Author of Upcoming Elon Musk Biography Says ‘There Is No Evidence’ Billionaire Has Any ‘Intellectual Achievements’
Attorney, journalist, and Elon Musk biographer Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess in a series of messages shared on X Thursday evening and into Friday.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/author-upcoming-elon-musk-biography-040538098.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world1333
Comments217
I guarantee his IQ is made up too. Not that an IQ test actually means shit.
IQ tests are combo test of how white and how autistic are you. All tests are biased, and what do you bet when he got his super special smart boy IQ label he was in South Africa and the test administrator was another white dude.
Wouldn't surprise me if the person administering the test was also paid under the table by Musk Snr to make sure Elon's result looked better than it actually was.
He was at a private school, it’s just called tuition, and it’s there to make sure powerful people’s kids stay in power. Intelligence has nothing to do with it.
IQ tests are not an objective measurement of intelligence! It kinda measures pattern recognition and some other skill! Its a scam to sell preparatory classes for itself!
40-50-ish years ago they quite popular! You were required to take one for uni admissions, for appliying to work… Well before we found out its bs!
It's a relative measure of performance for narrow and specific set of tasks. It's not BS, that's like saying the 100m dash is BS. It's just that people have wildly overstated the general implications of the measure.
That’s a useful comparison. I like it. There are plenty of popular anecdotes of the world’s best athlete in a particular sport attempting another and being terribly mediocre, so it probably resonates with the average person better than my usual many-types-of-intelligence argument.
The people who have wildly overstated the implications of IQ are the ones who developed and use it. Your analogy would be more correct if the 100m dash was used to measure the freshness of your breath.
That's the central problem with IQ. Intelligence as a thing that can be measured is much closer to "freshness of breath" than it is to 100 meters. It's subjective and colloquial. You admit as much yourself that IQ tests measure something, but not intelligence.
I think there is and always has been massive contention in even defining intelligence. Is it the same as wisdom? What about being smart? Are these all the same thing? How does experience inform success in general problem solving? What even IS a "general" problem?
I think it's still a valuable tool to assess peoples ability to recognize and apply transformations, implications, boolean operators, and arethmetic sequences.
But the idea that it provides some insight into the innate nature of a mind is preposterous. You CAN study for an IQ test: exactly the 4 things I mentioned are things you can study, and once you've mastered you'll be sitting on a 160+ result.
So, the base underlying assumption that these things are not learnable. That is wrong.
But, the idea that mastery of implication, transformation, boolean operators and arethmetic sequences don't provide a foundational system for certain tasks is also maybe not quite right either...
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of "athleticism", which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
To your point that the designers intended it to be a measure of the abstract notion of innate intellectual capacity, yeah maybe that was the attempt. Maybe that's how they pitched it. It isn't. Tough shit.
But that doesn't suddenly imply it's nothing.
Like most things (a degree, years of experience, SAT score, story points, Myers-Briggs etc etc) capitalism has completely fucked them. Business is so fucking lazy they just want to boil down assesment for suitability to enumerable values on a form. Just because metrics are inappropriately used and abused by capitalism doesn't mean they're not measuring something.
So, this was a super lengthy reiteration that IQ tests measure something, but it isn't "innate general intelligence". But to say it's as irrelevant as "freshness of breath" is maybe hyperbolic.
Myers-Briggs manages to go way beyond in the levels of bullshit compared to even these other items.
My favorite story about corporations using these kinds of tests is when some engineer I knew was interviewing at a few different major engineering firms. One of their HR people told him after one of of several interviews that the next time would also involve a personality test! He knew he had at least 2 other roles in the bag, he was just finishing up this company. He asked her - "are they also going to read my tea leaves?" - and declined to proceed further with that company. Because the notion that HR were gatekeeping for...checks notes....engineering positions at an engineering firm by using such debunked horseshit was something that instilled zero confidence in how the rest of the place might be getting run, and I absolutely don't blame him. I never had that as part of anyone's hiring "process" - it was always something introduced later as part of some "team-building exercise".
My favorite direct experience was when another co-worker who was awake and fine with asking pointed questions asked one of the people administering some "personality test" if she knew if they had done any tests where they gave the "results" to the wrong person, and see how they reacted (he was basically asking if they tested for the Barnum effect). Answer: no. (Of course)
Anyway, I suggest reading The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves
Hard to argue that careful statement!
Hey thought of how it could be used for good, to support:
I imagine a school administrator examining the tails of their school‘s distribution and using the knowledge to personalize education. Say, a bright kid isn’t being challenged and achieves straight Cs. (Privacy and fairness implications, I know)
Yeah I think using a renamed version of the test could be a good way to try and find gaps between aspiration and current state of foundational skills, for certain aspirations.
If a kid dreams of being a lawyer, but their scores are on the tail end, that's a perfect opportunity to revisit the foundations of formal logic. Just because some kids have managed to grok those foundational concepts independent of school doesn't mean others are incapable. Because let's face it, secondary school isn't teaching formal logic.
That being said, real tailored mechanisms would be superior to finding gaps. But, in the absence of such mechanisms, an IQ test could be an accessible stand-in.
I can agree with most of this. Capitalism, and society in general, banked rather hard on Galileo's old saying,
They took that to mean, "Give every facet of everything an objective measure in order to determine how make imaginary lines go up so imaginary numbers in our bank accounts go up.
I had an IQ test once for the job.
I had 140. They gave me an offer.
I declined. I don't want to work with other smart people, they are notoriously hard to work with
The 100m dash measures exactly what it says; the ability to dash 100m. Intelligence Quotient does not measure what it says. That's the issue. It's isn't what it claims to be, so is BS.
Well said.
If the 100 meter dash was called tetranlon it would be bs! If the intelligence test were called pattern recognition test then it wouldn’t be bs!
And what if I called a rose a stinkweed?
I think it's a completely valid criticism, and I agree with the critism.
I just think semantic hang-ups are really... Exhausting and of minimal value. Terrible ratio.
Extend the principle of charity, hurdle it, then get to the meat.
My issue is not with its name!
The companies still are trying to sell IQ test off as objective measurement of intelligence and overwhelming measurement of the population believes it to be so!
I am really not sure what you are trying to say, sorry!
But the test were invented in the 1800-s by a French dude for preschool kids to see who requires more attention for their development?
I don't know if it's fully BS. It's just another data point to add for the ahhkkksshhualllyy crowd imo. But pattern recognition I think has high importance in actual intelligence.
If I were to sell you a medicine that helps with mild headaches as an all healing magical remedy would you call it bs?
I'd call it great for headaches and not great for anything else.
I wouldn't call it bs because it works great for headaches. I'd call the claim that it works for everything as bs.
…
Dunno. I don't really get headaches. I wouldn't buy.
…
Yes, thank you!
I agree. Its also super biased. I wouldn't be surprised if it correlated with financial success in certain demographics in certain locations/communities, but like you say, it's not an objective measure of intelligence.
We had to take a mandatory IQ test at the beginning of military service, my score was in the highest percentile and because of this I ended up in officer training. It wasn't the Mensa type test, they measured our language, math and pattern recognition skills with a vast battery of questions with a time limit.
Many friends of mine got average IQ scores in the army test but they are the ones who are really smart and extremely succesful.
In university I got a chance to take the Mensa type test and got ~140 points. I just laughed it off since at the same time I was struggling to pass my courses, while my friends who got average scores passed them with ease.
I do not consider myself really "smart" in any way, I just have a very good memory and I'm pretty adept at solving problems. Otherwise I'm just about as average a guy can be.
Uh-huh and everyone stood up to clap buddy?
You know, its a thing to jerk off to yer fantasies but your fantasy is a high IQ score? Really? Was Ariana Grande not in danger in your dreams or something?
No.
The whole point - which you seem to have missed - was that getting a "good" score in some test can mean very little or nothing in real life.
It just means that you're good at that sort of mental exercise.
No that meant that you could afford a 2-3-4 week long preparatory course!or were pursuing one of a few very specific fields of mathematics! And you putting good in quotation marks strongly insinuates that you have no idea what a 140 on an IQ test means, which makes it absolutely impossible for you to have received it since it would have been explained to you! And ppl do tend to remember the equivalent of winning the olimpics, you know?
But I am sure that you received military training 40-50 years ago! Say, where and when did you receive it under whose preliminary command?
I've never taken any preparatory courses for anything and I'm not really good with mathematics, so no and no again.
And why I put the quotation marks around good is a reflection of my native language, we do that when one wishes to express their personal disbelief or doubt. I am well aware that the ~140 score is considered a good one by the designers of the test.
I served in the late 90's and there have been several refresher courses but I'm not at the liberty to discuss any specifics of service matters publicly. If you have done military service you know this.
IQ tests went out of fashion mid 80-ties and they were only ever required in the very very top universities! There is no military academy in the world where you would have been asked for one!
140 is not a good a score! 140 is fucking legendary!!! Which would have been again explained to you if you ever achieved that, which again you would remember since its the equivalent of winning an olympic! But you don’t have a singular fucking clue what a 140 means on an IQ test… How very curious…
Ones military service starts at the end of their training, then you will be required to put your oaths down! Your bulshitting couldn’t even be chalked up as a semblance of protecting your anonymity! Graduation lists of military establishments are not public and even if they were there are 70-200-ish cadets in every year!
And soldiers can and do talk constantly about their service (ps thats how you can spot valor stealers on the internet, ppl like you :))! They are not allowed to talk of restricted info and missions! If you were a career secret sevice agent, you would not talk about being a soldier on the internet!
Another thing that makes absolutely no sense are the refresher courses and is a quite stupid attempt of weaseling out of the question! Most manuals were written in the 60-ties and have yet to be updated! And if you received new equipment you would not be sent back to uni! You would be taken to a field to practice with it!
Now tell me! Does your minsicular penis feel larger for lying and pretending to be a big man on the internet?
Read it again. This post is not a flex.
He edited his comment, look up his edit history
Yes! If you know how to look up edit history, please do so! There has been no editing on my part.
Pffffffffffffffff 😂
You know its so sad that this might even work out for you, after all Trump supporters too refused to read the jan files
But you have yet to answer my one question! Does your miniscular penis feel larger for lying on the internet?
Full-scale cognitive batteries (sophisticated IQ tests) are great... for diagnostics. If someone has difficulties identifying the domains where the need extra help, accommodations. I order them all the time and they guide me on how to manage patients. The most telling thing about IQs is that I've never seen it in on a resume, not even mensa memberships.
But surely you are aware that companies are trying to sell it off as objectively measurement of int, successfully so since most of the population regards them so? This lil part is my issue!
of course. they do it because people are insecure.
Being interested in an objective measurement of your intellect? Silliest fucking thing I have ever heard!
The belief that an commercial IQ test is an "objective measure of your intellect" is a pretty good subjective measure of your intellect.
I am sorry, it is silly to think that in intelligence test measures intelligence
So, you know how there’s a button on the top-left of your keyboard for ending sentences? Believe it or not, there’s also one on the bottom right as well! It looks like this: .
Perchance you should demonstrate it in your own sentences?
If you meant the dot(?) as a demonstrative then you yourself have not ended your sentence! If you meant the empty before the dot(?) as the demonstrative then you make no sense!
What you want to bet he had someone else take the test for him lol? Judging by how he plays games and all, it seems to be his m.o….
he abandonded his schooling once he got his visa, and did some shady sht to get his BROTHER one too. hes more or less just a richer version of trump, just slightly"smarter".
I don't remember the quote exactly but.
"It's just so dumb" "So dumb it's genius" "No it's just dumb"
perfectly encapsulates musk.
From glass onion lol. Great movie, btw.
Janelle Monae crushes it in her role. I mean absolutely crushes it. In it she is acting in the role of a character acting in a role, which is actually really hard to do in a really satisfying way, and she absolutely pulls it off. What's more is that she lets the veil slip just enough, as an actress, for the character playing the role to be believable as an actress. Like her music and visual artistry as an R&B performer is incredible, but there's still a part of me that feels like the world lost something from her not going into acting. But if she had, she'd probably have put out an album that would make me lament she hadn't focused on R&B.
It's in that movie but it's not from it. Did you seriously think it had never been said before that? It's been used for centuries in different forms, even exactly as said in glass onion.
Same with "it's so bad it's good" both with and without "nah, it's just bad" after. I think one of the most well known things like that is "The Room", and many reference that movie when something else fits the description but it's not at all from that movie, it existed long before it.
Who shit in your coffee this morning?
Nah, I thought that quote from the film summarized it quite well…
Miles Bron --> Mr Elon is B?
Yes, he was intended to be a fictional stand-in for the muskrat.
I want it to be an anagram, since it has Elon in it. Never figured out a great one.
Elon's brim? Mr Elon sib?
Born slime.
Bin morsel.
This is such a burn! "Abramson noted, “It is also a particularly American disease to confuse wealth with intelligence and corporations with those who own them."
For many evangelicals, they also associate wealth with divine blessing.
Also any sort of success.
If you’re chronically ill or have family problems or are poor, you must have done something to deserve it, because god will reward the worthy. Makes it really easy to be bigoted.
Those are probably corollaries to Worthington's Law. "He makes more money than you do!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbU4VRs2rro
Presumably his companies must just run themselves, because we seem to be expected to believe that he's running a rocket ship company, an electric car company, one of the biggest social media sites in the world, moon-lighting as the de facto President of the United States, while also dicking around on Twitter all day long and being one of the world's #1 gamers and parenting like 15 children or whatever it's supposed to be now. (Or at least, the ones that are still talking to him I guess.)
I feel like Musk was a symptom of Americans really wanting a genius billionaire to be a real thing as it reinforces this American dream everyone's dreaming about.
Reading the CPAC transcript clearly shows that he's currently below average intelligence if anything.
Well yeah, that's the American Dream right? That if you're smart and work hard, you'll be rich?
Yeah and you need to be asleep to believe it
And like most dreams, it just won't happen in real life.
They wanted Iron Man and got Justin Fuckin Hammer.
Phoney Starck
My feelings are that Steve Jobs was the quintessential cultural personality CEO and his early death sent a lot of people desperately looking for the next one, who ended up being Elon.
The difference was that Jobs actually had taste and a good vision for the future. He could build a smart team and let them drive progress then motivate to go further without making things up like Elon. So the media papered over Elon's wild confabulation, instead of showing him in a true light.
Most of that's false though. He couldn't build a good smart team, Wozniak could. He was very good at screwing others out of ownership in the company they helped build though. He was also very good at one thing, envisioning a computer in every home, and a computer in every pocket. That was his one true talent.
But he was not "smart". He died to cancer detected early enough to heal with modern medicine, but chose quack treatments instead. There really isn't any such thing as general intelligence. Everyone's got very specialized knowledge in some topic, and are idiots in everything else.
Na, that is just historically inaccurate. The original Macintosh team collected their stories/memoires at folklore.org, which give you a pretty good overview of his talents. He was really mercurial and Woz was the better engineer, but played a really important role in the vision/design of computers as we know them today. In the original Mac team others did the engineering and Jobs never claimed to be and engineering type of person, but he had a good feel on the importance of design, clear visual metaphors and good interaction design and pushed the team relentlessly into that direction.
He was quite good at marketing. He wasn't a technical guy and apparently wasn't terribly good at driving technical people either. But he was great at selling whatever the tech people came up with.
His only smart trick was to sell things super expensive to flatter the ego of the buyer. It's not rocket science.
The focus on the user experience, rather than the underlying tech, was Job's key insight.
aka he was an idiot who didn't want to / was too dumb to take the time to understand machines.
That's the opposite of genious lmao. My boss is the same.
Time has been kind to Mr. Jobs. Read about his early years at Apple... he was famous for skewering anyone that disagreed with him. He also had lovely habits like parking his sports car in handicapped spots so he didn't have to walk as far. You can't disagree with his talent for running a company that did an awful lot of innovation, but he wasn't a nice guy. He named one of his first products, the Lisa after his daughter, but didn't treat the actual daughter that well.
For a "smart" person, his death was quite possibly a very unintelligent way to go. He basically decided to give all kinds of "holistic" crap a chance to treat his cancer and avoided medical intervention for almost a year. If he had gone with the medical path from the onset, he might still be alive today.
But he did have his moments. Like how he basically told the music industry to cut out the DRM, because it just made the ecosystem impossible. Or one time when someone was picking at him over abandoning OpenDoc in favor of Java (Java didn't work out either, but his response was on point, without being dismissive of the person).
Cancer sucks. It's hard to judge someone from dying when everyone dies. I do agree with you that treatment would be better. However finding out you are going to die has a grieving process. He took too long. But I kind of get it.
He also told the daughter it wasn't named after her for most of her life.
I may be misremembering but I think she wasn't a child anymore by the time he acknowledged that he was her dad.
Sure, just like he told her about Santa Claus for most of her childhood. You're right in that he did come up with some ridiculous backronym like Local Information Storage Architecture or something but let's be real -- he didn't have a lot of daughters and he could have named that computer ANYTHING. That computer was named after her, full stop.
Steve Jobs tried to cure his cancer with essential oil. If that doesn't scream dumbass I don't know what is
Had a colleague die from cancer, after being given a very good prognosis with treatment and declining all that because he read somewhere just getting a whole bunch of vitamin C would reverse cancer.
His case he had a powerful personal anecdote, a brother he lost to cancer who did try the medical route and died after a miserable treatment course. He even acknowledged that the prognosis was dire for his brother from the onset, and they described medical intervention in the brother's case as a long shot versus his being probably curable. We tried to share our own anecdotes about friends and family that were saved by cancer treatment, but ultimately nothing could overcome his personal experience seeing how much the medical treatments made his brother suffer and it failed to help in the end.
which he inherited from a Venusian Space Magic cult who believe the Roswel landing was people from Venus who gave us the raw fruit diet to heal all human illnesses because that's what they do on Venus.
I thought it was eating a raw fruit diet?
You can have a high IQ and still be an utterly inept moron. I have family in Mensa and they are hands down some of the laziest, stupidest people I know.
Mensa is utterly meaningless and so is any IQ test. We hardly understand how brain works and some think we can evaluate it through some online test and assign a number to it?
Ridiculous and anyone who'd fall for that should buy a bridge from me I have in Brooklyn to become a billionaire by collecting road tax fee, ayy great deal only mensa geniuses would recognize 😆
Oh, I know it's ridiculous. They took my family member, that's all I needed to see to realize that.
And the Understatement of the Year award goes to…
Seriously, when I first heard of this guy, I thought he must be smart. Then he started talking about things in my career field, and thought wow, that’s a stupid thing to say. The more he talked, the more I realised he’s a moron about nearly everything. Now I’m not convinced he can actually get dressed unassisted.
He definitely dresses himself !
I believe he chooses his own clothes, just not that he actually puts them on. It’s a bit amazing that he doesn’t wear the same Darth Vader costume every day like some toddlers insist upon doing.
He seems like the sort of idiot who could strangle himself trying to figure out how a shirt works, is what I’m saying.
And yet executives in your career field probably would have nodded sagely, assuming that affinity to Musk would confer an appearance of intelligence to them, because they have no idea about the field either.
After spending some time in that circle, it drives me insane that the biggest idiots in various fields are the ones ostensibly in charge of them. They toss buzz words with confidence each other in a great circle jerk of money while their results are frequently no better than luck.
About the only consistent ability they have is to be complete sociopaths to screw over customers, employees, and shareholders alike. Which admittedly is a pretty powerful ability...
It's the "Peter principle":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Feel like I see a variant where they were never competent, and promoted based more on willingness to game the system than results.
For example, there was this guy who started about the same time as I did, and he was utterly useless. The team would largely endeavor to keep him away from anything important, but he'd still screw things up and cry for help and after saddling his mistake on someone who was going to stay after hours, he'd just leave and hope it got fixed. If the person sorted out his problem, he'd make a big deal about how hard his problem was and now it is resolved and how awesome it was for him to pull it off in spite of the headwinds.
Some years later, the person was in an executive position and the person that pretty much did all the work he was supposed to do had zero promotions. Most of us had learned our lesson and were content to let him thrash (his work wasn't really important), but there was one guy that couldn't stand to see work not happen successfully, and thanks to that he was able to get ahead.
The other thing has been that work never promotes from within, they always get some exterior hire that seems to have the qualifications more like 'was a cool guy at the golf course' or 'son of a friend I owe a favor to'.
A few years ago I watched a clip of Musk giving a tour of a sort of museum SpaceX has that shows the evolution of their rockets. At one point he was talking about how the more recent rockets had fewer "fiddly bits" on the outside.
My thoughts exactly! After that it was like a domino effect... I realized that probably everything this guy ever said and done was pure BS. Fake it until you make it.
I've met a couple people who've met Trump, and let's just say "He's the dumbest person I've ever met" is the default opinion of him.
Not trying to be an ass, but do you have a link to that tweet?
Not op, but here you go: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
Just add "cancel" after x for a Nitter link.
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
The ass is the one who posts screenshots of a website without linking to it. Especially if its a screenshot of text
We don’t need to link to X.
I suggest linking to Nitter instead. Easy way to get a link is to add "cancel" after X (and before .com).
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1886318915707375664?mx=2
We need to link to all sources. If the source is malicious, replace the dots with [.]
No. We don’t. We don’t need to feed X.
Want to know the souce? Google “musk x ‘you have committed a crime’” and it’s the top return.
Not hard at all. Don’t feed that troll site.
Again, you're not feeding it if you replace dots with a [.]
What you're doing is preventing misinformation
It's giving Oblivion NPC lmao
"PAY THE COURT A FINE OR SERVE YOUR SENTENCE"
I know you have but what did I do?
Elonis a highly productive con man. He fooled me when I bought the FSD option on my Tesla in 2019 for $8k. When I sold it, the market only was willing to pay $1500.
Congrats on getting out of the abusive relationship, but may I ask why you believed him in 2019 when it was clear he had been lying and promising FSD for nearly a decade at that point? Were you just not following the news all that closely and took his word at face value? Or was the promise, if it came true, just so tantalizing that you turned a blind eye to the turmoil surrounding Musk? Thanks in advance, I love learning about peoples’ thought processes after they have realized they made a mistake.
Personally, I don't blame anyone being fooled. He has an army of social media cultists obfuscating reality for him without him even asking. It's hard to see the truth when it's drowned out by religious doctrine.
Yeah that bitch still own me 20 bucks when he closed my paypal account. What a cunt
Man this book will probably be banned before it comes out
Camacho would be a much better president
Camacho at least wabted to make things better and hire a smart person
Musk is our "smart person"
They need some Friendship:
yes. and it doesn't matter. donald trump is a moron, but he's evil, and has failed upward to be president of the united states twice, first time a million americans died due to a purposefully inept covid response, this second time, he's going to beat that number by ordinates. everyone so fixated on how smart or accomplished these nazis are, it does not matter. This is a way for everyone to feel better that they're smarter, or know sooooo many people that are smarter. If we were smarter, they wouldn't keep fucking beating, and killing us. IQ means nothing, it's what you can leverage with what you have individually or within or at the forefront of a group that does. And these Nazi fucks know how to do that.
Yes, they have a particular narrow cleverness about how to abuse people and systems for their own gain. Since fascists only care about power, pointing out that they are dumb, hypocritical or inconsistent doesn't achieve anything. All they see is that you're keeping yourself busy talking while they load their guns and prepare the camps. The only way to fight fascism is to actually fight it.
Well, the problem is that there are a whole lot of stupid people that are easily convinced to vote for people like this, even if our side believes in putting smart, experienced, educated people into power.
So, even if we are smarter, we are outvoted by a lot of very stupid people (in some instances - in other instances, it's because of extreme gerrymandering and "gifts" like the Electoral College, so even if we get a majority of people to make the sane choice, we still end up losing ).
Lastly, the weasel apparatchiks on their side have found ways to peel off voters with things like Gaza and the fact that Democrats have not given them a pretty pony, too.
Leon came from Apartheid driven wealth, which paid for his education, and learned how to suck the US taxpayers dry while firing people left and right. Fuck him and DOGE. What about his brother Kimball who hides behind the curtains?
Imagine being as stupid as this clown is and his vice president and still... STILL somehow being smarter than the average voter. The bar is on the ground, folks.
If it makes it any better id argue that the average voter at least has the excuse of being propagandized and under educated with minimal ability to improve. These fucks have more than enough money to inprove themselves nearly infinitely but would rather wallow in their egos and call it wisdom.
I feel like if ya sat down with Cletus the Appalachian hillbilly and told him the tale of his names origin he would probably find it interesting at the very least.
This is the part I’m still trying to wrap my head around. In the US, almost everyone with a pulse has internet access, and websites like Wikipedia are not blocked or filtered. Obviously you’re right because there are a lot of misinformed people, I just don’t understand how people let that happen to themselves.
To benefit from information, you have to be able to filter out the nonsense. Most people have no baseline to work with and are taken in by anything presented confidently and repeatedly.
The ability to improve oneself consciously requires the acknowledgment and will to do so those are both just as important. Thats not even getting into the mental health crises which adds its own problems and even more roadblocks. Imagine if you will a 30 year old man working a shitty job in a loading dock in rural Idaho the pay is shit the work is hard and when that dude finally gets home after 12 hours of work do you really think he will want to watch PBS eons or do you think he will watch Rust videos and pass out?
I may find that relaxing but even ill admit it that there is an appeal to mindless entertainment. Now consider the fact that this by itself has been going on for at least fourty years and thats not even getting into religious and political indoctrination. If theres one way to describe Americans as a whole its that we are broken.
I suspect that plenty of folks are hoping everything collapses simply because then theyd be able to get a fucking break even if it is only in death.
Brietbsrt, info wars, storm front or whatever they call it now, anything zuck, 4chan, damn, fox, etc
The thing is they might be passable as random folks. The problem is their power and aspirations far exceed random folks, and so, compared to what you'd want to see in those positions, they are very dumb, but exude so much confidence that people have a tendency to assume that confidence must be somehow justified.
While I agree with the premise of the book, everyone who has met/worked with/knows Seth Abramson all day what a piece of shit grifter hack he is, so I don’t know how much confidence I have in the book overall.
I do not doubt that evidence to support this assertion exists, but Abramson is always chasing the next big thing and bitches about how no one likes him on bsky like an angsty teenager. He’s just cringe.
I was actually kinda interested in the upcoming book... Can anyone else confirm if his work is garbage? I'm not super familiar with him.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/12/sharing-seth-abramson-not-once-not-ever.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-grifters-are-coming-laura-loomer-louise-mensch-sheriff-david-clarke-all-shopping-new-books/
Oh! Haha now I know who you are talking about. Yes he is very.... Intense on Bluesky. I must say I understand. Living in this world is like taking crazy pills and I can understand "just reciting reality out loud for as many people to see" as a coping mechanism.
Ahh, i loved reading this. like blam on a sunburn. cold water on a hot day.
I think i discovered i have a kink for people shit-talking about tech CEOs.
Blam!
Blam-o!
alright, one sec, registering BLAM! as skin lotion brand.
Perhaps if you could package it in a ninja smoke bomb form. So you get to the beach, set up your blanket and cooler, take off your t-shirt and pull a little yellow ball out of your pocket, and THROW IT DOWN BLAMO!
The sun has no power here!
:D
You have just been promoted to Product designer.
Did he even get a real degree?
I'm not convinced he even knows how to code, if we are being honest.
Elon doesn't think the government uses SQL. He's dumb as fucking rocks.
What does that mean? I don't understand the reference about SQL.
Think of it like this:
“This r**ard thinks the government uses PAPER [SQL]” - Elon Musk
It is literally that standard and common and obviously in use in the government.
(SQL is just a computer language for dealing with data and databases)
Sorry. Yes, I understand what SQL is. I just don't understand the reference - did fElon make some kind of remark about SQL and/or databases?
Also, for the record, I thought there are/were formats and standards for data within mainframes that pre-dated the SQL standard - such as ISAM. This stuff (COBOL and ISAM) pre-dates my entry into the workforce by a long shot, though, so I'm unsure that the use of COBOL means that ISAM is in play, or if those two things (COBOL and the chosen data store) can be independently selected, at least in typical use cases.
(These are probably the kinds of questions that fElon and his dogebags are unlikely to ask, because it might give the correct impression that they have no idea what the fuck they are talking about. Believe me, I've worked with their type, and in fact, with a few of this type right now, LOL. Swaggering cases of Dunning-Kruger poster boys that think they know every-fucking-thing there is to know about anything and everything. People that still have not figured out that a bit of curiosity and at least an ounce of humility goes a much longer way in learning.)
SQL is a language used to format requests to most relational and nonrelational databases. Databases are extremely commonly used for data persistence and retrieval. It's like saying the government doesn't use binary - or the government doesn't use TCP - or the government doesn't use paper. It uses all these things in abundance.
I know how to code and during my career, I've worked with people that could only barely do it, mostly relied on others to carry their weight, and often would fail upwards into management track stuff, usually done as a defensive strategy to get them away from doing damage hands-on. Of course, some of them effectively did MORE damage later by doing incredibly bone-headed things because some of them suffered from extreme arrogance and Dunning-Kruger.
Watching fElon in his takeover of Twitter and turning it into xitter, I was not paying too close of attention, but the level of chaos and performative bullshit seemed to be terrible at both a management/ownership level and on a technical one.
I’m pretty sure there’s no evidence that the soup between his ears qualifies as a human brain, but yet- here we are, allowing him and his term of incel lackeys full and unfettered access to all of America’s finances.
I always knew America would somehow end embarrassingly. I just had no idea it would be this shameful.
like kim dotcom. same guy to me.
There's this website that listed bunch of stuff about Kim Dotcom and his ventures. (the list barely scratches the surface. But the important thing is that people thought he was hack decades ago.)
When I visited the site last time, I was like "ohhhhh, they've found a picture of Kim wearing an SS helmet. I really didn't know what else I was expecting."
I'm surprised that the website doesn't list Felon Muskow as a charlatan.
Who?
That is because everything Elmo says and has said is a lie.
When is the biography coming out?
Also, when is that HBO documentary on fElon coming out?
What about his intellectual bankruptcy?
A failson that failed upwards
I'd give the little shit 0 gold star stickers too.
tell us something we don't know
College degrees are a dime a dozen.
I have two stem degrees and I am of average intelligence. At the very least, having a degree doesn't make you a "super genius" like the MAGAt cult believes
Going to college makes you a brainwashed lib, but also going to college makes you a genius.
Whichever one is convenient at the time.
Kind of like the answers to "What is DOGE?" and "What is Lon Musk's role in the government?" - the answer is whatever is convenient at the moment.
A college degree just means you could afford the time and money to stick around until an institution gives it to you.
Unless you are a celebrity, then some glory seeking institution will just give you an "honorary" degree.
College can be an enriching experience, but the degree itself doesn't prove you actually availed yourself of that enrichment or proved your capabilities.
I think it means more for a lower class/middle class person, where it really takes dedication and resourcefulness to get through such a program.
For upper class, you can get that degree regardless.
I disagree, it is considerably less impressive when he was born with an emerald spoon in his mouth. It's hard to do anything other than fail upwards when you've never gone without food, shelter, or basic necessities.
Donald Trump, great example of this. He's got a degree in economics. Do I really need to demonstrate how worthless his degree was? Are you really going to call it an intellectual achievement?
I mean, he is using his position to gain wealth and power. Im sure he didnt get there by being stupid. No, hes not some Tony Stark level engineer and his intellectual and engineering achievements are nothing of note. Hes really good at swindling people and getting a large proportion of the population to like him, that takes some talent.
Survivorship bias.
You don't hear about all the Elons who made a bad bet with the money from their dad's apartheid emerald mine, and ended up living meager multi-millionaire lives instead.
This. A million times this! For so many things in life. So many persons fail to get this. Entrepreneurs, billionaires, success-stories.
Succeeding doesn't mean you made the right decision with the information you had; it means you made the right decision now that we know the outcome.
Why would you do that? Writing a biography is not necessarily an endorsement. Did you read the article? The author reproaches him quite a bit, accusing him of stealing an idea and having terrible programming skills.
Because you support nazis?
Yeah, like, really. Author seems critical of Musk.
Are you under the impression that this book would make Musk money?
Eh, I despise Musk and believe he is a grave threat.
But this "Musk isn't smart" narrative is a waste of time and underestimating Musk makes him more dangerous.
Tesla was a nothing burger company before he acquired it. SpaceX has been highly successful under his leadership. Musk may not have provided much technical knowledge, but he's accomplished too much for it to be random luck, and steering such companies, even if not on a daily basis, is going to require applied intellectual skill.
Edit: guys you can downvote all you want but underestimating Musk just weakens your position and aids him. You're not going to an Ivy League school with average or below intelligence.
You're also not starting and guiding various companies to high level success if you're dumb. Yes Musk has failed projects. Essentially every company and many if not most entrepreneurs have suffered failures.
Allegedly he also got a relatively high SAT score (1400) according to Isaacson, a respected biographer (I'd want to see hard proof however).
Musk's IQ is probably something like 125, not 160. But it's not going to be 90 or other like that.
But I guess you can go ahead and play into his hand and boost him by underestimating him.
Imma quote from the article.
Musk's wealth isn't the best indicator of his intelligence. It's more circumstantial evidence at best.
"corporations with those who own them."
This veers towards been an non sequitur. The claim isn't that Musk is the corporation or that he is responsible for every decision. However, he is one of the (and probably THE) prominent voices in his companies and his decisions can massively impact the company's trajectory. One success is luck, multiple successes suggests there's a lot more than luck at play.
SpaceX was the leading private space company before he acquired it - it has actually lost ground to competitors since then but has an extremely passionate team behind it.
Tesla was the first company to seriously take a swing at automated response with an eye to FSD - they've since fallen far behind Waymo and other competitors.
When Musk worked at PayPal Thiel described him as a crazy risk taker and had him ousted as CEO while he was on two weeks of PTO for his honeymoon.
Musk is a huge fucking dumbass with enough money to fail horribly over and over.
you're not getting into UPENN being a complete idiot. Whoever started the company, Musk oversaw periods of the growth in SpaceX, Tesla, Paypal etc.
Musk is (edit: not) the smartest person in the world like he thinks he is. But it's nearly an objective fact that he's not stupid.
This is such a dumb hill to die on, and more importantly it benefits Musk.
edit: and as for failed programs, welcome to the world of business. Google, Amazon, Microsoft Apple, etc. constantly launch ideas that don't pan out. Are their leaders and engineers and everyone else dumb because a project failed?
And everyone there said it was because they had a dedicated team distracting Musk from the real work. He is, in fact, very dumb.
everyone where? Can you link the evidence or provide details so I can try to find it?
You are getting into UPenn if your daddy owns an emerald mine and has pseudoslaves to work in it.
And yes there are a lot a looooottttt of dumb people at google, amazon, Microsoft, and apple.
Evidence he bought his way in?
Sure, there are a lot of dumb people at those companies. But that's not the point. Failures don't prove that the leadership or specific individuals are dumb. Plenty of smart people have failed.
But have fun inadvertently supporting Musk!
What the fuck are you talking about?
"what the fuck" are you confused about?
The last sentence
You're really underestimating the contributions of people like the COO (Shotwell, who by all accounts, really reigns Musk in) and the actual engineering talent at SpaceX. Musk is hardly the first to come up with some of the aerospace ideas, but SpaceX is the first to push through the failure to success through a rapid prototype model.
lmao I am underestimating no one. Guys... touch some grass.
Musks's technical knowledge is probably pretty mid. Musk sure as hell isn't designing the rockets.
Acknowledging that Musk isn't an idiot in no way devalues the work of the many, many intelligent people around him. Why you'd think that I'm taking anything away from anyone else is baffling. Literally baffling. How did you come to that conclusion?
You can still think he's grossly incompetent without dismissing him as a threat. I don't care about his IQ since he's never done any tests to prove anything; his actions alone tell me that he's a dangerous moron.
He's not playing 4D chess here. His goals are to increase control, enrich himself and punish opposition. He's done this before with Xitter and Tesla. There is literally a pattern.
I understand that many people dislike Musk and disagree with his politics but to believe he is "lacking intellectually or is without exceptional achievement" is ridiculous. Precisely how many billion dollar companies have all these critics organized and successfully run? Exactly.
A trust fund and Forrest Gump type luck doesn't make a person a genius.
He is really good at talking out of his ass. The moment he starts talking about something your an expert in, the bullshit he spews becomes obvious.
What area are you an expert in ?
Talking out of the ass isn't particularly an area most people are proud to be experts in, but you do you boo
Nice to meet you too.
It is not rocket science
It's not even car design
It's just telling people what to do vaguely. If you want. You can also just be. It's not hard
Successfully?