Elon Musk is an idiot. He has never accomplished anything by himself in his life and has no remarkable competencies. He could be the most incompetent person on the planet. Like most rich people, he’s just lucky. And Luck Matters More Than Talent. He fell ass-backwards into big money, and our system protects big money. So it is impossible to have big money and not eternally gain more, no matter how stupid you are. Example: Donald Trump.
Musk, like Trump, hires people to do or invent things for him, and then takes credit when they succeed—or blames them when they fail (and they fail a lot more than you might have thought). And then he hoards all the profits. He did not invent Tesla. He just bought the company. He did not invent new rockets. He paid people to. He did not master a video game. He paid people to do it for him and then pretended he did it himself. And he did not invent PayPal. Someone else did; he just worked there (and if you thought otherwise, you were duped by his grift—congratulations!).
And when Musk tries to actually do something himself, literally everything he touches gets fucked up, from self-driving cars to Twitter to the government; even PayPal—that’s why they fired him. He was so bad at it that his own staff revolted and insisted he be canned. Indeed, nearly everyone who has ever worked for him says he is a shitty leader who has no business running companies. But alas, like other rich people who fail upwards, Musk’s contracted severance package for being axed from (what was then) PayPal for incompetence launched his entire career as a moneybagged gunknozzle.
And that’s the story of him.
How This Can Be Useful
All of that is true. And hardly news. But just this week I realized we finally have in Musk an example of someone so stupid that you can teach people how to think well using his best examples of thinking poorly. Because his best examples of thinking poorly are so starkly ridiculous that they bring into very clear relief what it means to think well. So today I am going to use three examples of his intellectual gunknozzling to illustrate the most basic failure mode in human rationality: a complete disinterest in asking “Why?”
I realize now that I have been spending most of my time the past several years focusing on what are actually level two and level three failures of sentient thought. Level two (which I have been mistaking as level one) is realizing that you have to earnestly try to prove yourself wrong before you can ever be reliably confident you are right (The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking). This applies to anything whatever—literally anything, from how to clear a sink drain to how to unify Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Level three (which I have been mistaking as level two) is then all the things you can build out of that basic principle—all the rules and principles that distinguish reliable from unreliable thinking.
I provide endless examples in my Critical Thinking category, but you can start with:
- Shaun Skills: How to Learn from Exemplary Cases
- A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research
- You Know They’re a [Good|Lousy] Philosopher If…
- And A Vital Primer on Media Literacy
It’s when you’ve mastered level three that you will be able to reliably determine whether aliens are invading Earth or demons exist.
Which is why whether someone is a progressive naturalist is a trusty litmus test for whether they are a reliable thinker: it’s where all reliable thinking ends up. So, if someone isn’t there, they cannot be a reliable thinker (at least, yet). Which can vary in degree (some people are only somewhat unreliable, some are hopelessly unreliable, and some are at various points in between), and in cause. It could be because they are lazy (they just aren’t interested in putting in the work to find out what’s true), or are busy (being too overworked by an abusive capitalist system to even have time), or because they are irrational. And being irrational doesn’t make them stupid in the sense of “unintelligent,” but rather stupid in the sense of being “foolish,” choosing not to apply their intelligence competently, perhaps trapped in a delusion that prevents them from applying their intelligence in a truth-finding way. A dupe, for lack of a better word. (For a quick breakdown on the difference between intelligence, rationality, knowledge, and wisdom, see my comment on how these are not the same thing.)
Which leaves this new level one of reliable thinking I had been taking for granted—and taking for granted on the assumption that people aren’t so stupid that they need this explained to them. But alas, Musk (and all his fans, insofar as he still has any) disproves my assumption. They need to learn this. So I need to put in some work here to explain level one and why it is essential to reliable thought. I’ll start with three examples, and then build out the general rule they all teach us in the end.
Planes Should Fly Straight (Says the Idiot)
This all struck me when I learned that Elon Musk actually thought planes should fly in straight lines. No, really. He said that…
What struck me about this is not merely how incompetent this shows him to be. This is really a no brainer. And yes, flight professionals pwned Musk on this, and even the original tweeter came back with the correct answer by doing the obvious thing: asking his pilot (a great example of curiosity driving a smart path toward an answer). But what struck me, rather, is that Musk didn’t do what a real genius does: correctly educate the tweeter.
As many noted, curved paths are often “the pilot’s preferred route for multiple reasons,” for something “as simple as weather” or “avoiding busy traffic,” a concern “close to big international airports, depending on aircraft size and preferred flying altitude.” Some people pointed out that flat maps don’t represent the curvature of the Earth, and that could be a factor, but this tweeter already ruled that out. But imagine Musk had replied, “Is it the curvature of the Earth?” Then he’d still be wrong, but (a) he’d be admitting his actual state of knowledge (with a question mark, recognizing he could be wrong and is just proffering a plausible hypothesis) and (b) he’d be exhibiting a curious interest in what the explanation actually is.
That would put Musk’s intelligence at “Average Joe” and thus exhibit no genius but also warrant no embarrassment. But Musk couldn’t even hit that minimum bar. He just arrogantly implied that planes are making bad decisions and “should” be flying in straight lines (this coming from the guy who claims he knows how to “fix” the FAA and is actually de facto in charge of doing so—yet is too incompetent to even manage personnel there, literally the minimum skill of a CEO, but set that aside for a moment). What you should immediately be asking is, “Why wasn’t Musk at all curious to actually know why this plane’s path was diverted?” The answer: he isn’t curious at all. He lacks curiosity as an epistemic virtue. Yet that’s a virtue essential to a scientific mind, as I explain and document in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire. It is in fact essential to any rational mind.
Here is how a rational person behaves (assuming they don’t have better things to do than reply to random science-question tweets):
- If they are a genius, they probably already know the answer, and would be happy to immediately explain it: planes have to conserve fuel and avoid uncomfortable or risky weather, which means their flight paths have to evade things like turbulence, storms, crosswinds, headwinds, updrafts, downdrafts, even other flight traffic (and sometimes actual no-fly zones); or, conversely, to take advantage of tailwinds (even jetstreams). Mountains and deserts and bodies of water create variations in these factors. And since curved paths are more fuel efficient, a path designed to avoid one problem or take advantage of another won’t signal this by sudden changes in direction.
- And if they are not a genius, or are but don’t know this one particular thing (as many a genius cannot be expected to, since it’s really happenstance whether you’ve ever asked this question yourself), this is what they will do instead: they will spend five minutes googling the answer and evaluating the information they collect (weighing sources by reliability, clocking answers that are independently corroborated, down-rating answers they see being questioned by real experts, and so on—all level three thinking). And then they will reply with what they found. Of course, the best, A-level, I-have-only-five-seconds-to-reply answer is simply the most obvious: “Have a flight attendant ask the pilot.” I mean. Duh.
So if Musk were a genius, he’d have answered this flight poster with an explanation of why planes can’t take direct routes. Even if Musk didn’t know, he would go, “Oh, that’s interesting. I wonder if there are reasons for that?” And then check. And then find out. And then answer with what he found. That would take all of five minutes to complete as a task. Because that is what a genius does.
But this requires having actual epistemic virtues. You have to actually have critical curiosity and baseline competence to know that this is the correct way to respond to questions like this. Musk’s reply proves he lacks even these basic virtues and competencies. And that explains nearly everything else about him. Which is why we should never, ever, entrust him with anything. His shareholders should fire him from every position. Congress should ban him from government service. But the epistemic lesson for us is: do the opposite. DDWMWD, “Don’t Do What Musk Would Do.” Musk does incompetence peak well. You can’t even write better examples of incompetence than his. So all you have to ask is, “What would Musk do?” And then do entirely the opposite of that. That will get you on the right track away from being an idiot.
It’s also more fun. Curiosity is a passion. And pursuing passions is pleasurable. It’s also how you become a genius. Or in any way smarter. In fact, it is the only way to.
Millions of 150-Years Olds Proves Fraud (Says the Idiot)
Musk stupidly claimed “millions” of people are receiving social security checks who have impossible ages like “150 years,” and “therefore” there is massive fraud in the social security system. Yeah. That happened. And it’s weirder than it sounds if you hadn’t already heard about it (most people have). For the initial story, see PolitiFact; but even FoxNews had to call out this one, as did even the self-proclaimed “fucking moron” Joe Rogan. There were some errors in that initial reporting (and I have rewritten this section here to get it up to date), but you can back to the correct picture by reading “COBOL, Dates, May 20, 1875, and Disinformation” by Michael Chaney and “150-Year-Olds Are Not Receiving Social Security Payments” by Janet Nguyen. This is still Musk’s most embarrassing mistake yet, as I’ll explain. And it’s very educational.
When I heard this, I was especially shocked. Not because I had some false belief that Musk is supposed to be smart (I was never duped by that con). But because the one competency—literally the only competency—Musk is supposed to have is coding. I don’t imagine he was ever particularly good at it. But I assumed he had to have at least the bare minimum of competence in that one skill, enough to at least get an entry-level coding job. But, alas, now we know. He couldn’t even get hired for an entry-level coding job. Which finally prompted me to check. And yep. Real coders doubt Musk has even basic coding skills. The only independently verifiable case I could find of him actually coding something was in BASIC, an extremely simple language that has been dead for decades. In every other case of fawning propaganda, Musk could be taking credit for his partners’ and employees’ work, or even just lying—just as he does with his “video game proficiency.” Certainly, if anyone can adduce evidence otherwise, please do in comments and I’ll emend my suspicions here. But right now, that’s how it looks.
But let’s look at it this way. Imagine this. An entry-level coder comes in for a job interview. They have some training, a relevant degree, but no job experience. You have to decide whether to hire them. So to test them, you pose them this conundrum: “You are auditing the United States Social Security database and find millions of persons recorded there who were all born on over 150 years ago. What do you do?” If “what they do” is announce to the public that millions of people are fraudulently receiving social security payments (or even just “Call the FBI to investigate!”) you would immediately stop the interview, put their name on a “no hire” list, circular-file their application, and politely ask them to leave.
Any minimally competent coder would immediately see that the problem must have something to do with the code. Like incorrectly entered or missing data (and in this case, as Musk showed: no date of death entry). While it is certain that there are always some people improperly collecting social security checks on people who have died (and there are government personnel tasked specifically with finding them out—though Musk fired a lot of them, so, there’s that), it is not even remotely likely that these frauds are collecting checks on millions of people born over 115 years ago. Some windows and widowers might be legitimately collecting such checks, but not millions of them. For millions of people in a database to have strange birth dates screams of coding error. So a competent coder would say, “Let’s find out what’s going in the code.”
But this isn’t just a measure of expertise in a specific skill. It is that. But it’s bigger than that. Because even someone with zero coding knowledge would be curious here and behave far more intelligently than Musk. This failure again illustrates the single most important thing that distinguishes a reliable person from a complete idiot: he never asked why. With “millions” of impossibly old pepple showing up in his tables, any non-idiot’s very first question would be, “Why is that?” And then, of course, he’d find out. And maybe then their next question would be, “Are those people actually being sent checks?” And then, of course, he’d find out the answer is no. And we’d never get that embarrassing tweet.
Obviously a non-idiot would expect this database to be complete. So it should contain everyone who has ever had a social security number—millions of whom, needless to say, will have to be dead. “There are dead people who had social security numbers, therefore there is massive fraud” is a frighteningly irrational line of thought. But any curious person would have found out first. And what they’d find is that millions of previous recipients of social security didn’t have a date of death entered, probably because they were already dead when the computerization occurred, and thus to save time and money, no effort was spent tracking down every dead entrant’s birthdate. This is why (as anyone who asks would find out) the SSA system has an automatic stop on checks at 115 years.
But notice that this rudimentary human competency requires curiosity. You have to be impelled by your nature to ask, “Why are so many impossibly old people in this database?” Rather than immediately invent a reason in your head and then confidently announce it to hundreds of millions of people, thus exposing your stupidity to epic ridicule. Only the most profoundly stupid person does that. Which is how we know Elon Musk is profoundly stupid. Everyone else asks “Why?” first, and finds out, and then…well, they found out. So they won’t make that stupid claim. They will simply note the oddity, and maybe assess whether it’s worth the bother of doing anything about. If your mission is saving money, though, (and you’re not an idiot) you probably would say, “No, it’s not worth the cost of entering millions of death dates on obsolete files.” Since none of them are receiving checks. So…who cares? Which is of course exactly the decision process of the people who built that database in the first place.
A genius would admire that efficiency decision and maybe even muse about it online. An idiot would go on full public panic mode about billions of dollars of vampire checks. And then get pwned even by “fucking morons.”
COVID Panic Is Dumb (Says the Idiot)
I needed a third example for this article so I googled “dumbest thing Elon Musk ever said” (no, seriously, I did). That “the internets” then provided hundreds of top-ranked examples (entire florilegia of Musk stupidity can be found at Byline Times, The Guardian, The Daily Guardian, The Crucial Years, Sky News, Mother Jones, Politico, The Drive, even Quora, and beyond) is of course its own indictment of the man. But I was interested in a suitable example for teaching. So I looked through the endless options and picked one I had already blueskied:
Which links to Sam Harris’s account of Musk’s scientifically illiterate covid nuttery and his refusal to admit he was wrong or even be honest about it. Which also illustrates that Musk has no honor or moral character. Though one could write a heavily sourced article on just that fact using well beyond this one example, here I am interested only in the epistemological question this exchange illustrates. Although among the examples I reviewed, I did also think it was interesting that Musk is so incurious (and science illiterate) that he actually thought his car was orbiting Mars. But an apologist could claim Musk was lied to by his own engineers who launched it (though I doubt that, who knows). Here, however, there is no such escape: Musk made a scientifically illiterate statement; Harris called him out on it with vast data; and Musk did nothing. He did not update his beliefs.
You can watch every step of Musk’s idiocy, documented by Harris, and observe how it represents a failure to act like a critical thinker. For example, Harris starts with quoting Musk’s attempt to convince him COVID was unserious (as he declared on March 6 of 2020): Harris says that when Musk answered him with “proof” he “included a link to a page on the CDC website, indicating that Covid was not even among the top 100 causes of death in the United States,” which as Harris notes “was a patently silly point to make in the first days of a pandemic.” Note the lack of curiosity: Musk did not ask himself, “Is this statistic a relevant indicator of the seriousness of the COVID pandemic?” (Which would have, in five minutes of thought and time, proved to be “No.”) He just fished around for anything that vaguely resembled a proof of his point and confidently sent it to Harris, without any critical thought whatsoever. Defending Musk’s belief was more important than checking if it was right. Which is the most dangerous failure mode in human thought (it characterizes literally all popular religions).
Although kudos to the latest reply (as of today):
Likewise, that Musk still has not deleted this Tweet (despite deleting a ton of his other embarrassing mistakes there) signifies his irrational commitment to the false belief it expresses. But there is a darker reason this matters than the mere fact that Musk “turned out” to be catastrophically wrong: Musk was provably wrong even then.
As Harris points out, he argued with Musk for hours, presenting tons of data and analysis, concluding in the end that “if I hadn’t known that I was communicating with Elon Musk, I would have thought I was debating someone who lacked any understanding of basic scientific and mathematical concepts, like exponential curves.” Of course, Harris is making the same mistake as Musk here. He should have realized this meant Elon Musk was “someone who lacked any understanding of basic scientific and mathematical concepts, like exponential curves.” Harris should have updated his beliefs—and didn’t. He was more obsessed with maintaining his belief that Musk was an informed genius, than in checking if that belief was even right. (It of course was wrong.)
Harris points out that before Musk’s tweet Harris had been doing what a reliable thinker would do and looked for relevant bellweathers (not irrelevant data), and found one in particular: “Italy had already fallen off a cliff.” Indeed, the Lombardy region of Italy began the first Western lockdown just two days after Musk’s tweet; the entire country would follow just three days later. Between the first case there on February 20 and Musk’s tweet on March 6—not even two weeks—nearly two hundred people had already died of the disease in Lombardy alone. That’s terrifying. The pace slowed after because of the ensuing measures (lockdowns and eventually vaccines and every other mitigation procedure everyone hated—yet that saved countless lives), but still Italy lost over 70,000 lives to COVID that year alone (and lost almost 200,000 to the four-year pandemic altogether).
Just now I did a time delimited search of the internet up to March 6 of 2020 and can confirm the materials available to Musk were abundant, detailed, and alarming—which is the point Harris made to him at the time. And yet, even after all that…
Elon bet me $1 million dollars (to be given to charity) against a bottle of fancy tequila ($1000) that we wouldn’t see as many as 35,000 cases of Covid in the United States (cases, not deaths). The terms of the bet reflected what was, in his estimation, the near certainty (1000 to 1) that he was right. Having already heard credible estimates that there could be 1 million deaths from Covid in the U.S. over the next 12-18 months (these estimates proved fairly accurate), I thought the terms of the bet ridiculous—and quite unfair to Elon. I offered to spot him two orders of magnitude: I was confident that we’d soon have 3.5 million cases of Covid in the U.S. Elon accused me of having lost my mind and insisted that we stick with a ceiling of 35,000.
We of course had well over a hundred million cases, and over a million deaths. Cases exceeded five million before even 2020 ended—and exceeded one million the month after Musk’s stated disbelief. Harris, by contrast, was spot on: in March of 2020 he had concluded from a review of the data that U.S. deaths (not cases, deaths) would exceed a million within a year. They did. Why was Harris able to be so prescient and Musk so not? Because Harris doesn’t fail at level one. He was curious to know how bad the disease really was, and looked around for all the best data and analysis he could find, and vetted them, and thus updated his belief. His curiosity was fundamental here: he really wanted to know, and accordingly actually looked, and critically weighed what he found because he really wanted to know. He looked for all the steel men. He also understood basic science and math, so he could tell when he was being snowed (as Musk was doing) or informed (as the scientists Harris consulted were doing).
This is a basic skill. You need to not only be curious enough to learn how to tell the difference (between being snowed and being reliably informed about something), but also, of course, curious enough to regularly employ that skill. “Is what I’m thinking correct? Is what I am being told correct?” To be able to competently answer those questions starts with actually asking them—you have to start with being curious enough to even want to know these things. Otherwise, you’ll never even develop that skill, much less reliably apply it. And if you don’t have that skill, you are functionally an idiot. And if you have it and don’t use it, you are functionally a fool.
Musk doesn’t even have this skill. He is not even interested in having this skill. As is proved by all the other evidence I’ve linked to here. Musk is catastrophically unreliable. And his disinterest in developing this skill—and the lack of curiosity that explains that disinterest—explains why Musk always fucks everything up, never knows what he is doing, and is routinely wrong about things.
What We Should Learn from All This
The kidding-on-the-square show Some More News already nailed my level one point here: what unifies all these catastrophic failures is a stalwart lack of curiosity. Elon Musk is never interested in knowing why something is as it is or is going the way it goes. He just barrels through on pure arrogance, not even wanting to learn how to play a video game well—it doesn’t even interest him to know how. He just wants to be perceived as awesome; and not ever actually be awesome. Because the latter requires work—as well as the curiosity that drives it. Musk has no real curiosity. And consequently, he never learns anything, and thus makes endless bad choices (that SMN video even documents his catastrophically bad poker playing, illustrating my point here in a way John Nash would have taught classes with). But of relevance to today is that this fundamental lack of curiosity stunts Musk’s intellect. It is what makes him an intellectual idiot. This defines a level one failure in critical thinking: not asking why.
Notice the difference in behaviors that I outlined in all three examples: one option is to just blurt out and run with what you think, with no care for whether it is correct, but only the arrogant assumption that it must be; another option is to ask and inquire, to find out before declaring a conclusion; and the more that things still don’t make sense, the more you keep asking and inquiring until they do. The next step would then be to burn-test your conclusions: try earnestly to prove them wrong, and only believe them when you earnestly fail to. That’s step two, and thus level two good thinking.
But Musk isn’t even hitting step one. No one qualifies as a genius who isn’t hitting level 3. And no one qualifies as even competent who isn’t hitting level 2. And Musk isn’t even hitting level 1. In anything. And I suspect the resulting metrics will be something like this: failing at the first step is “dunce” category. It means over half your ideas are going to be wrong, and over half your projects will fail. Failing at only steps two and three is an “Average Joe” category. Maybe a fifth to a third of your ideas are going to be wrong, and maybe a fifth to a third of your projects will fail. Failing instead at only step three is “Journeyman” category, what you might call “entry level competence.” Your failure rate will be, say, only ten percent or so. But nailing all three steps is “Master” category. Your failure rate will ballpark around one percent. That’s genius-level achievement. Musk is not even genius-adjacent.
If you want to train at level three, and start learning all the common fallacies and cognitive biases we all fall into, and thus how to recognize them when they are happening, and start mitigating them and thus thinking like a master, join my monthly Critical Thinking Class. It’s an online correspondence course, self-directed, but with the chance to pick my brain in forums every day for a month, on any question about critical thinking you ever had, and get substantive responses the whole way through.
Continual whinging about “Global Warming”; but the tears of the American Left might ACTUALLY raise sea levels! /s I love the smell of Cope in the morning; it is the scent of victory.
I don’t understand the comment. But that issue is covered in: We Do Need to Do Something about Global Warming. That Trump-Musk-Vance-Johnson are all too stupid to grasp what is happening and what it is already costing them and their country is precisely the lesson that needs to be learned.
Unfortunatelyif the Sun has a brightness control, it isn’t one we can currently access. We can mitigate the effects on humanity with the usual tools of migration and technology.
The leading so-called “greenhouse gas” is water vapour. Cue ‘Old Man Shouting at Clouds’! CO2 is plant food and not at all correlated over time with World temperatures. The Roman and Medieval Warm Periods were a thing; going back to the Cretaceous and whatnot the World has been a cite warmer than even that. Conversly the entire planet has frozen over at least once.
Thomas L Thompson spends a great part of “The Bible in History” explaining the relationship of Palestinian history to the ups and downs in the climate from cool to warm, dry to wet, and back again. Similarly the ‘Rise and Fall of Roman Empire’ is intimately entwined with the vicitudes of climate; as is ‘The Bronze Age Collapse’.
“Global Warming” is just one more round of daffy apocalyptic eschatology derived ultimately from daffy Iranian myth-mongering c. 400BC. The sky never falls; it is very unlikely to ever fall.
The irony!
That’s all delusional and pseudoscientific nonsense, Steven.
I am not encouraged by this to think you can even respond to evidence anymore. But in case you still have any critical mind left, this issue is addressed, with evidence, elsewhere (in We Do Need to Do Something about Global Warming) and should be discussed there, not here.
Steven: You cite no sources and there’s a good reason. You’re just laughably wrong, and your fallacious arguments show that you know it and are emotionally invested otherwise.
CO2 being plant food does not mean it is not a greenhouse gas. You might notice, Steven, that we’ve had more wildfires, we’ve had plenty of deforestation, and so the plant sinks for CO2 may be lower than they have been in the past? The same with water vapor being a greenhouse gas not meaning that CO2 isn’t. You can do this experiment in your fucking home, Steven. You can trap heat with CO2. This is basic physics.
CO2 is in fact quite well correlated with temperatures. You’re repeating an incredibly brazen, stupid lie. Yes, you need to take into account changes in luminosity and CO2, but when CO2 goes up, temperature will inevitably go up, all else held equal.
Worse, the burning of fossil fuels has an immense array of other costs, such as local pollutants and the usage of non-renewable resources we need to save, so for multiple reasons we need to be getting off our fossil fuel addiction, so the entire argument is just stupid from the ground up.
But, of course, you’re beyond reason. You’re not going to change your mind no matter how many literal thousands of papers that demonstrate all of these points and why the overwhelming consensus is what it is. Do you want your SUV, Steven? Or do you just need to defend capitalism? What’s your woobie?
Some potholer videos, because your errors are so basic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJoijPh2i-A on “plant food”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ3PzYU1N7A on how CO2 can both lead and lag temperature.
The issue in our present environment is that most of this stupidity is ideologically mandated.
Even the straight flight example, or Musk calling a guy a pedophile for pointing out that his contribution was worthless, matches an ideology of aggressive, performative muscularity and masculinity. “He speaks off the cuff and calls it quick”. The fantasy of being able to get away with being that stupid and to bend reality to your will speaks to a lot of people.
(This is why I think the fake gamer thing actually really helps illustrate that Musk really is stupid: that looks weak as well as stupid . His insecurities really got exposed on that one).
And, of course, the 150 year olds and the COVID stuff is all just part of a firehose of lies. People have realized that motivated reasoning means that you can just say whatever you want and some portion of people who need the things you say to be true will rationalize their way to it being true. In that environment, lies that are obviously incompetent actually work just fine.
Really, a lot of this reads like scammers intentionally never fixing their English because they only get people who will be inattentive or gullible enough to fall for the scam that way.
To be clear, I do think that Musk is in fact phenomenally stupid, but the point is that, as long as stupidity is rewarded, tactical stupidity and actual stupidity will be difficult to distinguish. The world is now in Poe’s Law.
I don’t think Musk is lying. He wouldn’t risk lying to tweet about planes flying straight, that served no aim. It simply was him blurting his self-imagined genius. Which indicates the 150-years-olds thing wasn’t a lie either. He really was that stupid. Otherwise he would have anticipated being pwned by coders, the very thing he fears (as the gamer thing proves). That made him look dumb. That he didn’t know it would is why he is more stupid than dishonest.
But he is also, of course, a liar. Just like Trump: fantastically stupid and ignorant; and a habitual liar. Neither Musk nor Trump is the “genius” everyone keeps trying to invent a theory of. They have no master game plan. They are just bulls in a china shop reacting to passing whims. They have no grand plans. They aren’t even capable of having grand plans.
But otherwise, yes: they are fully empowered by a stupid populace that valorizes, protects, and rewards their dumb white male behavior.
Not that it matters much, but the man labeled by you as sociopath was onto Musk way before it was cool. Sorry, that is the only jab, I promise.
I like the read, but I have one correction. I think Musk was self-taught PHP coder, afterall he wrote zip2 which eventually got sold to Compaq. At that time I believe PHP was commonly used to write web based applications. PHP is still in use. Since he had not trained as a computer scientist he created a code that professionals call “hairball”, a nightmare to maintain. Anyway, Zip2 has been entirely rewritten by the professionals. They did used a fraction of the original code written by Musk. A side note, Compaq has never utilized Zip2 and eventually went bankrupt, but for entirely diffrent reasons, will be my guess.
I don’t like how media and Hollywood portray coders as someone constantly typing and hacking away. The truth is, the job involves a lot of learning, reading, designing and debugging. There is a popular saying that, “you will find 1-25 errors per 1000 lines of code”. That would be a well managed code. A hairball, as it grows introduces bugs exponentially, to eventually be too costly to maintain. Thats’s why engineers love design patterns and architecture, when it comes to large applications.
Musk reportedly claimed that does engineering everyday. Well I don’t think so, neither in tech or science. I don’t know if promoting self image and ability to overtake the media as a “tech genius” requires engineering, but I know he is iliterate in science and engineering. There are plenty ways to show it but this one is very simple. He uses a tech word salad (just like Chopra) to confuse the audience. He utilizes a notion that if you don’t understand it, it makes him a genius. Which is false. Great example is, Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s way of explaining very complicated topics with simpler analogies. He could have just thrown an equation and call it a day, right? But Tyson doesn’t assume everyone knows what he is talking about.
Musk is doing the opposite. Real engineers don’t comunicate this way, unless certain terminology is well established and well documanted, but only in that particular closed environment. Outside of it, each engineer will try to comunicate their ideas in the simpliest way possible, to avoid miscomunication, because it’s costly for every one. They will also reveal caveats, as a humble respect to the scientific comunity.
I have seen some videos in the past where Musk would throw a made up formula and yet again it shows how narrow are his “engineering skills”. Formulas would often be incomplete or made of a simple multiplication of made up words. Has anyone noticed that like to use word “10x” a lot? It means ten times more, but he likes to sound like a “mathematician”. The real engineers use models like differential equations to represent some “reality”, becasue everything is dynamic and relative in this world. There is much more in E = mc2 than meets the eye, and those who studied physics or tried to derive Einstein’s equations on their own, will know. I am not claiming that I did, but astrophysists would do it just for a warm up.
As the last point, I would like to add to ‘What should we learn from all this’ section, if you don’t mind. I resent the idea (not from you obviously) that general public focuses on one personality and wants to believe that such person has done great things alone. This superhero fetish distorts people’s minds like brain cancer and must be stopped. There never was one Batman, never was one Spiderman nor Iron Man or Doc from “The back to the future” in real life. Eveything we have is a fruit of a teamwork and stands on the shoulders of the scientists from the past. Steve Jobs was an imbecile not an inventor, Thomas Edison was a intelectuall property thief. Companies need to start to give credit to all engineers who gave their lives to their product. Instead of big conferences done by CEOs, they need to start showing all the patent plaques they have, for the true genius names are engraved on them.
Thats is all I have, Richard. Good read and highly recommended. I would like to argue with you on some topics, but I suppose this one is not going to be it. I mentioned earlier a person that is obsessed with Elon Musk and you have probably guessed that I was talking about your beloved thunderf00t. Psycho or not, check out his take on Elon. I also recommend Common Scence Sceptic channel, if you want to dig more into the “genius”.
From a big fan, thank you.
Did he, though? That claim only comes from Musk. The product came from a company with other coders. How much did he actually do, beyond mere repetitive (rather than creative) gruntwork? Given his tendency to lie about things like this, and take credit for others’ accomplishments, we should not trust his narrative. By contrast, the coders I linked to were finding evidence to the contrary, supporting this doubt.
As for example.
That’s a secondary but important point, so well worth adding to the conversation. Note that Level 3 thinking already gets you there, i.e., false beliefs about how success works (Just World Theory, Great Man Theory, etc.) is among the thousands of false beliefs that a good reasoner will inevitably get themselves out of, precisely because they think better. So the goal of getting people to shoot for level 3 will have the effect of also getting them out of these common cultural tropes.
Indeed, level 2 alone can get you there. A level 2 thinker knows not to believe something without earnestly trying to disprove it first. Which means they would try to disprove “Great Man Theory” before believing it, and that will inevitably lead to their discovering it is false.
But it being false does not entail the converse (that would be a fallacy of denying the antecedent). If P, then not-Q; not-Q, then P: If “genius who smartly leverages help, then not a singular driver of innovation or success; therefore, if not a singular driver of innovation or success, then genius who smartly leverages help.” Fallacy.
There are examples of geniuses who smartly leverage help (basically every contemporary scientist openly admits their successes are team efforts, and Nobel Prize awards recognize this). But Musk is not one of them. He is not a singular driver of innovation or success. But he is also not even helping, beyond being the money man; and when he tries to help, he ruins everything (links in the article). So he should actually stop trying to innovate and just let other people do that—and give them the credit. But Musk thinks he’s awesome. So he keeps meddling. And only disaster results.
P.S. And it does not surprise me that psychopaths are good at spotting other psychopaths. But plenty of non-psychopaths already figured this out from day one. I was never duped by Musk’s mythology, nor were a great many others. It tends to be dudebros who fell for it. Because they are really, really bad at this. But think they must be good at it. This is the entire driver of most false and toxic worldviews (as I have been especially documenting recently).
Thanks for the article! This does a good job of disillusioning people of the image Elon has tied to portray of himself as a highly intelligent, well educated, hard working, and successful businessman. It’s quite the contrast comparing him to someone with a degree in Philosophy and PhD in Neuroscience and who is interested in actual data like Sam Harris. I don’t understand how a numerically literate human being could possibly accept that bet. I remember reading that before the COVID pandemic took off in the US, the Chinese government was already issuing city-wide lock downs in major cities, including lock downs that forced Tesla plants in China to temporarily cease operations.
One of the most notable things you mention in the article is his lack of moral character. He grossly exaggerates his achievements, fantasizes about unlimited success and power, thinks he’s special, has difficulty handling criticism, has difficulty admitting he’s wrong, has a documented history of interpersonal clashes with coworkers, has a history of highly defamatory conduct, and he has a notably long list publicly documented failed romantic relationships, divorces, and affairs. Not to mention a history of dubious lawsuits that reflect poorly on him, his willingness to lie in support of his political ambitions, policy changes he made at Twitter in support of disinformation, and both a willingness and desire to be associated with Trump. In other words, he has strong Narcissistic and Antisocial traits, very similar to Donald Trump, though probably not nearly as severe as Trump. These personality traits are critical to understanding how someone like this operates since they indicate a well researched pattern of behavior. Difficulty acknowledging your own shortcomings and lack of knowledge is going to make it hard for anyone to achieve Level 2 on your scale, and impulsivity combined with a lack of need to work due to wealth will make the intellectual curiosity of Level 1 difficult.
One of the most remarkable things about reading your article is that it is a reminder of how well lying can work, even Big Lies. When you only hear an highly exaggerated or false narrative, it often takes more than just a few bits of contradictory information before you realize that you are looking at a house of cards and should question everything you thought you knew. Case in point: even Harris had difficulty realizing that Elon Musk’s reputation for being scientifically and mathematically literate was really an outward facade of falsehoods and gross exaggerations.
It might be nice to do an article on recognizing lies, in particular Big Lies, and identifying when you’re dealing with Narcissistic Conmen. Humans don’t usually encounter large scale deception directly impacting their daily lives, so recognizing it can be difficult.
One last thing worth commenting on, I thought it was really odd that Elon Musk ordered all the software engineers at Twitter to send him examples of their code for him to review, on paper, to be used as the basis for firing over half the company. Even if he were a competent coder or understood how software engineering projects work, I don’t see how this exercise could possibly be a good use of his personal time or a good strategy for determining who to lay off, as evidenced by the fact that he was forced to face palm hard and publicly admit a need to rehire notable numbers of workers.
Well, to be fair, no one has any reason to believe half the things China says, or that what they do is “smart” (as opposed to desperate and draconian; they are, after all, functionally a delusional autocracy). So I could understand not trusting them.
But to see how far that would fly, I took your advice just now and ran a time-delimited search for what Musk would have been reading as of March 6, 2020. Though there was a lot of just that kind of skeptical reporting (which might have triggered Musk into not believing it), there was also data too frightening to continue doubting COVID was serious. China’s interest was always to downplay the number of dead, so that even their numbers may be lowballed means COVID was either a serious problem or even more serious than that. A rational man would grasp this. Musk is not a rational man.
I think they are. Trump is senile. That’s all he adds. He is Musk in thirty years.
Your friend (?) Thunderf00t has been gleefully and pointedly proving all of your above comments for years.
Watching the Musk fanboys defend (more accurately–worship) him is a trip. We have to face the fact that there are a lot of stupid voters who either don’t know or don’t care what these morons do.
Is there a good URL or list to start with if someone wants to dyve Thunderf00t’s threads on Musk?
Rebecca Watson had an excellent video pointing out that, even here, where Tf00t was right, he was still deeply unimpressive in his criticisms, just like many of his responses to people like the younger Hovind.
Please provide URLs if you can (to Watson and Tf00t re: Musk).
Here’s Watson’s video. I think Tfoot has a Youtube channel or something, but I’ve never visited it.
https://skepchick.org/2025/01/thunderf00t-is-still-an-ignorant-loser/
Thanks. See my comment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7bEgGbKh4E is the Watson video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1agF2WAoHQ is a TF00t video. He’s actually turned even on Musk’s economic politics which is pretty startling.
And I see he tf00t has a whole list of videos to choose from on the subject. I haven’t watched them so I can’t vouch for them. But interested readers might.
The Watson video you linked to seems to be an update about tf00t, not Musk. But I see she too has a list of videos on Musk. Ditto.
Tf00t has a schtick that gets old very quickly. So yes he has been right about Musk, but he wastes a lot of your time getting his point across.
For those wanting more background on the problems with SpaceX see How Elon Musk Leaned on Starlink to Achieve Profitability at SpaceX and Was the SpaceX Launch Really a ‘Success’?.
Their dreams of genuine gains in cost-to-orbit per kilogram of payload are mostly fantasy (How Will SpaceX Bring the Cost to Space Down to $10 per Kilogram from Over $1000 per Kilogram?) and can’t be calculated presently because SpaceX is selling launches at a loss (and only making it up on Starlink subscriptions).
I think in the end, any investment like this will eventually produce the desired result, within physical limits. So it would not matter whether Musk, China, Russia, or the US put in the dough and took the losses over years to test-fail to success. But one should not oversell the achievement. Musk isn’t doing any of this. He’s just throwing billions of dollars at it until someone else does it. Much of which from the US taxpayer (who could have spent that on NASA doing the same thing).
For the SpaceX part you’re making the same mistake as Musk here – trust some internet bubbly biased information instead of doing proper research. A Falcon 9 launch using a reused booster is generally understood to have a marginal cost of <25Mil ([2] has it in a SpaceX critical source), and they’re selling it for between 65 Mil (commercial) and 100 Mil (government) which is certainly profitable on its own. [1] has an model for the revenue last year.
[1] https://payloadspace.com/estimating-spacexs-2024-revenue/
[2] https://spacenews.com/spacex-and-the-categorical-imperative-to-achieve-low-launch-cost/
The links I provide cover the amortized R&D cost and the cost of fuel, parts, and operations. The fact that SpaceX is in loss except for Starlink subs means they cannot have been selling at profit. They are selling rides at a loss. That’s why your metrics can’t be used to determine the actual cost of these launches. Perhaps, indeed, in future, this will change (as I note). But right now, there’s where things are.
I assume that’s sarcasm. But just in case: that is not how that concept functions. The up/down rule is a relationship of power. Musk has vastly more power than me and in fact most people (politically, socially, and financially). So I can only be punching up. The up/down rule does not apply to mere differences in moral character or intelligence or competencies because the misalignment of those attributes with access to power is precisely what is being punched.
[Deleted by Editor]
I am leaving this post up (albeit deleted) to remind people that sock puppets are against my comments policy (see last line there) and can win you a lifetime ban. This is just a warning.
I guess pretending to be Musk sounds funny to someone but it’s deceptive and is not allowed here.
This article is punching down! Like Jesus, the radical woke DEI left hates Elon Musk because he tells them the truth. Elon Musk built rockets with his bare hands, all his employees do is move stuff around and demand “better wages” and “free dental.” His hairline is NOT receding and he is widely considered an ‘alpha male’.
I assume that’s sarcasm. But just in case: that is not how that concept functions. The up/down rule is a relationship of power. Musk has vastly more power than me and in fact most people (politically, socially, and financially). So I can only be punching up. The up/down rule does not apply to mere differences in moral character or intelligence or competencies because the misalignment of those attributes with access to power is precisely what is being punched.
Hilariously, what’s more DEI (in the right’s irrational belief) than brazenly siding with a white billionaire who acts precisely like the right constantly insisted falsely that Soros acted? Imagine if Harris had won with the blatant, illegal help of Soros in swinging elections and Soros was now cutting right-wing policies in an entire new department with special unconstitutional rules and behaviors. I’d take this idea that the right believes in meritocracy far more seriously if you didn’t keep voting in and voting to subsidize (and actually subsidizing with wingnut welfare) all sorts of mediocre losers. Shapiro is a failed screenwriter. Musk is an incompetent buffoon who had emerald mine money and is now lying about that fact.
The fact that Musk of all people is considered an “alpha male” by many is actually true and goes to show how nonsensical the “alpha male” idea is. Garrison draws Trump like he’s prime Arnold Schwarzenegger. All one has to be to be an “alpha male” is to be vile, cruel and obnoxious… which does ironically match the reality of the actual “alpha male” research on wolves, that such behavior only came about in captivity because they were artificial packs, thus showing that the entire foundational idea of a huge swath of the right is based, as HBomberguy pointed out, on people bragging about how insufferable and violent they’d be in prison.
On “airplanes should fly straight”: their shortest route on a long distance flight, say Los Angeles to London, is a great circle. If you have a globe, lightly stretch a string over it between those two places to see the shortest path, which is not, on the ground, a straight line. Or Google “great circle routes”, or ask a trans-ocean pilot. Except, if there were a straight tunnel through the Earth that would be shorter. This is a great example of how knowledge does not always diffuse well across the gap between the humanities and science. I guess that being on the science side leaves me intolerably ignorant of a lot of their knowledge.
Note you are talking about intercontinental jetways, whose paths are decided by the odd shape of the Earth and the presence of jetstreams (I linked to a video explaining this already). The case in point was a north-to-south route down the coast of California, to which such considerations do not apply (as I noted in the article).
The only specific route I can find in the article is the one from San Francisco to Houston, shown on the map in Ryan Petersen’s post. It appears to me to be basically a great circle route. They are the shortest on long over land trips as well as trans oceanic. Lines of longitude (n-s) are great circles. Great circles in whatever orientation (they don’t have to be n-s only) drawn around the globe all have the Earth’s diameter. You can find them with the string. They don’t slip off the globe. Lines of latitude (e-w) shrink in diameter the farther one goes towards the poles from the equator. They are not great circles and are not the shortest paths. Longitude paths that happen to run through two widely-separated cities are great circles and the shortest routes to take, but not paths along the lines of latitude. This is purely geometry. Atmospheric conditions such as tailwinds and jetstreams may be taken advantage of to save time and fuel if meteorology helps the pilot. (alas for NOAA since we are speaking of DOGE/Musk)
The Earth is a little oblate. It bulges near the equator and is flattened at the poles. This possibly is due to rotational centripetal force prior to solidification. I guess that would be the official explanation. This minor detail is possibly included in long range transports’ computers and autopilots which are informed by accelerometers mounted on the planes’ inertial platforms which are electro-mechanically kept oriented according to particular navigation schemes, or, since my time, maybe GPS takes care of it.
When flying a great circle route at constant altitude, your path is curved just like the surface of the Earth is. If you flew in a literal straight line you would tend to fly off on a tangent into outer space, though in practice this would be limited by the aircraft’s ceiling (the max safe height at which it can fly).
The most important point is your objection to “planes should fly in straight lines”, which is a naive attempt at efficiency, that would actually decrease it. Many of the DOGE efforts seem like that to me.
The tweet was regarding a route from SF to LA. The image of the route is literally in my article. So I don’t understand your confusion.
As for longitudinal routes (east-west and west-east), there are many factors besides the one you outline. I linked to a video covering them all. That’s in the article too.
But overall, I agree with your insight: the idea that “going straight” would be more efficient is a signature of naivety and ignorance, and thus incompetence (and thus, a lack of curiosity that would lead to competence); and that’s the same thing DOGE is doing, not realizing that efficiency gains are far more complicated than just naive “straight line” reasoning, which actually decreases efficiencies.
An example is the Texas powergrid catastrophe: conservative oligarchs refused to invest in cold-weathering their power plants to save money, but they lost far more money when that came back to bite them in the big freeze. An efficiency expert would have explained to them that the initial investment in cold weathering would amortize to far less cost than just “betting” a rare weather event won’t happen before you golden-parachute out of your position and thus no longer have to care what disaster is due the company you leave behind.
You make more money when you spend it. This is counter-intuitive to “straight-line” thinkers. But it’s obvious to competent thinkers. This is why DOGE cuts all the actual staff that was maintaining efficiencies in the system, by illogically deeming them wasteful spending. But by eliminating them, wasteful spending will inevitably increase, not decrease. Their damage to the IRS is going to have a similar effect (of reducing rather than increasing revenues, and thus creating rather than eliminating waste and fraud—since, FYI, tax evasion is fraud, and letting fraud go unchecked is waste).
Oops. Should have said “centrifugal force” not “centripetal force” caused the Earth to solidify in a slightly oblate shape, 4.6 billion years ago, due to its rotation about its axis.
The COBOL standard date explanation is most probably not correct:
https://dev.to/mdchaney/cobol-dates-may-20-1875-and-disinformation-5ggh
Musk (please ignore his teenage boy edginess and his non-existent sense of humor) provided histogram data that shows people born before 1875 in the database:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076
I still doubt there’s any fraud or real checks coming out. However as a software engineer, the database looks like it contains garbage(i.e. false) data that should be probably cleaned up (sometimes this is much easier said than done in legacy software systems and databases). This is most probably due to some legacy reasons and the application code is probably designed to deal with these data issues. So my very uncertain conclusion is that Musk is probably using half truths, but given the limited information available, there might be some waste (not intentional fraud) resulting from the garbage data.
That’s excellent. And led me to more information here.
Updating my beliefs! I will rewrite that section.
As expected then: The 115 years old cutoff business rule in the application code is an example of dealing with imperfect data which is a common strategy in building backend applications.
Any slightly competent software engineer knows that we usually aim for a database with perfect data that neatly models the business domain (social security in this case). However, it often doesn’t work that way and we have to deal with imperfect data on a frequent basis due to a myriad of factors like imperfect data sources, very high volumes of data in certain domains where the precision gained from keeping all the data can’t be justified cost-wise or performance-wise, or even due to some technical limitations in distributed systems if we opt for eventual consistency of data which happens a lot …etc. Hence, we frequently need to handle imperfect data in the logic on the application side.
I’m an average software engineer myself with only 5 years of experience and I’ve known this by heart probably after a few months in my first job. I find it extremely hard (and I’m usually very charitable) to believe that Musk, regardless of his level of software engineering competence, is ignorant of this.
And I suspect will be found (if anyone checks): while some of these instances may be entry failures (someone just forgot to complete a field, because they got distracted or or were an intern or something, and no one was auditing their work), some may be forced errors (the data literally did not exist to enter), which would have been known when the database was first created, so they would know from day one a stopgap was needed to account for persons long dead without recorded deaths, as they’d be staring at tens of thousands of such entries when they compiled the database to begin with.
Nice blog. A little off topic.. but what do you think of this paper? Link: https://www.academia.edu/127949202/The_Markan_Perspective_on_Petrine_Theology_A_Response_to_Richard_Bauckham
I haven’t read it, though I sympathize with its project. Bauckham’s work is so routinely bogus I have largely given up bothering to even respond to it anymore.
There seems to be a decent evaluation on Reddit (of all places) that suggests the author is on point.
At a glance, it seems a decent analysis, and maybe they cover this, but:
My immediate thought is that Bauckhamn (as usual) is doing the standard apologetics thing: leaving information out that, when put back in, reverses the conclusion.
Like with his example of Lucian’s work on Alexander of Abonuteichos: the reason we conclude that it was written by Lucian is that he fucking says so, repeatedly—and not because of any ring structure. Ring structure calls attention to a character, not an author. So naturally it will target the author when the author wants themselves top be emphasized in some way. But that only indicates authorship when the author tells us it does. So the analogy cannot hold for Mark; to the contrary, Bauckham’s thesis predicts Mark (on the model of Lucian) would have said he wrote it. He doesn’t. Thus Bauckham’s thesis is refuted, not validated.
It’s also of course ridiculous to propose the anti-Petrine Gospel was written or dictated by Peter. Peter’s Gospel would be Matthew, not Mark. And as I show in OHJ, Peter is indicated as the central character by being at the center of Matthew’s ring structure for the passion narrative, not its outer ring. But that does not signal Peter wrote it. It signals that Matthew (or whoever they are) wants to center that character at the full depth of its downfall narrative, which naturally a Petrine sectarian would—since they then have Peter redeemed by individual prediction earlier and group narrative later.
Bauckham pulls this same stunt with name frequencies (the evidence is actually the opposite of what he avers). And so on.
TERRIFIC post Richard…! As the great War historian Sarah Paine plainly puts it,” to many people play half court tennis and don’t acknowledge the facts of the other side. Ignorance I suppose. Thanks for mentioning Sam Harris. I have wanted him to have you on his podcast “Making Sense” for some time. How do we make that happen?!
Cheers friend!
Fans would have to persuade him. I have been very critical of him though, and he has an ego, so he’s likely to be disinclined.
I urge everyone who didn’t worry much about Musk firing tens of thousands of government employees with “Probationary” standing to listen to the first 20 minutes of the Feb 28th edition of the Open Circuit podcast. Perhaps you thought this was an obvious cost-saving measure.
It turns out “probationary” does not just mean new hire or older hire that has made some mistakes. It means you were an expert in private industry and courted by the government to take a much lower salary to lead a team or solve a a difficult problem at – for example the department of energy. Because you have never worked for the government before you are “probationary” for a few years – but remember, these people are superstars courted out of private industry. Fired
Probationary also means you have been promoted recently to a higher level managerial position. Others in the department tried for it, but you were best, so you were promoted. Fired
Probationary also means you were a high-performing manager at one agency and did such a good job you were promoted to an even higher level management job at another agency. Fired
Some of these experts – like ones who know how to keep a hydro-electric dam running while it is surrounded by wildfires – have skills that are not taught in any textbook, or at any university.
The White House reversed course and rehired some of these experts, but look at how poor the original decision was – just fixating on the word “probationary” without examining what it means to be probationary
This is indeed one of many examples of how these actions display extraordinary incompetence and recklessness.
I fail to see the point. Envy, frustration, and hate aren’t going to do anything except make you miserable and aternately bore and annoy folk until they chuck you out on your ear. Much like the American people have turfed out the Dhimmiprats in favour of politics and policy that favours them rather than discriminates against them.
You are a bundle of contradictions, Richard: the history; philosophy; and science are generally impeccable except where they intersect with your politics and ideology, which are generally dire. The links in the former genrally go worthwhile places; in the latter generally to ill-thought out partisan laziness. I don’t get it: the ideology is clearly just Xtianity with “God” edited out for a “New Torah” of “Progressivism” delivered by mortal angels.
Meet the new gnosticism; same as the old gnosticism.
My metaphysical naturalism derives from both binning the janky in a religious philosphy, and deriving the roots of that philosophy and and discerning its’ offshoots; making sure I don’t substitute either the root stocks or the cuttings for the dead tree I’ve tossed on the fire. You don’t look to what happened to Xtianity and Judaism after their maturity and the Enlightenment to what they morphed into when the idea of “God” became untenable and so wind up with a philosophy that has either has false underpinnings just like the previous religious philosphies; or becomes a Judaeo-Xtian “heresy” merely shorn of the supernataural.
Hence the furious argument with the previous dipensation: you are fighting on the same religious grounds about the same spritual and metaphysical nonsense with much the same farcical apologetic as Origen against Celsus. The Right is a coalition, a large part of which is Judaeo-Xtian and roots its’ politics and philosophy in that tradition. It is not a monolith. Assuming it is I think leads you to irrationally excluding the middle.
I’ve been following you about fifteen years and have read your back catalogue from before that; your “arguments” have been bouncing off most of the folk you have ostensibly been addressing them to for about twenty five years. You might want to retire to your motte and re-think your epistemology; repeating the same behaviour over and over thinking “Just one more push…” will get you nowhere and is more than a little crazy.
I love this idea that “the American people” have done anything in one election cycle. If Trump had won by the margins Reagan had won, then maybe you’d have an iota of a point, but, you know, I know liberals who were alive during Reagan, and they were no less American as they despised the direction of the country. Trump won by a much tinier margin than Reagan. The idea that everyone is on board in an election where tens of millions of Americans didn’t vote and the margin was as tight as it was is just self-serving conservative propaganda.
So, Steven, would you have said that “Americans” gave the boot to Trump in 2020, when he got smacked around? Or are you inconsistent?
As for progressivism being just Christianity with mortal angels: First of all, that’s a pretty fucking significant difference, Steven. But, second… uh, seriously, fuck off with that self-serving, ego-protecting lie?
Christianity is a belief system based in perfection. Most progressives and leftists think we must perpetually improve, and be on the watch for slipping back, because no magic force guarantees that progress will be uniform. That’s especially true after postmodern criticisms of inevitable narratives of progress.
Christianity posits a world based in certain prophecy. But liberals and leftists are perfectly comfortable with ambiguity and limits to knowledge. Chomsky has talked extensively about the need to experiment with new social institutions, and Albert as he presented parecon was clear that he was proposing a tentative model to be further tested and either refined (and adapted to specific societies) or binned. Contrast that with the dogmatic right-wing belief in markets and capitalism (even as they lie about their principles in that regard and abandon markets when it suits them).
Most forms of Christianity, while posing as universalist, actually embrace extreme, literally burning, hate for the outgroup in the form of hell (or even annihilation). Liberals and leftists are actually universalist.
Your irrationality aside, in the real world, the world is not perfect and we know we can improve it. Does that mean that every tradition or existing structure is wholly rotten? No, not necessarily. Nor is it necessarily the case that every solution will work and that every problem will be soluble. All it takes to be a liberal, leftist or progressive is to accept that some can be, and that history isn’t over. Not one bit of that is “Christian” except in the sense that there is an imagination that the future may be better than the present. This is such a brazen strawman, and shameful in the extreme.
In contrast, your apparent conservatism (or, at least, sympathy to it) is actually based on just world fallacy, failed causal connections, motte-and-bailey fallacies, and countless other religious-type thinking.
And if the right isn’t a monolith, neither’s the left, but you apparently have no problem in monolithic reasoning on the one hand but you do with the other, in brazenly hypocritical special pleading. And yet, this supposed non-monolith keeps on being able to goosestep behind the Cheetofuhrer and achieve really incredible ideological unity. Look at the right’s view on Iraq: They loved the invasion before, now they hate it. No need to do any soul-searching on how previous Republicans led that charge, right? Similarly, the fact that white evangelical Christians stopped caring about ethics in politics right at the time that they elected a serial philanderer and rapist is extremely telling that their values are not authentically held, ever. This is statistically demonstrable.
Not sure what you mean, Steven. MAGA has no policies that are good for the American people. The American people were duped into electing a corrupt kleptocratic oligarch who is doing nothing but screwing them over. Because American voters no longer pay attention to policy or even epistemology anymore.
If you do not agree with this observation, you are delusional, and your epistemology is catastrophically broken. So you need to start fixing that. See my “critical thinking” category in the drop down menu up on the right margin.
Not a great way to convince anyone of your position, claiming they are delusional if they don’t agree with you. I don’t share your politics and you leave me scratching my head about how you come to your conclusions. Trump would get my vote over Harris everytime; she was clearly the worse choice and demonstrably not up to the job. I don’t see any evidence that President Trump is a a corrupt kleptocratic oligarch that doesn’t come from poisoned sources. Neither evidently do the majority of Americans that sufficiently care and are motivated to vote.
If you win the popular vote and the Electoral College; you have a mandate to govern. The American people clearly preferred President Trump over the other candidates presented even before several high profile Democrats crossed the floor and joined him. He himself is a Democrat in exile; leaving us with the curious phenomena of an ostensibly Republican Administration composed in large part of Democrats. This Administration looks an awful lot like a Centrist coalition to me. I applaud it: you can’t carry on doing the things you have always done. If they haven’t worked for 3 or 4 decades at least, they will not work in the following 3 or 4 decades either. Pursuing crank idiotology on top of all of that is an even greater recipe for disaster.
It is a bummer I know when the plebs decide they’ve had enough and reject the “brilliant” ideas of their “betters”; but such are the perils of living in a constitutional republic and not a managed bureaucracy. They will occaisionally take seriously their duty to defend that republic from ALL enemies, foreign AND domestic.
I can’t “convince” a delusional person of anything. That’s what makes them delusional, Steven.
That’s why I cannot “convince” you. All I can do is inoculate other readers from your disease.
Maybe someday you will get out of your delusion and realize this. Maybe even my words will be a part of that process. But ultimately, all I can do is show you and everyone else how delusional you are, by showing how out of touch with reality you are, and how that is hurting people (by your every vote and behavior caused by this contrafactual delusion), even the people you purport to care about, with links and breadcrumbs full of evidence.
As an example, Steven:
You chose to respond to Richard giving you brief feedback but not engaging in detail with your argument, but not to my longer comment that showed that your original argument was riddled with special pleading, false premises and naked in-group bias.
It was easy to say that Richard was being a meanie by calling you delusional, but not to deal with any of our points.
And when corrected, you retreat to your personal views. You think Harris is worse. You don’t think Trump is a corrupt kleptocrat; or, rather, you do see that evidence, but it comes from “poisoned sources”, which actually doesn’t mean it’s false, which means you are using a genetic fallacy for your key argument to support your guy, which is the hallmark of delusion. No need to actually assess whether Harris or Trump’s policy positions are objectively more or less indicative of kleptocracy, or their public behavior. No, your echo chamber is trustworthy, because it’s yours!
And “a mandate to govern” doesn’t mean destroying the Constitution. And we both know, Steven, that you did not take Biden’s clear mandate to govern that seriously. You resisted. So are people today. But Trump is using a very weak mandate to act as a dictator. You invoke this argument against a deliberately weak strawman that no one in this conversation even brought up. Trump could have a mandate and also be a corrupt kleptocrat. It’s totally irrelevant to Richard’s point, but as of March of 2025, it’s your side’s talking point, and so like a puppet you repeat it. Incredible delusionality.
Not relevant to this discussion but is there any update on your next book on Jesus mythicism? You said you were preparing something for the tenth anniversary but I don’t remember seeing any update.
Indeed it will be published this year. Expect an announcement in the next month or two.
Musk is an idiot and most rich people are just lucky? Spoken by a lefty who has stooped to begging for money online because “a close relative died.” What bullshit! Your jealousy and need to try to elevate yourself by tearing down others is once again showing.
Yeah. Charity is bullshit and getting paid for a living is ignominious.
You’re one of those “empathy is a sin” scumshirts. Heil Hitler I guess.
But, um, you just proved my point.
Own goal.
Ah, yes, the move of those worshiping the big ol’ rational raisin: A genetic fallacy. Richard could be the saltiest guy on the planet and Musk is still a dumb asshole, who doesn’t need to beg for money because his parents gave him that money instead, because they had it.
Hey, Tonto, want to deal with the problem? Want to actually face the fact that luck is indeed massively deterministic of success? And by “luck”, any rational person means
1) Events that one cannot control that make one have opportunities (e.g. Musk’s particular weird geek brand could not have been profitable any time before the Web era, so if he had been born a mere 20 years earlier, he’d just be one of those rich dilettantes and not have been able to worm his way into something like PayPal)
2) Talent (which Musk has none of but people like Bezos clearly do, because while talent is at least an endogenous trait to a person it is not under their control , so the only thing that can show someone’s merit is their hard work to develop that talent , the very hard work Richard demonstrated Musk doesn’t show)
3) The genetic lottery of being born into wealth with proper nutrition, assets and social capital
4) Being relatively healthy (e.g. Musk could have been exactly the same person but had he been born with Tay-Sachs he almost certainly would have died horribly instead of becoming a billionaire)
All of which makes naked capitalist ideology about merit nonsense. Going to deal with that, or just get mad at the messenger?
Musk aside, psychometrics is not an opinion. You cannot just determine someone’s IQ like the guy from the first link did for Musk. That is pretty much bullshit.
I believe I have found some evidence that Musk’s IQ could be Mensa level, but far from genius. (1400 score on old SAT, which highly correlates with standardized IQ tests).
Anyway, intelligent people can still be stupid and irrational. It’s not like it shields you from stupidity. There are many other things to be taken into consideration. I see a bloated self-image problem with Musk, damaging his intellect.
I’m having a sense that intelligence is being equated with rationality, trained skills or even knowledge, which is misleading.
Not trying to defend Musk (he has said some obviously stupid things), but are we supposed to believe that a purely average person, with no talents and potential, has become the richest person alive?
That’s my point as well: IQ does not measure rationality, knowledge, wisdom, or competence. Stupidity is not a low IQ. It’s a low application of intelligence (whether one has intelligence to apply or not). Hence, to call Musk an idiot is not saying his IQ is low. It’s saying he is not a competent thinker. Whatever IQ he has is being completely unused and not leveraged into thinking well. He is stupid because he makes stupid decisions (about what to do and what to believe) and he does that because he is lazy and incompetent. His IQ, whatever it is, is doing nothing for him. Because he is doing nothing with it.
Nevertheless…
Yes. That’s what we are saying.
I think you have fallen victim to Just World Theory, whereby you assume success is only produced by brilliance, when in fact it rarely is. Most success is produced by privilege, luck, or grift (most often all three).
That’s why Musk is running almost every company he owns into the ground and consistently makes bad decisions and believes so many profoundly stupid things.
Indeed, even his companies that are doing okay (-ish; like SpaceX) it’s because he is less involved in running them. This is how Trump (possibly the stupidest man on the planet) got rich: by starting with a giant wad of cash he didn’t earn and then paying other people do everything for him and taking the credit when they succeed and blaming them when they fail. Capitalism rewards luck, not talent.
The rich don’t want you to realize that, so they push the mythology that wealth entails genius and thus especial competence. It does not. And never has.
Please identify what link you are talking about.
That is not a reliable inference.
First, how do we even know that’s actually his score? (What is the source…Musk?)
Second, SATs can be taken multiple times and trained for (and indeed Musk did not score well his first go); they thus represent teaching to the test, not IQ. Hence there are wide variations in correlations between SATs and IQ. See this discussion and this discussion for perspective. And see this correlation chart: a 1400 (1980s) SAT clusters near 130 IQ but includes performers at 115 IQ.
Third, second scores don’t count for this. If you take the SAT cold, those results will correlate with IQ more strongly than second takes. Second takes entail all the gain is in training, not IQ. In other words, Musk did not “increase his IQ” between his first and second takes of the SAT; ergo the second take cannot be measuring his IQ, but the difference between that and training to the test. So what you want to know is what were his original scores. So…why aren’t we being told what those are? That’s the question you need to be asking.
Fourth, the reason even “first take” SAT scores correlate with a rather wide range of IQ is that SATs measure knowledge more than intelligence. Thus, someone who is lazy but smart will score low, but someone who is privileged (e.g. receiving excellent primary and secondary education and language training) but dumb will score high.