What is the deal with these people who are super-successful offline (e.g. Chamath, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk), but on social media have such mediocre, cringe, or bad opinions, getting easily-verifiable facts wrong or just repeating sale or boring stuff, or digging in when wrong? Why is there such a large disconnect between being so successful in one domain (e.g. creating companies) and the ability to produce good, well-informed opinions online?
My answer: People who are really successful offline tend to be specialists--they find something that works, and then scale or repeat it. People who have "good opinions about a broad range of topics" are generalists, but this does not necesailty lead to large wealth, which typically requires specialization.
Generalists tend to be higher IQ and get bored more easily, seeking novelty, but this comes at the cost mastery at a skill to become wealthy. Becoming a billionaire at running restaurants means knowing everything about the restaurant industry--perhaps not exactly intellectually simulating work--but necessary for success. Specialists can be really smart, but I would say generalists are smarter in the aggregate. There is no "industry person" who is as broadly read about history and other humanists topics as Moldbug, for example, as the ultimate generalist.
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I can get two answers here:
Politics is not his main calling. It's like saying "how can he be so smart and yet playing cello so badly?!" or "how can he be so smart and be unable to make two three-point basket shots in a row?!". He's not a political pundit, that's just not what he does. I don't see why there should be a skill transfer to public policy. In fact, the public policy culture is horrendously bad about it right now - we're listening to actors, musicians, beauty queens, random teenagers with PR-obsessed parents, TV clowns, and so on, and regularly elect people with absolutely no transferrable skills at all to guide our policies. Sometimes it comes to complete idiocy, as requiring certain genetic makeup and genital set as the only requirement (can't be even called a "skill"!) for a public policy position. In this environment, I'd say Musk is way above the average on the quality of his skills.
Maybe what you value as "effective skills" really isn't? I mean, sure, he never wrote a policy essay or a book. But why should we accept that the skills in writing an essay or a book (or, alternatively, skill in paying someone for writing it, which you readily accept) is something important for either Musk or the society to benefit from the genius of Musk? There are millions of books and probably hundreds of millions of college-level essays. What's the use of having one more, really?
Also, having considered the question of "what's the problem", I invite you to consider the question of "how would you fix it?", outlined here: https://www.themotte.org/post/183/alignment-problem
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