3 ms·
The challenge with the world is that it requires nuance, ad hoc thinking, and effortful thinking. The human brain doesn't like putting effort into thinking. It'
by csallen 6mo ago
The challenge with the world is that it requires nuance, ad hoc thinking, and effortful thinking. The human brain doesn't like putting effort into thinking. It's uncomfortable. It's easier for us to just have one rule, one heuristic, that we can simply apply to many similar situations. This is why ideology exists and is so powerful. You can always find people chanting the same phrase or slogan, over and over, regardless of the circumstance. Because it's easier for them to do that than it is for them to treat every situation as unique and to reason through it from first principles. Hell, sometimes that's just not feasible.
In this situation, yeah, sometimes powerful people do dumb shit. And ideologues come by and say, "You just don't understand the 4d chess!"
But also, sometimes it's the opposite! And the powerful person does something smart, but that's unclear or unfamiliar to the average person without massive wealth/access/power. And ideologues from the peanut gallery come by and say, "Another powerful person doing stupid stuff!"
And of course, the right (but alas more effortful) approach is to evaluate each situation individually, and reason through the factors, and also to wait to see how it turns out, before evaluating.
For example, the author evaluations Elon's purchase of Twitter as an irredeemably stupid decision. And I agree, many things about how that went down seem very stupid. But at the same time, dude has launched an AI lab that's gotten tons of press and exposure thanks in large part to X, combined it with his other companies, and is about to IPO for $1.5T+. Maybe you don't like it. Maybe I don't like it. Maybe there's lots to complain about here, but it's difficult to describe this as a "stupid" move.
Does that mean he was playing 4D chess? Also, maybe not! Maybe he just lucked into this situation. Maybe he didn't foresee it initially, but figured it out later. Or maybe, much more reasonably, he figured that he has tons of optionality and tons of leeway, so even if he doesn't have a good plan to begin with, he'll likely figure it out. Who knows.
It's tough to be a speculator judging from the sidelines with incomplete knowledge. And it's even tougher to avoid allowing our biases and ideologies to compel us to simply shout our beliefs rather than being objective and analytical.
- riffraff 6mo agoYeah I don't buy that xAI story, musk would have gotten a popular ai lab even without Twitter if he wanted. Except.. his ai lab is not popular. It has zero value and people only use it because it's on Twitter and they don't pay for it. The fact that he had to merge it with a successful unrelated company tells you all you need to know.
- sureglymop 6mo agoRecently an xAI recruiter reached out to me for a position at xAI. They mentioned that they had been impressed by my GitHub profile and wanted to fast track me to an interview. Fun fact: I have not a single repository on my GitHub. I think the position was about creating training data and realistic coding scenarios or something.
- ZeroGravitas 6mo agoI though the 4D chess explanation was that he bought it (was forced to buy it by courts) because he was entering politics and wanted to be able to ensure the deaths of half a million children in Africa: https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=interval_minutes&order=asc https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=inte... It looks like he succeeded wildly at that.
- ljsprague 6mo ago[flagged]
- throwawayqqq11 6mo agoYour overly simplistic graph about population growth omits steady falling birth rates and more importantly, why they are falling. But why should i explain when your mind is occupied with africa when mentioned in a side note and that it comes with an article opening like this > To understand what’s at stake regarding the Mediterranean ... occupied with africa and implying harmful migration without ever basing it. But a cheap 100 year projection expressed _in a single graph_ in a way does fit into a conversation about overconfident stupid people.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 6mo agoStraight to the white nationalist racists to back him up, this guy gets where Musk is coming from and approves. Citing this guy: > Steven Sailer is an American far-right writer and blogger.[1][2] He is a columnist for Taki's Magazine and VDARE, a website associated with white supremacy.[3][4][5] Earlier writing by Sailer appeared in some mainstream outlets, and his writings have been described as prefiguring Trumpism.[2] Sailer popularized the term "human biodiversity" for a right-wing audience in the 1990s as a euphemism for scientific racism.[2][6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sailer On this site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unz_Review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unz_Review > The Unz Review is an American website and blog founded and edited by Ron Unz, an American far-right activist and Holocaust denier. It is known for its publication of far-right, conspiracy theory, white nationalist, and antisemitic writings.[1]
- nearbuy 6mo agoYeah, the Twitter acquisition wasn't obviously irredeemably stupid. I think it was a bad decision, but paying a 38% premium above market price for an acquisition of a public company is within the normal range. You can argue the markets were irrational and Twitter was overvalued, but you shouldn't argue it's obvious because it clearly isn't obvious to a huge number of investors. You could argue Twitter is a poor fit for Musk's goals, but that wasn't obvious either. Twitter didn't have to change radically to be worth its price. It just had to grow profits a bit and maybe help some of Musk's other projects (like Grok).