This is a special post for quick takes by Zac Yauney. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Elon Musk is what Scott Adams was trying to be.
In Scott Alexander's "Dilbert Afterlife" he pointed out that Adams had the idea that if one was so smart, the highest ROI use of that strength was to try to control lesser minds by taking advantage of their vulnerabilities. His hypnosis and "linguistic killshots" were attempts at this.
Listening to Elon on the Dwarkesh pod and I feel like they are finally exposing him. Dwarkesh and John Collison are engaging in more or less rationalist discourse and asking all the obvious follow-up questions, and Elon just has storytelling and vague generality. The emperor has no clothes. (I know many have known this for a while but it is just striking how clear it is)
The thing is, Elon is tremendously "successful" because his tactics work against less discerning minds I guess. Tesla stock price depends entirely on his ability to sell nonsensical ideas to investors and the public. And for a long time it has worked, he's extremely wealthy!
One of my theories is that the reason that rationalists fail to exert this level of influence is because we try to operate on simulacra level 1 (genuinely saying what we mean) and it turns out that that is by far the weakest of the four. Elon (and Trump, and others) are abusing the power of the higher simulacra levels and even though we're smarter we don't have as much influence because we aren't willing to do it.
I also think most of us lack a sufficient theory of mind to understand why the things they say are so compelling to the public, because they seem so stupid to us. So it would be hard for us to do it ourselves if we tried.
we try to operate on simulacra level 1 (genuinely saying what we mean) and it turns out that that is by far the weakest of the four.
Level 1 allows you to work on something alone. So if you can't find other people who would cooperate with you (e.g. because you are a little autistic), level 1 is the only one you can work at. Your options are to work at level 1 alone, or serve other people, or fail.
Which I suspect might have also been Scott Adams' problem. He could see that the other levels work better, but he couldn't work at them efficiently. So he just kept writing about how cool those levels are; sometimes impressing people who were at the same skill level as him. But he has never achieved those levels himself.
Elon Musk... I am not very familiar with him. I suspect that he is sufficiently non-autistic to be able to use the higher levels efficiently, and yet he radiates enough nerd vibes (naturally? or is that an image cultivated on purpose?) to convince the nerds that he is one of them, so they keep simping for him and working for him.