I appreciate any article that isn't painting things black and white. It's okay to be inspired by the work SpaceX and Tesla is doing while also thinking Elon might be losing his marbles
I think I saw it on X today, ironically. I am also subscribed to you on Substack but I had to disable notifications in the app because it was constantly bombarding me and wasting tons of time.
In my experience, extremely smart people being extremely stupid sometimes is more the rule than the exception. Not sure if it’s conceded to include myself in there ...
I'm pretty cozy within my "no extremes" niche, where I get to be merrily idiotic within reasonable boundaries on a near-daily basis without all the hassle of having to muster exceptional or even notable smarts.
When people have studied what happens to doomsday cults after the prophesied day passes, they found that those cult members who were *most* intelligent were the ones most likely to stick with the doomsday cult afterwards. Surprisingly, intelligent people are potentially more vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking because their brain is better able to account for new, contradictory information. They can craft and warp that info to fit into their worldview better than less intelligent people.
The Ben Carson point is one that I made all the time when he was running. My friends would hear some wild thing he said and be like, "This guy's a moron!" and I'd feel compelled to push back. Like, he has been crazy successful at a thing that would be unimaginably hard for the most talented surgeons in the world. He's not a moron, but he is out over his skis on a topic he's not an expert on.
SpaceX is built to avoid him making any engineering decisions because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He insisted on not having a thrust diverter for the first Starship launch which is the reason why it failed. He’s a charlatan who has duped you.
Indeed! People like Musk and, to a great extent, Zuckerberg, for all their genius, have HUGE social blindspots, which isn’t uncommon — even Steve Jobs was known to be a pretty shitty human to those closest to him, which is all kinds of fucked up but we still praise the shit out of that guy.
People who are inordinately “smart” in one aspect of intelligence, are sheer morons when it comes to interpersonal relations. The problem is that the people with the lowest EQs are the ones controlling how interpersonal communication literally happens.
This Jonathan Haidt video talks about how “the West” got most of its moral philosophy from people who were towards the autistic end of the spectrum, which he seems to think was a huge wrong turn for our culture.
And this was a great video and so telling - (I never thought of Bentham to be “on spectrum” but I think it’s true lol)
And it’s very interesting that I think politics and (I guess to a less extent maybe) traditional C Suite ppl are farther from the end of autism spectrum than those tech ppl and it really struggles with dealing with this new reality centered around social media.
And also, I could be well wrong on this but I feel like both left and right wing loud voices are dominated by those who’re closer at the end of the spectrum - and I think one way to complement this is go full analytics and rely on data and polls (which requires a certain literacy to discern good one from shitty one esp issue polls) but at least on the left side, I think a lot of ppl also hate math so…
Interesting take and one we should all keep in mind while assessing ourselves and others - that said, I disagree with one aspect of your analysis...”swindling someone else while they do the work for you, everyone would be doing it. “ not everyone would be doing it ... most people are self-aware enough to know that is unethical and have enough self-regulation to resist doing so. Elon lacks emotional intelligence despite his other varieties of intelligence. Thanks for an interesting post!
Yeah, but LOTS of people are unethical and lack self-regulation.....jails and prisons are filled to the brim with folks with those traits, and I don't think they're all potential billionaires.
I have to agree with you...those in jail are outliers though (one hopes)... I was saying that most (again one hopes) wouldn't pursue the larcenous/rent seeking path... Jeremiah seemed to be a bit absolute in his declaration
I think this is really really spot on- one thing that has driven me nuts multiple times is actually the lack of understanding this concept by many ppl.
It’s so funny and infuriating that intelligence is often treated like a singular scalar value and a lot of online ppl left and right die on the dichotomy hill of “this person X is smart or not”.
Like c’mon, you must’ve seen a loooot of ppl at school who’s good at math but suck at English or the other way around.
I really wish ppl understood that intelligence is more like high dimensional vector than a single scalar value let alone binary “smart or dumb”
This is continually getting new likes and pageviews - I'm curious if you just read this, what link brought you here?
Saw a note https://substack.com/@amoswollen/note/c-76954458, immediately drawn to the title. Only when I saw this comment did I notice it wasn't written yesterday haha.
I appreciate any article that isn't painting things black and white. It's okay to be inspired by the work SpaceX and Tesla is doing while also thinking Elon might be losing his marbles
Likewise. Saw the same note.
I just got here from this week's Weekly Scroll and I highly enjoy your writing style so I figured to read this older piece.
I think I saw it on X today, ironically. I am also subscribed to you on Substack but I had to disable notifications in the app because it was constantly bombarding me and wasting tons of time.
(not that you specifically were bombarding me - the Substack app, I mean)
I lurked a little bit after Jeff Maurer name-dropped you and then quickly subscribed, and this showed up in my feed.
Also saw Amos Wollen’s note.
In my experience, extremely smart people being extremely stupid sometimes is more the rule than the exception. Not sure if it’s conceded to include myself in there ...
I mean, for one thing, I don’t know how to spell “conceited“
I'm pretty cozy within my "no extremes" niche, where I get to be merrily idiotic within reasonable boundaries on a near-daily basis without all the hassle of having to muster exceptional or even notable smarts.
I think this article characterizes Elon Musk very accurately, moreso than any other ones I have seen.
It puts into words very well what I think of him, and I appreciate giving an unbiased take on such a controversial figure.
When people have studied what happens to doomsday cults after the prophesied day passes, they found that those cult members who were *most* intelligent were the ones most likely to stick with the doomsday cult afterwards. Surprisingly, intelligent people are potentially more vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking because their brain is better able to account for new, contradictory information. They can craft and warp that info to fit into their worldview better than less intelligent people.
The Ben Carson point is one that I made all the time when he was running. My friends would hear some wild thing he said and be like, "This guy's a moron!" and I'd feel compelled to push back. Like, he has been crazy successful at a thing that would be unimaginably hard for the most talented surgeons in the world. He's not a moron, but he is out over his skis on a topic he's not an expert on.
Actual aerospace engineer here:
SpaceX is built to avoid him making any engineering decisions because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He insisted on not having a thrust diverter for the first Starship launch which is the reason why it failed. He’s a charlatan who has duped you.
Indeed! People like Musk and, to a great extent, Zuckerberg, for all their genius, have HUGE social blindspots, which isn’t uncommon — even Steve Jobs was known to be a pretty shitty human to those closest to him, which is all kinds of fucked up but we still praise the shit out of that guy.
People who are inordinately “smart” in one aspect of intelligence, are sheer morons when it comes to interpersonal relations. The problem is that the people with the lowest EQs are the ones controlling how interpersonal communication literally happens.
This Jonathan Haidt video talks about how “the West” got most of its moral philosophy from people who were towards the autistic end of the spectrum, which he seems to think was a huge wrong turn for our culture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMjvYSKODrk
Yeah totally!
And this was a great video and so telling - (I never thought of Bentham to be “on spectrum” but I think it’s true lol)
And it’s very interesting that I think politics and (I guess to a less extent maybe) traditional C Suite ppl are farther from the end of autism spectrum than those tech ppl and it really struggles with dealing with this new reality centered around social media.
And also, I could be well wrong on this but I feel like both left and right wing loud voices are dominated by those who’re closer at the end of the spectrum - and I think one way to complement this is go full analytics and rely on data and polls (which requires a certain literacy to discern good one from shitty one esp issue polls) but at least on the left side, I think a lot of ppl also hate math so…
You’re only ever as smart as your irrational obsessions allow you to be.
Interesting take and one we should all keep in mind while assessing ourselves and others - that said, I disagree with one aspect of your analysis...”swindling someone else while they do the work for you, everyone would be doing it. “ not everyone would be doing it ... most people are self-aware enough to know that is unethical and have enough self-regulation to resist doing so. Elon lacks emotional intelligence despite his other varieties of intelligence. Thanks for an interesting post!
Yeah, but LOTS of people are unethical and lack self-regulation.....jails and prisons are filled to the brim with folks with those traits, and I don't think they're all potential billionaires.
I have to agree with you...those in jail are outliers though (one hopes)... I was saying that most (again one hopes) wouldn't pursue the larcenous/rent seeking path... Jeremiah seemed to be a bit absolute in his declaration
I think this is really really spot on- one thing that has driven me nuts multiple times is actually the lack of understanding this concept by many ppl.
It’s so funny and infuriating that intelligence is often treated like a singular scalar value and a lot of online ppl left and right die on the dichotomy hill of “this person X is smart or not”.
Like c’mon, you must’ve seen a loooot of ppl at school who’s good at math but suck at English or the other way around.
I really wish ppl understood that intelligence is more like high dimensional vector than a single scalar value let alone binary “smart or dumb”
The apartheid emerald mine thing is so pervasive in the circles I run in online. It's wild.
You, sir, are a gen-ooooh I see what you did there.