does seem like he has never really thought deeply about this complex problem, and did not come into the position with a clear set of principles on the matter. He probably should not be as hands-on as he is, as he is a shit-stirrer, which is not reflecting well on the prospects of Twitter becoming a more open and fairly adjudicated service.

Depends if you want an open and fairly adjudicsted service, or even believe such a thing is possible.

My rules enforced unfairly in my favour > your rules enforced unfairly in your favour.

With my rules and your rules fairly both discarded as Impossible fantasies ;) for illustration.

What Musk is doing in this view is then only an error inasmuch as it provides a point of cooperative hate, a target, for the opposition to organise against (without the need for communication as Musk provides the target signal flares himself by being clearly non on side).

Loudly broadcasting a strong commitment to free speech, then turning around and censoring not only legal-but-sketchy posts (like the one guy broadcasting his plane location), but even not-sketchy posts (like people talking about competing social media platforms). No matter how you slice it, this was an error. Either it is an error to censor after making such a strong public commitment to free speech, or it was an error to make that commitment in the first place without fully considering the ramifications.

Loudly broadcasting freespeach and then not breaking that means allowing lots of illegal content, among other things, otherwise it's just quibbling over where the line is and thus subjective ( subjective aka objective but only if you have certain priors haha). The error was to make a strong commitment to free speach in the first place I woukd agree.

Yeah, I'm not necessarily criticizing him for not running Twitter in a free speech absolutist way. But it was pretty dumb to say he would do so, and then go "well actually not really" after the fact. Dude should've given more thought to whether he could deliver what he was promising.

Now, there seems to be a shoe waiting to drop on legal/financial issues, but it is entirely possible that Musk will manage to radically slash prices, weather the storm of financial and legal troubles

Twitter , unlike many money-losing tech companies (like We Work) has kept its capital burn under control. It has plenty of cash from IPO. Twitter had already gone public a decade before Musk bought it, and the share price was at $45, about the same as its IPO, which one would not expect for a company at risk of going out of business. Elon's cost-cutting measures should further help.

Tech CEOs don't have much political power despite having loads of money. Even tech owners are surprisingly weak. It may be fun belittling government bureaucrats as do-nothing wordcels but the Twitter saga has conclusively proven they hold the whip hand when the chips are down.

That he has made a series of bizarre (drug fueled?) blunders says little to nothing of the actual power someone in his position holds.

series of bizarre (drug fueled?) blunders

Musk is a very impulse guy. Wired did a big exposé of his leadership during the crucial rollout of Model 3. Have a read:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-tesla-life-inside-gigafactory/

So his behaviour is pretty consistent. It's just being in the open instead of behind closed doors.

says little to nothing of the actual power someone in his position holds.

I disagree. Musk being the owner of Twitter means little since the EU can regulate away any changes and the US Deep State can pressure advertisers to institute an economic boycott unless he behaves. The message is crystal clear: do what we want, or your platform dies. Musk got the message and is now looking for an exit.

Did he even want to run twitter? Musk doesn't really seem to be the type who wants to run the mundane daily operations of a company that is established. He bought it, he made his changes and now someone else can manage employees and emails all day long while he builds rockets.

I actually don't see the woke side winning here at all. Contrary to what some people think CNN journalists having a public group chat on twitter is a small part of twitter. Football (Soccer) is huge on twitter and the La liga and Premier premier league fans seem to care less about the twitter drama. Looking at what is trending right now in Sweden, hockey and football are 4/5 things trending right now. Twitter is huge in the middle east and Japan. Music is big on twitter, porn is big on twitter, day traders use it, it is one of the best ways to follow the war in Ukraine. Even reality TV seems to do at least as well as politics on twitter.

The journalist-class thinks twitter dies without them since their filter-bubble dies without them. Thats like saying facebook is dead without your facebook group since that is most of what you see on Facebook. However, most others don't see or care about your facebook group. Youtube stopped its annual rewind because people were angry that none of the big youtubers were on it. In reality the big youtubers you follow have 0.1% of users following them and there are huge phenomena on youtube that you have never heard of.

Elon hasn̈́'t impacted the user experience of F1 fans, people who want to follow concert tours, get live updates on the oilmarket, watch stuff explode in Ukraine, find out what is happening on a Friday night in Dubai, or view their favorite tiktoker's new video. If anything transactivists are more dependent on twitter than twitter is dependent on transactivists. The woke are powerful because of their voice and their voice is mainly social media. I highly doubt the userbase will follow them to alt-twitter that is twitter from 2021.

hasn̈́'t

Check your keyboard; I think your fnords are showing.

And while you’re right about the normal use cases of Twitter, there are also push factors if you let all the witches hang around. It’s a site built around harvesting outrage via retweets.

Imagine if every time one scrolled down to the NYT comments, 10% or so were randomly replaced with Fox News comments, and vice versa. I think that’d make a lot of the casual audience either furious or jaded. The hypothesized risk to Twitter is that every topic gets polluted by [insert outgroup opinion] and people leave for cleaner bubbles.

I accept that the insulation of hentai-Twitter is evidence against this. I’m not confident that it generalizes for topics which don’t have a clear equivalent to the nsfw tag.

The hypothesized risk to Twitter is that every topic gets polluted by [insert outgroup opinion] and people leave for cleaner bubbles.

This feels like year zero thinking, like history started when the left assumed the zeitgeist and nothing existed before that. Hypothesised risk? Never mind hentai twitter, the whole site didn't start this censorship shit in earnest until around 2016, and before that there were no mass exits for cleaner bubbles. I don't have to imagine if every time one scrolled down to the NYT comments, 10% or so were randomly replaced with Fox News comments, and vice versa - because I lived it, and people did what they do now - bitched about it constantly but continued using twitter anyway. Hell, that's what the NYT and fox news comments sections were like before they were nixed - and both those comments sections were furious when they were shut down "to combat hate speech" (they couldn't use your hypothesis as the reason to shut them down because everyone could see with their own eyes that nobody was leaving for cleaner bubbles.)

I will say I used to use Twitter for sports news and following foreign wars, then a little after Elon bought it I kept getting porn popping up and deleted it.

Did he even want to run twitter?

I suspect Musk would've loved to run Twitter, if it weren't for all the people. Insofar I can tell, Musk kept running into the plain-old fact that he just wasn't as well-liked as he is, and that he has to deal with people who dislike him or at the least don't care about him. If the choice were to run Twitter as its beloved and sagacious God-Emperor or not running it at all, I think he'd much enjoy the former. This isn't a choice he has: Musk can lord over it as a fief populated by a varied lot or not at all.

And yes, he seems to prefer not being in charge at all then.

Did he even want to run twitter?

If he didn't, why didn't he appoint someone from the start?

He is used to being the hatchet man, so conceivably he comes in, makes the unpopular but necessary moves, absorbs all the incoming fire, then hands off operations to someone who gets to start with a clean slate.

He wanted insight into the company and make the changes he wanted. Now that he has put twitter on the course he desires he can move on.

I find the Twitter saga to be equal parts pathetic and boring on Musk's end, but.. Do elaborate. I don't really read into this Funtime Adventure the way you seem to:

While it may make more sense for most people to go for a STEM career over a humanities, this episode should serve as a warning sign to conservatives who have spent decades dismissing humanities are irrelevant. [...] The SJW campus liberals may be annoying, and perhaps even ridiculous, but ultimately they have more power than you in society.

How do you figure?

Asking whether he should as CEO of Twitter.

Resign? Continue? You missed the most important word in the post there...

("I accidentally the CEO position"?)

While it may make more sense for most people to go for a STEM career over a humanities, this episode should serve as a warning sign to conservatives who have spent decades dismissing humanities are irrelevant (long before the "woke" era). The SJW campus liberals may be annoying, and perhaps even ridiculous, but ultimately they have more power than you in society. And that power can be leveraged even in STEM areas.

Yup. @DaseindustriesLtd / Ilforte had a good post on that back on reddit. Dilbertesque enginners vs. management, or wordcells vs. shape rotators might be a fun meme, but until shape rotators start unleashing armed autonomous drones, it's not even going to be contest.

That said, I'm not sold on humanities degrees being the best way to train management. Something like the Boy Scouts is probably more effective, which is probably the reason they nuked it from orbit.

but until shape rotators start unleashing armed autonomous drones, it's not even going to be contest.

The battle cry of the Shape Rotator Uprising: "get rotated, idiot"

Granted, I guess that uprising is slowly trundling along as AI gets better (and it probably doesn't help that John Carmack recently left FB/Meta to focus on AI at Keen Technologies).

There's a giant asymmetry in that the STEM types have actual work to do. They see the wordcels engaging in wordcelery on the job and think to themselves, "that's absurd, but all I can really do is focus on my work."

The wordcels can fudge the definition of their jobs and end up getting paid to be commissars.

Is accruing political power and shaping the narrative / course of society not 'actual work' to you? It may not be as straightforward, but I can guarantee you it is not easy.

Shit cleaning vs. shit shifting.

Can you explain a bit more what you mean here?

Vocations can be broadly. divided into ones that are positive sum for society (janitor, engineer) and ones that are zero-sum (advertiser, politician). Depending on whether you value pro-sociality or job prestige, you might declare one or the other to be "actual jobs".

I would argue jobs on either end can be positive or negative sum. For instance, people who are in 'real jobs' in food science companies that purposefully make their unhealthy food addictive. They're doing 'real work' not just accruing social power, but actively making society worse.

On the other hand we need to organize people to have a functional, large society. Even though many people in advertising and politics are zero or negative sum, I think that the overall ecosystem is vastly important. We need good politicians who know what they're doing and care, otherwise we end up with a mess of government.

I'm not sold on the idea that management in its current form is even needed to run society.

I'm so not sold on it in fact that I'm actively supporting any effort to automate them away.

It's not that they're needed, it's that if you don't have some of them on your side, the ones from the other side are going to come over, beat you up, take your stuff, and shut you in your locker.

All we need is an AI that can create convincing org charts.

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