unrelated to your otherwise helpful comment, I just wanted to note that it is "demur" (i.e. hesitate or object) you want in this case; "demure" is an adjective meaning shy or modest.
You can disagree, and I do too, but it is the basis of an interesting discussion.
Personally I think that fully autonomous vehicles need to be at minimum 100x safer than humans in order to maintain a social license to operate. I’m not saying the law needs to codify that. I’m saying that society could never accept a system which was merely 10x safer than humans. Imagine every vehicle in North America was replaced with a robotaxi and road deaths absolutely plummeted from 40,000 to just 1,000 per year. That’s still an article every day about “Elon Musk's river of blood”.
Supervised systems do not need such extreme safety, because the human driver remains responsible. But here’s an idea: if you want to use supervised FSD, that’s fine, but every collision gets automatically uploaded to a repository that is searchable by law enforcement and insurance companies.
This isn't about people who just happened to make it big in a market rally, though. You're talking as if I'm speaking about people who just happened to buy some Bitcoin in 2012 rather than leaders of some of the most successful corporations on Earth.
They're not infallible, but modelling them as complete idiots that just happened to get lucky is also... Not really consistent with reality, as far as I can tell. These people might not be good people, but they're good at playing a certain kind of game.
Things can look stupid when we don't understand them, but there has to be some intelligence somewhere at some point even if the arrival of wealth then suffocates it with sycophants. If Musk or Trump or GWB were all *merely* the idiots they're often mocked as being, chances are we'd never have even heard of them. They almost certainly weren't even "merely average".
Now, stupidity that arrives after the bank balance reads a billion dollars, that's terrifyingly powerful.
There's "rich", and there's "enough money to rot your brain". I can believe Trump started with the latter, but the other two were less than that. IIRC GWB was "just" a multimillionaire even when he became president, about the same as Musk when Zip2 got sold.
The only reason we hear about Musk is because the gamble on PayPal gave him enough to then roll the dice again on a few more things, of which SpaceX and Tesla kinda actually worked.
Though with Tesla, their lifetime profits being ~= lifetime government subsidies to them and their consumers, by "worked" I mean "you can buy them and drive them" rather than it being a genuine business opportunity.
While this is a dick move, when the question is "is he smart?", it's still a positive result.
1. Trump was born wealthy. There was no "arrival of wealth" that smothered the intelligence you suppose he might have used to earn the wealth, because he didn't earn it.
2. You don't understand. Trump is successful because of his stupidity, selfishness, and vile behaviour. Not despite it. In 2016, the Republican primary field had 20 or so candidates on a wide range of reasonableness. Trump crushed them all, because he most represents the average Republican voter. If he were more intelligent, or if he cared more about anyone other than himself, they would not have voted for him. His arrogance, lack of intelligence and morals is quite literally his strength because it's what makes him so relateable to the American masses.
There are two possibilities. One is that half the country are total idiots and the people leading them, and leading the country, are also total idiots who only got into power because half the country are, again, complete idiots below average intelligence.
The other is that you are in a bubble and have been convinced that the leadership of the world’s premier superpower are below average intelligence, along with 70-80 million voters. The former is not something an intelligent person would believe, you have thrown out serious analysis for political theatre and memes and should rethink how you view the world. Now stop to consider that maybe actually half the country has a totally different worldview, and that their leadership, having reshaped global politics, is actually full of intelligent people who are cold and calculating. I know it’s harder to stomach, but just consider it for a moment.
Someone like Trump isn’t the first rise to the top of the country and be a con man or be as mad as a hatter in the end… He will not be remembered for his brain power.
I think he will be remembered for the decline and the loss of influence by America across the world that will be his legacy.
> below average intelligence, along with 70-80 million voters
Given what words mean, approximately 122.3 million US citizens eligible to vote ought to be below average.
When you say bubble, I'm inclined to agree, though for reasons that I suspect are uncooth to say out loud: we here are a bubble of smart people, so to us normal looks dumb.
Because it's not a single data point, intelligence is a wide surface area where you can be smart in some areas and stupid in others. Furthermore whether you are being intelligent is relative to ideals and goals, and not everyone has the same ones.
I find it difficult to imagine an intelligent person who finds it hard to get what they want. The trope of the oblivious genius who is incredibly competent in a single field of inquiry but completely unable to handle day-to-day life is more a creation of media than how reality works.
At first I thought you were referring to Umberto Eco's laws of fascism: "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as at the same time too strong and too weak."
but it's subtly different, because incompetence is not weakness.
It's pretty clear in how people talk about billionaires: They must somehow conclude that the people most successful within a system that rewards certain things are not competent because the things the system rewards are not what they think the system should reward (it is fine to believe the system rewards the wrong things, but people walk straight into denying that those people have skill even within the system, or they claim that skill within the bounds of the system does not reflect any "real" skill - totally ignoring that elites tend to stay elites even through, say, Communist uprisings).
Hence how someone can say that Musk is "dumb" with a straight face.
> the system rewards are not what they think the system should reward
It's the grown-up version of nerdy kids hating "the jocks" in high school. We're all just a bunch of dumb kids. Maybe obsolete children, but still children when it counts.
That said, Elon Musk celebrated cutting funding that fed starving children and supported cancer research by waving around a chainsaw on stage. The richest man on earth did this because he wanted lower taxes... for himself.
When Anubis weighs his soul against the feather it's likely to completely destroy the scale.
I'm not saying any of the people in charge are good people at all. I'm just saying that they are skilled at achieving their own goals, regardless of the morality or lack thereof of those goals.
I don't even think that. I think half of them accidentally stumbled into success. Elon was kicked out of PayPal with a nice golden parachute so he wouldn't sue.
Regression to the mean is pretty nasty. Stumbling into success can make you a car dealership owner or something like that, but being consistently successful in business requires just about as much skill as being consistently successful in, say, chess.
To be clear, I'm just saying that I don't hate him because he's more skilled than I am. Not anymore than I hate olpymic athletes for being better at ice skating. He's certainly more skilled at Making Money.
I hate him because he is a cartoon villian, who when given enough wealth to feed the world chose to punch down instead of lifting up.
I suspect most would point to The Garden of Forking Paths as his "main labyrinth story" if he could be said to have such a thing. The Library of Babel is also a labyrinth of sorts. I recall another where a guy faked his own murder. He was really a labyrinthine guy.
I'm glad they're doing well but I would guess only a tiny fraction of the people who use Spotify would be capable of setting up Navidrome. I tried and went back to Plex. I wish it were otherwise but if something takes more than a few clicks to go from zero to music that leaves 95% of users out! I hope these projects get more accessible though.
why even bother with this "you know what I mean" stuff? if you're going to say things like this have the conviction to say it straight. you come off as a bigot AND a coward this way.
