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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27702 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

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.

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.

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