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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27703 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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I've seen people expressing bafflement that the average midwit on Reddit might think they could run Musk's assets better than Musk if they had the same luck/unscrupulousness to have the same resources. I ask, after seeing Musk apparently fail to understand Wikipedia costs money to provide, who wouldn't?

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?

  • -24

This is not enough effort, and too much heat (and "boo outgroup," assuming you are not a midwit on Reddit). Don't post like this please.

Here's an honest question: many people in the comments here are saying that Wikipedia could be run for about 5-10% of the donations it receives each year. Given that, it would only take a couple years for Wikipedia to collect enough donations to set up an endowment that would pay their costs in perpetuity without ever needing to do any fundraising again (usually one can expect to withdraw 4-5% of an endowment each year without eating into the principal). Is the Wikimedia foundation already doing something like this? If not, has anyone proposed it and has the Wikimedia foundation explained why it's not doing it?

They already did that; there's a $100 million Wikimedia Endowment. But WMF keeps asking for money and then figuring out things to do with it (in many cases, re-donating it).

Might be a fun graph to see where those donations go.

Probably would, but I think the accounting's divided by location in their official stats; to get the really-fun one you'd want to break it up into individual items and then re-aggregate by cause.

Good point. Actually, after making my comment I tried looking at the Wikimedia Foundation's financial statements and noticed they listed about $5 million per year in returns on investments, which is about in line with a $100 million endowment. Arguably $5 million per year is not quite enough to keep Wikipedia running but it's probably close.

It is enough, you can look up their financial reports. They spend more money on donation processing than on actually hosting the website, true story.

I don't think it's obvious that $5 million per year is enough to support Wikipedia. Certainly it is enough for web hosting, but presumably they need at least a few employees (e.g. sysadmins, a few programmers and web developers) and it also seems like a good idea to retain some legal counsel and some people to manage the other employees, do the accounting, etc. This does not cost a huge amount of money, but could easily be a few million.

But if you have a detailed argument that Wikipedia could be run for $5 million per year I would be interested in hearing it (I mean this sincerely, it seems like an interesting topic).

They're not doing it because if the service was funded they would lose their excuse to beg for more money for causes.

You have a website everybody uses and is part of the bedrock infrastructure of everyone's lives. People either extract money and power from controlling it or they will quickly get replaced by people who do so. Such is the nature of power.

Wikipedia is so valuable as a resource that they know they’ll always be able to get funding. At worst they can get the UN or a few rich people to fund it, or even a university with a large endowment that wants the prestige. So there’s no reason to take any steps toward fiscal sustainability. It’s too big to fail.

That's an interesting point though it raises the question of why Wikipedia never tried in a serious way to become a profit-oriented enterprise. Once it got big enough it probably wouldn't have been hard to monetize. Perhaps some of what's happening here is that people in the Wikimedia Foundation are just picking up $100 million bills left on the ground by Wikipedia's failure to try to make money off of its product. People won't ignore that kind of money-making opportunity forever.

Wikipedia depends on the editor community to keep the encyclopedia current (and the Pareto distribution of editor activity means that the part of the community that matters is quite small) - the community increasingly see the WMF as a parasite using their encyclopedia to raise donations under false pretenses. The Wikimedia software and the text of the encyclopedia are open source - the only thing that the WMF actually controls is the IP and domain names (which would use value fast if they pointed to an "encyclopedia" that was full of rubbish).

The Fram ban incident was the point at which the community and the WMF became actively hostile - and the community won by getting Fram's ban overturned and an in-principle agreement from the WMF that wikis with active communities would remain primarily responsible for policing their own users. But the community now know that the self-perpetuating woke oligarchy that control the WMF think of them as unwashed white male neanderthals who are only one step removed from gamergaters, or something like that. My read was that both the WMF and the community realised that either side could destroy the social value of the encyclopedia, and neither wanted to do so.

When Jimbo (who had much more goodwill in the editor community than the current WMF leadership) launched the for-profit Wikia in 2004, the threat of an editor revolt meant that he had to keep it entirely separate from Wikipedia. If the WMF tried the same thing, there would be an editor strike.

Wait, Jimbo's the reason why Fandom exists???

This is an interesting story, but it seems hard to square the "Wikipedia's editors resent being seen as Deplorables by the WMF" with the "Wikipedia has a community of power editors who are proud Commies" thing alleged elsewhere in this thread.

I agree, but wokestupid insanity is fractal.

The background to the Fram ban was that the WMF were proposing to change their ToS to incorporate the usual vaguely worded Code of Conduct that people expect to be selectively enforced against conservatives but is actually selectively enforced against spergy men who are more focussed on improving the product than playing politics. And as part of the ToS to use the server, this would be enforced by the WMF and not the community. There were the usual complaints by the WMF that the sex ratio in the community (which is male-dominated for the obvious reasons) must be due to Deplorable behaviour chasing women away.

Most of the evidence in the case is not public, but it looks like a woman who was friends with the WMF CEO was adding articles on Spanish Paralympians that were sufficiently badly translated that the community thought they were making the encyclopedia worse. Fram tried to make her stop, and she tattled on him.

What is public is that when the MSM picked up the story, the WMF leadership briefed that Fram was banned for being mean to female contributors and that the row was about the WMF trying to crack down on endemic sexism in the editor community.

There are a lot of proud Commies who really are sexist (the sex scandals in the UK Socialist Workers' Party were hilarious), and even more who are victims of bad-faith allegations of sexism by the establishment left. The "Berniebro" meme is the canonical example.

Yes and no. You don't need to keep the WMF to keep Wikipedia - not even legally, because Wikipedia's content is CC-BY-SA and thus anyone with the money to handle the load can make a WP mirror.

It would be hard to get people to use a new, mirrored version of Wikipedia while the Wikimedia Foundation exists.

Yes, but 2rafa was saying the WMF would get bailed out if it somehow did go bankrupt.

I'm saying that in that specific highly-unlikely situation the existence of the mirrors would avoid the need for that.

The more interesting question is why isn’t there a conservative Wikipedia?

For most things Wikipedia is good enough but there is obvious editing for culture war. As the first source for everyone for basic information it’s quite powerful.

Costs of running the site are negligible. Musks could personally fund it for pocket change. Or if they got even 10% market share and the same donation rate as Wikipedia it would be self sufficient.

Does the right just lack any amount of people with nothing better to do than edit Wikipedia articles. In a world this big that does almost seem impossible.

The world could use a second encyclopedia to be a check on the first.

For most things Wikipedia is good enough but there is obvious editing for culture war. As the first source for everyone for basic information it’s quite powerful.

Wikipedia is just a mirror in front of the cathedral. It doesn't do independent research or fact-checking. The cathedral leans left, so does Wikipedia. If it leant right like it did in the 50's, so would Wikipedia.

I wonder if Hebrew Wikipedia has a noticeably different lean.

There's conservapedia. Just nobody uses it.

Vox Day promoted InfoGalactic is another one.

Does the right just lack any amount of people with nothing better to do than edit Wikipedia articles. In a world this big that does almost seem impossible.

Short answer, yes.

Longer answer, the different sides have a tendency to select for different personalities and the sort of semi-nuerotic systematizer who'll spend hours doing cross-referncing and fighting edit-wars for free, skews overwhelmingly to left. At the same time, those with the temperament to be effective conservative culture warriors also tend to have other commitments. For example, there was a time from about 2013 to 2016 when i was a broke college student for whom spending hours arguing with atheists on the internet while sipping cheap bourbon was an entertaining and budget-conscious way to spend a weekend. Whereas these days the internet is something I do on the side for 10 minutes at a time between other tasks. Such is the price of having a family, job, and proper responsibilities.

why isn’t there a conservative Wikipedia

Because it would immediately be labeled as racist and then most people wouldn't touch it.

This tactic is losing strength but it's been very effective over the past 10+ years.

Conservative Wikipedia existed as conservapedia, and racism was not the main criticism- the blatant agenda pushing and poor quality of article was the main one.

What would it even take to make a wiki “conservative”?

Option one is to get editors who share conservative biases. This is a stupid idea as far as making a useful wiki. Think of all the ways in which making Wikipedia more progressive would detract from it, then remember that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

We can maybe do a little better by vetting editors for (life) competence. Before you can edit this article, submit your last two pay stubs or a picture of a marriage certificate. Some similar poll tax evidence that you have your shit together. Unfortunately, this has the same problem as just paywalling the whole site: it’s not selective. Every barrier you add will prevent some number of useful edits. Even if those edits come from basement-dwelling channers.

What about cultural solutions? Stepping back from the ideological bent, I kind of like the idea of trying for a more deliberate institutional design. I’m not sure exactly how Wikipedia resolves conflicting edits and sources, but I’m sure you could make a process that favored existing, long-standing text over new revelations. Stare decisis. I suppose this would have conservative effects on everything from scandals to deadnames.

Consider banning secondary sources, to insulate from editorial slants and fear of missing out. Or perhaps no sources less than five years old; we don’t want hot-button issues. Hell, don’t bother making an article until a subject has been around for that five-year window. Keep your finger off the pulse of current events and avoid all that volatility. I’d suggest stopping articles at a fixed date, but I can’t decide on 2007, 1981, or 1955.

I conclude that the best option is just echoing Wikipedia, but running each page through GPT with the prompt “write this like Tucker Carlson.”

Option one is to get editors who share conservative biases. This is a stupid idea as far as making a useful wiki. Think of all the ways in which making Wikipedia more progressive would detract from it, then remember that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

Reverse stupidity is not, superimposed stupidity is. If you get a bunch of rabid conservatives, and a bunch of rabid progressives, lock them in a room and tell them they can't get out until they agree on a common answer, you'll get a decent article. This process was working pretty well for a while on Wikipedia, and it's working pretty well on Twitter's Community Notes right now, so I see nothing stupid about the idea.

Unfortunately, this has the same problem as just paywalling the whole site: it’s not selective. Every barrier you add will prevent some number of useful edits. Even if those edits come from basement-dwelling channers.

You weren't against limiting the number of useful edits from basement-dwelling conservative channers, why worry about it now?

Ah, heck. I really should have included the word “only” in that first block. As in: only allowing editors with conservative biases.

I agree that not throwing out conservatives would result in a better wiki. I didn’t think that was what sliders was looking for.

They could at least TRY, you know. Right now there are editors on wikipedia that have bloody hammers and sickles on their profile bios. And nobody bats an eye when they edit some bullshit with their political bent.

Ah, you've figured it out. Just throw all the commie editors off the helicopter, right?

I don't care if a communard decides to fly the hammer and sickle on their bio. Not any more than I care about the Gadsden flag or an actual, national flag. There are probably catgirl-avatar editors who exclusively edit Wehrmacht articles, and I still don't care.

The problem arises when, as you say, they edit some bullshit. If that were trivially detected by looking at a profile picture, I don't think we'd be having this conversation. One side would have purged the other ages ago.

Ah, you've figured it out. Just throw all the commie editors off the helicopter, right?

How about: just stop throwing the conservative ones out.

The more interesting question is why isn’t there a conservative Wikipedia?

Because if it managed to get any notable traction it would be instantly banned from payment processors, deranked/delisted from search engines, blackholed by internet routing and banished from app stores if it existed.

Look at everything that happens to kiwifarms.

Kiwi farms was regularly facilitating actual crimes, though.

Conservative normies doing conservative normie things don’t get debanked. Right wing edgelords do, but that’s not the same thing.

Kiwi farms was regularly facilitating actual crimes, though.

No it wasn't. They actually tracked down the SWATters, and several of those SWAT attacks were meant to discredit and attack the Kiwifarms (especially the MTG one). The site isn't particularly nice but they don't actually facilitate actual crimes. They also aren't responsible for anyone dying/committing suicide, either.

Conservative normies doing conservative normie things don’t get debanked. Right wing edgelords do, but that’s not the same thing.

There's been a pretty serious wave of debanking, specifically, aimed at the right wing gun culture world, well short of Defense Distributed-level weirdos. While not specifically a bank, GiveSendGo lost Discover as a payment option back in the Rittenhouse era.

Which isn't different from what you said, in some perspectives, but the line where 'edgelord' get drawn controls quite a lot. There might have once been enough institutional trust to think that this could stop at just the KF-grade assholes in the same way that I once believed 'punch a Nazi' could actually mean just punching actual nazis; in practice the leftist doxxing leagues get support from Harvard University and credit card companies get Blue Tribe calls to drop Red Tribe sales as a category.

Kiwi farms was regularly facilitating actual crimes, though.

Any expansion on or evidence for this, or is this the tired old debunked "linked to suicides" smear again?

Kiwi farms was regularly facilitating actual crimes, though.

And Twitter was used to facilitate riots that caused billions of dollars in damage and a bunch of murders in the 2 weeks that passed between approximately May and November 2020.

I didn't see pre-Elon Twitter getting debanked, delisted from app stores, or facing advertiser boycotts.

Conservative normies doing conservative normie things don’t get debanked.

Controlled opposition is controlled.

Conservative normies doing conservative normie things don’t get debanked. Right wing edgelords do, but that’s not the same thing.

So basically the left decides how conservative a conservative may be before they can be considered an "edgelord" and debanked. Meanwhile, hammer-and-sickle sporting communists have nothing to worry about.

I don’t know that kiwifarms is a good analogue. What service were they providing that didn’t fall under social media?

What service were they providing that didn’t fall under social media?

Well... exactly. See how much fury they generated, and imagine if they were doing something meaningful instead of just being a chat board.

Call me naive, but I think kiwifarms drew all that ire because it was so damn useless. It had no goal other than dunking, and it was really, really low-effort. That raises hackles more than actual hate groups. After all, it's a commitment to join the WBC and go picket funerals. It costs nothing to make an alt.

Is lolcow news a service? If there was an ongoing internet kerfuffle there would be updates there. Often from primary sources and people directly or peripherally involved.

The problem is that you have to be VERY ideologically motivated to feel that Wikipedia is too liberal. It's generally neutral/accurate enough that only people with serious axe grinding chops will notice.

As a result, conservative alternatives become skewed SO conservative that the negative impact on accuracy is immediately noticeable.

This is where Moldbug's dream of the antiversity runs aground, it needs to be MORE accurate than the liberal/neutral version not less, and that improvement needs to be immediately noticeable to all involved. Which is a really tough percentage to squeeze, actually, if you aren't reading Wikipedia articles about transgender athletes or historical controversies. Most of the time on most of the topics people read about, vanilla Wikipedia is good enough, which is exactly why the ideological bias is so insidious.

The more interesting question is why isn’t there a conservative Wikipedia?

This question comes up fairly often - "there's a leftist X, so why isn't there a conservative X"?

At least part of the reason is that the right is simply less interested in conservative X's than the left is in leftist X's. I personally wouldn't be interested in reading a "conservative Wikipedia". I just want Wikipedia, with as little bias and censorship as possible.

This question comes up fairly often - "there's a leftist X, so why isn't there a conservative X"?

At least part of the reason is that the right is simply less interested in conservative X's than the left is in leftist X's.

Nah... the premise of the question is simply wrong. There are rightwing alternatives to most social media platforms, and I think they're usually bigger than their explicitly left-wing counterparts.

Examples? Truthsocial has less activity than Twitter. Voat or whatever that was shutdown a while back. What's the conservative version of FB?

I did say explicitly left-wing, Twitter / FB / Youtube etc., are trying / pretending to be neutral, no? I think Locals is the closest thing to FB, but their structure is a bit whack. It's not quite Twitter, not quite Facebook, not quite Substack.

Because the world doesn't want politically motivated encyclopedias, it wants accurate, unbiaised, apolitical ones. Of course, Wikipedia isn't that, but that is current only known to the extremely online centrists and conservatives/right-wingers. The move is not to make an explicitely political one as it will be rightfully ignored, it's to continue to raise awareness that Wikipedia is not accurate, unbiaised and apolitical.

One problem, on top of what other people have already mentioned, is that an explicitly conservative version of Wikipedia would likely be more politically biased than the current officially-apolitical-but-left-leaning version of Wikipedia. Wikipedia started out fairly apolitical and certainly not obviously left-wing (the founders met on a forum for discussing Ayn Rand's philosophy!) but over time has drifted in a leftward direction. Despite this, most articles are still fairly objective and accurate. Part of this may be because lots of text on Wikipedia was just literally written years ago (before the political bias became noticeable) and part of it is due to the composition of the population of editors and the cultural norms that have developed, which both have a lot of momentum and don't go from apolitical to extreme far-left in a few years. Moreover, at least conservative people are not explicitly banned or discouraged from contributing to Wikipedia and so there are probably more conservative editors than there would be if that was not the case.

Actually we don't need to just imagine a hypothetical "Wikipedia, but conservative." We can look Conservapedia, which was founded with the goal of being a conservative version of Wikipedia. Comparing Wikipedia and Conservapedia, I think it is clear that Wikipedia is substantially better and more factual than conservapedia. Take, for example, their articles on Ronald Reagan. Conservapedia's article describes him as "one of the greatest American Presidents and part of the conservative movement since the late 1970s" whereas Wikipedia says he was "a member of the Republican Party, his presidency constituted the Reagan era, and he is considered one of the most prominent conservative figures in American history." I find the second to be much more objective than the first.

I think both description of Reagan are correct. “Greatest” doesn’t mean best or good. I’m reminded that I can’t go into a sub neoliberal without being banned shortly and Reagan was the politician who implemented neoliberalism. For 35 years (1/3 of a century) every major politician had to describe themselves as a neoliberal. I do think that qualifies as great. I hate FDR but I wouldn’t have an issue describing him as great.

I get your point on adding a superlative that you didn’t need to.

I think the bias on Wikipedia shows up in this random paragraph in Obamas Wikipedia.

“The acquittal of George Zimmerman following the killing of Trayvon Martin sparked national outrage, leading to Obama giving a speech in which he noted that "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago."

How would we rewrite this paragraph in a neutral or conservative way. Some of it is information not included.

Here is my attempt: “The acquittal of George Zimmerman on the grounds of self defense in the death of Trayvon Martin sparked outrage in some communities. Leading the Obama administration to govern under BLM protest.”

Adding the reason for acquittal “self defense” seems more neutral to me instead of leading the reader to assume it was just racism. Took away the national part because it seemed to imply everyone agrees with that assessment. Took out the Obama quote because it implies the kid did nothing wrong (unless we should assume Obama picked fights like that). The use of the word “killing” to me implies a lot more guilt of criminal murder so I removed that.

The Wikipedia article is accurate on this point but the information you include or exclude would lead the reader to make much different conclusions.

I think most people would consider "greatest" to be a pretty subjective judgement and usually one with significant positive valence.

Also, I tried comparing the Obama article on Wikipedia and on Conservapedia and I think it's again clear that Conservapedia is considerably more biased and subjective. Literally the second sentence in the Conservapedia article is "Elected as America's first "post-racial" president according to mainstream fake news media, Obama exacerbated racial tensions and left a dismal legacy of a divided America along Marxist class, racial, and "gender normative" lines." That seems substantially more biased to me than the Wikipedia sentence about Obama that you quoted. Just the phrase "fake news media alone" is extremely heavy-handed. The bias in Wikipedia, when it exists, is usually much more subtle (except for a handful of topics and even then I think it's much better than comparable topics in Conservapedia).

I agree the conservative ones are more blatantly biased. I quoted the Wikipedia one to show how it has implicit bias in it.

For 35 years (1/3 of a century) every major politician had to describe themselves as a neoliberal.

Hasn't neoliberal almost exclusively been used as an insult? To describe a politician as an elite in the pocket of massive international corporations?

Began after Trump. Bill Clinton was forced to take it on. It’s an insult from the left to the center left (Americans lines) and Trump is probably the first GOP post-neolib POTUS. I’d draw the line around 2015-2016 as the time it became an insult. Establishment is still mostly some form of neolib.

There's Conservapedia. Founded by Phyllis Schlafly's son.

I went there years ago and it was unintentional comedy. The Charles Darwin page's first two images were photos of Hitler. It claimed that Darwin is responsible for inspiring the Holocaust, etc. It was unhinged.

They got rid of that silly stuff and now it is boring. Edit: I take that back. They've returned to looniness. I thought they went away from that, but they must have pivoted back.

Not unintentional comedy.

What happened AIUI is that a huge number of progressive trolls went there and started intentionally turning the place into a Colbert-style parody. Schlafly's ability to tell the difference between trolls and real conservatives was negative - because the trolls were lying, they could pretend to be more conservative than the real conservatives - so the trolls wound up in effective control of the content.

They got rid of that silly stuff and now it is boring.

Are you sure? https://www.conservapedia.com/Poland#NATO_mercenaries is hilarious.

https://www.conservapedia.com/Russia-Ukraine_war also has russiabot derangement.

But the first one has high concentration of deranged claims that I have not seen so far :)

If you think that Conservapedia has got rid of the silly stuff, just check their Joe Biden article.

Country: United States

Military service: 4-F

Highest rank attained: Junta leader

Political beliefs: Socialism with Chinese characteristics, Communism, Xi Jinping Thought, Fascism, Liberalism, White Supremacy[1], Kakistocracy

I thought they purged that stuff and purposefully became boring, but I didn't check recently.

Number of deaths attributed

33-40 Marxist color revolution[2] 10 Non-combatant drone killings[3] 200 Kabul airport bombing[4][5] 1,700 illegal migrant deaths,[6][7][8] plus the horrific 51 deaths in a truck found June 2022.[9] 715,385 Covid Death Tracker[10] 48,465 CMS Medicare Tracking System;[11] 40,097 reported to VAERS[12] 478,000 from experimental mRNA Covid vaccines[13] NATO aggression in Ukraine 320,000+ (civilian, military, and foreign mercenary fighters as of 10/16/23)

Looks like they're back on brand. I'll click around a bit when I get some time.

Does the right just lack any amount of people with nothing better to do than edit Wikipedia articles. In a world this big that does almost seem impossible.

I think the distribution of ‘free time for activist projects’ between right and left wingers is functionally bimodal. Right wingers with abundant free time prioritize church and family, or legitimate actual charities, over boring culture war grunt work, and this is in large part because conservative communities largely have access to churches with actual things to do, legitimate actual charities, and families with help to give in a way that’s atypical for hardcore left wingers.

Because there can only be one definitive undefinitive source and despite the bubble effect of sites like this one the Liberal opinion on (most) factual questions is the popular opinion.

Wikipidea is undefinitive because it is a democracy; you will never get conservative wins in an open platform because there are less conservatives than liberals.

I thought that Wikipedia was not a democracy. It is a cabal of power users asserting what truth is.

Yup; if by cabal you mean a random selection of people with enough time, energy, and autism to try to be a bona-fried wiki warrior: Upper middle class Americans/western Europeans mainly white mainly kinda vaguely agnostic non practicing.

Eg, liberals; like most people.

The more interesting question is why isn’t there a conservative Wikipedia?

There is! More precisely, there are two.

Normie boomer conservative Conservapedia that began as creationist intelligent design project during the noughties and Infogalactic, alt right flagship project by Vox Day.

Why you never heard about them, you are asking? Because they are not Wikipedia. Everyone uses Wikipedia because everyone uses Wikipedia, because Wikipedia link comes first in every search. Even if Elon started heavily shilling one of these sites, I cannot see how he could singlehandedly change it.

I looked up the page for "evolution" on both of these sites, then looked up "Gamergate", "Gaza," and "Trump" on Infogalactic vs. Wikipedia.

Conservapedia goes ad hominem in the second paragraph of "Evolution", stating that the majority of the vocal proponents are atheists and agnostics, and proceeds to go into 12 paragraphs of skepticism, including in there the whopper that "The fossil record does not support the theory of evolution and is one of the flaws in the theory of evolution." (Sources: "creation.com" and "annointed-one.net"). Combined with the failure to properly explain what evolution is, this bias makes it useless as an information source.

Infogalactic, in contrast, takes the text for the "Evolution" and "Gaza" articles straight from Wikipedia. Gamergate, as one may imagine given the Vox Day connection, is a completely different article from that of Wikipedia: the Wikipedia article emphasizes the "harrassment campaign". The Infogalactic article emphasizes the revealed corruption in journalism, but does touch on harrassment allegations.

Finally, the "Donald Trump" article: Infogalactic auto-redirects from "Trump" to "Donald Trump". Wikipedia redirects to "Trump (disambiguation)". The intro to the Wikipedia article injects POV in where it doesn't seem appropriate (differences with Infogalactic emphasized):

Trump won the 2016 presidential election as the Republican nominee against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton while losing the popular vote.[a] During the campaign, his political positions were described as populist, protectionist, isolationist, and nationalist. His election and policies sparked numerous protests. He was the first U.S. president with no prior military or government experience. The 2017–2019 special counsel investigation established that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to favor Trump's campaign. Trump promoted conspiracy theories and made many false and misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics. Many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racially charged or racist and many as misogynistic.

The corresponding infogalactic paragraphs:

Trump won the general election on November 8, 2016, in a surprise victory against Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, and commenced his presidency on January 20, 2017. He became the oldest person to assume the presidency (surpassing Ronald Reagan), until Joe Biden in 2021, the wealthiest person ever to assume the presidency, and the fifth to have won election while losing the popular vote, though his supporters claimed there were irregularities.[1] His political positions have been described by scholars and commentators as populist, protectionist, and nationalist. In the first year of Trump's presidency, the economy improved significantly[2], but progressive opponents strongly criticized his direct and plain-spoken personal style. With no significant scandals or international events to report, the democrat media focused on unsubstantiated allegations that Trump's election campaign team had colluded with Russian intelligence agencies to influence public opinion[3][4]. The official investigation was eventually closed, with no evidence of the conspiracy theory[5].

Infogalactic definitely has a bias, but it isn't leaving as many details out selectively. I might start preferring Infogalactic now. However, from the change log it looks like there is only one active contributor?!

Yeah infogalactic started as a straight fork of Wikipedia with the planned killer app of replacing edit wars with something showing multiple views. I think it died from lack of use.

Most people using wikipedia are not looking for high-profile political topics. As Encyclopedia Dramatica famously put it when launching a vandalism campaign, you can't have a free-to-edit encyclopedia without editors who are willing to periodically check in on the article on fourth-order Runge-Kutta numerical integration to make sure it hasn't succumbed to vandalism, linkrot, or onward progress in computer languages used to implement the algorithm. What ED learned was that Wikipedia does, in fact, have editors willing to do that.

Vox Day thought that gamergaters and puppies would give him the basis of editors he needed to do this on Infogalactic. It didn't. It didn't help that he was dividing his time between too many projects at the time.

It makes you realize what an incredible coup flipping Twitter from far-left to neutral was.

Once networks become entrenched they become almost impossible to dislodge. Despite the truly epic level of whining after losing their playground, progressives journalists and celebrities can't break their Twitter addiction and still use it. Even a new product with the backing of a trillion dollar corporation couldn't dislodge Twitter.

If progressives can't create a left-wing Twitter alternative, then creating a conservative Wikipedia is a doomed project from the start. The only hope is that Wikipedia is disrupted by new technology or there is a slow march through the institution.

editing for culture war.

Any particular examples?

Does the right just lack any amount of people with nothing better to do than edit Wikipedia articles. In a world this big that does almost seem impossible.

I was under the impression that any right wingers who try to edit Wikipedia have their changes reverted almost instantly, and lose their edit privileges to boot.

Was that not the intention behind Conservapedia?

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money

That's not the most charitable read, that's the obvious straight-forward read. Do you really think it's possible that Elon Musk doesn't know that servers cost some amount of money?

As others have noted below, Wikipedia doesn't need the money it raises to run itself, and hasn't needed it for years. Wikipedia could put it's assets / raised capital in a safe financial vehicle and run its servers forever on the profit. Elon Musk is 100% correct Wikipedia simply doesn't need a large yearly donation campaign to run itself as a website.

Musk is in an even better position to make this argument as he just massively cut the operational waste of a major website to prove the ridiculousness of the actual costs to bloat ratio. He is the only person who has ever done this at this scale, and thus is the best person in the world to listen to about wasted operating expenses.

I am not an Elon stan, but this is a willfully anti-Elon take that requires squinting his comment into absurdity just to prove how stupid he must be.

If you have been tricked into thinking Wikipedia needs your individual donation to keep the lights on, that's on you and on Wikipedia for lying to you, not on Elon.

It's funny when the musk hate gets so strong, that an obvious interpretation is considered the most charitable read :marseyfacepalm:

The cool rocket stuff aside, I have no love for the billionaire... but can we apply some of this scrutiny to everyone? Or at least other billionaires and major politicians?

Musk is in an even better position to make this argument as he just massively cut the operational waste of a major website to prove the ridiculousness of the actual costs to bloat ratio.

Ding ding ding.

Maybe it was not worth 44 Billion, but he proved that an operation that was cruising off of VC money and staffed up as if they were expecting to repel an invasion could fire most of their personnel and operate on a relative shoestring with minimal degradation in service.

Seems plausible something similar could be said of Wiki.

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?

Wikipedia receives money via fundraising campaigns which appeal to end users to donate. The copy these campaigns use is notorious for being misleading or deceptive about the company's financial position, something that people (even seasoned members of the Wikipedia community) have been complaining about for years. As others below me have noted, only a tiny fraction of Wikipedia's operating expenses go towards keeping the site online, and most of the editing done on the website is done pro bono rather than by its hired staff. I, personally, think it's dishonest for a nonprofit to misrepresent itself as being on the precipice of going under without an immediate influx of charitable donations, and to imply that said charitable donations are going directly towards keeping the site online (when in truth, for every dollar you donate, something like 6 cents are going towards server costs).

Elon's companies receive money either by selling products or by soliciting investments. If you think his products are shoddy or overpriced, say so (I can't comment, having never sat in a Tesla and barely using Twitter, before or since Musk's takeover). If you think he's only securing investments by knowingly misleading investors, say so. Otherwise I'm not even sure what "Elon, I think you deserve less money" really means.

The vast majority of the Wikipedia Foundation's money goes to supporting political causes, not runnign Wikipedia. Wikipedia is relatively cheap to run for a major global site. Musk is correct, and the critics nipping at his heals are midwits.

"Midwit" is exceedingly generous for the people piling on this specific Musk criticism. It takes about 2 minutes of internet research to check how much Wikimedia Foundation spending actually goes towards providing Wikipedia.

Some serious stones and glass houses imo. By those standards 99% of the Internet is dumber than “midwit”.

Can we just say “they don’t seem to know much about Wikipedia’s finances”?

It's not "don't seem to know much"; that's fine for everybody not joining the pile-on. It's "joining the pile-on without bothering to find out". Nescience vs ignorance.

If not midtwit than what?

My guess would be people wanting to culture war that don’t care much about the facts. It’s prefereble to hate on Elon (plays for wrong team) than figure out he’s factually correct quickly.

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?

Musk isn’t running a charity. If Redditors want to convince companies that launching satellites on SpaceX rockets into space is a bad deal financially, they can make that argument.

I ask, after seeing Musk apparently fail to understand Wikipedia costs money to provide, who wouldn't?

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money

The link goes to a screenshot of Musk's Tweet, whose first sentence is (emphasis added):

Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia foundation wants so much money?

Note the bolded "so much," which was not "any." As such, it actually isn't the most charitable read here that Musk thinks Wikimedia deserves less money, not no money, it's the obvious and straightforward read. And it's a highly uncharitable, to such an extent as to be just plain wrong read to say that this indicates a failure to understand that Wikipedia costs any money to provide.

To address the actual question of the post, I think it's notable that even midwits (I hate this term, but whatever, it's the original term used here and it conveys the meaning well enough) tend to look down on people who infer the broad competence of someone in some general endeavor based on a highly uncharitable and downright twisted interpretation of a single Tweet made by that person. Such an inference is so obviously unjustified and so obviously reflective of the interpreter's mentality rather than that of the person making the Tweet that it takes very little intelligence to understand that.

Or maybe he's asking "what is all the begging about, where is the money actually going?"

Which is a question I'd like answered myself. I regularly get the begging headers on the Wikipedia pages and mostly ignore them. Then I read that there's a Foundation supposedly in charge of the thing. Okay, fine, need some kind of management.

And then I read that the Foundation has, to use a technical term, a metric fuckton of money (allegedly).

So yeah - where's all the money in the begging campaigns going, then? Jannies do it for free, after all.

A lot of it appears to be featherbedding. But it's also re-donation. Wikimedia is part of a vast group of linked leftish non-profits which pass money around between them, and their main purpose is likely to serve as a source of money (since they look like a clearly worthy cause).

So Musk is right, and it's not "hur-dur servers cost money you dimwit", it's "Paul pays Peter, and Peter pays Paul, and then everyone goes out to an agreeable dinner".

A few years ago I looked at the budget, and Wikipedia was spending more on travel and conferences than they were on servers.

The costs have ballooned enormously since.

The money is quite simply being wasted. Wikipedia worked perfectly well (better even!) ten years ago when the budget was a small fraction of its current bloated state.

The interface also wasn't complete trash like it currently is. Some of the older barely web 2.0 with very sparing use of js versions were way better.

It's all bull shit jobs and lobbying for Left Inc. Giving them money is giving money to left wing failsons and faildaughters to "raise awareness". It bothers me so much that they can run this scam and nobody cares (see the reddit thread).

Why does Twitter cost money? It's just other people providing content...

The irony of trying to own Elon on Twitter costs when he successfully ruthlessly shrank a huge amount of bloat there.

Is there anything more singularly obnoxious than a Reddit thread of smug shots at Elon Musk? According to them, apparently he doesn't know electricity and servers cost money. And firing most of the worthless staff at Twitter was the worst self-inflicted wound anybody could have ever made!

You ask why this causes bafflement, but do you really think these idiots know something he doesn't? That they have a better grasp of tech and its funding than the man who has a history with payment processors, cybercars, rockets, and now social media - and Elon is just bumblefucking his way to success? I'll grant that he is human and more error-prone than his godly 4d troll image would have some believe. But give any one of his businesses to a chump in that thread (or a group of them) and watch it go belly-up or taken away from them under their noses.

Maybe Musks's single qualification over these people is that he doesn't post on Reddit. A lot of Musk criticism clearly comes from a type who thinks they could do the same job he does even better if only the world had been more fair and gave them the opportunity to do so. It's laughable and contemptible in equal measure.

Is there anything more singularly obnoxious than a Reddit thread of smug shots at Elon Musk?

A Hacker News thread of smug shots at Elon Musk? Not that HN isn't just another subreddit, of course, but it's a bit worse since a more tech-industry-focused version should naturally be full of people who should know better yet the threads are exactly the same.

I think you’re describing Reddit in general. If you read a general news discussion on almost any topic, they’re smugly wrong most of the time. They don’t know how the things they’re discussing actually work, don’t understand the power dynamics of politics at all, and still think that they can run whatever it is better than people who have decades of experience doing that thing.

Of course I think that’s to be expected when most of the user base are college students with minimal work experience and post graduates who have yet to build a solid career. Almost everyone thinks they know how to run things at 18-25 because they are taught all the theoretical stuff about the subject and have never dealt with trying to actually build something.

Elon does draw this more than most because he loves to troll and get attention for himself and put on a show. If he did the same stuff but without the fanfare and trolling, I don’t think most people follow business pages well enough to know about how other CEOs are making very similar decisions.

I definitely am discussing Reddit in general. The hot takes and easy karma shown in that thread appear any time Elon or any minimally right-coded figure pops up as a topic nearly anywhere on the site. You'll be browsing a sub for a video game or show you like and then one day there's a "DAE see similarities between Musk and the Dark Lord?" post sitting up top with 6 gold and thrice the upvotes relative to anything else.

Few are immune to smug convictions. But there is something stupefying about the particular thing they are convinced of. I'd frankly find it more tolerable if they accused him of being a grifter, a conman, a snake, or even evil. But dumb and incompetent? It's this reflexive tic among leftitsts where surely your opponents are just straight-up retarded; as opposed to you, brilliant cat man shooting for the 6 figures with your journalism and poli-sci courses (assuming they're even taking those and not just posing). And it's not just Reddit. I dont think a week goes by where I don't get fed an article about how Musk is doing something crazy or inscrutable. Just this morning I was reading about his digs at Wikipedia, and the article hintingly framed this as mental instability.

This started to feel tryhard with Trump, and it's doubly so with Musk.

I think the forward in your face way that both Trump and Musk do things matters a lot here. There are thousands of tech companies out there doing very similar work to what Musk does. There were certainly hybrid and I think electric cars made by other companies that don’t get the same attention Tesla does. Even outside of tech, lots of companies have moved plants to locations with less regulation. There have been companies that have had massive layoffs and major retooling that don’t get the same attention that Musk gets, and that’s in part because he’s doing these things in very loud public ways.

Trump was the same way. If you’d have put his actual agenda up against any Republican of the last generation, he’s not that unusual. If you took him back to 1992, he’s a democrat. The difference again tends to be that he’s loud, proud and extremely in your face abouT what he’s doing.

I think there are a lot of reasons that that style is seen as stupid. Most people have been taught by culture to see thinkers as quiet unassuming people who don’t have emotions and don’t really market themselves or their ideas. The persona of Spock is the archetypal “deep thinker” in American culture. Trump and Musk are not like that. I don’t think it’s grifting in the normal sense of things. They actually believe in the things they say, but they also understand that a persona full of confidence and a bit of showmanship are needed to make the changes they need to make. But if you’re used to thinking of quiet stoic people being smart, showmen aren’t going to come off as smart. Then add in that they’ve been in university where they’ve been taught that smart people are the ones with the right opinions and thus once Musk starts saying the wrong opinions he gets seen as obviously stupid because if he were smart he’d agree with the phds in the university.

Not only am I used to thinking of quiet stoic people being smart, I'm used to thinking of loud confident people being full of shit.

It doesn't help that Musk has actually got stupider as he got more famous. Everyone who worked with him at early-stage Tesla or SpaceX said he was scary because he understood the technical aspects of your job better than you did. But since he was normie-famous he has mostly been signal-boosting right-coded midwit conventional wisdom.

You can tell this by looking at what experts in his fields think of him. The car and rocket people all had the initial reaction of "This is a longshot, but it could work, and I want it to work." People who know anything about civil engineering's reaction to Hyperloop and The Boring Company was "Musk doesn't even understand why the last N people who tried this failed, so he is going to repeat those mistakes." And people who know about AI tend to think that Tesla is well behind Waymo and Cruze in autonomous driving.

My guess is that the underlying cause is some combination of drug abuse, long-term effects of lack of sleep, and no longer feeling the need to do his homework before running his mouth.

Or maybe he knows more about physics than other topics he’s tweeting about. Most people have a single or at best a set of very closely related domains that they really truly understand on a deep level. Musk is really scary good at technical stuff, he knows a lot about mechanical and software engineering. He knows less about politics and whatever conventual wisdom he’s tweeting about.

I think the Onion article was correct, he just wants to be liked. Right-coded midwits are desperate for some really well-known person to like them, so they are easy to cater to this way, and Musk is one of the most famous men on the planet.

Which is one of the reasons I think we might see him, and his companies, faceplant soon-ish. There's no way someone in his position doesn't know these aren't the people you're supposed to court if you want to stay on the good side of the establishment. It's either "I gotta found someone to rally around me when the chickens come home to roost" or it (and here I mean everything he's doing with Twitter rather than just signal boosting the right) is a parting FU on his way down.

So 'roll hard right and die'?

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Everyone who worked with him at early-stage Tesla or SpaceX said he was scary because he understood the technical aspects of your job better than you did.

There is no damn way he had more than a surface level understanding of any of it.

I've spent many hours discussing this exact line of thought with several people, and no, they insist he's a "failson" who's just short of being literally retarded and his entire business model is a matter of burning daddy's money and causing unmitigated destruction in every field he's active in.

In other words, Musk Derangement Syndrome.

"But apartheid emerald mine." I think there's obvious criticism to be made about Musk. But instead nonsense like that is endlessly repeated.

The worst is that people are somehow convinced that Elon grew up rich when it's the furthest thing from the truth.

Elon grew up middle class with almost no connections to important people. More than that, his father was absent and abusive, often giving Elon's mother no money while she worked multiple jobs to support her family.

Elon is the embodiment of a self-made person. I think that's one reason that people have EDS (Elon Derangement Syndrome). They can't accept that their own failures are the result of cowardice and lack of effort. Therefore, anyone who succeeds must have had an unfair advantage.

They can't accept that their own failures are the result of cowardice and lack of effort.

There's more than that there. Musk is the equivalent of Michael Jordan; for every one of him, there's a hundred others that were just as brave and worked just as hard, but didn't win the genetic lottery or were unlucky.

My understanding is that Elon got a bit of money from his family as seed capital - but not a particularly large amount, and probably not that much more than the amount to open a restaurant or any other small business, which is done every year by thousands of people. In some ways he did have an advantage - if he came from total destitution, he might not have had the same success. But I think that's a little bit ungenerous. Lots of people in the US could scrape together 50k of seed capital, but most of them don't become megabillionaires.

I don't think that's even true. His dad, an abusive shithead, gave him $20k at one point but it had zero impact.

His Dad was somewhat wealthy at times but by the late 1980s the emerald business (which he bought for $50,000) had failed. Later, his father relied on Elon for handouts. After early childhood, Elon lived with his mother, who worked to take care of the family with little to no monetary assistance from his father.

Compared to a typical PMC class American, Elon was in fact quite disadvantaged, though never destitute.

No they dislike Elon because they see him as a traitor to the left.

Something happened to Elon in the Ukraine war situation. After helping out Ukraine greatly with Starlink he had some sort of bad encounter with the State Department / National Security types.

Despite being a loyal tech lefty for years none of his friends would do anything and he realized he needed friends on the right to balance things and protect himself.

That's what lead to his crusade for free speech and his Twitter purchase. Word went out on Reddit that he was a traitor and should no longer be trusted. People fell in line and started attacking him.

That's what lead to his crusade for free speech and his Twitter purchase. Word went out on Reddit that he was a traitor and should no longer be trusted. People fell in line and started attacking him.

Should he buy Reddit as well, then?

The Starlink thing certainly didn't help, but leftists and liberals have hated Musk for years prior to the Ukraine invasion. See these Onion articles about him which predate the war:

"Fetid, Shit-Covered Elon Musk Announces Plan To Revolutionize Nation's Sewage System"

Speaking of once-great institutions, wtf happened to the Onion? They used to be genuinely funny, and apparently it's all just hate clapter stuff now.

They got bought by the owner of Telemundo around the time of the Trump VS Hilldawg election. It's been churning out unfunny democrat agitprop ever since. The old writers were absolute masters absurdist comedy.

A lot of it moved to clickhole, and then because most of the stuff left was politics, TDS slipped it a Mickey and had its way with it.

I think it goes back a little farther than Ukraine. For a long time he was viewed somewhat favorably on the left because of Tesla. Electric and hybrid cards used to be strongly left coded, or at least hippy environmentalist coded. There was a whole South Park episode about people who drive Priuses huffing their own farts. And in Stephen King's Under the Dome he had the one journalist who was a Republican but also, shockingly, a good person which was demonstrated by her driving a Prius and not having any conservative viewpoints. Now it's just a normal car that anyone might drive. More recently environmentalists have shifted away from "gas cars bad, electric cars good" to "all cars bad, trains and bikes good" so he doesn't get brownie points for that any more.

Anyway, in 2016 after Trump was elected he met with a bunch of business leaders including Musk. Musk wasn't a Trump supporter and I'm having trouble googling his exact wording now but my impression at the time was that he was moderately more willing to work with Trump than any of the other CEOs and that's when I remember the tone on reddit and other left wing spaces starting to turn against him. I think it culminated in 2018 with the Taiwanese cave kids rescue where he tried to build a submarine for them and then accused one of the rescue divers of being a pedophile. Since then he's consistently been a bad guy to the left and has been seen more and more favorably by the right.

It's probably also conflated in that tech CEOs in general used to be seen a lot more favorably than they are now. In 2010ish Google and Apple were seen as the good guys in contrast to Microsoft being the evil corporation. Now every large tech company is hated so I think that would have affected Musk even if nothing else had changed.

It's probably also conflated in that tech CEOs in general used to be seen a lot more favorably than they are now.

Are there any other tech CEOs that have been turned on to a similar degree? It seems like the others are mostly positive.

Gates(yes, I know he’s retired, but how many people can name his replacement), Bezos, and Zuckerberg are all widely disliked.

Zuckerberg and Bezos are widely disliked in the same places Musk is, Zuck for privacy stuff and Bezos for being a monopoly and Amazon working conditions. I don't see as much hate for Nadella or whoever runs Netflix but I think that's just because they're less well known. Actually Nadella does get some praise for Microsoft's open source contributions so he's probably the most popular of the bunch.

Taiwanese cave kids

Thai, not Taiwanese

For me personally, "Paedo guy" and "Funding secured" were enough to push me from "Hooray for the eccentric genius" to "This guy may be smart, but he is not a fit and proper person to be CEO of a strategically important company". That applies for different reasons whether he was on drugs at the time or not.

At the time, this combined with the obviously dishonest SolarCity deal and the rapid turnover of Tesla CFO's to make me suspect that Tesla was the next Enron. I'm happy to admit that I was wrong there.

At the end of the day, I have to ask why Musk was able to make loads of money off of Paypal, then Tesla, then Space X when these were all industries with established and extremely smart players and he went from the bottom of those barrels.

Huh? I’m pretty sure the mass Elon hate dates back to at least the early Tesla years. The blue/grey tribe tension isn’t unique to him, either. I don’t think “word on Reddit” made the difference.

They can't accept that their own failures are the result of cowardice and lack of effort.

I wouldn't even go that far - I agree that Musk works insanely hard, but he's also really smart. It's not like the only reason I'm not as rich as Musk is that I don't work as hard as him.

Having now read his biography, I'd say he's smart but not genius level. He got a 1400 on his SAT, for example, which is average around these parts.

The main reason for his success seems to be an extreme appetite for risk and zero social desirability bias. That enables him to do things which are possible but which most people wouldn't even consider - such as firing 80% of the workers at Twitter for example.

That’s 1400 in the 1980s, when it was considerably more difficult.

1400 in the 1980s would be 1400-1480 in the late 1990s after the famous recentering. There's been another recent jump with the addition and removal of the New Coke Writing portion, but even at the median it was tens of points, not hundreds. For an older SAT supposedly a 1400 correlates with a ~140IQ. His intelligence is at that 1-in-200 "got accepted into a STEM PhD program" level; his work habits are what are at the literally 1-in-a-million "sleep on the office couch while working hundred hour weeks, then after selling that company for tens of millions do it again with the next company ad infinitum" level. A "normal" workaholic would have relaxed a little after the first multi-millionaire payout, and probably would have ended up happier and saner but wouldn't have ended up a multi-billionaire.

He's also been very lucky, but that's partly down to personality too: he's won a bunch of high-variance gambles that most people wouldn't have risked making in the first place.

his work habits are what are at the literally 1-in-a-million "sleep on the office couch while working hundred hour weeks, then after selling that company for tens of millions do it again with the next company ad infinitum" level.

I think that's a good deal closer to 1/10,000. Consider the work ethic of the average Navy SEAL for example, and then consider that there's a bunch of people with SEAL tier willpower that don't become SEALs.

It's still lower than a good chunk of the people here. It's not like a 1400 then was harder to get than a 1600 now

Fair enough. I'll concede that he's probably top 1% intelligence which puts him in the top 80 million smartest people in the world.

But Terrance Tao he is not.

Interesting side question. Are there any tycoons from history who are legit 175 IQ type outliers?

Jeff Bezos was at DE Shaw before he founded Amazon, and was successful there. DE Shaw are like Jane Street in that they recruit primarily for raw IQ and can afford to be extremely selective on it. 146 IQ (top 0.1%) doesn't cut it. 155 IQ (top 0.01%) probably does. Top 0.01% is also around the level where other smart people start using the word "genius" to describe you.

175 IQ is 1 in 3 million, and even the people who care about ultra-high IQs think that the distinction between very smart and very, very smart ceases to matter around the 1 in 1 million point. Re. the various comments on high SAT scores, the Prometheus Society considers 1560 on the old SAT to be 1 in 30,000 which corresponds to a 160 IQ on the current standard scale. There are no longer any publically available IQ tests which are accurate at that level.

SBF was above-average IQ for Jane Street, which also qualifies him as a legit genius.

If we treat "implausible polymathic success in a wide range of IQ-loaded fields" as a sign of genius-level IQ, then Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon are probably the smartest world leaders in history.

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Interesting side question. Are there any tycoons from history who are legit 175 IQ type outliers?

Bill gates is the obvious one. I’d probably point to John mcafee as the mentally ill version of the same thing, maybe some of the enron people, possibly Thomas Edison. Deeper in history you get into ‘who is a tycoon, really’, but the wealthiest men in history are I think Mansa musa and Francisco Pizarro, neither of whom seem likely to be geniuses. John Rockefeller strikes me as probably the smartest of the original robber barons, but probably not to genius level.

Only a handful who have extremely impressive academic performance, like Gates. Even for those who do, it's questionable - Zuck wasn't a highly impressive Harvard student even though he got a perfect 1600 on the SAT, which many more impressive students don't have. It's hard to say whether Rockefeller, Carnegie, or even modern tycoons like Larry Ellison are comparable.

Unsure if a “tychoon”, but the Renaissance Technology founder Jim Simmons. He isn’t Terrance Tap either, however.

Bill Gates is probably the go-to answer, but I also say Steve Ballmer. Unsure if either is at the 175 genius level, though.

harder to judge the older generations. Rockefeller had to be smart, but a lot of his success is hard work and ruthlessness. I guess pioneering new things that the government hates does take creativity.

I also get the impression he has an unusual facility of being able to obsessively fixate on a specific topic or task for hours or days at a time, without getting distracted, breaking his concentration or seeing any significant fall-off in productivity.

He's pretty clearly being sarcastic about how the majority of Wikipedia spend seems to be on bloat and random political efforts.

Wikipedia could run the entity with about 10% of it's incoming cash and everything else is a bureaucracy and progressive fundraisers. Whilst they shake down users for donations like their $10 is going to be the difference between a 404 error and Wikipedia next year.

In fact, if you look at @EverythingIsFine's post, you're not sufficiently cynical. If you take the hosting cost, and double it for overhead, it's still less than 5% of the yearly donations.

FYI I clicked on the link in your post and it brought me to a Reddit post about Lady Gaga wearing a funny hat.

It's fixed.

Looks like the auto-flip to old.reddit might have fucked with it, will try to fix when I get a minute.

Should work now.

The first time I heard about the alleged mismatch between Wikipedia's operating expenses and how much they raise every year was here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer, but I don't know how relevant it still is.

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money,

I'm the resident Musk-skeptic here who called him a fraud, and expects SpaceX and Tesla to crash and burn in the middle-term. I don't think he's wrong here. The disproportion between the funding they're raising and the funding they need to run the site is massive and insane. I think someone back on Reddit mentioned it was literally running out of some guys closet for many years, until it became a Respectable Nonprofit, and they started looking for things to spend money on.

So while it doesn't literally cost no money, you can more or less round it down to it costing no money, and that's without attempting further optimizations like P2P hosting.

Tesla to crash and burn in the middle-term

Yeah, decent prediction. At the very least a crash in market cap. And generally just being displaced by other car manufacturers making electric cars.

SpaceX ... to crash and burn in the middle-term

Nope. No way.

Can you define your motte-and-bailey for Musks crashing and burning?

I can see Tesla stock falling 70% and car production tripling. Happens all the time in stocks. Car companies usually aren’t valued that high.

SpaceX valuation I actually believe a lot more. Starlink looks like it could be one of those tech platforms (like say the cable company) that pisses off economic rents for decades.

And SpaceX really did change our rocket technology. Calling him a fraud just seems way off as there is some very real hard tech he created out of nowhere. And I don’t think you should get a victory lap if someday financial markets and their fickle nature drop his networth a large percentage.

Can you define your motte-and-bailey for Musks crashing and burning?

I don't do motte-and-bailey's or at least I try not to. My terms would be:

  • Starship does not make it to orbit. I already have 2 bets on this, feel free to join. You can pick the timeline as long as you keep track of the bet (though preferably pick one before our hairs turn grey)

  • Neither company makes it through the next major recession, sans bailouts or change of ownership and massive restructuring.

Calling him a fraud just seems way off as there is some very real hard tech he created out of nowhere.

To the extent that he did, I think it's way overhyped. I may be proven wrong on the fraud thing, but I fully expect there to be some voodoo accounting in SpaceX in particular, and for the changes he brought to the industry to turn out to be a mirage.

And I don’t think you should get a victory lap if someday financial markets and their fickle nature drop his networth a large percentage.

Well, now I feel you're the one bracing to do a motte-and-bailey. I'm making a serious accusation here, and would not consider victory laps if he merely has a slip on some deadlines, makes less money than expected, etc. I believe his companies run on almost raw hype, and the price of his stocks is sustained by memes. "Drop his net worth by a large percentage" sounds like exactly what would happen under those circumstances, and I don't want you to do a victory lap if he happens to get a bailout through his political connections.

Thing is I think you’ve already lost by your metrics.

Tsla created an entirely new car category. People spent $23 billion on their cars last quarter. Still retains 50% US market share. About $1 billion in fcf last quarter. Assume they continue to grow but in a mature market it’s on about $10 billion in fcf at a terminal rate. I could see that company only being worth 100-150 billion. Tsla market cap today is almost 700 billion. So yes I could see the stock collapsing 70-80%. And the meme stuff gives it a huge premium. But I still consider inventing a new car category and doing $100 billion a year in revenue as falsifying your thesis.

Starlink

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/13/23872244/spacex-starlink-revenue-customer-base-elon-musk

I don’t disagree he overhypes but doing a billion plus in revenue last year and I’m guessing 2-3X this year in an entirely new category is a huge accomplishment. Long term I think this is his best business. And it’s already shown military capabilities. Perhaps to the extent of causing Russia to lose the Ukraine War.

SpaceX itself has shown huge price cuts versus incumbents. It’s also an enabling technology for things like Starlink and some start ups like Varda Space.

No idea if his rockets make it to orbit. I don’t believe in recessions so tough for me to bet on a recession scenerio, but looking on seekingalpha Tsla has enterprise value 15 billion below market cap which means they have net cash. Tough to go bankrupt in that situation unless you have other operational leverage (union contracts for example can do that).

The reason I asked for a motte-and-Bailey is because yes Musks sets crazy projections and I agree he usually fails though. But his underlying what he actually accomplished dwarfs any “hard tech” accomplishments I’ve seen from any other human in my lifetime.

Personally, I get some of the Musks hate. I do think he’s committed security regulation violations that would put anyone else in jail.

Thing is I think you’ve already lost by your metrics.

Come on, my metrics was Starship making it to orbit, and Tesla not bankrupting / needing a bailout in the future.

Tsla created an entirely new car category

I don't think this is accurate. People have been playing around with electric cars for decades. You might say they're the first "commercially viable" electric cars, but this is exactly what I'm questioning. IMO he generated enough hype to produce these cars, but the investment does not make financial sense.

Starlink

There was a leaked email where he was screaming at his coworkers to get Starhip done or Starlink won't make any real money for the company. Maybe the leak was fake (though never heard of it getting deboonked), or maybe it was just Elon cracking the whip, and they'll be fine even without Starhip, but it's something to consider.

SpaceX itself has shown huge price cuts versus incumbents

Again, as far as accusations of fraud goes, this is where I'd paint the target. I think there's some financial juggling going on that allows him to pretend the launch price is cheaper than it is in reality. If 5 years from now he'll upload a video to X where he's driving a remote-controlled Tesla on the moon to the applause of his investors, I'll eat crow.

No idea if his rockets make it to orbit.

Well, that's lame. Starship is supposed to be the big cost-cutting thing. It's supposed to take us to the moon, and Mars. If it never makes it to orbit, surely that will be a big disappointment?

But his underlying what he actually accomplished dwarfs any “hard tech” accomplishments I’ve seen from any other human in my lifetime.

What tech of his impressed you so much?

Personally, I get some of the Musks hate. I do think he’s committed security regulation violations that would put anyone else in jail.

Counterpoint: The SEC is stark raving mad. But I actually agree, I don't think he's doing anything jailworthy.

Your rhetoric and your standard for “Musks isn’t a fraud” do not seem to align.

You make accusations of huge accounting fraud. Bigger than Enron to be perfectly honest and then fall back on he has to go the moon to be proven wrong. I feel like this is the definition of motte-and-baily.

And the thing on electronic cars it’s a gigantically huge accomplishment to go from some hobbyist thing to a $200 billion a year auto manufacturer and the first privately funded auto manufacturer since basically Ford (Hyundai I believe had state funding; one could quibble that tax rebates on electronics helped him a lot). Steve Jobs didn’t even accomplish that feat with the smart phone. We had commercialized blackberries before him.

As far as investment in Tesla being justified - if you look at his actual fundraising for it then $4 billion in yearly fcf is a good investment. It’s current 200x fcf multiple seems expensive to me.

The costs cuts per kg launch to space is one of the biggest technological breakthroughs I’ve seen. Is this chart all fake numbers

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-cost-of-space-flight/

If you want to not be in Motte-Bailey land you need to establish that these numbers are fake. We had no improvements in decades and then Musks came along and prices collapsed. Same with cars you negate all his Tesla accomplishments because we had hobbyist.

I’m actually disagreeing with you on whether Musks committed criminal offenses that result in jail time. I think that is 100% yes. But he’s politically protected because he’s too important because his engineering accomplishments are the greatest thing since atleast WW2.

Your rhetoric and your standard for “Musks isn’t a fraud” do not seem to align.

You make accusations of huge accounting fraud. Bigger than Enron to be perfectly honest and then fall back on he has to go the moon to be proven wrong. I feel like this is the definition of motte-and-baily.

I think they align pretty well. For one making it back to the moon is what Musk was contracted to do. He's literally giving away tickets to the moon to youtubers, surely, if nothing else, giving away tickets for what is, charitably, a fake-it-till-you-make-it venture can be described as fraudulent?

Secondly, you're misrepresenting what I'm saying re: accounting. While I think SpaceX is not running at a profit, I believe the investors have an accurate financial picture of what is going on. I think the company is going to crash because the massive profits they are expecting in the future are not going to show up, not because there's a giant gaping hole where the profits are supposed to be right now. The accounting fraud I'm expecting to come out is it turning out that the government paid a lot more per launch than the headline numbers are saying, but it's hidden under "miscellaneous" expenditures, or something.

And the thing on electronic cars it’s a gigantically huge accomplishment to go from some hobbyist thing to a $200 billion a year auto manufacturer and the first privately funded auto manufacturer since basically Ford

As far as investment in Tesla being justified - if you look at his actual fundraising for it then $4 billion in yearly fcf is a good investment. It’s current 200x fcf multiple seems expensive to me.

Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.

It would be impressive to set up a brand new auto manufacturer, if it wasn't at risk of falling apart when it runs out of hype. The reason there were no privately funded auto manfucaturers since basically Ford wasn't because there's some uncrackable mystery about building cars, it's because the established automakers have such a massive infrastructure, that they'd eat you for breakfast if you tried to compete with them. Musk managed to generate enough hype, to get enough money, to set up competing factories, but that doesn't mean the hype was justified. If the company can't stand on it's own two feet, and will end up needing a bailout, or getting sold at a garage sale to it's competitors, then I feel my statement about it crashing and burning is entirely justified.

Is this chart all fake numbers

Very likely manipulated to an extent that makes them effectively useless. For example the Shuttle number is derived by taking the cost of the entire program, and dividing it by the amount of launches. The SpaceX numbers, I believe, is what they charge other private companies. We have no insight into their accounting, and we don't know how much it actually costs to put a kilogram of payload to orbit with a SpaceX rocket, that would make it apples to apples with the Shuttle.

If you want to not be in Motte-Bailey land you need to establish that these numbers are fake.

On one hand that's fair, on the other hand you know that I have no way of doing that unless I can look at their accounting. As a compromise I offer to plant my flag here, if I'm right it's bound to come up sooner or later.

But he’s politically protected because he’s too important because his engineering accomplishments are the greatest thing since atleast WW2.

I have to once again ask what is the marvel of engineering he created that has you so impressed? If his companies end up successful, I'll agree he's a brilliant executive, but from a tech point of view nothing he did seems all that impressive?

For one making it back to the moon is what Musk was contracted to do. He's literally giving away tickets to the moon to youtubers, surely, if nothing else, giving away tickets for what is, charitably, a fake-it-till-you-make-it venture can be described as fraudulent?

what makes it 'fraud'? lots of space companies have sold launches for rockets that have never gone up yet.

I have to once again ask what is the marvel of engineering he created that has you so impressed? If his companies end up successful, I'll agree he's a brilliant executive, but from a tech point of view nothing he did seems all that impressive?

reusable rockets aren't impressive? even if you think the cost savings are all faked, the sheer volume of launches that they enable is an incredible achievement in their own right.

Musks does usually fail. And he sets goals that he is likely to fail. No complaint there. If you judge Musks by the goals he sets them he is a loser.

For the record I’ve shorted Tesla before and have never owned it. The goals he set are 10-100x what the rest of society is trying to achieve. He ends up doing 5x. A .200 hitter in baseball when the rest of the world is batting .03.

I don’t know if he will get to the moon. I do know no one else on earth even has a plan to go to the moon. We have sclerosis in hard tech.

I’ve said what I think he’s done that are huge advancements. All modern tech is built on the shoulders of giants to an extent so your always going to have a whataboutism that some other guy was doing something similar. But his achievements went much farther than that other guy. You’ve disagreed these are big achievements and quite frankly I think you are wrong.

And I’ve been wrong on Musks in the past. I always doubted it. Then a few years later he had all these companies humming and produce great products at lower costs and greater scale.

I do agree his hype and promotion are a big reason why he achieves things. It’s why he’s a great boss. He inspires his workers to accomplish goals they didn’t think possible. He’s no doubt a very talented engineer. His real ability is being the greatest coach we’ve ever seen at getting his teams to achieve things we don’t think we can accomplish.

This is completely correct. It's not even up for debate, really: You can find the 2021-22 financial statment here and scroll to Page 4. In ONE YEAR, they (Wikimedia) received 160 million dollars in donations and in the SAME YEAR spent literally twice as much money (6.2 million dollars) in just processing those same donations than they did on internet hosting itself (what people assume the money is spent on) -- which was only 2.7 million dollars. Look at those two numbers. 160 vs 3 million. They aren't even in the same ballpark. 15 million dollars they literally just gave away in grants and 88 million dollars in salaries and 18 million on "professional services", which is odd for an organization that primarily (as far as I assume most donors are concerned) simply runs Wikipedia and literally prohibits (most) paid editing...

There's a reason why I advise people to avoid donating money to Wikipedia if at all possible. Wikipedia does not need the money, and at this point reducing the income stream is the only way they might change.

I'm not optimistic that they will, of course, but at the very least we stop rewarding irresponsible behaviour.

Agreed. Wikimedia is a hugely profitable business, operated on a pay-what-you-want business model. It is impossible to tell just how profitable because the published accounts don't distinguish between spending that supports the encyclopedia and community (paying the salaries of the Wikimedia software developers, subsidising conference attendance for Wikipedia editors from poor countries etc.) and spending which is actually distributing profits to the pro-establishment leftist causes that Wikipedia's stakeholders like.

Per this 80,000 hours article, fundraising for ineffective charities (or for-profits masquerading as charities) is one of the most destructive things you can legally do because it reduces donations to effective charities. The Wikimedia Foundation know that their appeals are deceptive and that their marginal grantee is ineffective, so I have no qualms about calling them an evil organisation. (This is despite the fact that, unlike most Motteposters, I do not consider the pro-establishment left to be per se evil).

The English Wikipedia community who are actually editing the encyclopedia are eccentric but not evil, and produce a pretty good encyclopedia.

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