>>461050Elon is a complete retard. He's making twitter crash and burn. And the people who are still there can't really code at all.
And Musk has lied about his credentials for over 25 years now, he isn't even an engineer and never invented Tesla, merely took it over in a corporate takeover from it's original creators.
I’ve begun to suspect that the key to understanding Musk’s behavior lies in a statement that he has made repeatedly, but hasn’t been examined seriously enough.
Elon Musk thinks we’re living in a simulation. He behaves as though this is an elaborate, sophisticated game, and that the vast majority of us are non-player characters (NPCs).
Since 2016, Musk has insisted that the probability of our world being a non-simulated reality is just “one in billions.” This is based on a thought experiment from philosopher Nick Bostrom, one of the founders of Longtermism: If you begin from the tech-accelerationist premise that the capacity of computer networks will endlessly increase, then it is easy to imagine a far-future where our computer networks have grown so vastly powerful that they could simulate the development of human civilization with the same ease as your laptop launching The Sims today. With limitless energy sources and limitless computing capacity, billions of simulated realities, indistinguishable from “base reality” might one day bloom. It then follows that the probability of this being the one non-simulation is infinitesimally small. [1/the total number of simulated realities across all time.]
The simulation thought-experiment seems intuitively more believable if you are living the life of Elon Musk. Musk is CEO of multiple companies. He has moved markets with his tweets. People have become paper millionaires just by investing in meme coins that he likes. His life has the narrative arc of the standard hero’s journey. His is an exceptional life, surrounded by fawning supporters that nod at his brilliant insights, challenged by opponents who he can vanquish through a mix of wit, charm, insight, and hard work. Elon Musk life follows the narrative arc of the hero’s journey.
The simulation thought-experiment is less appealing if you are just a normal person working a normal job. If you work an entry-level job at a Tesla assembly plant, you might wonder why the arc of your simulated existence hasn’t been a bit more, y’know, adventurous. (Sure, we might one day construct Matrix-style computer simulations where the inhabitants live a life of repetitious drudgery. That’s disappointing, albeit certainly possible.)
Of course, if you question the tech-accelerationist premise – if you believe that Moore’s Law is slowing down, and that the pace of technological change sometimes moves fast and other times slows down – then the whole thought experiment is rendered a bit silly. We might be living in a simulation, but there’s no way of knowing if we were, no reason to assume such capabilities are inevitable, and nothing meaningful to be done with such information. (Emily St John Mandel has a wonderful riff on this last point in her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility. I won’t say any more about it here to avoid spoilers.)
It’s somehow unsurprising that the simulation thought experiment comes from the same philosopher who is responsible for the most extreme variant of Longtermist thinking. The appeal of longtermism to tech billionaires like Musk is that it suggests his actions today will echo through the millennia. It is a moral philosophy that encourages him to ignore pedestrian concerns like workplace conditions at Tesla factories or global poverty so that he can instead spin elaborate fantasies about colonizing Mars. For strong Longtermists, most of the 8 billion people alive today are effectively NPCs. Their actions and personal welfare simply do not matter to the long term fate of humanity, according to Bostrom’s cold calculus.
And by the same token, the simulation thought-experiment can serve as a schematic that separates Musk and his billionaire pals from the rest of the planet’s inhabitants. Elon can approach every new field and new challenge as though he is the first to encounter it. Whether its purging bots and protecting speech on Twitter, inventing next-generation robotics, or international diplomacy, he behaves as though the people who have spent decades developing expertise in those areas do not matter, because to him they are NPCs.
Elon Musk never had any special insights into how to improve Twitter. He was just a rich guy with an unhealthy level of self-confidence. He was able to raise billions from his peer network, not because they had any special insights either, but simply because they also had a ton of money and absurd self-confidence.
They’ve been operating as though they are the main characters in a video game, one in which everyone who don’t have their wealth and worldview just don’t matter. (And life is pretty easy once you are a billionaire — the difficulty mode is definitely set to “casual.”) The rest of us, from assembly workers and baristas to lawyers and politicians, are just NPCs, filling out the backdrop of their adventurous, simulated lives. A thing just hasn’t been tried until one of the real players has tried it.