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Kyra Lise's avatar

I appreciate you trying to relate to this guy somehow. And see him through the lens of his terrible childhood. Congratulations on a nuanced approach that accepts a great deal of his self-narration as fact.

To me, I see and have seen over the last 5 years, a drug addiction spiraling in its usual pattern. Something I’ve witnessed close at hand many times and it’s frightening to be honest. It’s impossible to separate the fact that he’s a drug addled lunatic who has no moral center and clearly is deluded to the point that he agrees with you that he’s “the smartest man in the world” (as if there were some way of adjudicating that). That’s never been a healthy perspective and most of the folks on the planet who have had this view have been exceptionally destructive to humanity and proud of their ability to wield power in a cruel way. Is he smart? Yes. What is the value of that intelligence if it is demonstrated to maximize contemporary harm even if he “see the future” and knows how to course correct and the cruelty is just an unfortunate outcome? To me, intelligence, disconnected from compassion is the definition of evil and I think Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed would agree with me. I’m also female, also highly intelligent without being particularly well educated in formal way and highly effective in the world I work and live in. My work has been often minimized or ignored or taken over by less intelligent men who take credit for my work as their own. This is a fact of life for highly intelligent females since the dawn of time (read Gerda Lerner’s scholarship on this matter) and this means that solutions to many problems of humanity arrived at by women are disavowed almost as certainly as they are recognized and this colors my opinions of how we valorize intelligent men.

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Kevin's avatar

There's a lot of this that I agree with (and occasionally try to explain to others with little success/impact). But there are a few missing pieces:

1. DOGE largely failed because Elon listened to people who were just making shit up, as you note. But there were also many, many people offering insightful solutions who were ignored. The fact that DOGE's chosen actions directly follow the far right ideal of eliminating career civil servants, even though they are a minor component of government spending, is deeply suspicious.

2. Elon almost certainly has type 2 bipolar disorder (see Gwern's review at https://gwern.net/doc/psychiatry/bipolar/elon-musk/index), and is correspondingly self-medicating with ketamine. This is necessarily accelerating any mental breakdown regardless of the underlying cause.

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