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Elon Musk's Shadow Rule
tl;dr After initially donating Starlink terminals and providing free internet at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Musk realized that it's actually pretty expensive to keep it on in a warzone, and asked the Pentagon to help pay for it, or he would turn it off. Eventually they hammered out a contract. Also, he proposed a peace plan involving Russia keeping some territory, which was roundly booed.
By all accounts Starlink has been a massive boon to the Ukrainians, since their ability to communicate basically hinges on starlink. But because he wasn't willing to keep providing it for free, he's a pro putin shill and a traitor to the US, and the service should be nationalized. It's not like the US and other governments haven't dragged their feet on providing the best firepower (ATACMS, for example).
Perhaps the counteroffensive grinding to a halt means a new scapegoat is needed.
If Musk had simply gone to the DoD and told them that his company couldn't afford to keep providing this service free of charge, he probably could have reached a deal similar to the one he got much earlier. Instead, he started messing around with the service itself, and if that wasn't bad enough, he is alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable.
I sit on the board of a nonprofit that relies heavily on volunteers. While I don't expect these volunteers to have the kind of dedication an employee would, nothing irritates me more than when someone volunteers to do something and then doesn't do it. No, you're under no obligation to help me. But keep in mind that if you tell me you're going to come and then don't show up it complicates things because now I have to rearrange my plans on the fly, and your absence may be the difference between finishing the job in one day and having to dedicate more time. If I know this in advance I can work around it, but I don't like surprises. Even worse is when a vendor reneges on a deal. Yes, I'm grateful that you're providing goods or services for free or at a reduced price, but when you change the terms a week before the event I either have to come up with money that's not in the budget or find someone else on short notice. It's probably not the best analogy, but the point is that just because you're doing something nice at your own expense doesn't mean people don't have a legitimate reason to be pissed if they get cut off before they've accomplished the goal you're ostensibly helping them with.
No he didn't.
They are geofenced to not work in Russian-controlled areas so that Russia can't use them. Starlink continually updates this to match the situation on the ground, presumably with some allowance for contested areas. Occasionally Ukrainian advances have outpaced Starlink employees knowing about the situation and updating the geofence, particularly during the period being referred to when they made rapid advances. "Appeared to be" is the giveaway to be maximally skeptical even if you don't already know about the incident in question. "The media very rarely lies" but "appeared to be" here functions as journalist-speak for reporting Twitter rumors without bothering to mention whether those rumors were true. The New Yorker doesn't feel the need to verify the factual accuracy of the claim because he's not saying that appearance was true, just referring to the fact that it seemed true to thousands of people on Twitter who already hated Musk for his politics and jumped to conclusions after hearing about some rapid Ukrainian advances having their Starlink service cut out. The only plausible story of political interference (aside from sending the Starlink terminals at all) has been the claim he refused to disable Starlink geofencing for proposed Starlink-piloted suicide drones striking Crimea, out of fears of escalation.
The article doesn't mention it but of course he has said exactly why he wants a settlement: he is concerned about a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia escalating into nuclear war and posing a major risk to humanity. His way of thinking here should be more understandable to this forum than most, since he has taken considerable inspiration from the same intellectual environment as LessWrong/Effective Altruism/Scott Alexander. His underlying motive is the same as his motive for Tesla/SolarCity (global warming), SpaceX (mitigate existential risk by making humanity a two-planet species), OpenAI (mitigate AI risk by having the developers take the risk seriously), NeuraLink (mitigate AI risk through interfaces between AI and the human brain), and Twitter (mitigate political censorship and the risks that enables). Not to mention sending the Starlink terminals to Ukraine in the first place, though that was more small-scale than his usual concerns.
He didn't try to personally negotiate a settlement because he sent the Starlink terminals and felt that gave him the right to, he would have done it anyway. He did it because, having made more money than he could ever personally use, he has been working to defeat what he perceives as threats to humanity. You might criticize his arrogance in believing he is capable of doing so, but Tesla and (especially) SpaceX have accomplished things that conventional wisdom considered impossible so it is perhaps understandable that he thought it was worth trying. There is obviously nothing wrong with criticizing him, I think he has made plenty of mistakes, but I wish people actually engaged with his reasoning rather than being like this article and rounding him off as Putin sympathizer or whatever.
I just skimmed the latter part of the article but this bit stood out. We get a "seemed to" and it's implied he...believes in a specific conspiracy theory because he once changed his Twitter avatar to the protagonist of an iconic videogame in which a bunch of conspiracy theories are true? But at the same time trying to claim Deus Ex as an anti-capitalist game that he is implied to be missing the point of? If Deus Ex is so leftist why does using it as a Twitter avatar signal a specific conspiracy theory rather than signaling leftism, not to mention signaling neither?
That's possible, but all i have here is the New Yorker's assertion vs your assertion. Do you have a source or something?
My guess would've been that access would've been controlled by some method of authentication, so that the Ukrainian terminals would work anywhere but anything held by Russians wouldn't work at all, making such a geofence unnecessary.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-elon-musk-spacex-technology-business-c79c81ff4e6a09f4a185e627dad858fa
It was remarkably difficult to find this. Most of the news coverage, especially more recent news coverage, presents it as implicitly nefarious and either doesn't know or doesn't bother to mention that Ukrainian officials have stated what the issue was. Other than this Associated Press article the only other one I saw mentioning the actual reason was this Financial Times article quoting a third party.
Starlink was made free throughout Ukraine so I think it just works if you have a terminal without needing an account. Doing authentication separate from owning the device seems impractical, for many military purposes you want it running continuously and it's not like you want it to start demanding a password (that soldiers have to memorize) any time it loses power. By comparison apparently Ukraine has been supplied with some SINCGARS encrypted radios, they work like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINCGARS
But something like that doesn't work for Starlink, you can't have someone at SpaceX talk to the user and confirm he's Ukrainian every time a Starlink terminal is turned on.
Thanks! That's interesting, and is enough to make one doubt the original story.
Although, at the top of that article is the following:
Which is also odd.
... It's very weird, in a grand sense, that we're trying to draw all of these conclusions from a few paragraphs of text scattered across a few small news articles, right? It seems easy for misunderstandings, intentional or not, to emerge from that. And that's not just a problem for this, but the whole project of 'understanding politics and the world via news'.
That quote was specifically about not allowing them to directly control drones via Starlink, not "use of Starlink for military purposes" in general. They're fine with allowing them to be used for military communication but apparently not with drones carrying Starlink terminals so that they can be controlled by satellite without worrying about range and with less concern about jamming.
Reuters: SpaceX curbed Ukraine's use of Starlink internet for drones -company president
The Economist: Ukraine is betting on drones to strike deep into Russia
Aside from Starlink's apparent desire to not directly serve as the command and control system for drones and Musk's stated fears about escalation, I wonder if the U.S. government played some part in that decision, like how the U.S. has been reluctant to provide Ukraine with long-range missile systems capable of striking inside Russia.
Washington Post: U.S. in no hurry to provide Ukraine with long-range missiles
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You should have doubted the original story from the beginning. The fact is that it's easy for trained, intelligent journalists to create 'misunderstandings' without actually lying. Musk was never accused directly of sabotaging the Ukrainians - he was just 'appearing to'. His presumed sympathy to Russia becomes an assumed fact. The actual explanation is omitted.
Journalists are not idiots. They write exactly what they want to. Take the phrase 'Musk seemed to embrace COVID denialism'. Elon Musk is one of the most famous and public figures in the world who makes a habit of running his mouth on Twitter, but this trained journalist apparently can't figure out whether he believes that COVID exists.
I like Musk. What he’s doing for Ukraine is uniquely valuable, and the article is an obvious hit piece with a tenuous grasp on reality.
But reversed stupidity is still not intelligence. The OP could have defended Musk, even excoriated the New Yorker, without stretching the facts. It doesn’t take a partisan hack to reveal other hackery. Instead, OP reduced the story down to the parts he found most favorable. Is that really any better?
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This just made me realize I generally trust Internet commentors on themotte more than just about any mainstream newspaper. Why would I trust a mainstream newspaper on a culture war topic?
Maybe works, but what how do you secure that authentication?
Ukrainian equipment and personnel can both be captured and interrogated to spill their secrets.
This is one of those age old problems in information transmission.
One of the ways to make the tech useless to the Russians, even if they crack all the security is to geofence.
Probably a good heuristic, sadly. Even if it is filtered from mainstream sources, as @curious_straight_ca says, people here at least have pretty solid Bayesian filters compared to the general public.
Where else are we going to get info? There's simply far too much out there to sort though, and the only way to manage the huge sorting problem is networking with other intelligent people and hoping that a collective effort can give a better sense of true information than an individual effort.
I'm genuinely curious how others think we are supposed to get good info - do we just spend hours and hours every day sifting through the news?
My heirarchy of news trustworthiness:
Top Tier: Happened to me or someone I know that I can ask about it.
2nd Tier: A trusted public personality that does their research has commented on the thing. Scott Alexander, Zvi Mowschowitz, Glenn Greenwald. I was gonna say "etc" but no other names came to mind.
3rd Tier: Well regarded comments from communities I trust. The commenters on themotte, or scott's blog, or zvi's blog all fall in this category. Well regarded blog personalities or podcasters, who post interesting stuff, but aren't necessarily doing the verification work, like Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, etc.
4th tier: The rest of the world. Yes, I put the NYT on the same level as some random 4chan troll. I don't know their motivations, I don't know their standards, I don't know what they trying to sell, etc etc. I don't discount the possibility that other people may find these sources far more trustworthy. Some people like Scott and Zvi specifically use these sources. But I don't know how to read these sources to tease out truthful information. So they are still useless to me without an investment on my part into understanding these sources. And that is an investment I feel no interest in taking, because I've already got sources that work for me. If they stop working for me then things will get shuffled around the tier list, as they have been before.
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At least half of the information we discuss here comes directly from mainstream newspapers, and much of the rest is filtered through them. And the information that comes from newspapers is disproportionately about 'real things' like politics, business, and war, while the thing that come from internet journalists are more often weird internet or culture war drama.
Also, motteposters are wrong a lot, as demonstrated by how often we disagree.
The same way you solved that problem for every other network-connected piece of military equipment, of which there are a lot? That was just a "guess" on my part though, I don't have any particular knowledge about this area.
Preventing the other guy from using your stuff is a pretty common problem in procurement. You’d have systems engineers writing specialized anti-tamper plans.
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I'd say plenty comes from Twitter, blogs and real life experiences. And a bunch of the references to newspapers are because they are wrong and sharing stories we strongly disagree with.
And disagreements don't necessarily mean someone is wrong. There are a wide range of values here, and people with different values and the exact same information can easily disagree.
If I had to put my finger on why I distrust mainstream newspapers, it's that I'm not sure they place any value on real truth. They instead have a proxy measurement of "journalistic integrity" which means keeping your lies and misdirections within certain bounds. And those bounds seem to grow every year.
There is usually a tradeoff between ease of access for the people you want, and security against those you want to keep out.
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How is that an argument for trusting mainstream newspapers on a culture war topic? Literally nothing here makes the argument that they aren't manipulating the information they pass on to the public.
Newspapers can be wrong all they want, it's their dishonesty that's the problem. Also, likelihood of falling for obvious hoaxes.
It isn't, it's an argument that we do already trust mainstream newspapers as much as we trust random internet commenters in many areas.
I think most instances of newspaper 'dishonesty' that we identify are more unintentional mistakes or poor socially influenced reasoning that's amplified due to other social dynamics, rather than the kind of thing you're (presumably) imagining where someone says or thinks 'wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!'. The reason I think this is you can watch that happen organically in internet communities of both left and right wingers, and the information they produce is less reliable than that of the media. Not that explicit intentional dishonesty doesn't exist, it's just much less common - and it's also not obvious it's more frequent in the mainstream media than random internet people.
I've seen people make this kind of distinction when talking about honesty in general as well as honesty by journalists specifically, and I don't really see how there is a distinction. Making unintentional mistakes or using poor socially influenced reasoning is how a motivated person acts on their belief of "wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!" Almost nobody likes to think of herself as a Machiavellian amoral manipulator and so most people's brains have mechanisms to protect them from such a belief while still enjoying all the advantages of getting to act like one. Making unintentional mistakes (that inevitably follow a pattern of bias in some direction) or not activating one's skepticism towards and protection from the social dynamics that influence one's reasoning is one such mechanism that allows someone to (honestly convince themselves that they) have the cake and eat it too.
For the layman, one might be able to generously extend them enough charity to acknowledge that they're just not to be expected to understand their own biases and how to properly account for them. I don't think we can extend such charity to self-proclaimed journalists. Such people have an active responsibility to convey the truth that they themselves volunteered to take on, and step one of that must be accounting for unconscious mistakes one will inevitably make in a way that confirms their own biases and flatters themselves and their in-group while denigrating their out group. If they haven't taken steps to proactively counter this bias within themselves, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that they are being dishonest, just in a clever way that allows them to honestly convince themselves that they aren't being dishonest.
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I don't believe for a moment that the anti-Musk article that started this thread was an honest mistake, any more than Cade Metz' article attacking Scott was.
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Or, in fact, a little bit less, as cjet was pointing out.
The difference between these two is illustrated by this meme. Even if newspapers' dishonesty is not a result of Machiavellian power games but social dynamics, the fact is they know the negative social dynamics are there, and are doing absolutely nothing to stop them, and are in fact looking for ways to promote them even more.
Given the popularity of "don't give ammo to the rightoids" argument on progressive forums, I'm pretty sure that this is also happening quite often. We would of course need access to journalist's private communications to prove it either way, but that just means your denial of it happening is completely irrelevant.
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