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[silverspawn]

I'm also annoyed at people misusing the word hypocritical. Sure if everyone misuses a word, eventually that should become the standard meaning, like with gg in games. But if a word has a widely recognized negative connotation, then arguing that hypocrisy is somehow good or saying this specific thing is hypocritical but good anyway is just irresponsible. Hypocrisy is never good because it entails lying.

[silverspawn]

eg it's not hypocritical for me to say extremely negative things about school and be a teacher because there's no standard I'm pretending to have but don't have

[silverspawn]

Actually I feel inspired to write The ten most annoying things in the world, preliminary list

10. wounds on my tongue that make eating painful
9. people arguing that politicians who advocate for term limits need to step down early
8. bureaucracy
7. offensive ggs
6. having to beg high status people for things
5. people making no sense when talking about consciousness
4. dropping the article when translating movie titles / disregarding the article of movies/albums/books when sorting items
3. people saying Elon Musk is a bad guy, especially if they pretend to care about climate change (sorry faust)
2. people not changing their minds
1. insects

[MiX]

Is this ordered?

[silverspawn]

yes

[silverspawn]

that felt really good

[faust]

3. people saying Elon Musk is a bad guy, especially if they pretend to care about climate change (sorry faust)

Let's annoy you some more I guess.

How do you think Elon Musk helps with tackling climate change?

[silverspawn]

From the perspective of how annoyed I am, the factual question to what extent Tesla is effective or harmful at mitigating climate change is not all that important. What is important is that we have a guy who is now the richest man in the world, wouldn't have to work another second in his life, but chooses to work 16+ hours per day, repeatedly attempting ridiculously hard and risky things because he thinks they have the greatest expected value for humanity. Even if I thought he was wrong about Tesla (and in fact, he may or may not have been wrong about OpenAi, which probably matters more anyway), I would be no less annoyed at people who mock his character

[silverspawn]

Although I think I am more annoyed still at the people who agree that Tesla is good but think it is now correct to mock him because he said something stupid on Twitter once

[MiX]

Although I think I am more annoyed still at the people who agree that Tesla is good but think it is now correct to mock him because he said something stupid on Twitter once

What if they care about climate change but don't like Tesla?

[silverspawn]

It was inevitable that I forgot at least one thing when making this list. Sites asking me to insert special characters into passwords should probably be #9.



rarely is the utter incompetence of people so crystal clear and inarguable

[silverspawn]

Although I think I am more annoyed still at the people who agree that Tesla is good but think it is now correct to mock him because he said something stupid on Twitter once

What if they care about climate change but don't like Tesla?

well that's faust (I think), so what I said about the difference between his character and impact assessment. If you just think he does unintentional harm, I don't have that much of an issue with it, although I think it's probably not true.

[faust]

From the perspective of how annoyed I am, the factual question to what extent Tesla is effective or harmful at mitigating climate change is not all that important. What is important is that we have a guy who is now the richest man in the world, wouldn't have to work another second in his life, but chooses to work 16+ hours per day, repeatedly attempting ridiculously hard and risky things because he thinks they have the greatest expected value for humanity. Even if I thought he was wrong about Tesla (and in fact, he may or may not have been wrong about OpenAi, which probably matters more anyway), I would be no less annoyed at people who mock his character

I mean the above is not a good quality in and of itself. The same was probably true about Hitler.

[faust]

Though I would also debate that Elon Musk does things because he thinks they have the greatest expected value for humanity, but that's probably a longer discussion.

[silverspawn]

And then the security questions like 'what is your favorite movie' don't they realize that this can change I don't even get it

[silverspawn]

Hitler is interesting because I do think he's actually fairly easy to sympathize with him compared to eg Trump. I view him more as an example of how important it is to have correct beliefs than as an example of evil.

There was this netflix movie about him 'look who's back' which I found surprisingly good, and he is, in fact, kind of  portrayed as a likeable character, certainly as someone convinced he's doing the right thing

[silverspawn]

Though I would also debate that Elon Musk does things because he thinks they have the greatest expected value for humanity, but that's probably a longer discussion.

Note that he does say this pretty explicitly. He could be lying, but isn't that a weird thing to lie about?

[faust]

Hitler is interesting because I do think he's actually fairly easy to sympathize with him compared to eg Trump. I view him more as an example of how important it is to have correct beliefs than as an example of evil.

There was this netflix movie about him 'look who's back' which I found surprisingly good, and he is, in fact, kind of  portrayed as a likeable character, certainly as someone convinced he's doing the right thing

I'm not sure I see a difference; I feel like the vast majority of "evil" people, including Trump, believe that they are doing the right thing.

[faust]

Though I would also debate that Elon Musk does things because he thinks they have the greatest expected value for humanity, but that's probably a longer discussion.

Note that he does say this pretty explicitly. He could be lying, but isn't that a weird thing to lie about?

It's a perfectly natural thing to lie to yourself about. Also every person in power ever claims a thing like that, because how else would you justify having that kind of power?

[silverspawn]

Though I would also debate that Elon Musk does things because he thinks they have the greatest expected value for humanity, but that's probably a longer discussion.

Note that he does say this pretty explicitly. He could be lying, but isn't that a weird thing to lie about?

It's a perfectly natural thing to lie to yourself about. Also every person in power ever claims a thing like that, because how else would you justify having that kind of power?

I think most people don't think in terms of 'highest expected' anything.

Hitler is interesting because I do think he's actually fairly easy to sympathize with him compared to eg Trump. I view him more as an example of how important it is to have correct beliefs than as an example of evil.

There was this netflix movie about him 'look who's back' which I found surprisingly good, and he is, in fact, kind of  portrayed as a likeable character, certainly as someone convinced he's doing the right thing

I'm not sure I see a difference; I feel like the vast majority of "evil" people, including Trump, believe that they are doing the right thing.

I tend to carve out a bundle of character traits like 'how consistent are you in your beliefs' and 'how hard do you work for what you believe' and 'how many sacrifices would you take' and 'how much are you motivated by selfish material reasons', and also if one is doing bad things, whether the justification is something like "i realize this causes suffering for group  but it's justified for reasons YZ" or rather "I realize this causes suffering for group X but I don't care/think that's good"

On those metrics, I suspect Trump scores exceptionally poorly. Hitler may not score great, but definitely better. Musk would score higher than just about anyone else.

If you only define evil by the effects that someone has, I have no idea how that could possibly work without giving you absurd conclusions. If you know Megan Phelps Roper, you would arguably have to say she was evil before leaving the church, but if you listen to interviews with her, it's crystal clear that her personality before and after was exactly the same, all that changed was that she encountered convincing arguments against the  fundamentalist Christian Doctrine. If you don't know her, substitute any other religious extremist who opts out after hearing a strong argument against her beliefs.

[faust]

I tend to carve out a bundle of character traits like 'how consistent are you in your beliefs' and 'how hard do you work for what you believe' and 'how many sacrifices would you take' and 'how much are you motivated by selfish material reasons', and also if one is doing bad things, whether the justification is something like "i realize this causes suffering for group  but it's justified for reasons YZ" or rather "I realize this causes suffering for group X but I don't care/think that's good"

On those metrics, I suspect Trump scores exceptionally poorly. Hitler may not score great, but definitely better. Musk would score higher than just about anyone else.

Let's tackle these one by one.

"How hard do you work for what you believe"
How reasonable is this? Surely it's good if you push for things that you think are good. However there are people who work too hard and that results in high stress and a poor mental state to make important decisions. I don't think anyone should work more than 40h/week, and I don't think it's a moral good to do more than that.
How well does Elon Musk score on this metric? I cannot say how hard he works, I expect a good deal more than 40h/week. So I guess here he would score rather highly.

"How many sacrifices would you take"
How reasonable is this? Fairly alright. I mean self-sacrifice isn't a good unto itself but it is generally indicative of a person that cares about others. You can also overdo it and tear yourself apart for the benefit of others.
How well does Elon Musk score on this metric? He is the richest man alive, so clearly extremely poorly.

"How much are you motivated by selfish material reasons"
How reasonable is this? Good I suppose, if you have the luxury to not care about your material benefit. I wouldn't say poor people are evil because of the extent they are doing things for selfish material reasons.
How well does Elon Musk score on this metric? Well by all accounts he seems to be struggling with narcissistic personality disorder, so he inherently does a lot of things for his own ego. He does seem to have a particular obsession with being richer than Jeffrey Bezos. Overall I would say very poorly.

whether the justification is something like "i realize this causes suffering for group  but it's justified for reasons YZ" or rather "I realize this causes suffering for group X but I don't care/think that's good"
How reasonable is this? It just seems to reward people who are better at rationalizing. I think there is actually more value in having the self-awareness to say "I realize this is a problem but I just don't care enough".
How well does Elon Musk score on this metric? I'm sure he's very good at rationalizing his actions. Whether the rational argument are really what drives him is hard to say from the outside, but based on a general understanding of human psychology I doubt it.

[silverspawn]

He is the richest man alive, so clearly extremely poorly.

No, this inference doesn't work at all. Tesla and SpaceX both had small probabilities to succeed, both according to the base rate and according to Elon Musk himself. (I think he said about 10% chance for SpaceX.) Throwing all your money into doing something that no-one has ever managed to do before with the probable outcome that you go bankrupt is an enormous sacrifice, and the fact that he got lucky doesn't change this.

It's also not surprising that he got lucky, that's just the survivorship bias. There are probably a bunch of people like him who took similar risks and didn't get lucky, and that's why we're not talking about them now.

And working all day is also a big personal sacrifice.

Same reason for his motivations; if you want to get rich, neither SpaceX nor Tesla nor OpenAI nor the Boring Company are even slightly rational projects. Neither is tweeting that the stock price of his own company is too high, nor pledging to donate your entire fortune, nor arguing that there shouldn't be subsidies for electrical vehicles. There are tons of examples that prove he isn't motivated by getting rich. You can't equate the actual outcome with the expected outcome.

[silverspawn]

I remember Musk saying in an interview that he had to rent money to pay for his appartment. This was a couple of years ago, when Tesla was already producing stuff, but was still at risk of going bankrupt, and he had put quite literally his entire fortune into the company.

[silverspawn]

Also:

I don't think anyone should work more than 40h/week, and I don't think it's a moral good to do more than that.

If I were only allowed to work 40 hours a week, I would have had no chance to finish the paper I'm working on by November. That's like 6 hours a day. I don't know where I'm at, and it varies, but it's certainly more than that. I think Musk does about 16.

[silverspawn]

(Also don't you have a master in math? There's no way you can do that with 6 hours per day. Which I realize isn't an argument that we should have to work more.)