"If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at who He gave it to” — Dorothy Parker (attributed)
For years, many celebrated Elon Musk as a tech visionary in the Steve Jobs mold. Others suggested he was simply good at stealing other people’s ideas. Either way, the man is now teetering on the brink of madness.
I don’t say this because he is a MAGA-adjacent, Trump fanboy — plenty of billionaires are attracted by the GOP’s minimalist tax and regulation policies regardless of who has the reins. I say it because Musk keeps proving he is nuts.
He has embraced Pizzagate, spoken favorably of the Great Replacement Theory, reinstated Alex Jones on Twitter, said bad Jews are engaged in “dialectical hatred against whites,” and posted complete nonsense about the Paul Pelosi attack. There’s more, but the reader gets the point.
On Sunday, he thought a poorly reasoned polemic from the Twitter account Autism Capital was an “Interesting observation.” This right-wing account argued that the ideal political arrangement for good decision-making was a “Republic of high status males.” See the picture below for the full argument
This is not an “interesting observation.” It is the aspirational fantasy of a dim-witted teenage boy who has trouble talking to girls. Let’s parse the argument.
For starters, women may not on average be as muscular as a typical guy. But it is not the size of the dog in a fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. (I don’t usually do hokey, but it seems appropriate here.) And just try to get between a mother and child. Heaven forbid she has a gun — what good are your big biceps then? (BTW have you seen a picture of Musk shirtless? He’s the poster child for low-T. No wet paper bag will feel threatened.)
Besides, what self-defense has to do with information processing is unclear. As is the meaning of “consensus filter.” It is the kind of jargon used by writers who do not know what they are talking about to dissuade the intellectually unconfident reader from asking them what they talking about.
Next up is the passage:
“They literally do not ask “is this true”, they ask “ will others be OK with me thinking this is true.” This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus. If every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believes it.”
This is a classic example of using a lot of words to say very little. They could have just said: “Intellectual timidity leads to uncritical groupthink.”
However you phrase it, the irony is that it perfectly describes MAGA.
The argument continues by asserting that “high T alpha males and aneurotypical people” have information processing skills other people do not have. However, they offer no evidence for this contention. So a rational thinker will ignore it until they provide some evidence.
As their conclusion that “a Republic of high status males is best for decision making” is based on this evidence-free contention, it can be dismissed as meaningless wishful thinking.
This is what Musk thinks is an “interesting observation.” Oh, please! It is the sort of pretentious drivel handed in by average students short on time, nursing a hangover.
